One of the best things about being a form tutor is having a “team” of children I see each day. But form time can also be utterly draining and demoralising when it lacks purpose, goals and structure.
How do you avoid this? The answer, I believe, is to align form time with the needs and values of the school. This gives the sessions purpose, making them feel meaningful for staff and students alike.
But what does that look like in practice? Last year, my school put in place two simple initiatives to give clear structure to form time, helping these sessions to act as effective bookends to the day.
The first of our two initiatives is called Morning Mastery and has two features: Prep and Whiteboard Wednesday.
Prep is dedicated to building individual students’ study habits over time. We begin almost every day - between 8.40am and 8.55am - with different types of retrieval practice based on a standardised set of knowledge organisers.
During these sessions, students go through a three-step process of “look-cover-write”, focusing on different chunks of “fingertip facts” from their curriculum. We have two minutes of looking, two minutes of writing and two minutes of self-correcting.
On Wednesdays, we do something slightly different: the tutor asks questions, based on the knowledge organisers, and puts them on the whiteboard. Students then respond in a standardised way.
The idea of these activities is to embed good study habits and help to ensure students go to their next lesson ready to learn.
The second initiative takes place in afternoon tutor time. Every day, tutor groups are read to by their form tutor for 20 minutes. This is an idea developed by Helena Brothwell (@educurious2015 on Twitter).
Across our multi-academy trust, we have collaborated to select texts that we believe will broaden students’ horizons and instil a joy of reading.
We share these texts on a rotation and teachers have advance copies, so they can read ahead. The idea is to regularly model reading for pleasure and to share our enjoyment and our ideas about what we read.
We have taken several steps to make it easier for form tutors to stick to these initiatives. Admin staff have organised the resources, placing folders, knowledge organisers, plastic wallets and books in boxes in each form room. We have supplied all tutor groups with a standardised slide of instructions to ensure consistency and asked sixth-form student leaders to make a video on how to “do prep”.
Every morning senior leaders monitor the process, not to catch tutors out but to lend a hand where needed: fetching missing books or stepping in to cover absences.
We didn’t introduce any other new initiatives while this approach was still bedding in, and repeated the instructions and expectations at staff briefings.
Most importantly, we ensured that staff understood the point of it all: that it would help all learners, especially our most vulnerable, to develop better study habits and make form times more worthwhile overall.
Ultimately, the process has made life easier for staff. What’s more, it means that tutor times are now never demoralising. Instead, they are an integral part of the school day.
Jude Hunton is headmaster of Skegness Grammar School. He tweets @judehunton
This article originally appeared in the 27 August 2021 issue under the headline “Form time is for forming good study habits”
