A history teacher preparing lessons for Ofsted Inspection

Next week we will be involved in an Ofsted and as such i have been getting my lesson plans together for the possibility of an observation. As regular readers will know I 'loves a caveat early doors' and here is todays; I do not profess to be an expert on Ofsted, I am not trying to give out guidelines, but simply to offer my reflections. I have been observed once by Ofsted in 2010 and I am using that experience, along with advice from many people, to help me write this short blog post.

1) Focussing on Progress
I have really tried to focus on progress in my lesson planning. This is obviously from the start to the end of the lesson but also for each of the parts of the lesson. My old Head of Faculty once said "as soon as they walk in do a mini-plenary" and whilst this might have been partly a joke, I believe it is sound advice. Ofsted are only 'in' the lesson for a short period so it important that they can see the progress that has already been made or is made in that time. The easiest way to do this is to have lots of mini-plenaries built into the lesson plan.


2) Pick activities that you are familiar with and your students love
The lessons I have planned for the Ofsted contain elements and activities that the students know and have done before in another guise. When planning the lesons I have included activities that I (and the students) know work really well. I don't believe an Ofsted inspection is time to try something completely new. Others might disagree but I feel that if you have taught an activity before and it has gone well then there is a reasonable expectation that it will be successful again. If the students are doing an activity they have done before and enjoyed they will be far more engaged and focused. There will also be less chance of them getting confused or mis-understanding.

An example of this is an activity I have used before which involves 'building' a conclusion using different cards to represent each factor; the higher off the table the card is the more important it is. Students complete several cards (each with a different factor on) and then construct them into a kind of tower using blu tac.

A Card building activity from Year 7 based around the causes of the Peasants Revolt

A card building activity from Year 8 about the reasons soldiers carried on fighting in WWI

The students place key words on the front of the cut up cards and place explanations (written or visual) on the back.

Here is a completed 'building' on the causes of US involvement in Vietnam from GCSE

I know that this activity was successul and that the students loved it. They were also able to be creative and the resulting conclusions were well thought out and of a high level. When I told one of my Year 8 classes we were doing this activity next week they all went "Yes!" What that said about the lesson that they were currently being taught I don't know! However, I do know that they will come into the lesson engaged and looking forward to it.

You can also see from this that both my Year 7 and Year 8 lessons will be doing, in part, a very similar activity. The content and level will be different but the resources similar. This has really helped my planning work load. Once the Year 8 lesson was planned it was easier to plan the Year 7 one.


I think that if I focus on progress and pick activities I know my students love then I will give myself every chance of having a successful lesson whether I am visited by Ofsted or not. I guess too that these are not bad principles for any lesson.

The Power of Stuctured Collaboration - trying to adopt Kagan Structures into my students learning

Yesterday we had our second session from @T2TUK on Kagan Structures @Rossett. This built on a session that took place last year. This second session gave us a few more examples of structures that we could use in our lessons but more than that it reintroduced us to the ethos of structured collaboration and the learning power of the collective over the individual.

For me the most powerful element of this message is the aspect that when we teach others we understand the content much better, our brains have to work harder to explain to someone else compared with just understanding it for ourselves.

All teachers understand this principle. It is a principle at work right now, as I write this blog, I am trying to convey my experience to someone else, this is making my brain work harder and it would work even harder if you were here discussing it with me.

This is particularly powerful for me as I believe that I could include more collaboration in the learning of my students. So today, with the words and enthusiasm of Elaine @KaganUK ringing in my ears, I have tried to further develop the collaboration in my classroom. I must make it clear, before I begin, that I am not a trained Kaganite (or whatever the plural is) I am not aiming to show how these structures are set up but simply to offer some examples and reflections of how I have tried to use them.

Examples
1) I started by using 'Stand up, hand up, pair up' with my Year 8's looking at WWI. This basically involves students standing up, moving around and discussing a topic with different students in a paired format. I added my own element of @Westylish glamour by making the students do a 'Top-Gun' style high5 rather than just a regular high5.

Two of my Year 8 students completing the 'Top Gun' Style High5 before discussing WWI

This proved an interesting and engaging way of getting the lesson going and allowed students to mix with others in the group.

2) I started my Year 12 class by doing a 'Quiz-Quiz-Trade' using the key concepts from the last lessson. I gave each student a concept, got them to 'revise' it whilst I did the register, and then set them off to test their peers, in a paired format (again with the Top-Gun High5's). The students walked around and tested each other and, where appropriate, coaced more information out of their partners.

