ERRR #064. Paul Spenceley on Formative Assessment

What truly matters is teachers expertise. The most important tip for new teachers is to set out your boundaries. 44% of jobs will be automated. It reinforces cycles of disadvantage. Hello listeners and lovers of learning and welcome to episode 64 of the Education Research Reading Room. The podcast brings you into the discussion with inspiring educators and education researchers. I'm Oli Lovell and it's a pleasure to be your host. In the e-triplea. I'll start today by acknowledging the Boon Wrong People of the callination on whose lands his podcast was recorded, par respects to elders past and present, and acknowledge that colonization and dispossession are both ongoing processes. This episode we're speaking with Paul Spensley. Paul was a high school head of science, head of biology, and science teacher for over three decades. He was heavily involved in Dylan William and Paul Black's King's College formative assessment project and has built on William and Black's work over his career to refine and improve many of the formative assessment techniques and strategies in their classroom. Paul Spensley's work on formative assessment has been so influential that in 2000 he was given an audience in Buckingham Palace to acknowledge his significant contribution to education. In today's episode we discuss Paul's book on formative assessment, Successful Science Teaching. But it's really on so much more than just science teaching. This book is an absolute gem written by a lifelong teacher, four teachers. It's unapologetically practical. And that's why I was so keen to have Paul on the podcast. The insights that Paul shares in this episode on everything from improving learning intentions to running quality classroom discussions to helping students to improve their exam strategy technique are not to be missed. I'd also like to remind listeners that if you're keen to never miss a podcast blog post or any other exciting educational announcement, then jump onto OliLovall.com/subscription. And don't forget to subscribe to make sure that you get all the updates from me about teaching and learning. And a web address again is OliLovall.com/subscribe. This episode of the Etriple Art Podcast is brought to you by John Cat educational. And this month I'm excited to share that Tom Sherrington and Oliver Kavigliola's new book Teaching Walkthroughs 3 is now out. With an all-star cast including the likes of Adam Boxer, Effort First, Harry Fletcher Wood, Josh Goodrich, Mary Miley, Pep Smakray and Eva Hartrell, this is a walkthrough 's volume not to be missed. Walkthroughs Volume 3 takes up to 80 high impact teaching and professional development ideas, strategies and techniques and presents each in a concise description or five step sequence, complete with exquisite illustrations by Oliver Kaviglioli. For anyone who is looking to expand their repertoire of teaching, learning and professional development approaches, Walkthroughs Volume 3 is an incredible resource. You can get Walkthroughs3 at johncatbookshop.com and if you use the code E-R-R-R-3, visit our website at www.cattle.com/cattle.com. You can find all of our videos on the website at johncat.com. That code E-R-R-R-R-3-0 will also get you 30% off my book, Cognitive Load Theory in action. This episode of the Etriple Art Podcast is also brought to you by Catalyst, a project pioneered by Catholic education in the Archdiocese of Canberra and Galban. Catalyst is an evidence-based educational project that's working directly in schools and with teachers across the ACT and parts of New South Wales. Catalyst has its genesis in this podcast and it's a structured and strategic approach to bringing the science of reading and the science of learning to life in more than a thousand classrooms. It's drawing on both local and international expertise, including several guests from the Etriple Art Podcast to realise the bold vision of transforming students' lives through learning by developing excellent teachers and leaders. If you'd like to find out more about opportunities at the Catalyst project and Catholic education in Canberra, including the professional development they're running, the way they are engaging Australian and world-class leaders in evidence-based education and even to explore employment opportunities, just click on the Catalyst logo or follow their link in the show notes. Now, without further ado, let's jump straight into episode 64 of the Etriple Art Podcast with Paul Spenceley. Paul Spenceley, welcome to the Education Research Reading Room podcast. Thanks for coming on, Paul. Just to start off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience in education? Well, when I left school, I'd had a pretty rubbish experience. I didn't like any of the teachers anything about my school. So I went off and did a four-year degree in biology and education determined to be better teacher. That was the starting point. When I finished that, I got a job at nine to thirteen-year-old middle school and after several years, the government reorganized and I ended up being part of an 11 to 18 comprehensive, so mixed gender, full range of ability, absolutely everything. And altogether, I spent about twenty years in that comprehensive system. And then I moved to a girl's grammar school, which is a very highly selective school, one of the top sort of four key schools in the country in England, so it was really, really good. I spent ten years there. One other key thing that happened along the way was back in 1998 when I was at the comprehensive I was involved in the King's College project, which led to the work, our Black and William, that probably people at Bird of the Code, inside working inside the Black Box. And it was that that got me into formative assessment in a really, really big way. Wonderful. That's a lovely, concise history from you and obviously an enormous amount of time in the classroom. And a very interesting kind of start for you in that most people who have a negative experience of school want to get as far away from schools they possibly can, but you kind of, you were straight back into it keen to do a better job than what you'd experienced. That's wonderful. Next question for you, Paul. What do you think is the purpose of school-based education? This is actually really simple. I ask a few of my people I know are teachers now. I feel like, "Oh, it's really hard, but I don't think it is still. It's just to enhance the life chances of students of pupils. It's as simple as that. The better education, the better life chances." Okay. Great. And in terms of the purpose of science education, because we're discussing your book on science education and formative assessment today, what do you think is the purpose of science education more specifically? I think with science, I mean, I've not got kids, but kids always ask the same question. Why? Why is this? Why is that? Kids are naturally scientists. They want to know about the world. And as a science teacher, is there a job to tell people why? And whenever you answer, there's always another one. Okay. Help them go further down the rabbit hole of the wives. Yeah. Very good. We're discussing your book today, which is all about formative assessment and science teaching. The book is structured very, very clearly. It's structured as if a teacher had written it, in fact, Paul. And one of the places that you start is you start with learning objectives. Let's just jump straight in there. What does it take for a teacher to write a good learning objective? Can I just check? Do you have learning objectives in Australia? Do you use learning objectives? Yes. Most certainly, they're very popular. Right. Okay. Cool. I think one of the problems with learning objectives, I mean, I've got to say, I've seen hundreds of lessons, mostly scientists, hundreds of lessons. One of the problems with learning objectives is that teachers write what they sort of generally want to find out during the lesson, what they think kids are going to be able to do. And the point that I would say is that a learning objective should be for the students, not for the teacher. It shouldn't be some sort of vague aims that a teacher knows what's going on. It should be something that's absolutely crystal clear. So that the student know what they're going to be learning in that lesson. It should be more like success criteria rather than a sort of vague aim, if that makes any sense. Yeah. Could you give us an example of maybe a vague one and then how that could be changed to be more specific and student friendly? Well, one of the classic ones, I'm the unbiased one, the classic ones, I see again and again, is people write things like, you know, to be able to describe folks' senses or to be able to explain folks' senses. And you're like, well, if you think about that as a statement, I could be for any age from like 11 up to 18. You know, what the hell have I got to do? It's meaningless. One night I used as an example in the book was the one about sort of, you know, to be able to describe and explain the adaptations of animals to cold climates. Now, that sounds fine. And the teacher knows what they've got to do, but the consent got clue. Now I would change that and I would make it so that it was two separate things. First of all, to be able to state at least three adaptations that polar bears have to help them survive in cold climates and then to be able to explain how those three adaptations help them survive in cold climates. And I think sort of that then gives the students a really clear idea of what you mean by describing explain. So you've gone and this was something that was, I found quite interesting in the book, you really emphasised the value of numbering things or numbering the expectations for students. So there it was, you know, name three adaptations that polar bears have to cold climates. Well, why do you see that as important? Numbering isn't the only way to do it, but it is a very, very good way of doing things. Apart from anything else, the idea of numbering makes it very, very clear to the students How far they've got along that learning journey? in the lesson, I've done one out of three, I've done two out of three. That is something that is crystal clear for students. That kid next to me is done two and I've only done one. I'm behind. That you can judge that in a way that you can't judge, describe and explain these adaptations. And again, I think it's key for the students to be able to do that, not for the teacher to keep acting to do it. Got it. And I imagine you've kind of advocated for this approach to learning objectives as you've moved between schools and as you've taught and as you've worked in different departments. Have you come across any pushback to this kind of changing of the format of learning objectives? No, I've been quite the opposite. Literally, quite totally. My book is called Successful Science Teaching, but I've done whole school, so it leads to loads of schools. And the number of teachers from other departments, history, psychology, maths, who've said, this has really made a difference. My kids really know now what they are doing. It's made all the difference to how they feel about the lessons and how easily they can measure their own success and have the confidence that gives kids. And now it's been amazing. That's great. And you mentioned before, numbering isn't the only way, but it's a very good way of writing a good learning objective. What are some of the other ways? As long as you have really, really clear success criteria that the students can understand, it doesn't have to be like a number of things. It could be that you say, by the end of the lesson, you need to be able to do. And then it just needs to be a clear statement. It could be draw a graph of this or that chemical reaction or whatever. It could be a skill like that. Okay. And if we return back to your photosynthesis example, what are some better learning intentions you've seen that relate to photosynthesis rather than describe and explain or describe photosynthesis? I mean, again, if you said something like, you know, to be able to state what each of the products of photosynthesis were and what happened to each of the products of photosynthesis is another learning objective. Already you've broken it down and made it a bit easier. Depending on how you're wording that, you're going to give an idea, you know, because for example, if you said, you know, to be able to describe the difference between the light dependent and the light independent stages of photosynthesis, then clearly you're talking about something quite different. So I think sort of being able to sort of pigeonhole it and sink in terms of the students, sink, well, you really, really want them to be able to do by the end of that lesson. Because we as teachers tend to know that, but