Friday Mindset #197

Happy Friday!

A quick reminder of that course we flagged last week - the one run by Bath Spa University’s Network for Learning, and featuring Martin taking you through a fifteen-session curriculum for effective revision. This one’s perfect for GCSE or A Level leaders - you get a powerpoint covering all fifteen activities, plus a handout for each one.

It’s on November 12th, and it’s online, from 4:00-6:30pm. Not a freebie, but a bargain. And because you read this newsletter, you can of course follow-up and chat with Martin, as well as Steve and Tony, anytime you want too.

Check it out here:

Alright, enough of that. Let’s dive in…

Something we're reading...

Once you’re in a leadership position, you end up spending a fair bit of time during the Spring and Summer terms interviewing potential candidates for teaching jobs. We’ve done our fair share. Once, we remember a candidate responding to a question about raising the standard of teaching in a department where they didn’t teach; a subject outside their own. Would that be a challenge? “Well,” they said. “Fundamentally, teaching’s teaching.”

Whenever we heard a teaching’s teaching response in an interview, it got a tick from us. Obsess of the micro-differences between teaching Geography and Economics, and you’re heading for a dead-end. This week, we’ve stumbled across a paper that vividly illustrates the fact that teaching really is teaching.

Simon Burgess at the University of Bristol looked at 251 teachers in 31 UK schools teaching over 7000 year 10 and 11 pupils. His team watched thousands of GCSE Maths and English lessons; there were 231 folks on the observation teams and 2700 15-20 minute classroom visits. Observers recorded exactly what was happening in those classrooms - the ‘instructional activities.’ Ten emerged as ever-present; things like ‘gauging student understanding’, ‘use of white board’, or ‘open discussion among students and teacher’.

Here’s what they found in Maths:

And here’s English:

Squint hard at those, and you’ll see there’s almost no difference in the frequency of instructional activities.

Here’s the biggest differences for you; the second-most frequent activity in an English classroom - open discussion - is the third most frequent in a Maths classroom. Students work in groups a little more in English - it’s the fifth most frequent activity - but it’s the sixth most frequent in Maths. Students copy from the whiteboard less in English, but extremely rarely in either class. Assigning homework seems to take a little longer in Maths.

Other than that… well, teaching’s teaching. Here’s the paper.

And here’s one interesting subject-specific finding. Students did better in Maths classes if teachers did a little more practice and assessment. And students did better in English classes if teachers did more peer sharing of ideas and responses.

Fascinating stuff.

Something to try...

A powerpoint for you this week, subscribers! We’ve been looking again at vision, and the importance of goal-setting, and we’ve developed a new and interesting way of encouraging students to set academic goals.

It’s based on this fantastic study - which we write about in The Backpacker’s Guide to University - and it encourages students to set goals in a particular way. We think you’re going to find this one really useful…

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