Sharon Williams Educational

​Can you have a good lesson without questioning? I think the answer is no. Let's examine this further.

The real learning takes place when students talk to each other. High level questioning and collaborative learning activities are a must for a good lesson.
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There are several ways that students will learn – and make progress – in your lesson. 

This is a big question which educationalists have researched, analysed and debated for years. Consequently, there is no one answer – but in essence it is

• making sense of something and understanding how it connects with existing knowledge or experiences
• gaining an insight into new knowledge, behaviours, skills
• how we make sense of our world
• an active engagement in new experiences which lead in some way to changed behaviours, knowledge or skills

Most importantly for teachers is how do we ensure learning takes place?

Learning for progress has to be information which is embedded. That is, it becomes something which remains in our memory either in the short term or the long term. We need to make sure that new knowledge finds its way into students' long term memory so it can be recalled at a later date for examination purposes!

When it comes to planning lessons then, our choice of activity is vital. So how do we plan effectively? Some of this has already been examined in three earlier lesson planning blogs (Learning outcomes; Starters and Plenaries; Differentiation). Here we will look at the impact of certain types of activities on learning.

In the chart below I have plotted certain types of activities against the potential for learning of each. Note the role played by the teacher in both lesson preparation and lesson delivery.

We need to carefully balance teacher-led activities with those where the students can contribute more fully.

Here's a question for you - if an activity does not lead directly to learning – how long should you spend on it? What percentage of the lesson can afford to be teacher led, if the students are not actually able to make progress during this time? If you only have an hour – should you spend 30 minutes of that hour talking to the class when there is too little learning potential from this alone? ​

Here's another way of looking at it. Ultimately we want students to have the opportunities to make connections between new information and existing knowledge or experiences. This is what helps us to learn.

When you are planning your lessons therefore, consider the amount of teacher input compared to the amount of student input and its relationship to learning potential. 

The chart below looks at both teacher and student input in relation to learning. ​
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Examine each of the boxes below - remember the aim is to get a balance between teacher and student input - with the aim of ensuring high learning potential. 

Suggested tasks for your evidence portfolio:

1. When observing others next week, try to examine the percentage of teacher and student input, the types of activity and the learning potential of each.

2. Take a look at one of your earlier planned lessons and see if you can adapt it to enable a greater potential for learning and student input.

• ​Should it start off the next topic?
• Should it recap the learning from last lesson?
• Should it be a chance to check learning before moving on?
• Should it set the context of the new unit of work?
• Should it embed the learning of the last topic before moving on?
• Should it test learning?
• Should it be totally unconnected with the topic, and simply be there to get the brain working?

 
The answer is – any and all of the above!

Questions - ask the class some questions about a new topic to gauge their understanding and existing knowledge.
Students are invited to ask questions which could be answered through the lesson (or through the unit of work) 

Three things they want to learn about a particular topic

Three things they learnt last lesson

Present information they have prepared for homework to a partner / another group / the class

​Equally as important as starters are the plenaries.

The aim of the plenary is to determine the level of learning that has taken place. This should not be confused with the completion of the tasks. Just because a student has finished the work, it does not follow that they have learnt the information. 

Also don’t be fooled into thinking plenaries can only come at the end of the lesson! If you remember my post about AfL (assessment for learning) we talked about the need to check learning intermittently throughout the lesson. If you wait until the end it may be too late to discover that several students didn’t learn as much as you hoped!

Wherever they are placed in the lesson, plenaries – or mid-lesson mini plenaries – are designed to check and reinforce learning.

They work best when the students have a chance to articulate their learning. They are not as successful if you tell the students what they should have learnt, and ask them to agree they have learnt it!

The act of articulating something you have learnt has the dual role of reinforcing that learning.

Think about the times you have discussed a new idea with someone: the more you explore a topic, the more it makes sense to you as it makes stronger connections in your brain. Additionally, it will be more likely to move into your long-term memory though repeated examination. (This will be covered in a later post on Recall and Revision)

Plenaries – like starters – are for ALL students. They will not be successful if you only engage with a handful of students. 

So although many plenaries take the form of question and answer – make sure you are involving ALL students in answering. 

Use mini-whiteboards – students all write down the answer / idea / draw the diagram… and all show you at the same time by holding the mini-whiteboards up.

Traffic lights – students tell you how confident they feel in their newly acquired knowledge by holding up red (not confident); amber (quite happy but would like to go over it again) and green (got it!). You will need coloured cards for this, but it is worth making a set that you can use again and again.

Write down three things you learnt.

Write down three questions you still have about the topic.

Complete a crossword on the topic. You could create this yourself, or set a task for the students to make one for homework - and use it as the starter next lesson by swapping with a partner!