we don't share it. Yeah. Does this mean that we end up with many more learning objectives than a teacher would usually have? Quite possibly. I would say to avoid going beyond three, more often than I would probably only have two. But if I thought I needed any more than that, I would probably break it down and make the lesson almost into smaller parts and have one or two and then stop partly through and have a check and then have another one or two. But certainly, what's interesting is that primary school kids are used to in Britain, kids are used to success criteria for learning. But we come to secondary school and we go to these weird aims, basically. Okay. Thanks, Paul. The next thing we're moving on to is this idea of plenaries. Now I understand this is a word that's used a bit more frequently in the UK than it is in Australia. So maybe we'll start off with what is a plenary? In the UK, it's generally a lesson, it starts with some sort of starter activity. Then I have all the bits and pieces, the main bulk of the lesson. The plenary, and there could be two or three of them during the lesson, is the bit where you supposedly check the learning of the lesson. Traditionally it comes at the end of the lesson. In many cases, it might be a past question, a discussion or whatever, just to make sure that the students have actually learned and you can demonstrate their learning. So that is what a plenary will think. Got it. So it's kind of a point to pause it and check for understanding. Yeah. Interestingly, in this interview plan, I had, because I just said, where does a plenary come? Well, what is a plenary? And you said, usually you have a starter and then you have the body of the lesson and you have a plenary. So I wanted to start this interview talking about starters, because I saw that as what comes, you know, just before I just started learning a technique. But you said, actually, I'll equally please cover plenaries first. So why did you want to talk about plenaries before starters, Paul? Initially when teachers plan lessons, they plan teaching to get them to mind what they're going to need to teach. They come up with some learning objectives. And then what they do is they plan a range of tasks and then at the end of that, they bolt on a plenary. Now the problem with that idea is twofold. Firstly, the plenary is a bolt on rather than being a key part of the lesson. And the second problem is that if time is short, it gets scrapped. Teachers inevitably leave that part of the lesson. You know, they rush it or they're scrappy because the content in science seems to be the most important thing I've got. Now I disagree with that approach completely. And I think the most important thing is once you've got your learning objectives, the next thing you should do when you're planning lessons is to think, right, how am I going to actually measure to see whether the kids have met those success criteria. So you need to know what your plenary is going to be before you do anything else. And so that's why I'd like to talk about plenaries before anything else. It makes sense. Yeah, it's plan what students are going to learn, plan how you're going to check whether they've learned it and then plan how you're going to get them to learn it. That makes a lot of sense. So what does a good plenary look like, Paul? But I think the most important thing is it has got to be really specifically focused on what those success criteria were in the learning objective. So if you're going to say, right, I want to know three adaptations for a polar bear living in a cold climate. There's no point at the end of the lesson having a plenary that doesn't check those. You know, it's got to be really specifically tailored to those. And I think that's the key point. And whatever type of plenary, there are millions of them on the internet. Whatever type you use, it's got to actually specifically check those. And it might be that you need a couple of different types of plenary part of an exam question and a bit of discussion to check two different learning objectives. So far we've defined a plenary as an opportunity during the lesson, sometimes during the lesson, often at the end of the lesson, if you'd check where the students have taken away the key learning objective. So to me, that would say, okay, well, let's at the end of the lesson then just give students a little quiz that says, you know, name three adaptations of polar bears to cold climates and explain how they are adaptations to cold climates. Is that a appropriate plenary or are there other things we should be doing? I think there's some really good things that you can do. Again, if for example you decide about, I'm going to give them some short questions at the end, say multiple choice questions, people like multiple choice questions. The problem you run into there, if you give kids four or five multiple choice questions and there's four possible answers and there's one correct answer for each one, well, first of all, how many do they need to get right for their menu to know that they've actually achieved that learning? Secondly, if there's a one in four chance of guessing, you know, like how much do you know that they're getting it right by learning as opposed to guessing? Now if I was doing multiple choice questions at the end, I would probably have perhaps four answers, three or four questions, but in some of the questions, there might not be any answers that were correct and some of them might be two or three or one. Students will never know and then I might say, right, okay, you've got to get at least 60% of these right to prove to me that you've actually learned that. Now they don't know how many there are and that makes a whole different level of checking than a few questions at the end. But what about just a free answer question if rather than multiple choice, would that be sufficient or have you got some better ways of doing it? If it was an exam question or anything like that, I think the key thing, I mean, I, you know, using a past exam question is a great idea. I think the key thing is to actually make sure the kids know what success is. So don't just give them a couple of exam questions, say to them, right, you would need to be able to get seven out of ten in this question to be able to be sure that's enough or nine out of ten or whatever it is. They need to see what the actual learning level is rather than just, you know, okay, do the question, yeah, you've done a kill. Okay. And in your book, you talked about some other things like you talked about discussions as plenaries, you talked about explaining learning objectives, you talked about traffic like keywords and phrases and guess the learning objectives. Would you explain some of these to us? Discussions are much more difficult than they sound. I genuinely feel that. But things like spot the mistake, putting, you know, ten phrases on the board and maybe three of them have got errors in them. Some of them have got on half an error perhaps. Or maybe none of them have got errors and you say to kids, right, can you find mistakes in these and then you get kids working in little groups talking about those and seeing whether they can be, it's very good for picking up things like sort of basic, you know, misconceptions like the idea that kids think that like travels towards their eye. Yes. sorry from their eye towards objects when they see things. So you know like that sort of thing is easy to pick out with a sort of spot and mistake. Things like guessing the learning objectives. Sometimes I might sort of if kids are really used to using really good quality learning objectives and success criteria. I might sort of say right okay there's going to be two learning objectives today and then partway through the lesson. I might sort of start to say right okay we've covered this much. What do you think might be a good learning objective for that? And just getting them to actually talk about it you know if you were going to write a learning objective on the board now what do you think it would say? It's really powerful way of finding out you know what kids actually think they are learning and what they actually think they have learned. That's an interesting one. Kind of a question that's prompted in my mind is whether the extent to which you found that your teaching practices and your recommended teaching practices change if at all when you move from the comprehensive schools that you spent 20 years into the grammar school where you ended your career. Interestingly really not at all. I taught 16 year olds who couldn't even remember the letters of the alphabet and I taught 16 year olds who were going to go on to do medicine and literally everything I am talking about works across the board. People may not have the language skills at some times they may not be able to express things in writing but kids can still sort of join in a conversation and share things and there are examples in the book of some very low ability young lad for example who I've mentioned not personally but I've been talking about in the book and you know these things work across the board without a shadow of doubt I've worked in many many other schools other than my eye and there's no doubt that you know this isn't something that you need to adapt to different levels of ability. Not every single technique will work with every single kid or every single class but there's enough here to try without a doubt. Cool your book is about formative assessment so I would imagine that this whole idea of planaries you know for them to be formative we need to then do something with the information so did you have any kind of structures or approaches for say I've got one of those multiple choice sets of multiple choice questions you know some of them some of them have multiple write answers some of them have no write answers and you go through it and well first of all how do you practically actually go through the answers do you just talk through them do you you know that's I'm really keen for you to talk to us about the nitty-gritty of how you'd actually go through that and then what would you do with the information that if students clearly don't understand what's happened. I think that's a really good point because one of the things about sort of the whole idea of planaries and that is that they should allow the opportunity for you to say well actually we haven't learned that pretty well we need to do that again or something in book I've talked about the way we can structure sections of work topics of work and things and I think the idea that you finish a lesson do a planary and move on to the next lesson regardless or the next topic regardless is something we really need to move away from and I think that's a really big thing if I got to the end of a lesson and it turned out the kids hadn't learned what I thought they should have done I think the most important thing is that I would be starting my next lesson by going back and saying right okay well where do we go wrong what was the problem and we'd start now. Okay did you want to add anything about the way you would you would actually go through the answers because that's something I've been trying to like I feel like I've got a method now right so right now the way that I go through answers I always start the lesson with the starter and the way I go through answers is I've got every student does the starter on a piece of paper this is in maths and then at the end of once I've all once I can see they've all finished it but I'll make sure they've all got a mini whiteboard in a marker and I'll say all right what answer did you get to question one on your mini whiteboards in five four three two one they'll all have the answers and I'll be able to look across the classroom and go okay 100% correct good job let's move on to two or I might say okay we're only about 60% of us got that let me go through this or I might say okay only two of you struggled and I might just you know subtly point to some students I'll say some names like say can you just make a note for me to come to raise your hand during silent work time so I can come and help you with that so that's that's kind of the where I've come to in terms of going through answers exactly the sort of thing I would have done cool so do you have any can you add to that at all I think the only thing is that I would use students as much as possible so if say for example two thirds of the class have got an answer right and a third of them had how would you say if two thirds of the class got the did you use many whiteboards as well or I'm using little whiteboards or by having a little vote or something like that then I might get I might not even say at that stage whether it was the one third or the two third that was right so I might not say which third or two thirds got a got the question right what