Lesson Design for PP Students

Modelling / Success Criteria

ISSUES TO CONSIDER

Students from more literate / advantaged backgrounds will often come to school with a ‘pre-programmed’ understanding of what quality work looks like, because the sorts of abstract thinking, numeracy and literacy that is helpful in school is modelled in the home from an early age. Some PP students may be from environments where this sort of modelling, for example of how to construct a detailed explanation of an abstract idea, is less frequent or refined. As a result, they need teachers to provide a strong sense of what quality looks like, supported by models of work which displays these qualities. Ron Berger, in the inspirational book ‘An Ethic of Excellence’, claims this:

“I believe that work of excellence is transformational. Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same. There is a new self-image, a new notion of possibility.

There is an appetite for excellence.”

Possible Solutions:

- get into the habit of modelling quality in each task that you set the students to do. Aim to do this in a way which is fluid and fairly brisk, looking to ‘micro-model’ how to do part of the task / a similar task in order to establish how to do it well, before letting students loose on the wider task. Bring attention to excellence in every task.

- keep working on and tweaking your approach to modelling, experimenting with different ways to encourage students to engage with models. Ideas might be annotating models on the board, live modelling, getting students to highlight or annotate models and form their own success criteria, differentiated modelling where students are shown first how to do the task, and then how to do it really well.

- when modelling a task, try to anticipate the misconceptions / weaknesses students are likely to display. Show this to the class first, and then show them what excellence looks like (interesting article on this in Science teaching here)

- Try to get modelling / success criteria as simple and straightforward as possible. There is no need to use the term ‘success criteria’ with the students if you feel it unhelpful; it’s often just as clear to talk to students about ‘how to do this really well’.

- When modelling, aim to ‘sum up’ the key features of excellence that you want students to display - if students are exploring a model and suggesting why it’s successful, the teacher’s role might be to bring all the ideas together in a coherent, precise way.

Actions

- try out different methods of modelling in lessons, aiming to provide micro-models of quality, which bring student attention to quality without feeling ‘clunky’, for all significant activities in lessons

- Practice modelling with faculty colleagues, giving each other feedback on the clarity / focus of your explanation

- Look at the shared best practice videos / materials on the blog here: http://cherwelllearning.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/modelling or watch JJ modelling a task from about 3 mins in here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD3lve2eK6E&feature=youtu.be