Bitesize Research: The Relationship Between Reading Achievement and Motivation

This week, Jaya wanted to share with you a meta-analysis published by the Review of Educational Research in May 2020 by Toste et al. from the University of Texas. 

Objectives of study: This review looked to synthesise recent work on the relationship between reading achievement and motivation looking at students from aged 5-18 years. 

Headline findings: Reading achievement and motivation are correlated to a medium extent throughout the ages of 5-18. The ‘type of reading’, being vulnerable, or being a particular age does not seem to have a moderating effect on the overall correlation. 

Summary of study: 

• A student’s self-perception of reading ability has a strong correlation to actual reading ability.

• Looking at reading and motivation over time, the results of this study indicated positive, significant associations in both directions, with early reading as a stronger predictor of later motivation than early motivation predicted reading achievement.

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflections questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How can I foster students’ active engagement in reading in my lessons?

• What are the best practices to improve students’ self-confidence and self-perception of their reading? 

• How can we continually motivate students to want to read for pleasure? How can we best explain the benefits to them so that their motivation remains high?

If anyone would like to discuss this further - comment below and start the discussion!

Bitesize Research: Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning

This week, I wanted to share with you a review published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in May 2020 by Muijs and Bokhove from the University of Southampton. 

Objectives of study: This review looked to synthesise recent work on metacognition and self-regulated learning to try and determine the best approaches to develop these characteristics in students

Headline findings: Interventions to improve metacognition and self-regulated learning have different impact sizes, and some things you would intuitively assume improve metacognition actually have a lower impact

Summary of study: 

• Effective practices to increase metacognition and self-regulated learning include direct and indirect approaches. 

• Direct approaches include explicit instruction, and modelling metacognitive and self-regulated practices. Indirect approaches include offering relevant practice opportunities, dialogue and scaffolded inquiry.

• Assessment is crucial - as formative assessment and feedback enables students to monitor their own progress and make changes as necessary to their approaches

• It is likely that self-regulated learning and metacognition are highly specialised by subject - relevant skills do not seem to easily transfer from one subject area to another

• Counterintuitively, less impactful strategies to increase metacognition and self-regulated learning include planning, self-checking, recordkeeping and goal setting. Moreover, small group work also seemed to work more effectively than large group or one-to-one interventions

• The EEF also offer 7 recommendations for teaching self-regulation and metacognition here

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflections questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How can I look to include the most impactful strategies for metacognition and self-regulated learning into my teaching and learning practice?

• How can I make existing assessments and feedback more conducive to supporting the development of metacognition and self-regulation?

• How can I structure small group work to support metacognition? 

• What have I done already that appears to have made a difference to metacognition and self-regulated learning? How do I know that it has made a difference?

If anyone would like to discuss this further with me - please comment in the section below. 

I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.

Jaya

10 Top Online Resources!

Teaching remotely has brought our attention to the wealth of resources available to teachers (for free!) online. We have an amazing amount of innovation taking place in the school and use of online resources to engage students. 

A collection of general, cross-subject resources and tools you can use to enhance your online lessons and the learning experience for students can be found below with contributions from Amelia Rowan, Leyla Marasli, Michael Paulus, Jojo Laber and Ruhina Cockar.

Google Questions

What is it?

Google Classroom can be used to set a range of assignments, one of which is ‘Google Questions’.  These can be used to ask students surveys, comprehension questions, quizzes, opinions, and so on.  Students can edit their responses and reply to other students if you allow them to.  

How can I use it?

A great way to use these is as a Do Now - teaching online is difficult, but so is learning online.  Having students take ten minutes to answer a Google Question gives them time to transition between lessons and switch mindsets (as well as giving teachers time to take the register). It can be a great way to get discussion going (especially if you tell students a requirement for the Do Now is to respond to at least one of their peer’s responses), to immediately test knowledge, and to ensure students are engaged. You can differentiate the task as you can set different levels of questions to different groups of students. It’s great for showing student accountability as you can see who has responded and contributed and who hasn’t as it automatically “hands it in” when the student responds.

How do I set it?

Found on google classroom - go to “Classwork”, click on “Create” and set a “Question”

 

Quizziz

https://quizizz.com

What is it?

