Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
Weaving together the threads of a topic
Over time my lesson planning has gone through a number of iterations from ‘the three part lesson’ to ‘engage and excite’ to ‘enable don’t direct’ and ‘what will they be doing’. Recently the biggest changes have been around my increased understanding of how we learn and the plethora of teaching strategies based around our improved knowledge of cognitive science.
However, I worry that these new techniques, however powerful, could distract from the core craft of teaching a topic.
When planning I now have a bank of resources that I can use – with sheets and booklets that I know work well for SLOP; powerpoints with images to help my explanations; numerous resources to help me to generate retrieval questions; and Exampro where I can access exam questions.
I feel like, now that I have all of this at my fingertips, I recognise that the most important part of my planning process is still weaving together the story-line of the topic.
For years I have taught Chemistry and Physics almost exclusively at KS4 but now I am teaching all three sciences to KS4. For most Chemistry and Physics topics I have developed a fairly deep understanding of the topics and can tell their story fairly eloquently, but now I must teach some Biology topics for the first time. At the moment I am tackling Ecology. Last week I taught lesson 1, and the lesson had all the right ingredients but it just didn’t flow. It felt, to me, like a bunch of disparate facts.
‘Communities are groups of plants and animals that depend on each other’. ‘They are affected by biotic and abiotic factors in their environment’.
It didn’t feel like a story. I had been so focused on planning my first lesson routines and expectations I had forgotten to plan the story. So this week it has occupied my thoughts. I have been reading text books, watching videos and making mind maps desperately looking for the story. I have been weaving together the threads of the topic to find a way to make it flow for me.
The resources I use will probably be largely unchanged. The strategies I use will still be grounded in what research suggests will make the lessons most effective. But lessons shouldn’t become a ticklist of most effective strategies. We must not lose sight of the story.
I don’t like rollercoasters!
Adrenaline does not impress me. I prefer to be calm and in control as much as possible. To achieve this as a HOD, I have set up systems and routines for my lesson planning which I will share here.
- Medium-term planning (termly).
For this I use an excel spreadsheet with a tab per class and the dates down the first column. I add in any INSET days, mufti days etc.
- It saves me time when planning each week as I don’t need to flit to the scheme of work constantly when I do my initial plan for my requisitions.
- It ensures I hit any deadlines (although I’m not a slave to it and do frequently mix it up as I go along).
- This is when I choose my route through the course for each class and recognise the compromises I might need to make e.g. not introducing a new concept on Friday Period 6/Mufti day or planning to put long practicals into double lessons.
2. Weekly planning for requisition writing.
I write out my requsitions on a Sunday for 2 weeks hence. I know they are likely to change but prefer to do this the weekend before they are due so that I don’t have any big planning tasks to do, for my own teaching, during the week. I tend to know the activities I will want to use these days, and if I don’t get to them in the lesson I requested them, we have ‘Please Leave’ cards so that it doesn’t get packed away and I can bump it to the next lesson.
- First, I refer to my long term plan and make a note into my planner as a quick reminder of what the lesson will be about.
- I use this to write my requisition sheet which I print and put into my planner to be altered if needed before it is due in on Thursday.
3. Weekly planning of lessons.
- I have a master folder containing 5 folders labelled with the days of the week. Each day has a set of folders for the classes I teach that day labelled 1. Yr9 etc. (the 1. is the period of the day). So every lesson I teach has a folder.
- The Sunday before I make a copy of the weekly folder and label it with the number of the week and the date that the week commences on e.g. 1. Sept 2nd. (the 1. keeps them in order in the folder).
- As I plan my week I put any resources I might need into these class folders. The minimum requirement is a ‘Do Now’ task which is often the first slide of a powerpoint and contains a list of retrieval questions.
- As I go, I add any detail to my planner.
- I make a list of any copying I need onto a post-it note with the day, class name and number of copies needed.
4. Photocopying resources (Monday morning/after school)
- I photocopy the resources I will need for the week and put them into a set of drawers labelled with the class names.
When I have done this I can get my head out of the boat and relax into the week ahead. Yes things change – but I can tweak and fiddle as much as I like in the week, safe in the knowledge that I am not just about to suddenly plummet down an unexpected drop (to return to my roller coaster analogy!).
