#useful teaching tips

[pointsofpedagogy]

Guest Post: No Use Crying Over Spilt Knowledge

Points of Pedagogy would like to welcome you to its first guest contributor: JB the Science Guy! Nice and anonymised, but recognisable to his friends.

It’s a wonderful piece and follows presently:

For lack of a better phrase, I call this link learning – a way of making unmemorable facts un-unrememberable. The basis of this is to relate any information that they ‘just have to know’ to a funny action, thought, or story so that it is no longer just information, but a vivid memory. To illustrate this idea, allow me to bore you (and then thrill you!) with an example. All around you, at this very second, is a long (as students would say) process called the Calvin Cycle (discovered by the greatly named, lately dead, Melvin Calvin). This involved several stages: First, 5-carbon ribulose-1, 3-bisphosphate (RuBP) is reduced by the addition of carbon dioxide, resulting in the formation of two 3-carbon 3-phospoglycerate molecules (GP), that are then converted by hydrolysis of ATP and oxidation of NADPH, to 3-carbon glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate (GALP). This can then be used to re-form 5-carbon ribulose bisphosphate or form 6-carbon glucose. If you made it past/can remember more than one stage, do come and enquire about Biology A-level in 1968, because it sounds right up your street.

Now see if it’s any better with this way of learning it: My friend, Ruby P, was feeling funny and so she took some CO2. However, this didn’t make her feel better so she went to her GP who gave her some NADPH and ATP, which she drank in one big GALP. This then made her feel much better so she was just Ruby P again.

Remember any more? You may only know some of Ruby’s story, but it will stick with you longer than a list of compound names, and with practice you will get it all. Both of the above are ways of describing the cycle, but one links the cycle to memorable imagery, while the other leads to loss of attention after around 5 seconds, thoughts of lunch after around 10 seconds, and apocalyptic panic when the teacher asks you to remember any of it one minute later.

I have also used links via dancing (the lifecycle of a star? Sounds like a Cossack dancing demonstration to me; parallel and longitudinal waves? Time to shake your hips to show the directions of the waves) puns (I love frequency so much it Hertz (the unit for frequency)), and making a fool of myself (too many examples to quote). There is even help from elsewhere, showing how this can be used for key facts in many subjects (http://www.thinkalink.co.uk/). Sometimes it only works with one student, but if they get it, then you will permanently increase their knowledge. More importantly, you may increase their love for your subject, preventing possible future staff room ambush and your crying over spilt milk.

[pointsofpedagogy]

Striking a work-life balance…continued

We've had points 1-5 in an earlier post. Here, finally, is the remaining 5. No doubt there's a million more but these are things that have worked for me.

6 – Play the long game

This links back to point 3 (Don’t feel guilty), but is worth bearing in mind. When worrying about anything in teaching, and perhaps in life but I haven’t done the necessary legwork yet to check, it’s usually a good idea to think over a long time period. If there’s a problem, it’s no use killing yourself over it to fix it straight away. Instead, watch a game of tennis. The greatest player in the history of the game at the time of writing is (almost indisputably) Roger Federer. Not the fastest, not the fittest and not the strongest, but through flawless technique and a brilliant mind he conquered tennis more than any other for a long time. While in his prime he came up against athletes like Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic who would get the better of him from time to time, Federer’s main strength, from what I can see, is his ability to play the long game. To understand that it’s entirely possible to lose an early break without expending excess energy, in the knowledge that he could save that energy for later. When it comes to a 5-set match, he would rarely be beaten*.

7 – Where possible, don’t procrastinate

At first this may seem at odds with playing the long game, but shush. Hold that thought. Keep your bilious, knee-jerk reactions to yourself mister. There is putting off a job for tomorrow for the sake of your sanity, and there is ticking a task off your To Do List before it becomes part of your Reasons to be Overwhelmed List. *Cliché alert* As Mr Micawber puts it in David Copperfield, “never do tomorrow what you can do today” *Cliché alert*. I would not say ‘never’ here (see point 6), but I would say if it’s a short and menial task then just get it out of the way. The psychological weight of each point on your To Do List is too heavy to afford procrastination.

