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Friday Gem #17 – “What if?” questions

Autumn Focus: Questioning

Teaching and learning Gem #17 – “What if?” questions

This idea comes from Clare Duncan, who has thought about how “What if?” questioning could be incorporated into any lesson. She suggests that these sorts of questions can be used as starters, or to deepen understanding within the lesson. Most powerfully, they can be used as flipped learning opportunities to spark intellectual curiosity.

Whether posed by either teachers or pupils, ‘What if’ questions can be an invitation to innovate, discuss and debate.

·       What if we mixed these two colour together?

·       What if we altered a variable in an experiment?

·       What if we did nothing about climate change?

·       What if we put the character of Hamlet in the plot of Othello, and vice versa. Would the tragedies have happened? – This was a genuine question from Jess Leunig last week.

Clare says that when posing their own questions, students could end up going down rabbit holes, or they could end up flying high with the question. Either way, the learning experience is valuable.

She suggests that this sort of questioning is effective because:

  • ‘What if’ questions nurture curiosity and develop a sense of wonder (one of our key aims as a school).
  • They encourage playfulness and tinkering.
  • They take the student out of their discipline – encouraging that STEAM+ mindset.
  • They focus on enquiry rather than answers, discouraging perfectionism.
  • They encourage girls to take a germ of an idea and voluntarily delve further into it to satisfy their own inquisitiveness.
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Autumn Focus: Questioning

Teaching and learning Gem #16 – questioning for neurodiversity, the miracle of the pause.

This comes from Isabelle Alexander, thinking about the experience of class questioning for neurodiverse students.


  • Isabelle says that these students have been used to working at their own pace during lockdown, and are finding the speed of lessons on return to school a challenge. When ‘cold called’ to answer a question they freeze and feel the attention is sharply on them.
  • Her top tip is, “It’s not how you question, it’s how you let them answer.”
  • It is essential to give all students time, but especially those with those with slow processing.
  • Formulate a rigorous question, and tell students “I don’t want any thoughts about this for 3 minutes”. Allow students to collate their thoughts in any way – jot down bullet points, draw diagrams, do a mind map, or just sit and think. By saying ‘thoughts’ it shows that you are no expecting a ‘right’ response and encourages students to be exploratory who might otherwise be anxious.
  • The educational researcher John Hattie says that teachers well know which students do or do not know the answers and they “use this [knowledge] about whom to ask to maintain their flow of the lesson. Students are given, on average, one second or less to think, consider their ideas, and respond (Cazden, 2001): the brighter students are given longer to respond than [others]” and thus those students who most need the wait time are least likely to get it. Let’s break that trend!
  • In addition, writing the question on the board will help those students stay focused on track. It reduces their cognitive load, freeing up their working memory to consider a response to the question.

Giving significant pauses before getting answers is effective because:

  • It allows neurodiverse students and those with slower processing to think and be in a position to share: it facilitates participation from all learners.
  • It reduces “I don’t know” answers.
  • It builds students’ confidence and reduces anxiety.
  • It increases the number of speculative responses.
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Friday Gem #15 – big questions with Oxplore

Autumn Focus: Questioning


Teaching and learning Gem #15 – big questions with Oxplore

 

This Friday Gem comes from Monique Nullens, who recommends this brilliant (and snazzy) website – Oxplore.org. The site is created by Oxford University and offers approaches to challenges and questions underpinned by the latest thinking and research.

  • It poses a plethora of big questions on socio/political/economic/scientific/cultural issues.
  • They are thorny and provoking.
  • For example, ‘Does fake news matter?’, ‘Are humans more important than plants?’, ‘Are Explosions always destructive?’, ‘Would it be better if we all spoke the same language?’
  • Importantly, the website is beautifully crafted, and the big questions are springboards to an astonishing range of engaging articles, videos, quotes, facts etc.

Check out the website…it will be a genuinely fascinating experience.

 

Asking big, open questions in class is effective because:

  • With such big questions, there are no right answers. It discourages perfectionism and ‘learning for the test’.
  • It helps students realise that they don’t have to get everything right first time. In fact, in ‘big discussions’, students can get things wrong, reassess and change direction. That’s part of the fun and the freedom of these types of discussions.
  • It encourages students to play around with ideas and to throw things into the discussion to see where they lead. You could contribute an idea big or small.
  • It encourages higher order, critical thinking that transcends subjects. It draws concepts/knowledge from across a spectrum of disciplines. These discussions epitomise our STEAM+.
  • To quote Dan Addis in his recent WimTeach article on scholarship: “we can encourage students to attack a problem from multiple angles, playing with the blurred lines between the subjects, and discovering links that were hidden to them before. Quite apart from the fact that this lateral thinking is a skill that will benefit them in whatever avenue they wish to pursue in later life, it is also fun and rewarding.” 

    Try out a ‘no right answer’ big question as a starter to set the tone for the sort of experimental engagement you’d like from students for the rest of the lesson.

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Friday Gem #14 – YOUR ideas bout return to the classroom

Teaching and Learning Gem #14 –  Return to the classroom. Building Community; Finding Gaps; Knowing your students and giving voice to all

This is an ‘uber’ Friday Gem which collates and shares all your ideas from your breakout discussions. The level of thought and the deep exploration of our priorities for the classroom was humbling.

Please open and peruse the attached booklet of YOUR ideas.

 

Training: If you would like training on any of the digital tools discussed yesterday, please complete this form and we will set up some twilight.