am I going to be to say right okay somebody from the two thirds group you explain why you think your answers right somebody from the other group but you explain your whether you think your answers right and then choose another random kid and say right okay who do you think has got the best explanation and why and so on and begin to get people to sort of be able to justify their answers a bit and then see whether that makes a difference to some of the ones you've got it wrong okay so a bit of a vote discussion revote yeah and the discussing okay that's very similar to Harvard professor Eric Mazur on a few episodes ago and that's essentially the peer instruction approach that that he's developed so that's great to great to see now in the book you had a couple of really good specific plenary questions that I just wanted to to make sure our listens got to here did you want to share them Paul I think one of the ones that I particularly like and I've used it loads and loads of time is the idea that if you could go forward in time to the point where you were just going to answer an exam question on this work that we've done today what will be the two pieces of advice you would give to yourself and why and it's absolutely brilliant you can do that literally any topic any level and it's always absolutely fascinating because what you hear students saying isn't always what you would expect you know as a teacher you might think oh they'll talk about you know the two key points of knowledge and then you find that somebody you know would remind themselves about a skill or something you hadn't even thought of or they've got some sort of little rhyming method or something for remembering the order of something that you'd never even heard of before and it's always absolutely fascinating you know it could be that they want to give themselves advice on you know the order a way to do the maths in the question which you might have thought was you know really easy but they might be lacking confidence in maths it's an astonishingly good one and the kids love it because they think it's great fun because it's almost it's not like it's not like I work it's like a bit of fun or if I could travel in time absolutely love that that's a great question Paul so just to repeat repeat for for listeners the the plenary question is if you could go forward in time until just before you're going to answer an exam question on today's work what two pieces of advice would you give yourself and why and then I like that and why as well that's that's really really rich thanks that pull that's that's plenaries maybe we'll have to have a plenary at the end of this podcast but for now let's move straight on to do another idea that you cover in your book which is the idea of starters to start us off with starters Paul what is the point of a starter again I'm not quite sure how different people do it in different countries I know in schools over here a lot of emphasis on starters particularly with schools where they have problems with behaviour with students is on making a starter that's like exciting and brings a lesson to life and all of that sort of thing which is great but from my point of view if you do that but don't find out what the students prior learning is and where they're actually starting in relation to the learning objectives then it's fairly pointless so my key thing will be to say that what is most important yeah it's got to you know get their attention be interesting get them you know on side and so on but it's got to actually find out where the students are in particular for the students they need to know where they are at the start of the lesson in terms of their learning with reference to what they're going to be doing we're kind of getting a bit of a theme of polar bears in this podcast so let's stick with that theme if we're going to have a starter for that lesson what might a good starter for that lesson look like I might have had for example a starter where I got the kids to perhaps discuss in a small group anything they know about polar bears why they thought they you know what they look like and why and just get them chatting about it because might actually find that they already know quite a lot but on the other hand I mean as I discovered from if you read the book I mean I had a student who didn't know even know what kind of polar bears were so I think something like that might be quite useful where you just go around and you listen to the kids I wouldn't even ask for a feedback record a slap and chat on their table or something and just listen to what they were saying. Okay. What other types of starters would you do? One of my favourite ones is a 321 starter, which I do quite often, where I might say, picking out on a topic that we've done in the past that is relevant for today's work and say they do work on, I don't know, circuits, for example, and they've done basic work on the electrical circuits in the past. So I might have a question that's a starter that says, "Okay, give me three differences between series and parallel circuits. Two of our two users are using a parallel circuit to light a house. One thing that other people in this room might have forgotten or not fully understood about the series and parallel circuits." And if you word it so there is other people in the room might have forgotten, you will find that kids will say things that they're unsure of and so on, but because you've used that phrase other people might have forgotten, you'll get kids saying, "Well, I think people might have forgotten or might not understand fully and they'll say something that they don't understand fully." Okay. And that last bit is obviously the key bit. Yeah, I like it. You had a couple of others. One was, "Why can't I answer this exam question? What's that one?" Okay, that's quite not used a lot, obviously, with exam level classes, GCSA, A level, and classes. Put an exam question on the ball, particularly if it's a longer question with quite a number of marks which you might get in an advanced level paper. And so, "Right, okay, this is a question you'd need to be advantageous. Why can't we answer it right now?" Now, in many cases, you might think, "Okay, will it just because we haven't got the knowledge, we've got learned some stuff today." But you may find that it's not knowledge that the problem. And that's a really good thing for kids to know too. So, you might realise that actually it's a maths skill that they are, you know, can't interpret a graph or a table or a diagram. It could be that they don't have the vocabulary needed or haven't got the clarity. They might not even be able to understand what question wants them to do. So, there's a whole lot of things from which we would then go on to perhaps develop learning objectives, depending on what their answers were. Okay. Cool. That's a really, really novel idea. What else you got? Another one that I do at the beginning of topics is this idea of traffic lighting words or phrases. So, for example, an A-level group doing work on the kidney, I may have given them all the new biological terms and phrases that were going to come up in that section of work. Now, they would traffic light those. A green traffic light will be, "I've heard this term before. I was most, I know what it means. I'm completely happy with it." A red traffic light will be, "Never heard of this before. I've never heard of a net front or whatever. And I'm going to say that I don't have a clue." And number one will be, "Well, I've heard of this before, but I can't properly remember it." And obviously, they're the key ones, they're ones that you, they may have been taught before, but hadn't actually learned. And so, that's really useful. It's also useful in another way in that it shows the students that everything they do builds on something else that they've already done, you know, and it's all a continual learning. And that they can see where they come from and where they're going to again. And that's a really cool part. I know that one you mentioned when you were in the email was the, "I went shopping, I did." Because, you know, that's the game, kids play all the time. So again, that's a cool one. If you're starting a lesson and it's a follow-on, I might say, "Right, okay, during the last lesson, during the last lesson, we learned, and then the kids would have to say, the first group would have to say something, and then the second group would have to say, "During the last lesson, I learned that class, and then after those only counts, and you just keep going until they run out." And again, it's amazing which things you see they remember and which ones they're going. Yeah, I really like that one. That's great because, I mean, I was just thinking back to the last lesson with my students. I didn't know how long I could go for just defining or recalling stuff from last lesson. So in my last lesson, it was with my U-rated, something like circumferences, two pi r, and then another student could say r represents a radius. Another student could say, "Ratius is the distance from the centre of a circle to the outside, and one could say circumference is the distance around the circle." And one other one could say diameter is the distance across the circle. But after that, I don't know what else I'd say. It worked. But if you did it with small groups, so like a few kids on the table, they could all be saying the same things. And then you're wandering around. You might notice that some people know all of those on their table, and some people miss some on their table. Yeah, okay. And that's the sort of thing. So it doesn't have to last a lot, but you can get a lot of information quite quickly. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I like that. Now, my starters in my classes are much more boring than yours, Paul. My starters, at least in my U-rated maths class, they're basically every day they look the same. There's between about seven and ten questions on a printed sheet that the students come in and they grab one and they start working on it silently straight away. And it will include usually one or two questions from the last lesson or test the concepts in the last lesson. A couple of questions from within the last week, a couple of questions from the last month, and a couple of questions from a little bit earlier than that even. Any thoughts on a starter like that? I mean, what you've just said is absolutely great, because like the idea that when you said, you know, right, and a couple of questions from the last lesson, I think, and yet that's okay. But what about, you know, previous lessons? So, but then you went on and said exactly that, because that is exactly the sort of thing that you would need to do. You'd need to say, you know, right, okay, but what about two weeks ago? And what about four weeks ago? One thing I might sort of do, I mean, one thing you could do might be to have some questions written out with answers already written out, some of which are right answers and some of which are wrong answers. But they don't know which ones are right and which ones are wrong, or what's wrong about them. And rather than just doing the questions, they have to actually look at the questions and see whether they can, particularly if there's, you know, particular mistakes that kids make about, I don't know, doing fractions or whatever, you can include some of those. Yeah. You know, that's just another way around it. It's just something different to do it to start the lesson. Yeah. I like that. Cool. All right. So we've had a look at learning intentions. We've learned that they should be really specific, that they should be really understandable to the students. And one really good way of doing that is actually breaking them up into more parts and also specifying numbers of things that students can identify. We've had to talk a bit about plenaries. And the key idea that plenaries should come before, we should come straight after planning, plenaries should come straight after planning your learning intentions. And they should be directly linked to each other. That's the key idea there. And if we can use them formatively, that's ideal as well. And we've had a bit of a look at starters and starters as a way of identifying what students already know about a topic is kind of the key point that you made there, Paul. We're now kind of ready. I hope to move into the idea of presentation of concepts in a science class, Paul, how would you usually start to introduce a concept to students in your classes? Right. So if I was planning the lesson, I think one of the key things is if you're planning it, you're planning it in that order, you have the learning objective, you should then plan your plan array, then plan your starter. Now, the bit in between what I call the learning sandwich is the bit that should be flexible. Right. Too