My A/S students Quiz-Quiz-Trade about Nazism and the Law

This starter had three main benefits:

+ It proved a much more engaging way of starting the lesson than simply asking the students individually.

+ It got the whole class involved.

+ It proved to be a great AfL tool as students were able to work out which topics they understood and which ones they were struggling with.

3) I also got my A/S class to use 'Numbered-Heads-Together' to construct a plan for an essay question. This involves groups of four (3 in my small A/S group) producing an answer to a problem. Firstly, they write their own answer, then they stand up and lean in sharing their answer, they can only sit down when they have agreed and come to a concensus.

My A/S students 'Numbered-Heads-Together' about the main difficulty in answering an essay on Collaboration and Denunciation within Nazi Germany.

This approach yeilded three benefits:

+ It increased the confidence of all the group when they agreed on a consensus.

+ It allowed all the students to contribute to the answer.

+ It built up the teams and made the students feel part of something.

Reflections

The structures gave the classroom a real look of collaboration but you need to work hard as a teacher to make sure that the room has a feeling of collaboration too. It might look right but appearences can be decieving and there were a few examples today where the quality of the collaboration wasn't very high. This I am sure will come with time.

It looks like effective collaboration but is it?

In my Year 8 class, despite my best efforts to mix things up, it seemed that a lot of friends had stayed together and I need to make sure that I work harder to ensure a truly random nature of the groupings. I am confident though that, with time, I will be able to get this right.

Elaine @KaganUK was very good at constantly using a timer and giving fixed ideas about how long and how many times we should do an activity. This is something I need to develop over the coming weeks. 

Despite these concerns I have already seen the benefit of using these kinds of collaborative structures today.  

+ The whole class are involved for more of the lesson.

+ The learning was a lot less teacher-led particularly in my A/S class.

+ The Kagan structures can be dropped into the lesson really easily. They don't need a lot of planning and can be dropped in almost off-the-cuff to reflect a need in the lesson.

+ The students were much more engaged with each other and less with me.

+ The confidence of the students improved.

I am really pleased to have had the training and had a chance to try out these Kagan structures. I love the simplicity, the engagement and the student focus that they bring.

The Power of Structured Collaboration is something that has been very evident today.

Getting Student Feedback on my Teaching using Google Forms

I am a big believer in using student co-construction to help plan my lessons and as a vehicle for feedback (see my other post). This has proven very valuable however it has not allowed me to access a wide range of opinions from all the students in several classes. I designed a questionnaire using Google forms, with a series of simple questions to gauge the opinions of my students simultaneously from years 8 - 12. The questionnaire was anonymous and I only asked the students to specify their year group. using Google forms was incredibly easy. The form took 5 minutes to make and Google collate the responses for you.

Some of the results are displayed briefly below. I am using Tagxedo.com which is brilliant for turning a large amount of text into a meaningful image.

How would you describe Mr West?

I was struck by some of the words such as 'unique' and 'different' and it seemed that students valued my attempts to be creative and think outside the box. This made the time put into those kind of activities seem worthwhile.

What are your favourite types of activities in Mr West's lessons?

What struck me from this was the importance and value students placed on the active learning elements of my lessons. I was also struck by how popular my use of YouTube and Twitter is.

How could Mr West improve his teaching?

This was the most interesting and enlightening question. At first it can be the most difficult type of question to ask but it is always the most rewarding. My students made two contradictory points of note:

1) A preference for a more traditional form of teaching. They would like to see more "boring" activities and for me to "Maybe add more note taking during lessons". Quite a number of students "Would like a bit of old school copying down from the board every now and then."

2) A preference for more role play and active learning. They would like to see me "Try get the children out of their seat's every lesson!" and "maybe to do some more role plays to help us learn "

Clearly these two points are contradictory and reflect students with different learning styles. They also highlight the challenge of teaching; what works well for one does not for another.

Clearly then, doing a Google form and asking your class their opinions will not give you all the answers. But the value of this activity has been high. It has allowed a quieter element of my classes to state a preference for a more old fashioned approach. Don't get me wrong I will not be throwing the baby out with the bath water and getting a new set of board pens for every activity. But I have already started to incorporate elements of more traditional teaching into my classroom, I have made sure today that as part of my teaching I have displayed the key information on the board and allowed the students, if they wish, to copy it down. I will continue to do this and, in doing so, will be better at teaching to the needs of that group.

Using Google forms to find out what is good about my lessons is just a new, more effective, way of doing what I have always done. Listened to the preference of my students and incorporated that preference into my lessons.

It creates engagement and ownership of the learning from my students and it makes my job easier and me better at it.

Everyone's a winner! I encourage you to try it.