My aim is – not to have to use too much of my limited working memory during the day on having to think about my next lesson. If needed, I should be able to go into any lesson and click on the folder, click on the starter, and have some time to get my head around who is in front of me and what they need next. (Or deal with the person at the door who needs something from me five minutes ago). I seldom need to rely on this. But the knowledge that I can is something I, personally, really need to be able to enjoy my week.
Be yourself – everyone else is taken.
I saw this quote somewhere and it struck a chord with respect to my journey as a teacher. Having come into teaching late in my career I would have assumed I was old enough to be less prone to compare myself with others as much as I did. Over time I have noticed that this is a common thread in teaching – how often do you hear a teacher say ‘I just wish I had Miss X’s authoritative voice or Mr Y’s wonderful relationships with students. So what can I change and what do I need to accept as being just who I am?
- Behaviour Management
This is something I have worried about on and off all of my career. I fret that I’m not consistent enough (e.g. occasionally I forget to chase a detainee), that I don’t have enough ‘presence’, that I am sometimes too soft. But I’ve read all the books and there are systems I do my best to follow and, in fact, it turns out that we are all human and I’m doing alright. I know what I need to do, and I try to do it to the best of my ability, but the bottom line is I will never have the ‘presence’ that some teachers seem to have, and however much I try to be more strict the real me always seems to sneak through. My classrooms tend to be pretty orderly, and I like silent working a lot, so I think it’s going to be fine!
2. Organisation
I used to be pretty disorganised as a person. But this is definitely something that I have found pretty easy to change. I’ve read a lot of books on organisation and have loved getting systems set up for organising my work and home life.
3. Teaching style
This has definitely changed throughout my career but I wouldn’t say that everyone should teach like me. While there are definitely evidence based teaching techniques that are worth knowing, I’ve noticed that the teachers who I’ve worked with who consistently get the best results often have very different approaches to teaching, but share one thing in common – they are extremely motivated and enthusiastic about what they are doing! So I won’t lose sleep about whether the thing I’m passionate about right now will be ridiculed in a few years time because I’m pretty sure that if I do it with passion (and it is evidence based…) it will reap rewards.
4. Feedback
The way I give feedback is unrecognisable now to the hours I spent marking books in the past. There is always someone who seems to be able to mark books and tests with personalised comments every two minutes to make me feel inferior. I can’t be the only one who gave a cheer when research showed we were wasting our valuable time! I have embraced whole class feedback and am much more likely to change my next lesson than write a comment now. This was a change I found it easy to make!
5. Leadership
I always said that I could never be a HOD because I just wasn’t that sort of person. Claiming that I was seemed presumptuous, pretentious and arrogant. There is one particular HOD who I admired greatly – she was the sort of person you just wanted to follow, she was exactly the sort of leader I wanted to be. But I’m just not her. I am me! When I moved to a new school last year to be a HOD I intended to re-invent myself – but guess what – it turned out I followed me! Then, as time went on, I realised that we all bring different things to different roles, and a HOD is still just part of a team. With my team’s support I have loved the role and have become my own type of HOD – and that has been fine!
I am sure there are many other things that we all do differently, from displays to homework frequency, dress codes to fist pumps at the door, but the very fact that you are reading this means that you are probably doing it with with passion! As long as the evidence shows that something has impact I’ll put it into my teaching but realistically, only to the best of my ability and I’m just going to have to live with that!
Preparation for science GCSE exam results day.
What do I need to know?
I have set up an excel spreadsheet ready for results day. It is basically one which I have been using all year for the Year 11’s with some new columns ready for results day (so took me about 2 mins!). The columns I have set up are…
- End of Year 10 mock grades for each exam+ average
- Year 11 mock grades for each exam + average
- FFT target
- GCSE grades for each exam
- Average GCSE grade
- Progress measure for Year 10 to GCSE (GCSE average – Year 10 average)
- Progress measure for FFT to GCSE (GCSE average – FFT)
Other columns already there that I can sort by:
- Class name
- Pupil premium status
- High/Medium/Low Prior attaining
- SEN status
- Reading age
What will I do with it?
- Look for remarks.
Find students within 2 marks of a grade boundary and decide which paper would be most sensible to get remarked. I generally chose the paper with the most long answer questions to be re-marked. We have already got signed permission slips from the majority of students in anticipation of this.