A fantastic website where you can create low-stakes quizzes; you can either create your own from scratch writing your own questions, take questions from other peoples’ quizzes already made, or take whole quizzes made by others, for effective formative assessment.

Why is it awesome? (and better than Kahoot!)

• A fun, engaging way to complete Assessment for Learning in your lesson

• You get to watch the students complete the questions in real time so you can monitor their work

• You can write different types of questions (multiple choice, checkbox, fill in the blanks, poll or open ended)

• Although each question has a timer on it, students can take more time to complete each question which cater to both types of students: those who worry about the timer, wanting more time, and those who like the pressure of the timer

• There are detailed reports produced at the end of the quiz so you can pick on questions to go through and give feedback on

• You can link it to google classroom so it automatically has your classes on there. This means it’s easy to schedule the link to the quizziz on google classroom and it can import the quizziz grades into your marksheet in google classroom.

Nearpod

https://nearpod.com

What is it?

Nearpod is a platform that can increase student engagement in your remote learning classroom. You can create your own presentations that can contain quizzes, polls, videos, images, drawing-boards and web content. You can start with a resource you already have or check out some pre-made lessons on the platform for formative assessment. As with a lot of these resources, the best bit is the real-time insights you get given into what students know, and you can access reports after your lesson.

Three things you can create are:

The collaborative activity looks a bit like this (this is similar to padet): 

Have a read of this to understand more of how it works:

https://nearpod.com/how-it-works

Google Forms

Google forms have been an ever-improving G-suite app, that is fast becoming WA teachers go-to tool for making low-stakes assessment. Google form testing can be used for a wide range of question-types to suit your needs and can be used for all subjects. I myself have used them for assessing KS5 IB Economics students on perfect competition, and on balance sheets for IB Business Management students, to programming for our KS3 students 

Critically, Google forms provide immediate feedback to teachers on their students and their whole classes strengths and weaknesses in their understanding to help plan future teaching and learning. So no longer do teachers need to put individual question scores for each student onto a spreadsheet. These images below represent an example of how a teacher could quickly identify what learners fully understand and where misconception still persists. 

Further still, you can add auto-feedback for when a learner gets a question incorrect/partially correct. This allows learners to address the cause for each mark lost instantly and can even make a note of the perfect answer (similar to how we ‘Action’ items for learners during ‘Review & Improve’ post-assessment)

With the appropriate settings in place (see image below), a google form can be used to create a test on a chromebook that learners can not check other digital notes or ‘google’ an answer until they have submitted the form to their teacher. This really is a unique advantage of this tool over others and has enabled us to google forms for the bi-annual internal examinations with great success (with no printing required!)

Making a google form takes time and and mistakes in setting a certain question-type correct can undo the validity of the results you then receive if you are not careful. Until more years of consistently good use of google forms by teachers for high-stakes assessing, learners will persistently not take them as seriously as written assessments. So let's all use them more!

Google slides and docs assignments

What is it?

Google Classroom can be used to set a range of assignments. 

How do I use it?

• Assignments: used to set a worksheet, exit card, assessed task where all students get a copy of it. You can set a number of marks for the assignment, set up a marking rubric and a deadline.

• Quiz Assignment: used to add a google form (see above) assessment or quiz. The fun thing is that it will import the score from the google form quiz and it to your markbook on google classroom

  

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  Material: used to post lessons, YouTube videos, links to websites, resources for your lesson

Loom

https://www.loom.com

What is it?

Loom is a website that you can use to record your screen at the click of a button. Whether you use it as a google chrome add-on or you download it as a desktop app, loom records your screen and your voice with no time limit. It allows you to use the annotate and spotlight features to add more engaging features to your recorded video and as soon as you’re done it instantly provides you with a link that is accessible to anyone who clicks on it. Here is an example of some of the videos I’ve created using loom. 

How can it be used?