many teachers, particularly in science, worry about the content and wash and move the starters and the plenaries and so on. Too many teachers in science, especially an in subjects like geography and that, where there's a lot of content to get through. And maths, for example, what they want to do is treat it as like, I've got to get through this amount of stuff. And very often, it's like, right, this is something no, we're going to do this today, we're going to do it for a couple more days. Then they're saying, "Cousets, no, that hasn't helped kids at all." So if I was introducing new concepts, first of all, nothing is a new concept. I can't span this whole idea. You're probably too young, too young for Monte Python, but the idea that they used to have the, now for Sunnick totally completely different. Nothing is completely different. With kids, with a well chosen starter, they should always see that what is coming is building on something they've done before. So, if I'm introducing a new concept, it's like, remember this we did. Now we're moving it on a little bit to here. And by the end of the lesson, we're going to get to here. That's a different approach, I think. I think it's just having that attitude. What you do with your topic, how you present your work and so on, I think is really down to the teacher, whether you work, speak, presentations, practicals, whatever. But don't give kids the impression of what they're doing is something new and different and so on. Does that make sense? Yeah, I like it, Paul. I'm just expanding on your metaphor of the sandwich of the lesson, where you learn the intention of your starter at the top piece of the bottom piece of bread. the plenary is the bottom or vice versa. And I'm just thinking. I mean, that makes a lot of sense here because you may have some sandwiches, which only have a bit of marmode in the middle, right? It's just really not much there because you recognize that there doesn't need to be that much there, that lesson. But there may be other ones that are like, the BLT, it's got everything in it. I'm baking lettuce tomato, you add some cheese and whatever mayonnaise, whatever else you need. And that might be a really rich sandwich, but we've really also got to make sure that we've got those two slices of bread. Otherwise, it's really not a learning sandwich at all. So I do like that, I do like that kind of metaphor. - I think what it is important is that people tend, I mean, science teachers especially, tend to think that they have x amount of content that they've got to get into so many minutes and therefore everything that's got to be put into every lesson and so on. All we should be doing is thinking, "I've got this range of content to cover over x number of weeks." And I've got to put the bits into this lesson, which fit between my starter and my plenary for these kids, it might be different for the same topic, for another group, you know, I might be able to do an extra task in the lesson because those ones are a bit quicker or a bit, you know, better at doing this. We've got to get away from the one size fits all. So the filling in the sandwich gets altered depending on the starter of the lesson. So you may start in a different place. You may drop one of your tasks. You may add in a task and call one out later on. Flexibility. - Yeah, that flexibility, that's something that we'll touch on a bit later because that was something that I, in your book that I found a little bit controversial. So I'm really looking forward to exploring that with you. A bit more, building on this kind of sandwich metaphor, Paul. - Yep. - It's kind of interesting. I was running a workshop on retrieval the other day, like retrieval practice and in particular, using starters as retrieval activities. And one of the questions from a teacher was, you know, how long does this take? You know, you've got a 50 minute lesson. How long does it take student to do 10 questions and then for you to actually go through them and some of them in quite a lot of detail? And my kind of answer was, well, it can actually take a long time. It can take almost the whole lesson sometimes. But in my mind, it's often a lot better to focus on using tasks formatively and in a way that stimulates retrieval rather than focusing on the middle of the sandwich every lesson. Because say I'm teaching, I just talked about how I was teaching how to find the circumference of a circle in the last lesson with my year eights, I could spend the whole lesson doing some big exploratory activity where students all come to deeply understand the relationship between the radius and the circumference of a circle. But if I just do that in one lesson and never revisit it, because I spend every lesson doing such an exploration, in three months, they're going to have forgotten how to calculate the circumference of a circle from the radius, because I haven't looked at it again. So I'd much rather do, if I'm short of time, just do one example, get them to do one example, and then get them to do it again the next lesson, then again in three lessons, and then again in five or seven lessons, then again in 15 lessons. And I'm actually more confident that that's going to stick better for them than if I spend the whole of a lesson on, whole of every lesson on that something completely new as Monte-Pythe would say or something completely different, I think it was. And really beefing up the middle of that sandwich. - I mean, it's interesting because if you see science lessons, particularly with 11 to 14 year olds, when they're first at secondary schools, they do two or three weeks worth of work on plants, and then they go and do two or three weeks worth of work on electrical circuits, and in two or three weeks worth of work on rocks. And it's all pitch and hold, and it's like less and one we're going to do this, less and two, we're going to do that, less and three we're going to do that. And the teachers are so obsessed with sort of getting through content that there's none of what you've just been describing. I described it in a book and I wrote it an article right back in about 2000 Kings College. It literally feels like being a hamster on a will. Literally teaching science for many science teachers is like all I've got to do is get through more and more and more and more content. And they just don't step back and say, well, actually, I haven't got to get through loads of content. What I've got to do is make these kids learn stuff and that's different. - Yeah, very different. It's, I believe it's a John Wooden quote, it's about distinguishing, we're differentiating between, I've taught this and they've learned it. So yeah, and the hamster will's another way to think about that. - Yeah. - Dear listeners, if you're finding this discussion with Paul Spenceley stimulating, and you'd like to be able to easily refer back to and remember some of the most valuable takeaways from our discussion, as well as to dive a little deeper into some of the ideas within Paul's book, why not consider becoming a patron of the E.T. Blah podcast? Patrons are listeners who contribute a monthly donation to support the ongoing production of the show. And in return, they receive a summary each month of the key takeaways from the episode. Patrons also receive access to an interactive transcript of each episode, meaning that if you'd like to listen back to a specific part of the episode, you can simply do a word search for a key term and take it directly to the spot within the podcast and listen back at the convenient, click of a button. I'm really excited about this month's summary because Paul has given so many practical tips throughout this podcast with more to come in the second half. And I just can't wait to write up all his advice on writing better learning intentions, running effective planaries, what makes a good starter, how to run effective discussions, and Paul's methods for helping students perform better in assessments, which you'll hear all about in the second half of the episode. So if you'd like an actionable summary of this episode, the Etrepollot podcast, and if you'd like to support the ongoing production and sustainability of the show, simply go to patreon.com/err and sign up to support the show for as little as one dollar per month or the average donation of $5 per month. That's patreon.com/err to support the show and help to keep it sustainable for the long term. Now, back to this episode, the Etrepollot podcast with Paul Spenceley. So that's presentation of concepts and we didn't spend much time on that. In fact, we didn't answer the question at all. We just talked about how it's not that important to a plan or it's not as important to plan introducing concepts, but maybe let's return just to that to give you another chance to answer the original question and not emphasize the very, very important points around it. How do you, when you do, introduce a new, maybe it's not new, but a slightly novel idea to see-- Okay, in terms of introducing a topic or something to kids, it will be very much dependent on whether or not it's something they need to be able to run stand from a practical point of view. So, you know, like we're going to do an experiment to find out this out, or whether it's something that they may need to find out from sort of like research, or whether it was, you know, I mean, I might do a presentation. That part of the lesson would be no different to what a normal teacher will be doing in terms of science might be finding information out from a worksheet using a diagram to produce a table or whatever. Okay, so let's come back to our polar bears example. So, say you've run the plenary. The plenary was, have a chat in your table groups about polar bears, what you know about polar bears, and what they look like, why they might look like that, and how they behave, why they may behave like that, in relation to their environment. You've gone around, you've found out that they know their white, they know they've got thick fur things like that, and by the end you want them to be able to list three adaptations of polar bears to the cold, and why those adaptations make sense. What is the content presentation or content engagement like in this lesson? That would depend on the age and ability of the group, but it might be that they do research on computer, for example, to find out if that was possible, they might still be given a set of questions, you know, find out what color, you know, polar bears are, why they're that color, you know, it may be that they're given sort of a range of different textbooks and asked to look things up or whatever, you know, you've got to find out this information from here, this information from there. It might be that I do a presentation, or might do an interactive presentation where I get different kids to come up, depending on what other people say at the beginning and so on. So the actual feeling in the sandwich, if you like, would very much depend on the attainments and abilities of the students and the type of time constraints that I had and so on. But those parts, as I said, would be sort of like the things that we would have in our shared area, you know, on the computer, we might have different resources, work sheets, presentations and things that we may dip into. Those are the things that teachers, are good science teachers, are good at definitely keeping loads of notes and loads of presentations and things. I'm sure maths teachers as well. All right, cool. So that's what you feel teachers are already doing. Pretty well, I'm already have more than enough of. So something we can kind of kind of move on from. Yeah. That makes sense. Let's move to this tricky topic of discussions now, Paul. You said there's something that's very hard and something that's often often not done that well. But before we jump in there, why in the science class in particular, do you see this discussions as something important for us to do? Well, obviously it goes back to that idea that science is about the question of why in effect. Science is all about asking questions. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Questions are crucial to science. Science teachers tend to be paranoid about the amount of content they've got to get through. So where is your go-to starter is some short questions? 