Page Comparison

A traditional pre assess process which asks all the learners the same questions at the same time - whether they answer within a test, selecting from multiple choice options or using mini white boards - makes many learners uncomfortable. Low attaining learners “Our cohort” are often especially uncomfortable, so they often undermine its effectiveness by quietly not engaging, copying or otherwise avoiding answering, perhaps by claiming they know everything or nothing or perhaps by asking - when will I use this in life?

People are not naturally good judges of what they have learned, so rather than finding out if teaching has become learning, by asking learners if they know something or by assessing them at the end of the lesson, it would be better to assess by questioning at least one sleep after teaching.

Research by Bjork tells us that, until we learn something more about our own learning, we are often seduced into thinking

• that finding practice easy means we are learning well

• that finding practice hard means we are not learning well.

In fact almost the opposite is true. Fluency of practice is not an indicator of learning taking place, it's when we struggle to practice (Bjork calls it desirable difficulty) that we embed learning better i.e. it's easier for us to recall for longer. Once learners, learn about learning, over time, they will overcome this misconception.

An effective revision program uses these key behaviours

• pre assess: the learner decides what they need to learn,

• a more tightly spiralled curriculum: the learner splits up what they will revise into smaller blocks and space these out over their revision program,

• retrieval practice, self-assessment and feedback-when-necessary: to ensure that the learner fully retains all their learning, the learner reviews frequently what they have learned and gets help if necessary.

If we think about teaching following an annual scheme of learning it is much more like cramming than a good revision program since

• pre assess: may not be done at all or may not be done in sufficient detail or may be difficult for the teacher to use,

• all the teaching on a topic: is done within a short period of time and only once a year,

• practice questions: are done within a short period of time.

However it is not surprising we teach like "cramming" - as it is easier for the teacher - and it works for most learners

With timely practice the teacher can teach learners with a wide spread of attainment like a revision program rather than like cramming.

The purpose of marking may be thought to be

• To make sure there are no remaining written errors on the page: the reason might be that then the learner can revise from their exercise books. This is not a good use of time, because we want learning to be improved soon, rather than hope learners will return and revise at a later date.

• To give hints or clues or model answers to help the learner. However the teacher must guess what the learner was thinking/ not thinking when the learner made their error(s). This is not a good use of time because often the teacher will guess wrong, or the learner won’t read, or understand if they do even read , what the teacher has written.

• The teacher gives value judgements in the hope of changing learners effort/motivation in lessons. This is not a good use of time, because value judgements, even positive ones, may decrease rather than increase the likelihood of learners learning from suggestions and the learners motivation.

• A repetition of all or part of the original teaching. This is not a good use of time, because if the teaching of the lesson, didn’t lead to embedded learning, the teachers explanation - which is necessarily less detailed and can’t involve assessment for learning, as the lesson could - is less likely to lead to embedded learning.

Although each outcome of marking may sometimes be effective, the probability that any of these will be effective at embedding learning is low, and the cost to the teacher is high.

_{The only exception to this rule, is for example, if the learner makes an error in a complex multistage word problem, the teacher might want to write down the numerical answer (on the learner's page, or on the teacher’s lesson plan page) to save the teacher having to work out the answer to check the learners learner's correction.}

If the assessment outcome is a tick or best learned later or reset: there is no need for feedback in the next lesson.

If the assessment outcome is feedback on attempt or feedback on blank: then we expect the learner to try and self correct or get peer to peer help or initiate a feedback-dialogue with the teacher, within the rules of the classroom.

By assessing and where necessary, engaging in personalised feedback dialogue in the lesson, we gain multiple advantages:

1. The teacher is replacing the time and effort they would spend on marking, non-directed time, with only the possibility that they may need to spend directed time, inside of lesson time, on feedback. The teacher need not feel guilty, as not marking + giving feedback in the lesson (if necessary), helps the learner learn better.

2. The non-directed time spent by the teacher will be less - today - because this kind of assessment is far quicker than marking, and will be less - in the future - because feedback is far more likely to be successful and so similar questions will be asked less frequently and answered more accurately.

3. The learner has a chance to self correct or self reflect or get peer-to-peer help: so the teacher may not need to spend lesson time giving feedback or failing that, the learner has time to read the question again and will be primed to adjust their chunk or mental schema (Kornell et al 2009) during the feedback-dialogue;.

4. With in-lesson feedback-dialogue the learner is far more likely to engage with the teacher than they are likely to engage with the teacher's marking.

5. Without marking by the teacher, the teacher and learner can start the feedback-dialogue from a common place.

6. With in lesson feedback-dialogue the teacher has a chance to learn about learner's past thinking and/or influence the learner's future thinking, more effectively than with marking.

7. Feedback-dialogue makes excellent, non threatening, feedback for the teacher on fine detail ways to improve future teaching. It allows the teacher to gain decades worth of high quality teaching experience within a much shorter span of time.

