No-opting out: Being the voice of encouragement

 By Anita Shakya

Sometimes when we are tired, or low or vulnerable we might want to vanish or take the back road. No one wants to be seen making a mistake or not having all the answers. We value being respected and work hard to maintain the illusion that we have it all figured out. 

When things get tough, we bargain with ourselves. But, as professionals, we all have a small voice in our head that affirms that questions can be answered and challenges can be overcome. We have learned that we can do the things that make us uncomfortable and have proven it time and time again- we have built resilience and self belief. 

How did we get that “voice”? Opting-out is human nature,  our brains are trying to protect us from potential danger. But we have been guided by community, or even just that one person, to take a chance, to the point where, whatever it is,  it no longer feels risky. For our students, that can sometimes be the classroom where due to pride or fear or any other factor, our students sometimes want to act in avoidance and be invisible: but our role is to see them.

Challenging our students to be present, focused and learning is such a small thing but is probably what has the biggest impact over time. Whether it be from continuously correcting uniform, not taking “I don’t know” for an answer, or refusing to let them sit quietly on the sideline and not write in their books, we communicate that every student matters, in every moment.

What does this look like?

1. Pay attention to the little things.  If we can opt out of not being dressed and prepared then the foundation for the rest can go to the wayside.

2. Normalise struggle. Talk openly about how learning feels uncomfortable sometimes — that “I don’t know” is the start of learning, not the end of it. Use your own mistakes as examples of growth where relevant and appropriate

3. Always come back to the question.  When a student says “I don’t know,” acknowledge it, give a scaffold, and come. “Okay, think about what we just discussed — I’ll come back to you.” This reinforces accountability and belief in their ability to contribute.

4. Provide entry points for success. Ask questions that meet students where they are, then build up to higher-order thinking. Even a small success early in a discussion can reignite participation and confidence.

5. Use peer support wisely. If one student is stuck, invite another to model the thought process, then return to the first student to complete or summarise. This keeps them part of the learning flow rather than letting them disengage.

6. Be positive and empathetic. Use tone and body language to communicate belief: “You’ve expressed this so well before.” “Let’s figure this out together.” Over time, students internalise that confidence.

7. Celebrate effort, not just answers. Publicly notice persistence, risk-taking, and curiosity. This helps redefine what “success” looks like and lowers the stakes of participation.
   
   

When we refuse to let students opt out — consistently, and with care — we become that voice of encouragement that helps them build the same resilience we’ve developed as adults. It’s not about catching them out; it’s about bringing them in — in the act of trying, thinking, and learning.

Our persistence teaches them that learning is not something to escape from, but something to step into and that it is achievable for everyone.

What makes a good Do Now? Building a culture of success and student accountability through targeted questioning.

By Mark Rogers

1. I start every French lesson in the same way, by asking three students respectively to give me the day, date and month in French. The questions are graded, with students that need their confidence built asked the day and month, as these are the most accessible. When it’s the first lesson in a particular month, I may ask a higher-attaining student as the challenge to recall the month from over a year ago can be quite high. All this serves to constantly reinforce key vocabulary, such as number formation.

I then promote engagement with the key question, by asking three more students to translate key parts, again graded in this case by bronze, silver and gold. The example here requires the recall of the question word ‘que’ (what), the conjugated verb ‘fais’ (do) and the application of a reflexive pronoun ‘te’ (yourself).

These six questions should take around a minute to facilitate, as students open books and start to title their page before moving on to the Do Now.

2. Here, the base (introduction) task for the Do Now is to unscramble the sentences, which are based on content from the previous lesson and across the term/year so far. They do this independently, allowing me to circulate and check the progress of one or two highly vulnerable students that may need help. This is rare, but when they need it, I write the first letter of each word in their work to scaffold. The development task is to translate the sentence and students that complete this can apply their creativity to continue the final sentence in their own words. A task like this (prepared for a Year 7 group) can be completed in about 5-6 minutes.

3. For assessment, I’ll ask students to switch to green pen. I will then ask a middle-attaining student to give me the English for the first sentence, then a lower-attaining student to give me the French. This pattern is repeated for sentences 2-4 with the increasingly challenging questions reflecting to whom I am asking them. Finally I will ask for an example of the Depth task. In many cases, I will know what the students have written from circulation, so the public questioning is not so much for my own assessment, but more to build the culture of success in the classroom, improving confidence and giving the students a chance to show off what they can do. When it comes to getting students to produce a foreign language, this really is essential.