• Modelling: Sometimes there’s something that you’d want to model that’s quite complicated in method. Recording a loom video for this means that the students can pause, rewind and re-watch as many times as they like until they’ve grasped the method. This saves you from repeating the same

• Supporting SEN/LPA students: This is the main reason I use loom. I often record myself explaining a concept in great detail for the students who didn’t understand the work previously. I’ll then include different types of questions for them to attempt and then will show them my worked solution at the end of the video. Students will be instructed to go and watch the video whilst I’m live teaching the rest of the class something else. 

• Review & Improve for topic Quizzes - Review and Improve lessons can be boring for the kids if they feel like they have to sit there and watch you go through the whole lesson. You can record yourself going through a quiz and explaining the answers. You’re then in a position to instruct the students to go and watch the video that corresponds to the questions that they answered incorrectly.

Advantages over other screen recording apps

• You can record really long videos. I recorded a 35 minute video the other day! 

• You don’t need to download the video and upload it to google classroom. As soon as you’ve finished recording, the link to the video is added to your clipboard and all that’s left to do is to distribute it however you see fit. 

General Advantages

• Allows the students to be a bit more independent which is a great benefit for SEN and LPA students in general as they’re more used to working closely with an LSA or another teacher. 

• Helps lessons to run smoothly 

• The students are really appreciating of the videos 

• Improves teaching practise as it makes you think about what might need to be explained in greater detail and how to explain that so it’s as easily understood as possible. 

Bitesize Research: How teacher support impacts students' mental wellbeing, resilience and negative emotions

Each week on the blog I, Jaya Carrier, am going to share a bitesized, canape-style, quick summary of a piece of recent educational research with you. 

I find that trying to do this routinely really helps my own thinking about my own teaching practice, as well as ensuring that we as a school take the best possible evidence based approaches to T&L.

As such, this week, I wanted to share with you a study published in Frontiers in Psychology by Ken To from the The Chinese University of Hong Kong in January 2020. 

Objectives of study: This study looked to explore how teacher support to their students impacted the students' mental wellbeing, resilience and negative emotions. 

Headline findings: Teacher support matters, not only because it can reduce negative emotions, but also because it can improve resilience (which as a quality itself build up the healthy mental wellbeing of adolescents).

Summary of study: 1228 Chinese adolescents participated in this study and completed a questionnaire containing measures for mental wellbeing, teacher support, negative emotions, and resilience. The results showed that: 

• Teacher support can significantly assist adolescents' mental well-being.

• Part of the effect of teacher support on mental wellbeing was through promoting resilience, which accounted for 30% of the total effects.

• Moreover, teacher support also promoted mental wellbeing by reducing negative emotions. Reducing negative emotions had positive impacts on resilience, which in turn promoted mental wellbeing. 

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflections questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How have I supported the resilience of my students in the past? How did I know that their resilience has improved?
• How can I ensure that I build up the good relationships with students necessary to support them effectively?
• What are the best strategies to give students support?
• What strategies can I use that explicitly look to build student resilience? 
• How can I encourage students to learn from their experiences (metacognition), to seek help, and to self-regulate?
• How can I have conversations with students that routinely promote resilience?
• How does these findings to challenge? And to the IB learner profile?

If anyone would like to discuss this further - please let Jaya Carrier know or start a discussion below.

The use of enquiry-based learning in Geography by Divisha Patel

One of the main overarching features of effective geographical pedagogy that I learnt about during my initial teacher training in 2015, was enquiry-based learning. 

Geographical enquiry has been firmly established in the geography curriculum for the past few decades, however it has become even more prominent in the past couple of years, since the increased use of technology in classrooms. Ofsted (2018) stated that too much learning in Geography was based around content as opposed to the development of skills such as interpreting data, and that there was a need for students to be actively engaged in making sense of the world around them. 

Geographical enquiry is an approach to learning values pupils' own knowledge and unlocks what Allen and Massey (1995) refer to as individual 'geographical imagination'. Current knowledge is presented as contingent to be questioned and scrutinised rather than accepted as absolute reality. Geographical enquiry engages students in the development of a wide range of skills involved in the collection, analysis, interpretation and evaluation of information from a wide variety of sources, allowing for the development of literacy and numeracy. 

