Author: kiriakospet

We all know the power that our words can have on our students and colleagues but how often do we stop to think about the power of our words upon ourselves? Take the title of this article and the word, “problem”. Where did that take you? Did you picture your worst class? You pile of marking, your failing departments, your demanding parents or that one child that you cannot get through to? Did your heart sink at the “problem” the issue, difficulty, trouble or complication? Each of these labels create a sinking feeling, a wall or barrier that must be overcome. The obstacle is merely a metaphor, created by the language you have chosen to surround it with.

Taking time to stop and reflect upon anything can help us to overcome that which seems impossible. Let’s reflect upon our use of language and observe the impact that this could have upon our practice. Let’s discard the word “problem” from our vocabulary and replace it with “project”. Now look again at that parent, child, colleague or work to be done. Look at it as your project. Did you feel that? Did you feel the energy change from such a small difference? The word problem conjures the wall. The word project creates a sense of purpose. It makes me want to run for my big paper and markers to get started on the idea storm! A project has a desired outcome and it is up to you to design the routes that take you there. You learn upon the way, set deadlines and mini goals to lead you to success.

Spot the difference in these two scenarios:

1. It’s Friday afternoon; Lucy arrives at work, coffee in hand and pile of problems waiting on her desk. She has three classes of books to mark ready for the book scrutiny next week, her first lesson is 9Z5 with a class full of problem children and she has to fill out her performance management document before she leaves today.
2. It’s Friday afternoon; Lucy arrives at work ready to face the three main projects of the day. 9Z5 are her first priority. They have been working on routines as they enter the room. She then has three classes who are ready for a progress check; this is great timing for the book scrutiny next week. Finally, her performance management document will be completed. She hopes that this final component can be linked to the ongoing project with 9Z5, supporting their progress even further.

Is your self-talk more like Lucy one or Lucy two? Do you walk into a desk full of problems or a series of projects that you are working on? What difference could changing your self-talk to Lucy two’s “project”, “priority”, “component”, way of looking at the day ahead have upon your motivation? The work exists, the battle remains but you can learn to enjoy the battle by seeing it as a project to reflect upon and move forward with. Reflection can create changes that help us, not to eradicate difficulties in our lives, that is impossible. It can help us to face new hurdles as they arise. A reflective practitioner does not panic in the face of an unruly class, a failing teacher, a bad set of results or whatever else might blindside the fearful. They stop, take a breath and plan for success. They lead the change through their positive, reflective practice.

To lead change in education, we need to avoid the culture of racing forwards without ever taking time to stop and reflect. We need to recognise the reality that, when one project ends, another will be created in its place. There is no such thing as smooth sailing. We need to learn to navigate the rough seas through attitude and experience. Where are we? Where do we want to be? How are we going to get there? Reflecting upon our word choices is such a small change that can make a huge difference to our attitude, outcomes and motivation. Your reflections do not have to stop there…

Lisa Jane Ashes

Teaching and Learning Consultant, Author and Keynote Speaker

The best teachers recognise and embrace their potential to have a transformative impact on the wider future of the nation, and beyond. By promoting positive values, including tolerance, understanding and inclusion, this sense of moral purpose is the engine that drives the best teachers. It is a privilege to be a teacher, to have the opportunity to impact positively on the lives of so many young people, their families and ultimately their communities. Teachers get to make a difference to the lives of children and young people and improving their life chances and helping them to secure their futures. In this way, teachers have the most important job of all. The greatest of teachers, however, work tirelessly to create a challenging and nurturing environment for their students. Great teaching seems to have less to do with our knowledge and skills than with our attitude towards our students, our subject, and our work. Although, the list below is certainly not all-inclusive, it does narrow down numerous characteristics of great teaching.

When you next doubt yourself or feel exhausted by the job, just remember, YOU make a difference.