Critically, all of this also serves to promote student agency and build accountability. Once the Do Now has been assessed, in this case I will have asked 14 different students a question and asked one to show off their Depth task - all within the first 10 minutes or so of the lesson. Notwithstanding circulating to check on their work too. There are no passengers!

Reflection question: How can these principles be transferred to a Do Now in your subject?

The Power Of Objects: How Might We Teach Our Children Through The Lens Of Stuff?

 By Charlotte Nicholas

Consider the object in the image and ponder your answers to the following questions: What is it? Why might it have been created? What is it for? Where is it from? What might it be able to tell us about society? It may just look like a skull with numbers on but in fact it is so much more. This is a phrenological skull created by James Deville in the 1820s. Phrenology is a ‘science’ where the size of the head was measured and this was used to make revelations about individuals’ intelligence and character. The skull's deep lines show the 27 areas of the head responsible for certain characteristics and personality traits. This pseudoscience helped support attitudes towards criminals, racist ideology and stereotypes towards genders and can tell us a multitude of things about Victorian attitudes and beliefs. It helps us to understand the journey that psychology has undertaken to reach where it is today. You might be wondering about the relevance of a fake Victorian head….

What got me thinking?

When most people think of history as a subject they often think of endless and boring source activities. In fact, history teachers seek to avoid this ‘death by sources’ (G. Howells). Since my PGCE year, I was always motivated to find ways to make learning history as captivating as possible and completed my first assignment on learning about WWI not by studying the boring battles but by learning through objects and what they could tell us about the war. Ever since then I have been itching to bring objects into the history classroom. In the 1970s and 1980s historians and social scientists alike were grappling with the ‘linguistic turn’, a phrase that represents the shift to cultural and written sources instead of touchable and tangible sources. Now historians are faced with the ‘ material turn’ where they focus on historical objects and consider what they can tell us about people and their lives in the past. What did the reading say? `Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects: new opportunities from the ‘material turn’ by Bird, Wilson, Egan-Simon, Jackson and Kirkup, 2020 influence me to think about objects in the classroom again. This Teaching History article discusses a project completed by history teachers where they were inspired by the ‘material turn’ to focus on teaching history to students through everyday objects. The objects chosen represented economic transformations from 1000 to 1700 and broadly demonstrated the rise in manufactured products, and illustrating significant changes in society. Whilst this project was generally focused towards primary school students, the group found that students used their imagination to create their own impressions of the past. They were able to have a deeper conceptual understanding without knowing too much about the specific time period. Students were able to have freedom in their thoughts and could offer multiple ideas towards open-ended questions. Learning through objects helped students to consider the world as dynamic and changing, through the eyes of ordinary people not the elite and it added a little mystery to their lessons, mysteries they were inspired to solve. Students started to consider ‘What do things do to people?’ rather than ‘What do people do with them?’ (Labanyi et al). How might we consider this in our own teaching?: I am under no illusion that the most obvious place to teach about historical objects is in history lessons, however, there is a place for learning about objects across the curriculum, since the object itself is only half the story, it is really about the questions that are asked. In addition to this, an aspect of the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) internal assessment in the IBDP forces students to think about objects when they consider a question about knowledge and have to choose three objects which help illuminate this. If students were introduced to thinking about objects in a meaningful way across the curriculum and lower down the school, they might be better equipped to talk about objects when they reach the sixth form. Getting students to think about objects will help inspire ‘awe and wonder’ in our lessons, it is an inclusive method of teaching, all students can engage with an object in some way. It encourages our students to think with fewer limitations and encourages them to think for themselves, giving more meaning to the content they are learning about. Finally, it gives our students an opportunity to increase their cultural capital, giving them a chance to engage with items they may never have the chance to otherwise. I encourage you to take a risk and think about how you might make some room for objects in your classroom. I have included two examples of how we have included objects in the history and TOK classroom. I’d love to hear ideas from the WA community about how we might ingrain objects into our lessons and hear how you have made a place for them in your lessons.