​Plenaries should be given the time they deserve – they are part of the learning process! Articulating learning helps to embed knowledge. Consequently, anything less than 15 minutes is not sufficient.
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As a new trainee, you will undoubtedly miscalculate the time your tasks will take – time management will be a target for many of you, for some time! And as a result the plenary is often the thing which gets left off. Obviously you cannot jump ahead to the plenary if you haven’t given the chance for the students to learn the topics, but perhaps you could have some speedy progress checks in hand that you can finish the lesson off with.

​This will help you to reflect with your mentor about the success of the lesson in terms of the progress made by the students.

Progress line – students mark where they are on the line at the start of the lesson, and again at the end...
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Progress checklist – you give the students a checklist of elements they will be learning in the lesson. They grade themselves red, amber or green at the start – and again at the end...
 
Get the idea?

Perhaps you can share some of your progress checking ideas with me through the comments box, and I will post them on a future blog.

Depending on what course you are following to achieve your QTS, you will all be at slightly different starting points. Don't worry - you will catch up very soon!

Some of you will have had the opportunity to observe plenty of lessons and will have seen examples of how a good lesson should be planned. 

Some of you may have been studying the theory of lesson planning and how this should look in the classroom.
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Some of you may have even started to deliver part of a lesson, or even a whole lesson.

Certainly by Christmas, you will all be planning lessons and delivering them to one or more year groups in at least one key stage!

Outcomes, intentions, objectives...

There is a subtle but important difference in the terminology.

1. Lesson outcomes- what will the students be doing?
   
2. Learning intentions - what will the students be learning? 
3. Lesson objectives are a specific statement of what the aim of the lesson will be 

Although in reality it is all just semantics, I believe that the way in which you view these lesson goals is important in relation to how you deliver!

We are basically looking at the goals for the lesson – and there is a difference in the goal being learning related or task related.

Learning related – the intentions or outcomes of the lesson in terms of what the students will have learnt by the end of the lesson.

Task related – the lesson objectives in terms of what tasks the students will have completed.

​The move now is towards learning related outcomes, so whatever you call them, try to think about what you want the students to have learnt by the end of the lesson. The tasks are simply the methods by which they will assimilate the information and embed the knowledge. 

​We learn best when we

1. Know what we are going to be learning
2. Know what success looks like
3. Understand what we are going to be doing to be successful!

​So you need to share these outcomes with the students. ​

• You may want to have them listed on the board when the students arrive,

[Please note that it is not acceptable for the students to copy these into their books. Ofsted view it - and I agree - as being a waste of learning time!]

• You may want to do the starter activity first, and then discuss what they will be learning

• You may want to set a question as a starter and tell them they will be finding out the answers during the lesson...

​How you do it is up to you - and variety is important too, so don't do the same thing every lesson! The key though is how you will know if the students have met the outcomes you set: what is the success criteria?

The students will know they have been successful if:

1. They can share their knowledge in a presentation to the class
2. They can successfully compete in a quiz at the end of the lesson
3. They can complete a chart which asks for certain elements that they will be learning about
4. They can show their knowledge in a piece of independent work - possibly something you set for homework.

Once you have shared the outcomes, and the success criteria - you should explain what they will be doing in the lesson to be able to reach that stage. 

We can relax into the learning when we know the route we will be taking to get there. Sometimes you may want to surprise them - this is exciting too - but you always need to think about what will help them to remember what they will be learning.

Think about the plan in terms of how the learning builds. Below is a possible lesson structure based on Greaney and Rodd (2003) who researched and wrote about the Accelerated Learning and Learning-to-Learn models. (Well worth reading!)

You may explain that in the lesson they will be doing the following...

1. A group task to find out information, followed by some independent learning and then presenting their information to the class.

2. A task based on source material in the book which they will complete with a partner, followed by a group activity to find out more information, finishing with a quiz – where they set the questions for the other groups

​Working in this way, where the student is aware of how they will be learning and what success looks like, means they will be able to take more responsibility for their own learning – a position that you should work hard to achieve as a teacher. 

Note how in each of these examples it explains what the students will be expected to do to show they have met the outcomes.

​I find it useful to consider how I learn best. I did not enjoy being set an assignment, for example, without knowing - before I started - what I needed to do to get a good grade!

And still, when I go on courses, I like knowing how long we have for each task and what it will lead on to. Then I can make the most of each minute!

Observation tasks 

Look at 

1. How the lesson structure fits into the model outlined above. In your reflections consider how successful this was, and if there are occasions it does not work.

2. How the starter connects to either the previous lesson, or to the current lesson. Examine different types of starter and which engage the students the best.

3. How does the teacher share the success criteria? How to students make sense of this? 

EVIDENCE: Each of these will be good evidence for your portfolio when you link what you have observed with lessons you plan yourself.