2. Analyse the data.
Below is a list of what I will be looking for in the data. I have included my current ideas for potential actions if I see an issue in this area. I will NOT do all of this but will focus on a maximum of 3 of key areas where I see the biggest negatives and can see the potential that we could have impact.
- Progress from Year 10 to GCSE
- Does what we are doing in Year 11 have impact? Are there any sub groups which are least well served by our Year 11 curriculum? ACTION: Re-look at the Year 11 curriculum (see below for suggestions for subgroups).
- Progress Year 11 mock to GCSE
- This should give me an idea of whether students are revising effectively. Are there any subgroups that are not gaining much from their revision? ACTION: Re-look at the resources given to students in Year 11. We have a padlet of revision resources. Should we have a HT and FT version of the padlet?
- Progress from FFT (KS2) to GCSE. (this is split into subgroups that I can sort by).
- Pupil Premium vs non-pupil premium. Beware making generalisations here. By definition disadvantaged students are at a disadvantage, but for wildly different reasons so avoid broad brush solutions such as ‘give out revision guides to all PP students’. ACTION: drill down to see if there is any pattern to the type of student who is being worst served by our science curriculum.
- Gender. I’m not a big fan of sticking plaster interventions for gender. I don’t subscribe to the idea that, for example, making things competitive will make them more engaging for boys – they only will for the ones that win! If you haven’t read ‘Boys don’t try’ I highly recommend it for this, and for ideas to help disadvantaged (and indeed all) students. ACTION: The only meaningful action I can think of is to discuss with the team to ensure that we are all having equally high expectations for ALL students.
- If low numbers of Grade 7+. ACTION: If needed look at the curriculum and add to the level of challenge e.g. create SLOP for high attainers? How explicit are we about how many much revision is needed to get a Grade 8 if that is what they are wanting to achieve? Beware drilling down into the types of questions these students are able to answer – it is easy to jump to conclusion about particular topics/ types of questions. It is actually most likely that they just haven’t spent enough time learning the stuff they need to know.
- Underachievement of low prior attaining. I suspect that if this is a problem and that it is due to going too fast and not enabling students with low prior knowledge to do enough retrieval practise. It is a dilemma that I struggle with – I would like to teach some students less content more deeply but this risks a low level question coming up on a small area of the curriculum that we didn’t cover. We used more mixed ability grouping last year so I’m interested to see if this had any discernible impact. I will be looking keenly at the progress of this group and giving this a lot of thought.
- Underachievement of SEN. Are we using our LSAs effectively? I would really like to think about our use of LSAs more deeply next year. Again it is important not to over-generalise and to drill down to see which particular SEN students were not served well and if there are any things we think we can do that will have impact.
- Reading age. This is a bit of a worry of mine with the new GCSEs. I’m be extremely surprised if there wasn’t a pattern here!! This is something that I would argue is a whole school issue. Within department we already break down words and emphasise them when they are introduced. We are aware of the Tier 2 vocabulary that can trip students up and we use it widely to aim to make it more familiar to them. We could do more e.g. produce bookmarks of keywords for students with low reading ages to aim to help them to access scientific questions.
- Types of questions/ topic level analysis. I am cautious to dig to deeply into this type of analysis. If I discover that students were better at ‘electrolysis’ than ‘chemical changes’, have I actually just found out that the electrolysis question was just a lower level question? If I find out that they are better at AO1 ‘knowledge retrieval’ questions than AO2 ‘application questions’ have I actually just found out that they didn’t know the knowledge well enough to apply it to a new situation? This type of analysis could take a long time and I am not confident that correlation would equal causation. The only topic level analysis I plan to do is of questions on the required practicals to see if we need to do more work on students understanding of the practicals and of the key terminology used to analyse them.
- Teacher of the class. At my current school one teacher is in charge of all three sciences for each class. However, I won’t be looking at this other than to make sure I am aware which of the team might be disappointed in their results and therefore may need reassurance that I have seen what they do in the classroom day in day out, and that I believe that this is a much better way to judge their quality of teaching than the results of one of their classes. Each class has a different dynamic and we all know how much the results of a few outliers can shift an average. GCSE results should not be a stick to beat teachers with! Each teacher will be looking at their class in detail to see what, if anything, they can learn from any patterns they see.