4 science T their go-to starter is a quick discussion and it's also they go to plenary at the end of a lesson. Ask a few quick questions and that'll be fine. I'll know that they've learned something and so on. I think that's one of the problems that people think that every science teacher, because they're a teacher, come round the discussion and people don't, you know, I've seen lesson plans where people, you know, some of the training teachers, right, three or four sides of way four about for a lesson plan and at the beginning, as they, you know, start a discussion as if it's just going to happen. It's like, discussions don't just happen. They are really, really difficult to do to find out what kids actually understand and know is not easy. Yeah, couldn't agree more. So why are discussions important in science class? If you don't get discussions, you don't find out enough from your kids. If you go into science lessons too often what you see as a supposed discussion looks like a game of tennis between the teacher and several individuals. Throw question, it comes back, throw question, it comes back. My description of the discussion is more like a game of netball where it gets passed around all over the place. I don't think what people think about when they hear the word discussion very often, it is what I think about. Too often they think it means the teacher asking lots of questions. To me, discussions are kids talking and the teacher saying it's less possible in between. All right, let's try to model this. I've got a few characters here. I'll get a few characters in the screen. We've got bottle student. We've got, yeah, just random things on my desk. We've got tablet students. Yeah. We've got microphone student. Okay. And we're going to have a discussion. Paul. Yep. We have these different students in our classroom about polar bears. Right. Let's go. So I'm going to ask a question about polar bears. So I might start off with something like, okay, how many of the objects we've got in front of us are flexible in any way? What's left? All right. Well, microphone replies. I'm the kind of flexible because my core to the computer is a bit flexible. Yeah. Tablet student replies. I'm a little bit flexible because I made a plastic container. And bottle student says, I'm not flexible at all. I've made a glass. Right. Okay. So my question now is only going to be for the flexible students. Right. So I've sort of like narrowed down to a sort of small group already. And I put the focus on those. But I'm going to then say the own flexible students are going to be asked to comment on what they hear. Afterwards. So that's an emphasis on them having to listen. They're not going to be able to opt out because they know that they're going to have a role to play in this later. So I might then have a question like, what might happen if a polar bear was born that didn't have any fur? And I would let two, three of my flexible students answer. Okay. So would you call on them or would you just wait for volunteers? I might sort of like pick people randomly, probably. Okay. Let's keep the role play going. I was just being awkward in making none of the characters answer. So living, I'm living that one in your court, court, Paul, because I want to see how you deal with no students answering. Okay, right. Okay. So I might say, right. Okay. Tablets. You tell me an answer. So this is the tablet speaking now. If a polar bear was born without any fur would probably freeze to death. Okay. And I might say, thank you. And I'm saying, what was it? Why are you a head client? Yeah, we got, yeah, that would do. We'll introduce a headphone. Sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. So a headphone student says, yeah, they'd just look really weird because they wouldn't have any fur. So they would look like a weird polar bear. Okay. And we've got any more flexible ones? Or was that it? Have we done all the flexible ones? Well, we've got the microphones kind of flexible because it's got the flexible cords. So maybe microphone could say something like, if it wasn't white, maybe some, maybe might get eaten by some other polar bears, who were hungry because they'd know that it was going to die anyway or because it would look weird. Okay. I then might go to bottle and say, right, okay, bottle out of those three answers. How do you think was best and why? Okay. But bottle replies, I don't remember who said it, but someone said something about the polar bear freezing. So probably that's probably the best one because that's probably the most realistic answer. Okay. I then might go to somebody else who was in flexible and say, can you remind bottle who it was who said that one? Okay. This is watch. So watch says watch is also not very flexible. Our bottle, I think it was actually tablet who said that that with that for that first idea about it freezing. Okay. So we've got some basic ideas that we've picked up from that question. Now obviously it's quite difficult because like you'd normally have like quite a few more kids to be joining it. But the idea that you bounce a question around you get another question kids to be listening and ready to say something. You might turn around to somebody who hasn't been involved and just simply say to them, which person use this word or that word or whatever in their answer. Who didn't say this, which person didn't mention the fact that the polar bear might die, who mentioned the polar bear's mother just to get the idea that kids have to be actively listening. And you only have to do that a little bit now and again for kids to realize actually I've got this switch on here. He's not doing table tennis with individuals. He's not just going bottle bottle bottle because what tends to happen in science discussions. Content is king. People are worried. So they ask a fairly straightforward question. The almost universal start to question for science lesson is right. What did we do last lesson? You'll get a few hands up. Somebody else answer. They'll say, yeah, what about the next person and they'll add a bit more and say, yeah, but there was something more important than that. So they'll ask the third person and they're saying, I'm not sure. And so they'll give them a clue. Well, do you remember it was all it was about, you know, we talked about something. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, you've nearly got it. And then they move to the fourth person. And then that person gets it and they go, yeah, great. Now the first two people who answered, I'm going to answer again in the rest of that lesson because they've been made to feel like rejects because like they've been told basically what you didn't remember properly. And that means they're less likely to contribute 20 future discussion. You've also sort of decided what you wanted to hear before you even asked the question and you steered it in that direction. So people will say, you know, like what's the name of the green color and implants? You know, it sounds a bit like the same stuff we have in swimming pools. And then when somebody gets it right, they go, great, right. We've all learned that. Let's move on. That's not a discussion. And it does happen like that in science all the time. You might be sitting there thinking, God, you know, that's not what my lessons are like, you know, from a mass point of view. But that is what you would see if you went into a lot of science lessons, unfortunately. Yeah, trust me, Paul, I've run plenty of discussions like that, both in my physics class a couple of years ago and also in my maths classroom. So I love those tips you've given. Also, I was thinking one other question you could ask the students that's in a similar vein to who said this one or who didn't say this would be. Could you nominate someone who hasn't said anything so far so they can, you know, not only identify who has it's I'm but also identifying and welcome into the discussion students who haven't made a contribution yet. So it's good. And I think the way that you started the question with or the discussion with just something random and fun like who's who he is flexible. And I know examples in the book use is to things like who's who supports a football team that's where the blue jersey or anything like that. You're also learning a bit about the students and allowing them to bring it something of themselves into the classroom. So it's quite it's really welcoming and lovely. And there was something else you were doing there very consciously whenever tablets or bottle or earphone or microphone made a contribution. You weren't actually evaluating the contribution at all and that might be something that teachers didn't notice you were doing or you were not doing more to the point but you just said thank you. In a completely like no evaluation, completely dull tone. Yeah. To use Doug Lemov's terminology, you were managing your tell. You were not giving away to students. And that that was great. So yeah, tell us tell us about that. Well, I think that is really important. I think starters what what you said about sort of having a random question to start. Honestly, the more bizarre the question you answer to get a sort of like who would like to go to the moon if they could you know the opportunity kids will always put a hand up. And the more random it is the more kids will be willing to sort of go. I fancy that, you know, answering that question and getting back. And then that's already got their attention. So they're not messing around with chatting with their mate or anything. You've already got kids attention at the start of the discussion. Teachers almost always feel compelled to respond every time the kid says something. What I would quite often do is I would say, you know, right, I'm going to ask a question, I'm going to listen to I answers before I say anything else. And then we'll move on from there and then this next group. You know, so all eight of you are going to say something. Then I'm going to choose somebody who wouldn't like to go on strictly come dancing. And, you know, I would listen to all eight and I'm a best. Thank you. Or I just, you know, smile at them and just move on. Because otherwise half the discussion time is the teacher talking. So the less you say, the more the students are saying to in the same amount of time. And that to me is crucial. It's great. And it's the same when you're running professional development for teachers as well. You know, you'll ask a question or you'll invite a volunteer to share something. And then they'll kind of be answering to the presenter in the same way that the students answer to the teacher in the classroom. And again, that doesn't embody what a discussion is. The discussion is when the contributor speaks to the group rather than just the person up the front. So what you're doing by saying, thank you. Or that's one contribution. Let's go to the next one. That's two contributions. You're actually helping the students to see that the audience for their contribution is not the teacher. It's the class. Can I just add as well? I mean, again, I'm sound like I'm really sort of putting down on the science teachers. But content is such a worry for science teachers. What tends to happen is they want to shoehorn everything other than their key bit of content to the very margins of the lesson. You hear, if you go into science lessons, people say things like sort of, right, you know, we're going to do some quick questions now. And they'll ask a question and a couple of kids start messing around. And they'll say something like, you know, can you to be quiet? Because, you know, we've got to get through this quickly because we've got a practical to do. Now, what does that say about the sort of like discussion? We've got to get through this quickly. It's not important because we've got to do it quickly. Because the important thing is the practical we've got to do. Or, you know, we've got, we, you know, if we don't get through this quickly, we want to have time to do. You might just as well say to kids, well, you know, this piece of the lesson isn't important at all. Just sit there and play about with your phone or talk to your mates. But people subconsciously do that all the time. So you have one really good question. I saw a friend of mine did this and he came into, he was starting a whole topic on sort of like ecosystems. And he came in and he said, um, I've just driven here and he said there was a farmer's field. He said, it's got a greenhouse that is nearly the size of terminal five, Heathrow, air plot, air plot. Why do we need greenhouse is that big? And that's all he said. And the rest of that lesson was a discussion, which was a prelude to a whole topic on ecosystems. What a great question. Yeah. I mean, one of the examples I picked up in the book as well, which I mentioned was the idea that, I mean, you do work on magnets and you go into the next lesson and teachers will say, yeah, what were the end of the magnets called? Why happened to be put two north together? Why do two south together? It's all just little questions, kids can guess. Yeah, the teacher is saying round and said, you know, right, we did magnets last lesson. What might happen if we cut a magnet in half? How's that for a question? That really finds out what your kids have learned. It's a good question. And then crucially, they don't evaluate the answers as they come in. They