Words of Wisdom briefing 2014

Words of Wisdom

When marking…

•Check SPAG separately to content –it’s a different skill !

KS3 literacy starter suggestion

•Provide students with 5 – 10 words appropriate to the topic and give five minutes to come up with a creative story

Differentiation

•Differentiate by questioning

•Prepare top band questions, middle band questions and lower band questions

•Give extra points / rewards for getting the higher band questions

Differentiation

•Print different worksheets in different colours by levels. As the year advances you can demonstrate progress as some students move through the colour bands.

‘Bad Teacher’ counter-intuitive marking

•Mark everything which is right, WRONG

•Mark everything which is wrong, RIGHT

•Then get the students to correct the ‘bad teacher’ and write feedback on your bad marking

Word games

•Create games such as Scrabble, hangman, word-search or crosswords for your subject, using relevant key words

Find the positive

•Even for a poor piece of work, always try and find some positives!

Empathy feedback

•How would YOU feel if …

Correct the mistakes

•Give the students key words with errors in the spelling and get them to correct

Keywords

•Scramble the keywords for each lesson on the board as a starter

Literacytip

•Use mini whiteboards regularly to check spelling of key words

Differentiation

•Always change the colour of your whiteboard and font to dyslexia friendly

•Always use pictures alongside writing in displays, powerpoint or smart-board presentations

Marking and feedback

•Commit to DIRT – Directed improvement and reflection time – on a REGULAR rather than a ‘nice idea’ basis!

Differentiation

•Name students for different roles in the group to ensure all students participate and feed back eg. leader, negotiator, questioner, summariser, relayer.

Literacy

•Use THINK PINK highlights for SPAG errors and ask students to use their dictionaries to correct spellings themselves when they get the work back.

Differentiation

•Don’t make the task easier – make the thinking around it easier for those who need it

Differentiate from the top

•Aim high: start with the most challenging elements of the success criteria and scaffold UP to that, rather than beginning with a low starting point

Differentiation•Lower - Use ‘cloze’ fill in the gaps tasks or paragraphs, either providing the vocabulary needed or leaving it open depending on ability.

•All - Always ask students to justify and develop opinions verbally and in writing.

Student marking and feedback: colour code

•Use different questions at different levels on different coloured paper (these can be pre-prepared for certain tasks.

Rewards!

•When creating your own DIRT sheet for your subject, ensure you have an area for a reward value wheel to make sure students are rewarded for their efforts in improving their work

•Reward excellent literacy, both with specific verbal praise ‘I like your excellent choice of vocabulary / your accurate use of key words / the way you are speaking like a historian’ and give out reward wheels

Choices for differentiation

•Offer choices of plenary or a homework menu to give students more control of their learning and keep students stretched and challenged right to the end of the lesson and beyond…

Marking and feedback –saving time

•Have a code or pre-printed sheet or stickers for your most common comments or questions in feedback to save time writing the same thing many times.

Marking and feedback – no grades!

•When marking, don’t always give a grade, sometimes just give feedback as students are more inclined to pay attention to formative comments rather than skip to the grade.

Literacy

•Always spell out, write up or say aloud key words during the lesson and check understanding and spelling using questioning or mini whiteboards.

•Have spellings and definitions of key words clearly displayed in your classroom and in books

•Set regular spelling tests, quizzes and comprehension tests to check basic knowledge.

Clear success criteria

• Create separate literacy targets for improvement

• Use a SPAG checklist before tasks are started

• Link this to the SPAG criteria in the new GCSEs !

Marking tip

•When marking exams, don’t mark the whole paper through, instead mark all of Q1 across the group, then all of Q2 and so on – it helps you to self moderate as you mark.

Know your students

• Include a snippet of something that appeals to your students based on knowledge of their personalities and interests, whether football teams, sport, art, music or computer games.

Always think:

•Would YOU like to be in your lesson?

Empathy:

•Students have been sitting still behind desks all day – how much are you talking? How engaging is your lesson? How will you get them to focus? Design tasks with their whole day in mind and make your lesson stand out.

Explicit teaching of key skills eg. note-taking• Do you explicitly teach students how to make notes?

• Skills which we take for granted do need to be taught.

• Try using a series of instructions or quick reminders to improve the structure and quality of student notes

• Think: how will they use these notes to revise? Do you know? Do they know?

Marking & Feedback: questioning•Plan your questioning: While some questioning is responsive, other questions can be planned, particularly for higher ability students

•Have a series of questions ready which challenge reasoning skills, not just knowledge eg. Instead of ‘Is France a democracy?’ – ‘What does it mean for country a democracy?’

Marking & feedback: get students working! •Are you working harder than your students?

•They should be working harder than you!

•Get students to do the work in response to your marking and feedback eg. by asking questions, responding to feedback, improving and rewriting.

Marking

• If you feel you are marking too much, check the marking policy! You may find you don’t have to mark as much as you think you do!

If they can’t speak it, they can’t write it•Use questioning to develop extended verbal answers in class, asking students to justify and explain in full, using standard English and excellent, subject-specific vocabulary.

•By developing oracy, the quality of written work will follow.

Literacy is still important at KS5

•Give sentence starters to develop higher level responses at KS5, whether orally or in writing eg.

•‘It could be argued that..’

•‘Initially, it may appear that… however …’

Literacy: zero tolerance

•Spot a basic error on a piece of work? Hand it back and don’t mark it until it has been proof read and corrected

Thought stems

•Use thought stems for your subject to develop oracy and literacy

•Differentiate thought stem posters at different cognitive levels eg. identify, evaluate, analyse

Student-led learning

•Ask students to design the plenary or the starter for the next lesson

•Challenge higher ability students to link the learning to prior knowledge before fully introducing new information

Literacy and general knowledge: ‘read like a scientist’… ‘think like a historian’•Find a relevant, challenging text relating to your subject and set reading for homework or classwork.

•Take turns reading aloud (eg. ‘popcorn’ reading) and set comprehension questions.

•Then create a list of key words or questions arising from the text.

Marking

•Frequent and immediate feedback is more valued by students

Drop everything and read

•Why wait for your turn to come in a Year 7 Drop Everything and Read lesson?

•Choose a relevant text and take time out!

Use ‘CUPS’ for proofreading

•C – Capital letters

•U – Understanding: does it make sense

•P – punctuation

•S - spelling

Nominalisation – turn verbs into nouns• For more stylish academic writing, ask students to turn verbs into nouns.

• Eg. instead of ‘Germany invaded Poland in 1939. This caused World War Two to break out’ try turning the verbs ‘invaded’ into the noun ‘invasion’ and ‘to break out’ into ‘the outbreak’

• ‘Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 was the immediate cause of the outbreak of World War Two.

HAPS and A*

•Have an A* reading list

•Develop an A* glossary or vocabulary list

•Have extension questions from the next level up eg. GCSE questions for Year 8 or 9, AS questions for GCSE students