This has been a tough year - what was your biggest challenge?
Back in September, there I was, naively panicking, in my annual style, about the challenges of the year ahead. Would I be able to cover the hefty biology specifications? How would I give students enough opportunities to retrieve, apply and practise what I was teaching them?
Little did I realise how dramatically the challenges that I (and every other teacher) faced would change overnight.
Switching from teaching in the classroom to attempting to teach online has been one of the steepest learning curves in my career. I teach in a comprehensive school; we have students from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. And that poses some real issues around access to online learning.
Those with a personal device are able to access learning readily and to seek advice from their teachers as and when they need it. However, those who do not have the luxury of the same technology are in a position where they have to be far more independent. Without the skills of self-regulation, this can be a huge challenge for students.
The key to overcoming this problem is rooted in knowing your students: knowing their circumstances, their work habits, their strengths and their areas for development.
As a school, we have invested time in teaching our students about effective habits for successful learning. We have taught them to plan, monitor and evaluate their work and working patterns, so that, regardless of whether they are accessing online learning or working from paper-based resources, the vast majority have the motivation and resilience they need to work independently at home. This leaves more time for us to focus on students who are yet to develop the same habits, and who need a little more support and guidance to achieve their best.
What was your most joyful moment of the year?
My form group have provided me with many joyful moments throughout the year. Their sense of humour, resilience and kindness continues to overwhelm me, none more so than with a specific group of them who always find time to leave motivational messages on our form board. These messages are not just for me, but for their peers, too. They are always anonymous, always positive and always just at the right time for someone.
Their dedication to spreading positivity is something to behold. I am so grateful to work with such a thoughtful group of young people. I’ve missed them terribly during lockdown.
What was the most surprising thing that you discovered about your teaching?
Over the years, I have spent a significant amount of time curating a collection of lessons and resources, all neatly filed in efficiently labelled folders. I must admit to being hugely proud of some of the diagrams that I’ve made, animated and annotated to wow and engage my classes.
However, that sense of pride came crashing down this year when I started to learn more about cognitive load theory, split attention and dual coding.
Reading Oliver Caviglioli’s book Dual Coding with Teachers made me realise that many of my lessons were littered with overly complex diagrams, presented in one chunk on a PowerPoint slide, making them really difficult for students to process.
So, I have tried to improve how I present information, focusing on effective modelling and framing explanations in a way that maximises learning time. The changes I have made have led to more engagement from students, better interaction in question-and-answer sessions and improved motivation.
What was one thing you changed this year for the better?
Ensuring that students are making the most of their learning time is key. I see them beavering away, spending hours making copious revision notes that will have little impact on their knowledge.
However, thanks to engaging with the online teacher group CogSciSci, I have now introduced SLOP (shed loads of practice) as a key element of my teaching. This technique involves getting students to undertake extensive practice of a skill or area of subject knowledge through answering multiple questions of increasing difficulty.
SLOP has provided fantastic opportunities to model exam technique and for students to apply their learning. And their feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive.
The students have said that they love the challenge of completing the questions, embracing complex problems and, above all, achieving success. It improves their recall, application and motivation, and, for me, it makes planning and feedback efficient and targeted. Good news all round.
What was one thing you changed this year for the worse?
I introduced Cornell note-taking as part of students’ training in effective study habits. This technique has a lot of positives: it provides a structure for retrieval questions; it gives students the opportunity to reflect on and summarise their learning; and it can encourage them to focus on the work itself, rather than just its presentation. I was absolutely convinced it would be a sure-fire win for my classes.
However, as I quickly learned, Cornell note-taking is not for everyone. I don’t think I have ever received so many complaints about anything before.
“Miss, I don’t like them.”
“Miss, why do I have to do this?”
In the spirit of resilience, I told students that they had to do it because it was good for them.
On reflection, though, I didn’t spend enough time modelling the process. Students were frequently unsure about what to do and relied heavily on me to provide them with the information they needed. Far from making my learners more independent, it made them more reliant on me than ever.
What was the moment that will stay with you for years?
In the depths of winter this year, I was down to my penultimate appointment of what felt like a particularly long parents’ evening.
I provided the deserved praise, offered advice about GCSE revision, answered the parent’s queries and concluded the meeting with: “OK. Love you. Bye.”
That’s right. I made the complete faux pas of telling a parent that I loved them. Fortunately for me, the parent understood that my weary mind was simply desperately in need of some sleep.
My department, on the other hand, were less sympathetic. We now have a notice above our office door with those immortal words: “Love you. Bye.” It’s a wonderful reminder that having a sense of humour is essential in this job.
What do you hope to change this coming year?
As a science teacher, and someone who spent years working in labs, I have a strange confession to make: I don’t like practical work. I find it hugely frustrating that students see practicals as a “fun” lesson. I don’t object to science being “fun”, but to the fact that the purpose of practicals gets lost. Practical work is used by scientists to test a hypothesis and further our understanding. This is the philosophy that I would like to embed in my classroom next year.
I will be using the strategy of the “slow practical” to model and guide the process for students. This approach should remove the guesswork and the opportunities for a sneaky chat, along with a host of other distractions. At least, that is the plan.
Louise Lewis is a research lead and deputy head of science in a Yorkshire secondary school. She tweets @MissLLewis
This article originally appeared in the 14 August 2020 issue