do what you've just said and they've said, I'm going to listen to eight people's answers on, and then I'm going to ask someone who hasn't contributed an answer to share which one they thought was the best and why. Yeah, lovely, lovely question. You provide us with a good segue poll into the next section, which is all about content. This is the kind of controversial bit which I alluded to earlier, but I'd just like to share a little excerpt from your book and then have you comment on it. So you're right. For those who may be thinking at this point that this method of planning and teaching would inevitably mean that content was not fully covered, I agree. Teaching for learning is about quality, not quantity. I would also suggest if you were concerned by this to consider how much better a student would do in any exam if they were certain of 66% of their learning rather than had some idea of 100% of it or to put it another way. What is the point of teaching GCSE level eight or nine work to a student who will only ever gain a level five? Surely it is more important to ensure that the student is totally confident with all aspects of work at level four and five. Tell us more. Obviously I'm talking from a science point of view here. In the UK most science lessons, for example, classes are set into relatively big groups, but they're fairly similar in terms of attainment ability. When you say set, that's a UK word. Another word is kind of streaming. Students are placed into an achievement based classes. You'll have a higher class, lower class, etc. Now, to my mind, it's like, will you take a driving test? If you took a driving test, if when you were learning to drive, they said, "Okay, for the first couple of weeks we're going to do it in a mini, then we're going to go on to a van, then we're going to go on to a caravan, then we're going to go on to a truck, then we're going to go on to an articulated truck because you may end up having to do these at some point during your life." That way people would think that was absolutely ridiculous. So you'd be like, "No, I just need to learn to drive a basic car. If I need any of those other bits, I'll do it as and when I need it." For me, it's a bit like that in science. There's no point in teaching all the content to everyone and hoping that when you do that with some sort of splatter-gan approach, that some kids are going to learn some of it, some more than others. To my mind, it is much better to have a proper starter and a proper planery and make sure that the content is learned and learned at the appropriate level. If I take something like chemical equations, for example, now chemical equations, they could be done as simple words, very simple addition equations. You could have displacement equations. You could have go on to make balancing equations and you could have ones with brackets or parentheses. Now, they gradually get harder in terms of levels. If I was teaching chemical equations, I would teach what my students in front of me need it. So if I had students who were confident with word equations and displacement equations, I'd spend more of the time doing balancing and practicing this. If I had students who were never in a million years going to be able to cope with the maths of doing balancing and practicing, I'd spend more time on the words and the displacement. Too often, everyone seems to feel that they've got to teach everything to everybody because it's in the specification or in syllabus. See your kids who've got really low maths skills, really low language skills. When told they've got to do balanced chemical equations with symbols and numbers and everything, they can't cope with, but it's in the syllabus that we've got to do. To my mind, that is absolutely pointless. Getting them to do the things that are going to get them marks in the exam and getting them confident. I know you're a bit worried about that. I see what you're saying. I guess the challenge I have with it is a couple of challenges to that, I guess Paul. I'm really looking forward to your thoughts on this because I know you've thought about it for many years. One is, say subjects or classes aren't streamed. Surely there's you probably disadvantage those higher achieving students by kind of slowing things down and not covering. Say you don't even get to the end of the content, which is something you admit may happen if you teach in this way. Surely that's disadvantageing the higher achieving students who would be able to keep up with that pace. That's the first question I'll throw at you. I don't see how higher student students would be disadvantaged because what they would be doing would be, say you have work that goes level 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, the higher achieving kids would be doing work that was 7, 8, 9. Mostly medium kids would be doing 5, 6, 7 and the lower achieving ones would be doing 4 and 5. I mean, that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about sort of like, you know, not covering what is required. I'm talking about tailoring it for the students who are in front of you. It should be that all learners are learning at the level they need rather than on one size fits or you can't teach everything to everybody and expect students to simply keep up as if just being aware of the content is in some way good enough to improve their learning. That's not what it's about. Lower achieving students will become disillusioned if you're constantly moving them on to stuff they don't want to. understand, higher achieving students get fed up if they have to repeat stuff, which isn't, which they're already enough. What we need to be doing is getting each student, each group of students doing work at the level they need to make progress. Okay, I'm starting to understand your argument a bit more now because the way I first interpreted it in the book was like say you're doing a topic that's got eight big ideas in it. I was understanding is in, you know, if you don't not get into the end means you actually only cover five of the eight ideas because students don't seem to be grasping them along the way, but the way I'm interpreting what you're saying now is you do cover the eight ideas, but some of the students just manage to fully grasp it all and can do the higher level questions for all eight, but other students can do what's required to get the kind of lower level marks for all eight, which makes sense to me. But I would say that even with the most higher, highest achievement students, if it was a particularly difficult thing and they did only get seven of the eight bits covered, it is far better to be totally confident in those seven bits than to cover all eight and not be overly confident with four of them, you're going to get better exam results with kids who are more confident in what they do now. Yeah, maybe also maybe, um, maybe none of very little of that stuff's going to come up on the exam and the stuff they choose to put on the exam is the stuff that you didn't get to it or yeah, it's an interesting one. The other thing I'm a bit worried about is it's a bit of a slippery slope, I feel because if you're kind of saying, oh, I'm going to kind of stop and slow down whatever students aren't getting it, you know, acknowledging that as John Mason says, teaching takes place in time, but learning takes place over time, often students aren't going to get things first time round and that I feel like the solution often isn't to kind of stop and keep on going over the same ground, it's actually going to go, all right, we haven't all got this today, that's all right, we're going to revisit tomorrow when the starter and in a couple of days in the starter again. Let's just leave that for now, move on to the next thing and then we'll come and revisit it and see if we can go a bit deeper next time, but if we take the opposite approach and say, oh, well, we haven't all got it, so let's just pause and let's just all make sure we've really got it and then that still doesn't work, it's like, oh, there's still two of us who still don't get it, let's just pause and let's just stay here. It's a slippery slope where you can end up kind of not making the progress that would be possible if you just kind of sit the bar and use really highly effective teaching and instructional approaches to get students there. What do you thought on that? Well, I mean, I think what you said earlier on about your starters, where you sort of have things from, you know, like yesterday, but also the week before or two weeks before or whatever, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about sort of waiting until every single student has got everything. And if there are key things, you know, some things that, you know, clearly are an issue, one of the things will be that those are the things which you as a teacher make a note of and then those are the ones that you might go back to when you have your revision sessions or your obstacle catch ups or whatever. So you actually again target revision and catch up things which are actually required rather than just, well, let's just do a general revision session on, you know, chemistry or whatever. What I'm not saying is that, you know, you make sure every single student has reached a certain level before you move on. That's never possible. And you're quite right. But I think what is important is that the teacher and more importantly is a student's realise it's all about moving their individual learning on. And you can keep doing that and you can do it. And even if a student has only got two of today's three learning objectives, that's two more than they had at the start, you know, that's what we need to do. Yeah, I think that's really valuable out looking at I was using a very similar line. I'm running a maths intervention at the school. I'm working at the moment with three boys who've really been struggling. And, you know, we had our first session just two days ago. And there were 15 questions and, you know, one of the couple of the boys only got four or five of them right. And I really emphasise, you know, it's not about getting all the questions right. It's simply about setting a baseline. And if she got four to right today and you get five or six right tomorrow, that's an improvement. Absolutely. Then you are making progress. Yeah, they really perked up when I kind of emphasise that and couched in those of those terms. So we're on the same page with that idea, that part of the idea at least. That's what I think I think we can leave that. But I think, you know, it's an interesting and important thing for teachers to think about and wrestle with for sure. I'm keen to discuss something that was really interesting in your book to me. One of the many things that was really interesting was the idea was your section on linking formative and summative assessment. And you talked about this kind of, you referred to it as the million pound question. And the answers that you got to this million pound question, the first time that you asked it, could you tell us Paul, what is this million pound question? What are the answers that you often get? Literally, this is the ultimate question. If you think you are assessing your kids and you want to find out how your formative assessment or whatever is going, I got kids from a whole range of subjects and I asked them all the same question. I simply said to them, right, if you got a grade B in your last exam or your mock or whatever, what would you have to do to improve that to get a grade A in the next one? Obviously you can vary the letters or whatever. But that's the basic question. You should try this because the chances are you will get three basic answers. One is I've got a work harder in some way or another. That's a basic sort of phrase. Secondly, I've either got to do some revision or I've got to revise more or better something about my revision. And the third one, well, I'm not going to be able to get any better because I can't, I'm not very good at maths or science or whatever else it is. And that's very interesting because there's a big chunk of kids who think that learning is sort of fixed somehow. I'm never going to be any good at maths. I'm never going to be any good at science or physics or whatever. And those are basically the three answers you will get. And feel free to go try it at the interest in the sea. I think that's a great question. It's very much a coaching question. Jim Knight, when I had Jim Knight, a coaching expert on the podcast, and essentially the question he asks, the first question he asks when after a lesson visit will be, what would you give that lesson out of 10? If Ciro's worst lesson you ever taught and 10's an absolutely incredible lesson, what would you give it? And then they give you an answer and he will say, cool, what would need to happen for it to move to, so they said