1. A great teacher respects students. In a great teacher’s classroom, each person’s ideas and opinions are valued. Students feel safe to express their feelings and learn to respect and listen to others. This teacher creates a welcoming learning environment for all students.
2. A great teacher creates a sense of community and belonging in the classroom. The mutual respect in this teacher’s classroom provides a supportive, collaborative environment. In this small community, there are rules to follow and jobs to be done and each student is aware that he or she is an important, integral part of the group. A great teacher lets students know that they can depend not only on her/him, but also on the entire class.
3. A great teacher is warm, accessible, enthusiastic and caring. This person is approachable, not only to students, but to everyone in the school. This is the teacher to whom students know they can go to with any problems or concerns or even to share a funny story. Great teachers possess good listening skills and take time out of their way too-busy schedules for anyone who needs them. If this teacher is having a bad day, no one ever knows—the teacher leaves personal baggage outside the school doors. These great teachers also need wellbeing support too, so make sure you keep and eye on each other.
4. A great teacher sets high expectations for all students. This teacher realises that the expectations set for students greatly affect their achievement; and knows that students generally give to teachers as much or as little as is expected of them.
5. A great teacher has their own love of learning and inspires students with their passion for education and for the course material. Constantly renewing themselves as a professional on a quest to provide students with the highest quality of education possible.These teachers have no fear of learning new teaching strategies or incorporating new technologies into lessons, and always seem to be the ones who are willing to share what they’ve learned with colleagues.
6. A great teacher is a skilled leader. Different from administrative leaders, effective teachers focus on shared decision-making and teamwork as well as on community building. This great teacher conveys a sense of leadership to students by providing opportunities for each of them to assume leadership roles.
7. A great teacher can “shift-gears” and is flexible when a lesson isn’t working. This teacher assesses teaching throughout the lessons and finds new ways to present material to make sure that every student understands the key concepts.
8. A great teacher collaborates with colleagues on an ongoing basis. Rather than thinking of themselves as weak because they ask for suggestions or help, these teachers view collaboration as a way to learn from a fellow professional. A great teacher uses constructive criticism and advice as an opportunity to grow as an educator.
9. A great teacher maintains professionalism in all areas — from personal appearance to organisational skills and preparedness for each day. Communication skills are exemplary, whether speaking with an administrator, one of the students or a colleague. The respect that the great teacher receives because of their professional manner is obvious to those around them.
10. A great teacher contacts parents with a supportive phone call. Not the phone call to say something has gone wrong or a child has misbehaved, but a call to celebrate achievement, attitude and progression, either academically, emotionally or through showing kindness to others.
11. A great teacher realizes that attending school when they are unwell is not a good idea. As much as we want to be there, make sure the children and young people are safe and secure, spreading your germs is not good for the school. The greatest of teachers will take care of their physical health too in order to protect others from becoming unwell. There are no trophies or medals left in the cabinet for turning up to school sick!
12. A great teacher never stops learning. Every day a learning day.
13. A great teacher also realizes that greatness means having a bad day and that you cannot be 100% brilliant or great all of the time. However, working towards greatness as much as you can is what others will see and value in you. You are not a robot, you are a human being and great human beings have ‘off’ days too. Knowing when things haven’t quite gone to plan is what makes a great teacher a reflective practitioner.
14. Great teachers are collaborators, communicators and creative artists. Sharing your work and skills is as important as putting them into practice. Spread your greatness and in return you will receive thought provoking ideas back from others.

Whilst teaching is a gift that seems to come quite naturally for some, others have to work overtime to achieve great teacher status. Yet the payoff is enormous — for both you and your students. Imagine students thinking of you when they remember that great teacher they had in school or college! YOU can change the future with being a great teacher.

Nina Jackson

Teaching and Learning Consultant, Author and Keynote Speaker

Great CPD programmes inspire you to put into practice what you learn so you become an even better teacher. But effective CPD doesn’t depend on how long you spend listening or engaging in activity. Instead, it’s about the ongoing commitment you make as a school to do things differently.

Here are 8 reasons why CPD is so important:

1. Effective teacher CPD has a direct and measurable impact on student achievement. The Sutton Trust says students learn 40% more when taught by an excellent performer.
2. Good CPD increases staff morale, recruitment and retention. It also empowers staff to grow as pedagogical classroom practitioners.
3. CPD must be based on the latest and most reliable research to ensure you are delivering best practice in your classroom.
4. CPD is about more than just performance management. It creates much more effective teachers who can profoundly affect student outcomes for the better.
5. Great CPD not only grows great leaders but also enables them to coach talented individuals so they become increasingly expert teaching practitioners.
6. Choosing the right CPD will deliver the greatest benefits and value for money, which makes it crucial you select programmes that meet your school’s real needs.
7. Celebrating successes in Continuous Professional Development will create an even more positive experience for all involved.
8. Failing to evaluate CPD means you won’t know what works.

Costa Constantinou (BA, MA, PGCE)

Director of Educational Services

“But… I don’t know how to revise…” Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s a common phrase we hear from our students when it comes to exam prep. It can also serve as a reminder that it is vital we consider not just the content of what we teach, but also how students learn this material. As Dr. John Dunlosky points out in his article ‘Strengthening the student toolbox- study strategies to boost learning’, teaching students how to study is just as important as teaching them the content. Exploring and demonstrating effective learning strategies with students is crucial if we are going to train them to move away from unhelpful practices like last minute ‘cramming’ sessions, caffeine-fueled all-nighters and the highlighting of everything on a worksheet or textbook meaning the re-reading of it almost in its entirety.