As a result, from 2015-2019, we as a Geography department embarked on a period of transition, whereby we reconsidered how we planned our curriculum, and adapted our offer to best suit the skills that students need to know to be lifelong geographers. Using Roberts’ (2013) enquiry-based learning framework, we adapted our lessons and unit plans to reflect the 4 main principles. The screenshots are from a Y9 lesson, as part of the Economic World/Development GCSE unit. 

1)  Creating a need to know: what is the purpose of what students are learning? How do we raise interest, and provoke geographical questions?

2)  Using data: use of primary data from fieldwork, or using their research skills and critiquing the author, purpose, motive and audience. 

3)  Making sense: This is arguably where the learning happens, how do they use the source to develop their geographical knowledge?

4)  Reflection: This allows students time to consider what they learnt, and how they learnt. 

             

The impact of development an enquiry-based approach has been that geography students are now a lot more independent in their learning, which has not only increased their engagement but also awareness of the wider world. We don’t want students to become top-performing students, we want them to become well-informed geographers. As they have been scaffolded through the stages of enquiry and supported to develop their independence from as early as Year 7, by the time students get to Sixth Form, and embark on the IB course, they understand how geographical data impacts what we know and understand about the processes that affect human and physical geography. 

Bibliography

Roberts, M (2013) Geography Through Enquiry: Approaches to teaching and learning in the secondary school

Allen, J. & Massey, D. (1995) Geographical Worlds

Thoughts from a DoL

I consider myself fairly tech savvy - afterall I'm a maths teacher - we're a bit geeky about technology, right?

However, the government announcement of closing schools within three days meant we had to adjust to remote teaching at what felt like lightning speed. It also meant having to support a team of highly capable teachers in the same process at the same time - being a leader means at the very least being experienced enough to be able to coach and mentor your team through this change. Only, the catch is that I've never done this before - we're all on an equal footing learning at the same time, and it's an exciting but daunting chance to be a novice again. This was going to be a fast-paced, multi-dimensional learning experience!

Elements of my practice I would normally feel confident about, and therefore have been able to coach others on, now needed re-thinking when looked at through the perspective of a purely technological approach.

So I challenged my department to try different technology mediums to work on:

- Assessment for learning

- Feedback - verbal and written

- Questioning

I was encouraged by the examples of innovation I saw (NB: these will be featured in future blog posts in more detail): 

• Teachers found ways of using the zoom chat like a mini whiteboard - by changing the settings so students can only message the teacher. This empowered students who would normally worry about incorrect answers to engage more actively, and gave the teacher the ability to praise and encourage participation. 
• Using Quizizz and Google Forms as a means of low-stakes assessment in the lesson in place of mini whiteboard questions - mixing it up with allowing the students to see the answers straight away or not so the teacher can go through each question individually.
• Converting worksheets into online versions, creating exit cards and assessed tasks, and setting them as assignments on Google Classroom to be handed in by the student to be marked and returned for follow up. 
• Live teaching using a whiteboard over zoom to model concepts and methods, recreating the classroom feel with cold-calling. 

At the end of a few weeks of experimentation I feel extremely proud of how my department has adapted their practice, and the dynamism they have shown in finding multiple ways to assess, mark and give feedback. As a DoL it has made me reflect on the balance between wanting consistency in how we give feedback and marking through having a schedule and collaboratively planned assessment tasks, and giving teachers the freedom to give feedback and mark in a more organic, less-structured but equally effective way. 

In terms of Leadership it brings up questions like:

• How would I monitor this more flexible approach to marking and feedback?
• When we are back in the physical building where is the balance between feedback using technology and feedback in books? If there's a book scrutiny how does the feedback get evidenced? Is that an important factor to consider?
• How do stakeholders (students, teachers, parents) feel about a more fluid feedback cycle? How do you ensure parents feel confidence in the feedback their child is getting if it's not in red pen in their books?
• How would this fit in with the whole school policy and vision for feedback and marking? A discussion with SLT would need to take place so having some ideas and solutions to these questions ready would be the ideal way to start the conversation.

It's a really exciting time to be a DoL at WA tackling these questions and how we see our teaching and learning move forward post-lockdown. 

Resources spoken about in the post:

Zoom - www.zoom.us

Quizizz - www.quizizz.com

Google Classroom & Suite