seven, for it to move to an eight. So it's very much along the same lines of in terms of a formative and a self-reflective question. And it's interesting that you said there's kind of three answers that students will give. One is try harder, one is revise more, and one is, well, I can't get any better. I'd be further remember those three correctly. What are the kind of answers that right now to listen to? That might not sound very much like a million pound question, right? Because if it just leads to those three answers, it's not not all that helpful. So where do we actually want to get students to? What kind of answers do you want to hear students give to the million pound question? Well, I'd like to hear is students actually saying what specifically they're going to do, what work are you going to do? What actual pieces of work are you going to do that you're going to work on? What is your vision? What bits of your vision and how are you going to make them better? Those sort of things. And definitely nobody saying I can't get any better because that's not an answer. Everybody can get better. But what's interesting is you get those answers regardless of age, ability, attainment, anything. You will get the same answers. I've got the same answers in the Gram School. I've got the same answers from kids who can't read them right? Okay. So we want to get to more specific answers. Yeah. So this is what this part of the podcast is all about and what this part of your book was about. How do we get students to those more specific answers? Let's start with your idea of predicted versus actual market sheets. Tell us about these predicted versus actual market sheets, Paul. Right. Well, in the book, the front covers of the science exam sheets didn't look anything like a traditional cover with, you know, nine grade. There's a lot of information. One of the things is that we used to finish all the science tests either five or ten minutes before the end of the allotted time for the period in order for students to have some time to do an immediate self-reflection where they would go through each question or maybe each part question if it's like a complicated paper and actually write down how many marks they thought they were going to get for that question or for that part question. Now for low really low sort of attaining students, sometimes that will just be a smiley a sad face or an in-between one. But some may indicate indication of how well they thought they'd done on individual questions. And then when the teacher marks the paper, they put the marks for each question down next to that. And by looking at those predictions compared with the actual marks, both the teacher and the student can find out so much information. It's absolutely astonishing. I mean, the first time you do it, particularly if you do it in a mixed school, you probably find the boys are totally overconfident and the girls lack confidence. It is a starting point. As you go on with it, you find out lots more things and it's always astonishing. What other things can you find out? You may find, for example, that a whole cohort of students think they've done really well on a particular question that they've been all not done well on. And as a teacher, it's like, "Why do they all think they were going to do well on that? What was it about that?" And then you might look at a question and begin to look at where they lost marks. And you might find that actually, they probably were confident with the knowledge, but actually they lost marks because of an exam skill, perhaps they didn't interpret the question properly, didn't read it properly or couldn't interpret it graph or something like that. Students themselves can find things out because students quite often think that they're not as good at remembering stuff, knowledge. Then they actually are and actually achieve more things. And quite often for them, that's quite good because it's a confidence booster in that. Actually, you did remember the names of all the parts of the hearts on the diagram, but you didn't think you'd got more than four out of seven. That sort of thing. It's really powerful as a way of giving information. And you could, if you had the time, particularly during revision sessions and things, you could have the time to say, "Well, why did you think you had done so badly on that question?" And actually, you did well, why did you have the reverse? Cool. Something else you emphasized in the book was the importance of students producing revision resources, which makes a lot of sense, but I didn't want to deal with it a bit deeper and ask, in your mind, what makes a good revision resource and perhaps just as importantly, how did you support students to create high quality revision resources? It's like everything else. There's no one-size-fits-all. I would never tell students how to do revision resources. I mean, like they learn a talk techniques, but I would never tell them which one to use. So, different kids would need to do different techniques. So, if a diagram works for you or a list of questions and answers or whatever work for the individual, what is extremely important and what students don't always understand is that revision resources need to be usable. You need to be able to get the information back. A content-driven subject like science, girls, grammar school, girls love doing multi-colored extravaganzas for a revision. And they will cram as much on a piece of paper as possible in a hundred different shades of colors. And then when you say to them, "Right, can you find this fact?" They can't. It looks beautiful, but they can't find the information. So, one of the things that we introduced them was extremely successful. Things like end-a-topic tests and mid-term tests and things like that. We did allowing the students to actually bring their revision resources in and use them when they did the tests. Now, obviously, if you're doing that in the girls' grammar school, the very first thing they will say, "Well, we'll get all the answers right if we got all the resources." And of course, they duck because there's tons about the reasons why not. Including those I've just used. But one of the things that we noticed was that first of all, peer pressure, and we've done it in other schools, not just girls' grammar schools, but peer pressure, it looks extraordinary. The kid who didn't turn up the revision resources the first time and was the only one who didn't have any, thought some with them the next time, without me or anyone out there trying to tell them because they just felt that they were the only one who hadn't. And also, the quality of resources got better and better. Boys in our sixth form at the girls' school would look at what the girls were bringing in when they're getting out there, a little screwed up scrap of paper and go blind me. They thought, "Oh, that, and I've only got this, and then a few weeks later they're bringing in more." So it was extremely good. It was good for the students because they were able to see whether or not they could actually find information fairly quickly and easily in their resources. And many of the girls in particular discovered that cramming a load of stuff onto a piece of paper wasn't a good idea and you needed a bit more white space on the paper to be able to find things for example. So it was really useful. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's just kind of like a self-correcting mechanism of letting them bring it in and see and iterate over time. I like it a lot. There was a one specific method that you used within the schools you worked in, which you called the Marx method, that is the M-A-R-C-K-S method. And this was for helping students to kind of eke more Marx out of the knowledge that they had on assessments. Can you just a bit of an overview of the Marx approach? Right. Okay. This came about when my self and a colleague of mine were fed up with the fact that we were marking exam papers where kids were losing loads of Marx for what we call silly mistakes. And you're writing things on them like read the question properly, you muck it or whatever. And we realized that there were a few basic things that were losing Marx as well as just not knowing science stuff. So we came up with the following letters M stood for maths or graph skills, which is always a problem in science. Yeah, they don't transfer the skills even if they got them. The A was for application of science where my kids learn an example, but think the science only applies to that one example. So for example, they will learn that the moon has got very low gravity because it's got low mass. And that Jupiter has got a very high gravity because it's got high mass. But then if you say to them, you know, Marx has got an in between mass, they won't be able to tell you estimate what the gravity is because they haven't realized it is something that could be applied elsewhere. Not reading the question was the R so we've had maths application. I read in the questions properly is a real real problem, not just because kids have poor learning abilities, but sometimes as we found out in the grammar school, kids are used to skim reading if they're very able and they think they can do the same with exams and they make mistakes. The C was clarity, which in our case was things like scientific vocabulary might be units. It might be avoiding using words like it, they're maniac and actually naming things because you have to do that in science papers. The K was knowledge. We wanted it there to show that it was part of the thing. And the S was what we were statements per mark the idea if you do a three mark question, you need to say three different things, not one big lot along roughly answer. So what we did was when we marked the exams, the kids would get a tick if they got a question right. And then if they got a question wrong, instead of getting a cross, they got one or more of the letters. Now we're guessing. So if a kid gets a question wrong, which has got a calculation in it, it could be a maths or a, so he could get an M, but it could be that they didn't read the question properly. So it could be an R or it could be they written down the wrong units in which case it could be a C. So they could get three letters, even though they've only got one question wrong. So it was done like that. When the students got their work back, there was a little tally chart on the front and they put how many M's and A's and R's and C's and K's and S's they got. And almost always it's mostly knowledge, but the students always absolutely amazed at how many other ways in which they lose marks in their exams. And it has worked right across the board from the very lowest attainers right up to people going off to an in Cambridge right from the second. What had you not worked because we have used it to improve exam results in so many schools and with so many students. We introduced this after the mocks in year 11 and a girls secondary school, non agrarma school. So these, there was a group of girls and they were very low at training in science. They had no motivation. Their results were poor. It was self fulfilling. We introduced this we gave them back their papers we told them how many actual marks in terms of real marks, not percentages they needed to get to the next grade and then said right have a look where could you have picked up those marks. And then the kids guy could use the cold guy on this question and that question got to more marks, you know, bank done. I could have used a more scientific word here than I was calling it them and I would have got. And these kids their schools results went up by 11% and that was in about a four month period between their mark and their actual thing. The kids were actually amazed with it they were like, it's so easy, you know, I haven't got to learn those more stuff. I've just got to read the questions more carefully. Yeah, you're helping students to see the gap and you're helping them to see how they can bridge it how they can make progress. That's fantastic and linking this back to that million pound question. You know, if you ask these students after you've used the marks approach that million pound question, which you can repeat for us and for our listeners, what answers will they get? I literally did I had a year 12 bond with your group and I sat a parent's evening saying to each of them in front of their parents. You know, you got this in your mock this year, what do you need to do to improve next year and the sort of answer. I would get in with things like, well, I've got to improve my clarity because I tend to sort of, you know, say protein rather than globular protein. I tend to not be quite clear and precise enough in my language skills. I had a girl who said, well, what I've noticed is that I get all the short answer questions nearly all right. I get the long