Unfortunately, there are no magic tricks I can teach pupils for retaining information for an exam (as much as I would love there to be). Learning is achieved through hard work and continuous effortful practice. However, there are some very useful techniques and tips I would encourage. Strengthening the retrieval capacity of our students is essential and if we manage to store information into longterm memory, we are able to retrieve it again and again and again.

Working with my own pupils as well as planning and delivering the student Brain Booster masterclass workshops I deliver for Veema Education has meant I have developed a deep interest in neuroscience and the science of learning. However, what I feel is sometimes missing from the research papers are simple, practical revision strategies we as teachers can adopt to enable our learners to maximise the impact of their revision. So what follows is a list of the ones that I have found to really effective:

Retrieval practice is one of the most effective ways of learning that leads to fluency. Trying to recall something from memory requires mental strain and effort, which is why low stake-testing rather than simply reading, highlighting and re-reading information is more effective. When reading text from a textbook or worksheet have pupils answer a series of questions to test their knowledge and understanding from memory. These can be questions that have been prepared earlier or questions that you get students to prepare themselves. Knowing that students are about to test each other can be a wonderful engagement tool! To take this a step further, include some more challenging and higher order thinking questions that encourage them to think about how this new learning relates to previous information they have learnt in the past–whether this being yesterday’s lesson or something from last term.

Graphic Organisers such as mind maps, spider maps, sequential thinking and Venn diagrams should be used as much as possible for students to show their thinking and understanding of key ideas and topics from memory. When learning, students need to be active and graphic organisers are a fantastic way of reconstructing information they have been exposed to whilst making useful links and connections to what they already know.

Flashcards are a common resource students use when revising but research tells us that around 30% of people do not use flashcards to self-test (Hartwig and Dunlosky, 2012). This this is real shame as there are great ways flashcards can be used to test knowledge and understanding and memory. For example, you can train students to create flashcards in the following way:

• Write a concept or key term at the front of the flashcard and at the back get students to write down their answer. This can then be checked with the original answer to see how well they have done. This is an effective way of selfquizzing how much you know and where the gaps might be.
• While reading information, highlight key words, concepts, theories and at the same time translate this information to a set of flashcards, which can then be used for self-testing purposes.
• Combine writing with a visual illustration. Students can then test themselves by explaining this in more detail at the back of the flashcard.

One thing I would say with flashcards (and I’ve told this to my students many a time) is be weary of totally dropping from the pack the ones that you feel you are confident with. You should aim to revisit material as often as you can especially in the build-up to exams.

Cornell Note taking. I love the Cornell note taking system and many of my GCSE and A-level students did too. This is an excellent way of getting students to think metacognitively (McCabe 2001), asking questions, noting key terms, and summarising the content being revised at the end of a lesson or during independent study. This method enables students to self-test what they have covered in the lesson as well as piece together previously learnt information. You can download a guide I produced last year of how to use this and it’s a definitely worth exploring with students.

Spacing out your learning and revisiting material as often as possible is so important for embedding. This is one reason why I feel we constantly need to expose students to information they have previously learnt either in the lesson or through homework, mixing up material from different units in class tests or assessments if they are going to hang onto the knowledge they gain.

The key here to effective revision is not the hours of cramming you do in the final few weeks or days before the exam but regular, focused, shorter sessions with regular brain breaks. Cedepa et al (2008) in their research on spacing effects in learning show that the optimal intervals for retaining information between study sessions for say one week should be between one or two days, six months three weeks and 1 year every four weeks. I often put it to my students as ‘the little and often’ approach. Daily lowstakes testing, weekly reviews and cumulative testing is so important for helping students store information into longterm memory.

Past questions. Students need to practice different examination questions, over and over, well-spaced over time, rather than massed practice of the same problem type (and without looking at any notes). Also, the effect of exploring worked examples or exam answers, as well as writing their own, helps students process, practice and refine their revision to meet the parameters of exam success.

The reason many of the following techniques work so well is that they encourage learners to be active agents in their learning, They need to think hard about the information they are faced with. Learning that feels difficult embeds knowledge into memory better compared to learning that feels easy, which soon disappears–hence why we need to train students to avoid passive, superficial and time consuming techniques.

Preparing students for exams is never easy, and if we are going to teach students to be independent learners than we really do need to give some further thought into guiding students on how to revise, rather than simply telling them they should do this or focusing merely on subject content.

Costa Constantinou (BA, MA, PGCE)

Director of Educational Services