Maximising Your Questioning

By Michael Paulus

As part of Humanities, staff members give short and snappy weekly CPD sessions to the rest of the departments. I wanted to showcase what I felt was a really simple way to structure effective questioning in lessons that aids differentiation, provides retrieval practice to aid memory, supports classroom engagement and increases learners’ self-management through reflection.  In this blog post, I have summarised my CPD on Questioning. Enjoy! 

Scenario: I have just taught costs & profit calculation topic to my year 11 Business students last week. Here is a list of what I covered with them:

As you can see some of the content is more manageable (e.g how to define and give examples of start-up costs), and some content requires a variety of skills, such as calculation of profit based on figures given. Based on this prior learning, I wanted to start my next lesson with a series of questions that serve as retrieval practice and AfL, So I devised this structure to serve as my ‘DO NOW’:

10-Retrieval Questions

1. LPA Q1:  

2. LPA Q2: 

3. MPA Q1: 

4. MPA Q2: 

5. Context-based (linked to a situation, scenario etc)

6. HPA Q1: 

7. HPA Q2: 

8. CHALLENGE (high skill/knowledge question)

9. DEEP (a deep thinking-type question)

10. META/SOC (questioning that requires reflection, metacognition on the content and the wider syllabus)

(NB: I wouldn’t include “LPA Q1” etc on the board!!!!!)

So if I apply the ‘10-Retrieval Questions’ structure to the Costs & Profit topic above, it may look like this in my next lesson!

Other subject areas were also able to apply my 10-Retrieval Questions structure really quickly and successfully for a recent topic they taught:

I’ll end this post with an assortment of ways you might want to try in your lessons to enhance your questioning, which can and should be one of the most interactive and fun aspects of your lesson if you get it right:

• Pre-plan who you might choose before posing the question (but don't say the name first!)
• Rank order (either written or orally) the questions to increase in difficulty
• Give plenty of thinking time before selection (Don’t be afraid of silence!)
• “What is the counterargument for…?” or Can/did anyone see this another way?”
• Relate questions to a situation/scenario/context
• Questioning that asks students to consider deeper connections across topics/subjects
• Consider how you might sequence 2-3 questions that build on each other as they are answered
• Questioning on their self-efficacy towards a topic; “Which key term do you find the most confusing and why?”
• Using your lesson’s (obscure) Key Question to pose as your final question of the lesson
• ‘If this is the Answer... What is the Question?’
• ‘What if...?’, ‘Suppose we knew...?’ and ‘What would change if...?’
• Why do you think this is right….?
• Students devise questioning for peers/other groups
• Question the question: “Why do you think I asked that question?” or “Why was that question important?”

What's in a cube? A Differentiation Strategy

By Ellie Langsworthy

Cubing is an instructional strategy that is used for differentiation. We use it in the Expressive Arts lessons for supporting students with learning and completing tasks.

It is underpinned by Bloom’s theory of hierarchical needs. The theory proposes that learners begin with low order thinking skills, such as recall and recognition moving through to showing understanding by interpreting, evaluating or restating information. 

Below is the template of the cubes used as a method of asking these hierarchical questions:

How does it work?

• Students can work alone, in pairs or small groups

• They roll the cube and answer the question they land on, and repeat! 

One of the many benefits of the cube is that it’s a great way to engage students to have an active role in questioning and getting students to think deeper and more critically about a piece of artwork.

The cubes are so versatile that you can make different question cubes for different student needs; have a different cube aimed at your HPAs, LPAs and MPAs. You can also create task cubes where each face has a different task on it that needs to be completed to meet the objectives of your lesson.

Some examples of questions you can use according to Bloom’s taxonomy are:

Knowledge:

1. What is the definition for…? 

2. What happens after…? 

3. Recall the facts. 

4. What were the characteristics of…? 

5. Which is true or false? 

6. How many…? 

7. Who was the…? 

8. Tell in your own words... 

Comprehension:

1. Why are these ideas similar? 

2. In your own words retell the story of… 

3. What do you think would happen if..? 

4. How are these ideas different..? 

5. Explain what happened after… 

6. What are some examples of...? 

7. Do you have enough information to answer this question…?

Application:

1. What is another instance of …. ? 

2. Demonstrate the way to… 

3. Which one is not like…? 

4. What questions would you ask? 

5. Which factors would you change? 

6. Could this have happened in…? Why or why not? 

7. How would you organise these ideas?

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