Workload around planning and teaching resources

Earlier this month, the Government through the Department for Education released a number of documents which attracted a lot of discussion. There was a White Paper on Education which was dissected by many, called 'Educational excellence everywhere', and also a document which was the result of work by the Planning and Resources Review Group.
This is called 'Reducing Teacher Workload', and can be downloaded as a PDF from the link above, if you have time to read it.

For many teachers, downloading resources from the internet has become part of their practice - I do it myself of course from time to time, just to see how other colleagues have approached a particular theme - there are over 4.5 million downloads a week according to the most recent statistics I could find from 2015, so probably even  more now, and there is now the option to sell your resources through the site.

I've just been updating a chapter I wrote a few years ago for a book by Routledge called 'Debates in Geography Education'. There's a 2nd edition on the way. My chapter is on technology in geography and geography classrooms, and I've just added in a quote from the workload document from John Hattie, who will be familiar to some teachers from his work on 'effect sizes' (I used it in the courses I ran for OSIRIS over the last few years, as he is a fellow OSIRIS speaker):

there are a million resources available on the internet and creating more seems among the successful wastes of time in which teachers love to engage

(Hattie, 2012, p. 64)

The thing is that I think it's vital that teachers create their own resources. It's an important element of getting to grips with ideas and unfamiliar content (perhaps with the new specifications coming up) and working through how that will translate into a sequence of lessons. Teachers know what works well with the students they teach from previous experience, and also have a knowledge of what resources are available in terms of classroom spaces, materials, technology etc. There is a difference between what teachers want and what they need. They need to engage with their subject, and continue to develop as curriculum makers.

As the late Ted Wragg, who wrote lots of common sense said, teachers need to keep creating things and coming up with ideas, it's what we're paid for...
And it's why a lot of us will spend hours of our holidays continuing to do that, as we have done for years...

And if you don't want to do that, then feel free to buy my 'quality assured' textbooks :)

Firefly planner

Had a quick demonstration of this new student planner app at a staff meeting earlier in the week. It's created by Firefly.

We use their system for our school's VLE, and it connects with a system called iSAMS for our school administration.
The app is available for iPad only at the moment, but will be appearing for iPhone and Android.

It looks like it might have some potential for storing student marks and other information, as well as creating seating plans and other features.
Now all I need is an iPad... ;)

Moving English Forward.... and Geography ?

One of the latest OFSTED subject reports is on English, and was published in March 2012.
I'm grateful to the LEARNING SPY blog for this post, and to @Geographer84 for tipping me off about it on Twitter.

I was interested in this section, which backs up what I keep saying to various people who are subjected to an unnecessarily bureaucratic set of lesson plans and structures...


Inspectors believe that the effectiveness of learning in this and many similar lessons was limited by some common misconceptions about what constitutes good teaching and learning. These include the following.

• Pace. There seems to be a belief that the faster the lesson, the better the learning. While pace is important – a slow lesson is likely to lose pupils’ concentration – teachers too often concentrate on the pace of their planned activities rather than the pace of learning. For example, a teacher told an inspector that they had been advised that a starter activity should never last longer than 10 minutes. While this may be a sensible starting point for discussion, the inspector’s view was that a starter activity, like any other activity, needs to last only as long as is needed to ensure effective learning. 
• The number of activities. As implied above, some teachers appear to believe that the more activities they can cram into the lesson, the more effective it will be. This is often counterproductive, as activities are changed so often that pupils do not complete tasks and learning is not consolidated or extended. 
• Over-detailed and bureaucratic lesson plans. Teachers are encouraged to plan individual lessons in considerable detail. Inspectors sometimes note that excessive detail within these plans causes teachers to lose sight of the central focus on pupils’ learning. 
• An inflexible approach to planning lessons. School policies sometimes insist that all lesson plans should always follow the same structure, no matter what is being taught. In addition, evidence from the survey suggests that teachers often feel that they should not alter their plans during the lesson. The notion of a three- or four-part structure to lessons with certain key elements, such as a lively starter activity and an opportunity to review learning at the end, is helpful to teachers. However, teachers need to have the confidence to depart from their plans if early indications are, for example, that the pupils know more or less than the teacher had anticipated. The key consideration should be the development of pupils’ learning rather than sticking rigidly to a plan. 
• Limited time for students to work independently. A constant criticism from inspectors was that pupils rarely had extended periods to read, write or discuss issues in class. Indeed, inspectors observed lessons where pupils were asked to self- or peer-assess work before they had been able to complete more than a sentence or two. No doubt, teachers feel that they need to be actively engaged when they are being observed. However, this shows a degree of misunderstanding as inspectors’ priority is above all to evaluate the quality of pupils’ learning in lessons.
• Constant review of learning. As noted above, in lessons observed, significant periods of time were spent by teachers on getting pupils to articulate their learning, even where this limited their time to complete activities and thereby interrupted their learning! Pupils need time to complete something before they can valuably discuss and evaluate it. To invite self- or peer-evaluation before pupils have had time to engage fully with learning is counter-productive although the principle of self- or peer-assessment remains important.

Thought for the Day

I also want to lay to rest the myth that inspectors want to see a certain kind of lesson. Yes, lessons should be planned, but not in an overly complicated and formulaic way. A crowded lesson plan is as bad as a crowded curriculum. We want to see pupils engaged and learning. So if an inspector walks into a classroom and the pupils are working on an extended task for the whole time, that's fine. If a teacher is reading a play with the class and they are all engaged, that's fine too. There should be no prescription about lesson structure.


Michael Wilshaw in the TES