Teach Primary Issue 18.6

TAKE - HOME T I PS • Avoid making assumptions – meet children where they are, not where you think they should be. • Know your subject well – understand the curriculum progression and where the potential barriers, misconceptions and most helpful pedagogies are. • Provide written scaffolds (flipchart, slide deck, working wall, etc.) for the guided and independent practice part of the lesson for children to reference. • Be informed by the reasonable adjustments and classroom adaptations identified and agreed for children with SEND. • Model the use of adaptations, such as “I can look back at the working wall.” and “I will get a number square to help me.” so children understand how they can select and use additional resources. • Use a range of consistent adaptations over time and across lessons – repetition helps children to use new scaffolds with growing familiarity and confidence. • Use Q&A techniques that tell you what every child is thinking. You need to be able to scan all the answers quickly, so a single letter on a whiteboard works well here. • Plan great questions in advance. You won’t be able to conjure them up on the spot. • Ask hinge-point questions at crucial moments in the lesson, to determine whether it is ok to continue. • Pose an interesting question at the end of the lesson, perhaps in the form of an ‘exit ticket’. This will confirm whether or not the lesson objective was met. • Cold-calling can be an effective strategy. Combine this with short ‘talk partner’ discussions, so learners have the chance to articulate their thinking before you call on them. information so that your teaching is accurately pitched to their needs. To be effective responsive teachers, we need strategies to: • explore children’s prior knowledge before starting a topic; • monitor how well they are understanding new content during teaching, so we know whether they are ready to move on; • assess understanding at the end of a lesson, so we can adjust our plans for the next lesson if necessary. Effective questioning is crucial to all these stages. This means thinking about both the quality of the questions we ask and the mechanisms we use to find out what every child thinks. Dylan Wiliam introduced the idea of the ‘hinge-point question’ – a good strategy to use during a lesson to establish whether all children understand the lesson so far, or whether some might need further explanation or support. These often take the form of a multiple-choice question, because this is a quick and efficient way to gather the information on what every child thinks. By establishing an expectation that every child must show the teacher their answer to the question (whether that be by holding up a mini-whiteboard, A/B/C/D cards, fingers, etc.) a culture of ‘no opting out’ is created. You can then easily see whether all, some, or none of the pupils are on track with the learning. This is more effective than a ‘hands- up’ approach, in which you may only find out what one or two children are thinking. Crucial to success is that the hinge-point question is carefully thought out in advance, so that the wrong answers tell you something useful – revealing any common misconceptions or specific misunderstandings. This helps you to know where to go next in your teaching. You could, for example, establish whether children have understood the difference between perimeter and area by asking them whether the perimeter of a 4cm by 3cm rectangle is A) 14cm or B) 12cm. Strategies like these allow the teacher to make ‘in the moment’ decisions about how to proceed. Are some children ready to move on to some independent learning, whilst others require further explanation or scaffolding? The goal is to ensure that no child is left behind. Rather than finding out at the end of the lesson that some children ‘didn’t get it’, how much better it is to discover that during the lesson and to take swift action. The ultimate aim of adaptive and responsive teaching is to enable all learners, wherever possible, to achieve the intended curriculum outcomes. TP AS S E S SMENT S P E C I A L www.teachwire.net | 49 Ben Fuller is lead assessment adviser at HFL Education. Felicity Nichols is SEND adviser at HFL Education. hfleducation.org