A big thank you to our group facilitators: James Courtenay Clack, Dan Addis, Helen Sinclair, Alys Lloyd, Steph Harel, Lucinda Gilchrist and Claire Baty

A big thank you to the scribes: Holly Beckwith, Rebecca Brown and Jane Fawcett

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Friday Gem #13 – emoji vocab retrieval practice

Teaching and Learning Gem #13 – emoji vocab retrieval practice

The final Friday Gem of the year comes from the Classics Department and is a great one for linguists. Mark Wilmore did a digital learning walk and shared with me a fun and fast-paced vocab retrieval game from Dan Addis. Whilst waiting for students to join the live lesson (not wanting to waste any moment for learning), Dan posted a Latin word in the conversation space. Students had to post an emoji/picture that represented it.

Here is ‘fugit’ (he/she flees) and ‘templum’ (temple):

Here is ‘timet’ (he/she is afraid):

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Friday Gem #12 – meaningful personal targets

Writing

Teaching and Learning Gem #12 – creating meaningful personal targets

 

This comes from Helen Sinclair. She asked her Year 9 to write a reflection for their end of year assessment. However, as she watched them write it on OneNote, she noticed that some of the comments were rather vague. She therefore copied a range of different reflections onto the chat and asked the whole class to review them using the reaction emojis (being clear that a sad face didn’t mean it was bad, just that they thought it could be improved). Once they had done this, she then asked students to explain in the live call what made some targets more effective than others.

This is effective because:

  • It encourages students to be meaningfully self-reflective.
  • The collaborative nature of this makes it clear that all students have things to improve….it discourages perfectionism!
  • It emphasises the importance of making targets specific.
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Teaching & Learning Gem #11 – Digital Exit Ticket

WimTalks

Teaching and Learning Gem #11 – Digital Exit Ticket

Ian Richardson added me to his Year 9 Computer Science Team as a student, so I get all sorts of reminders to complete Teams Assignments, such as quick low stakes quizzes to check my knowledge. He decided to use Forms and Teams Assignments to push out an Exit Ticket to all students at the end of the lesson. This allowed him quickly to see how every student was feeling about her progress and it enabled him to adapt his teaching going forwards.

As a student, this is what popped up for me at the end of the lesson:

And when I opened the Assignment, I could fill in my self-reflection about the lesson:

This is effective because:

  • Every student gets her voice heard: it creates a one-to-one connection between student and teacher.
  • Through the Assignments function, Ian can quickly click through the responses and check who has/hasn’t completed it.
  • Ian can adapt his teaching going forwards to cater to the learners.
  • Ian can put in interventions/differentiate if it is clear that some students need extra support.
  • It encourage students to reflect on their own learning and progress.
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Friday Gem #10 – student collaboration using Miro

Teaching and Learning Gem #10 – student collaboration using Miro


We know how important it is to find ways for students to connect and collaborate during GHL. Clare Roper shared with me some videos of her Year 10s working together in real time using Miro – an online collaborative platform. She put students in groups using Teams channels so that they could speak with each other as they completed the collaborative task online. She could see exactly what was going on, to support and give encouragement live.

  • Fast and furious team competition about pollination

Teams competed to order the stages of the pollination process. This video is so fun…I think Clare has a future as a sports commentator!

  • Multiflow thinking maps about human influences on the environment

Clare was able to watch the different groups of students collaborating on their thinking maps and give immediate feedback. Watch here.

Miro has lots of different ways for students to collaborate. Click here to watch a short promotional video about Miro.

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Friday Gem #8 – the power of digital RAG forms

Teaching and Learning Gem #8 – the power of quick questionnaires to get a picture of whole class understanding

This idea comes from Nicola Higgs, who created a digital RAG sheet for students using Microsoft Forms. Students rated their confidence about the topic of climate change (covered during lockdown) by using  ‘red’, ‘amber’ or ‘green’ . This allows students to reflect honestly on their Guided Home Learning AND helps Nicola understand which areas of this topic she needs to revisit in lessons.

Here is a link to what her form looked like.

Below are some of the results, quickly giving Nicola a sense of the whole class picture and what has been understood by students:



Here is the excel spreadsheet generated, allowing Nicola to dig down into the detail of particular students so she can support them/make interventions:

This is effective because:

  • It is quick for students to complete and gives all students the ability to share their feelings.
  • It encourages students to be self-reflective about their learning
  • It gives the teacher direction about where to focus their teaching
  • It allows the teacher to see which students need more support or intervention
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Friday Gem #9 – Rubrics for effective and efficient marking

Teaching and Learning Gem #9 – use of rubrics in Teams Assignments for effective and efficient marking

Another top tip from Nicola Higgs and the Geography department, who have been using the full functionality of Teams Assignments to collect in and mark the work from her Year 7 assessment projects. The use of ‘rubrics’ allows for the marking criteria, assessment objectives and bands to be applied easily and clearly to student work.

She has made an awesome 5 minute video explaining how her department have used rubrics in Teams Assignments, and why they are beneficial. Do take a look! Watch here.

In short:

  • You can create and reuse marking criteria which you can then apply at a click of a button to a student’s work
  • It makes it clear to the student what skills/knowledge they have shown.
  • This is a super time saving tool for teachers while at the same time helping students understand how to succeed in the assignment.
  • There is also a box to add a short, personalised comment, so you can recognise the effort/progress of the individual