answer questions right. But the three or four mark questions, I don't write enough statements to get the marks. So she went away, I've been discussed this at parents' evening and did every single past exam paper, every three and four mark question on all of them and got an A-style rather than an A. People were saying things like, you know, I've got to read the questions more carefully. I've got to make sure I read the top before the actual question appears to start with part A or whatever. And I haven't been reading that carefully enough. That level of information and kids, you know, to what have you got to do to improve is a world apart from, I've got a revised harder. Many even with knowledge, one of the girls at this school who was really low at taming, when I said to what have you got to do to be better, she said, well, I thought I'd learned the stuff on the heart. She said, and I thought I could do that. But actually, I hadn't learned enough with the parts to be able to label all the diagrams that. And that's a world away from, I've got to revise more. You know, that's a girl who actually knows something specific that she's got to do with her revision. And that was a girl who had no confidence with science whatsoever, able to have a conversation like that. Yeah, that's great, Paul. That's wonderful. And it's really moving into that space of medical cognition and helping students to reflect on their learning. And a real thing that's come throughout this whole podcast really, which is about emphasizing that it's not about what's going on in the mind of the teacher. It's not about clarity for the teacher. It's not about understanding for the teacher or learning intentions for the teacher. It's all about putting things in terms that are relevant for the student and that the student can comprehend. You know, from learning intentions, a student that make a lot of difference in our students to discussions where you're actually putting students in the driver's seat. And now to this marks approach where you're again putting students in the driver's seat. It's just a wonderful theme. And I think it's probably one of the main reasons why Dylan William did have such positive things to say about your book and which is why he recommended it to John Cat and John Cat subsequently recommended it to me as a potential good fit for the podcast. Paul, another question on this marks idea before we move on to the next section of the interview. I'm wondering if you ever, because I guess I'm thinking about using marks in the maths classroom, but also the increased marking load for the teacher of identifying the specific source of the error and adding these letters. Did you ever actually just hand back the tips and crosses to students and then get them to add the letters to represent the MA, RCK and the S in addition to doing the tally? Or did you always have teachers add the letters as part of the marking process? But we always did it as teachers and actually it takes the last time. Just everybody found that it took less time because you tend to write things like read the question or you know, units or things like that. Teachers do things like that all the time and actually it was much quicker. What I have done is I've produced exam papers with pre-written notes, some of which are right, some of which are slightly right, some of which have got mistakes of reading the question or clarity or whatever in them. I've used those as revision tools and the students have marked those themselves using the MA RCKS and they've had to look and it's really interesting when they do that because then they start arguing about whether something should or shouldn't mark and they're sort of well, I don't think this, you know, and I had to go say, I've just realised, you know, I read these answers and see how the clarity is really bad. That's just what mine are like. So yeah, we've done it that way but we always put them on for our set which when we marked. We might move now Paul into just a few closing questions if you're happy with that. The first one would be, what are three of your favourite books on education? And I'm happy to hear, if you think that it's important for us, our educational listeners to explore a bit of outside education, we're happy to hear some recommendations there as well. I think many teachers who are called out in a cycle of marketing and so on, they'd never been that much time to read educational books. So the ones I have really focused on have been the ones that have been assessment for learning or formative assessment because that's what's been passionate ever since I was involved in the King's project. The one I've gone to most would have been assessment for learning, putting it into practice which was by Paul Black, Dylan Williams, Christine Harrison and the others in the King's College team which basically was the more practical version of the little work inside the black box leaflet. I think Dylan's embedded formative assessment book as well. For over 20 years now I have worked with people like Dylan and Paul Black and Christine Harrison. I cannot speak highly enough about them. These people changed me as a person, let known as a teacher. I'd probably have to say those are my two favourite books on education. There are others that I've read on education which are very much along the same lines by Shirley Clark for example but I think those are the two that I would pick. So I'm only going to pick two. Great. Robert. Would a vice-poll which gives you your first year teacher self? I think if I could go back I would tell myself that it doesn't matter if I go on to become the best teacher ever. That is irrelevant. What matters is that my students become the best learners that they can be and there is a big difference between those two things. It's not about how well I teach, it's about how well they learn. I love it Paul. I love that. I might also say to myself that getting better results from students isn't about me as a teacher doing more work and I think that's something I've tried to emphasize throughout the book. It teaches work as hard as they can. No one can do any more. There are too many times I've been to professional development things where it sounds like we've all got to do something else. What I've tried to show today hopefully but even more so in the book when people read is that it's not about more work to do these things. It's just a different approach. I think if I went back to my first year self I'd say you don't have to work hard. You have to work differently to get better results. That's great Paul and that first answer, it's not about becoming the best teacher, it's about helping your students become the best learners. That's definitely the, I'd say that's the bit of advice that the only ever question, answer this question that I'll actually consider getting tattooed because it's such a good one Paul. So thanks for that. I absolutely love it. Next closing question Paul, what are you currently excited about? Well obviously I'm quite excited, I'm an author, I can't believe it, you know, I mean here's me, I was a kid, I bought up an account at home with a very poor family, my first member of my family, I was going to university and now I'm an author, you know, it's astonishing. But what I'm most excited about that is I genuinely feel I have got something that allows me to help other science teachers improve their students learning. I mean I, I have to say, I've spoken at tons of conferences, I've spoken at lots of schools, I've supported loads of individuals and departments, I've retired a few years ago and part of the reason of writing this book during COVID was that I wasn't getting the opportunity to go and speak to school physically, I wasn't allowed to go and help people and so I'm excited that even now I can still get to people like yourself across the other side of the world. It's brilliant. Yeah, it is brilliant, that's wonderful and yet I've thought of another closing question Paul, it isn't one that I usually ask people but with the million pound question, who gets the million pounds? With the million pound question, who gets the million pound? As a teacher I would feel I had owned the million pound if the student said things like they said after they've done the mark stuff, you know, that would mean my internal reward I would feel, well that's worth more than a million pound hearing something like that. I think that's the best way I could answer that one. Let's go Paul, love that. And final question, any last calls to action or things you'd like listen is to go away today and do Paul. Presumably if people listen, it's because they want to improve the learning of their students. Hopefully, this is given them a flavour. You know, the successful science teaching book that I've done, it says science teaching but I've got to be honest, you know, there's a lot of transferable skills which I'm sure you'd agree, you know, for other subjects. Too many teachers like myself say they haven't got time to read books but then what they end up with. up doing is trying to reinvent the wheel, you know, like spend some time as for the students, more work isn't always the answer. What you need is to actually, you know, do things slightly differently. Can I also just, I mean, I want to quote something from the book because like I've talked a lot about, you know, this has been a way of improving. In 2010, my highly achieving grandma school had a 70% pass rate across the school for a levels. Now that was students getting an A star or an A level, which is very good. However, barnage was slightly under 68%, and the head spoke to me and said, you know, we need to do more of this assessment for learning stuff. So we really went through this in a big way. And over the next five years, we incorporated all the things, we introduced marks and all the revision resource tests and everything else right across the science department. Five years later, in 2015, the schools percentage for a star A moved from 70 to 75, biology have moved from 68 to 92. And that is a massive improvement. I'm pushing kids to that level at the top end when kids are already achieving very well. This stuff works and that did, and I say, I've got plenty of evidence. This doesn't just work in girls, grandma schools, you know, as I said, the very low achieving girls school had an 11% increase just by introducing marks and a few other bits and pieces that I mentioned in the books. You know, this stuff does work. It was shown to work inside the black box 20 odd years ago. And this isn't just nice ideas. You asked me a question at the beginning about what was the point of education and I said to improve students' life chances. You know, if 92% of kids are going in an A star A rather than 68%, that's more kids who've got a better life chance. That's what I'm all about. That's what I'd like people to take away. Paul Spenceley, that is a lovely message to finish on and it's wonderful to have the level of evidence that you have to back up all these incredible strategies that you've been recommending and sharing with us today. I also love how you were turned back. You're doing my job for me Paul. You took us back to the start for a bit of a plenary discussion at the end there to refer back to the purpose of education that you referred to at the start. No, it gets us ever done that before and I really respect you for that. And I it also shows the extent to which you do have this kind of overarching view of where we're starting, where we're going to within the lesson that is this podcast. And I'm sure that that kind of sense has served you very, very well. I know it's served you very well throughout you create. In today's podcast, you talked about when I asked you what you were most excited about. You talked about the fact that you were excited about the fact that you feel like you have something to help other teachers improve their teaching and their students learn learning and I absolutely couldn't agree more. I really love these episodes where I get into the nitty gritty with practicing teachers or recently practicing teachers like yourself and like the one of the other most popular podcasts with Sammy Kempner a few months ago because I feel like the insights that come out are just so great. And when I push you on questions and I ask you to model things, you know, we did the little role play it's just so real and so rich and so wonderful. So Paul Spenceley, thanks for your time today. Thanks for all the insights you've shared through the book and I know many listeners will have gained a must from today's podcast and I can confidently say Paul, you have earned the million pounds. Thank you. Thank you, Sully. It's been absolutely pleasure. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to me today. Have a wonderful week and until next time, keep learning. [Music]