3. Going forward
It is no point doing this if I don’t come out of it with up to 3 key changes we could make. Any more than 3 will be spreading us too thin. If any of them are specific to a year group (e.g. making changes to the curriculum to improve progress of high prior attainers aiming to get a 7+ in Year 11) I will need to double check that I actually have any students in the new Year 11 that it would be relevant to this year. The most likely changes I would anticipate will be to curriculum content/level of challenge, and to our approach to teaching how to revise effectively/the resources we provide to aid revision at home.
5 things you should know for your 1st year as Head of Science
1. Your team is your priority.
Actually, student outcomes are your priority – but we all know that the quality of the teacher in front of them has the greatest impact on student outcomes so your priority must be in supporting your team (teachers and techs) to be the best they can be.
- Get to know them! (I’m lucky to have an amazingly friendly and fantastically supportive team!).
- Be available (..see be organised below! – you can only make time for others if you’ve got your work organised).
- Give them the equipment they need (if you can!).
- Do anything you can to reduce unnecessary workload.
- Take your time over the timetable (be fair with class allocations and do you very best with roomings).
- Be well-read and pass on any useful current research.
- Know what is actually happening day-to-day. Walk through as many lessons as you can – be proactive. Look out for signs that a teacher needs your support and offer it quickly. It could be anything from T+L support to moral support – it is all your job!
2. Be organised!
Reduce stress levels by ‘having your head out of the boat’.
This is my absolute obsession now – and probably a blog all to itself! It includes…
- Consciously choose the planning tools you will use – I use a filofax clipbook organiser , a Pirongs Teacher planner, a filofax A5 notebook for meetings and a plain notebook for day to day notes I may need to look back at.
- Know the yearly deadlines you will have to meet and have a calendar with prompts to remind yourself what is coming up. Add anything to it that you didn’t know about until it had happened so you can transfer it to next year’s calendar (see image above).
- Organise your time – by day, week and month (I use a filofax and make my own pages for my lists as pictured below).
- Include a space for things you are waiting on so they don’t slip though the system.
- I plan all of my lessons and write my requisitions at the weekend. It frees up my time and reduces my weekday stress levels. I often tweak them during the week but if something crops up I can take it on because my lessons are always good to go.
- In your system make space to reflect on how you would do it better next time.
3. Know who you are!
Don’t underestimate your influence.
This covers a multitude of points but basically I need to be clear of what I stand for and communicate that. I am naturally quite prone to assume that nothing I do or say will be particularly noticed but I need to recognise that what I do and say will have an impact so I must plan what I will do, and what I will say!! Whether you like it or not you are the Head of Science now and so you have ‘become the role’.
- Decide who you are – don’t leave it to chance!
- Don’t let ‘impostor syndrome’ reduce your impact.
- Set out clearly what you think ‘good’ looks like – don’t make your team guess what you are thinking when you walk through their classrooms. If you are passionate about Powerful Knowledge say so. And say so again!
- Be a role model. Don’t expect others to do what you are not doing yourself.
- Most of the decisions people want you to make will simply require your affirmation (e.g. can the mock be on Tuesday?). Know when to say ‘that’s fine’ and what is worth fighting for. Don’t be unnecessarily combative to try to look ‘in charge’. Most people in your school will have student outcomes as their priority and so you should be able to say ‘that’s fine’ to most things.
- Be seen.
- Be positive.
- Look after yourself.
4. Get to know the ‘important people’ outside your department.
- Other Heads of Faculty – you’ll need to make a lot of joint decisions.
- The timetabler!
- The burser, SIMS manager. (I have photos of all of the admin and support staff in my filofax with their roles written underneath).
- Whoever is in charge of organising PGCE students (you want some!).
- Your line manager – a vital link to SLT. It is how you can make changes. Make sure that they know your priorities and hold you to account.
5. Know and own the direction of the department.
You don’t have to do all of the work but you do have to take ownership. Be brave and change anything you are not able to stand behind. But do so with the support of your team! These include things like ..
- Curriculum map
- Schemes of work
- Marking policy
This year has been the most rewarding of my career to date. If you are reading this and considering taking the leap there is really only one bit of advice you need – go for it! You’ll never look back!
Introduce Yourself (Example Post)
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
- Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
- Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
- Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
- What topics do you think you’ll write about?
- Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
- If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
comfyteach 