8. Feedback-dialogue provides an opportunity for the teacher to help the learner to better deal with the emotions brought up by errors e.g. to move on from self-criticism or making excuses or blaming others and to help the learner reflect about their question reading or process or problem solving skills i.e. help the learner grow a growth mindset.

9. Feedback-dialogue is likely to increase the learner's motivation whereas marking is likely to decrease it.

10. Sometimes during feedback-dialogue the teacher and/or learner will realise that the layer is best learned later - and this is also a productive use of the teachers and learners time - because now they can stop putting their time and effort into making this layer stick and instead put their efforts in to embedding other layers which are far more likely to stick. After all we can’t expect to go from a place where most teaching is forgotten to a place where absolutely all teaching becomes embedded learning. Surely a process where almost all teaching becomes embedded learning should satisfy us - there is no shortage of other layers to teach - before returning, to see if this layer will stick in a few months time.

The main disadvantage (such as it is) is that there is very little in the way of an easy to follow paper trail of the efforts the teacher has put in. There is the record that feedback dialogue has been requested, and possibly the corrected workings by the learner. In future assignments we usually see the learner being able to answer correctly similar questions and there is the record of the subsequent progress on the layer within the timely practice app. If the teacher must be checked up on, then the “checker-upper” must do the work to find out if the teaching is successful or not. This counterposes with a marking trail - where the teacher is doing the work of demonstrating that they have tried - but cannot possibly demonstrate that they have been successful - in embedding enabling the learner to embed the learning.

The teach-learn part of most lessons rarely holds low prior attainment learners back, but trying to practise too much or too hard in the practise-learn part of the lesson or failing to make efforts to embed new learning regularly does.

In whole class teaching, learners with low prior attainment can often answer questions from harder layers, but

• being able to answer in the scaffolded situation of whole class teaching, following on from reminders about their current learning and after a small bite of new learning, and

• being able to retain and answer such questions later is more difficult. It’s easy to be deceived that learning performance results in embedded learning. One timely practice experienced teacher describes this effect as “hurrah, they’ve got”, the teacher will want to move on, but recommends not doing this instead “just stop”.

See https://timelypractice.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CKB/pages/3110699106/Best+practice#(1) - teach - on - firm - learning - foundations (above) and remember the subsequent layer isn’t on firm learning foundations.

The teachers task with a timely practice scheme of learning is to

scheme of learning is to

• (2) - teach - 1 - layer - per - learner-, per - topic-, per - curriculum - spiral and https://timelypractice.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CKB/pages/3110699106/Best+practice#(above) and

• (5) - schedule - a -%E2%80%9Ctimely-practice-assignment%E2%80%9D-episode-every-lessontimely practice assignment episode every lesson (above)

so that new learning quickly embeds. There is usually sufficient time within an academic year to spiral through most of the topics within the scheme of learning several times.

Getting practise-learn and retrieval practice “more right” will lead to large learning gains, without the more sophisticated options suggested below.

• some maths puzzles or patterns to find within a times table grid written on e.g. a flip chart

• create a second “catch-up” timely practice assignment (which will have questions on more embedded layers, which are unlikely to need feedback: to do this create a second assignment, the catch up one, directly after creating an assignment for a lesson - the urgent question will have gone into the first assignment, so will be full of the second one will contain non-urgent questions). The “catch up” assignments, can be completed “any when within the next week” without causing the problem that retrieval practice questions will be asked too late, and so can be used as a filler activity,

• ask learners to annotate recently learned questions with think aloud speech and thought bubbles (either questions the learner is really confident they know, or questions the learner has recently had feedback on),

• ask learners to pair up and test each other on some times-table facts they are learning (perhaps have an envelope for each learner with a few flash cards in),

• ask learners to draw a cartoon of a given maths word,

which can be used by learners who finish earlier than their peers do.

Before a half term holiday: 2 + lessons to 1 week

Before 2 week holidays: 1 to 1+ .5 weeks

Before the summer holiday: 2 + to 3 weeks

• a whole class project which uses a mix of maths skills e.g. maths and Islamic art, group problem solving, nRich activities, what would you do with $177 billion dollars? (Jeff Bezos' wealth at the time of writing this), maths investigations, shape puzzles or

• school required activities such as tests or the school requirement for learners to set themselves targets for maths etc or

• whole class project which uses fewer/no maths skills e.g. history of mathematics, women mathematicians, mathematics of colonialism, wealth and income distribution, or

• review timely practice for the past term/year: learners compare their timely practice assignments from a term/year ago and now (teachers have reported to us that this results in impressive motivation gains), or

• learners annotate recently learned questions with think aloud speech and thought bubbles.

The teacher can also reserve, topics to teach just prior to a slightly shorter cool down period:

• e.g. topics which may be easy to learn, but time consuming to develop accuracy such as frequencyGraphs or stemLeaf,

• e.g. topics which are quick to review e.g. simplify or solvingReady (it’s quick to review these skills, one question from each layer is usually sufficient review).