8 – Think more, plan less

OK so you’ve managed to strike your work-life balance and you’re planned and marked for a while yet. No last-minute panics for you for at least a week. What do you do with your frees and evenings? Just stop? If you’re like me, you’ll sit down and think ‘Brilliant. Now if I just work at my usual rate I’ll stay this far ahead all year’. Not a jot of it! What a naïve fool I am every single time. I’ll keep working, but absurdly my rate of output is now a fraction of what it was. It’s Parkinson’s Law in action – work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. The problem is always the same. I replace lesson planning with just making elaborate resources. Give me three minutes to plan a double lesson and it could challenge Outstanding. Give me two weeks and you’ll get the most solid resources in the world and sod-all of a lesson to build around it. When you sit down to plan a lesson just think: what do they need to know by the end; how am I going to show that they’ve learned it; and what is the simplest way for me to go about fulfilling the answer to these two questions? 3 minutes more thinking time per lesson will save you hours and hours of writing and printing resources over the course of a year.

9 – Make friends with people who aren’t teachers

Sort of speaks for itself really. Good advice for anyone that.

10 – Surround yourself with support

Teaching is a collaborative game. In practice I haven’t found it to be half as collaborative as it should be, but there are certainly avenues. I don’t see that it makes much sense for there to be around 500,000 teachers in the UK alone, with much overlap in their areas, all reinventing the wheel for themselves. Your subject almost certainly has thousands, if not tens of thousands, of teachers all working towards the same exam. Of course we’re all delicate little snowflakes trying to exert our individuality, but the workload is obscene if you don’t collaborate. So whatever your institution, whatever your subject: share, share, share with others. Share resources with those in the same subject, share tips and techniques with anybody else, generally take the advice of others and don’t be too proud to ask for help. It’s genuinely more satisfying lending a hand than asking for one, so in many ways you’re doing your altruistic brothers and sisters a favour.

  *Admittedly Federer went and confounded my analogy by losing a 5-setter to Djokovic at Wimbledon this past weekend (July 2014), but I hope the point still stands.

[pointsofpedagogy]

Harnessing Competition in the Classroom

This is perhaps the blog post which most assured me that I should be writing separately away from the official blog of my school. You'll probably see why that is by the end.

People are competitive. It’s how we’re programmed, how we’re raised, and how we succeed. I won’t get too Desmond Morris on you with the anthropology, but it stands to reason that competitive traits are adaptive in helping us to survive, and therefore flourish in any successful species.

As somebody who exclusively teaches exam classes (and A Levels at that), I know the benefits of having an end goal with which to motivate students. In the run-up to their 2014 exams, I could get away with the most tedious, content-heavy lessons imaginable, all under the banner of ‘Things you just need to know for the exam’. Distracted or unmotivated students could, for the most part, be rallied with cries of ‘It’s your exam in three weeks!’ - An invaluable asset for any teacher. This admonishment is less effective however when exams are further away. How can I motivate their inner competitive spirit when exams aren’t for another 7 months? Even Nostradamus would struggle with that sort of forethought.

The answer for me was tapping into this competitive nature. I tried to picture me at my most competitive: what was I usually doing? Who was around me at the time? I play football regularly and am not averse to a drink-off. Then it hit me: pub quiz! I’m at my most competitive not out on the football field, but during a pub quiz. Or any quiz for that matter. Break out the Trivial Pursuit and you’ll see a side of me you probably won’t like. Scrabble you say? Then you’d better hide the good China, son. The prize doesn’t matter; it’s just about showing off.

Well that’s all well and good, but Waddington’s never produced a Psychology version of Monopoly. Alright then, I’ll just have to make my own. OK, so maybe not my own Monopoly board. But I do have students and a stopwatch (well, the timer on my phone); maybe I’ll play BBC Radio 4’s ‘Just A Minute’ and see if we can’t make good use of their competitive nature.

So I did. The third lesson I had with my year 12 class was surprisingly productive and I was stuck for a plenary, so I whipped out the trusty stopwatch and board marker combo, assigned each table a team name and away we went with me fulfilling the role of Nicholas Parsons, keeping a tally and announcing the winning group. This went on for a few lessons before I realised that we should perhaps be keeping a running score. The groups were already differentiated; I could maintain them for the whole year provided there were no significant problems. Over the weeks this tally turned into an out-and-out points system, students could choose their own team names and before I knew it, I’d created some sort of sectarian war. But a good, conducive-to-learning sort of war. Points were docked for lateness and missed homeworks, awarded for correct answers and good practice, entirely at my caprice. I even introduced a Word of the Day feature which, if they could use it naturally in conversation throughout the course of the lesson, was worth 5 points.

But then, I had a dilemma on my hands. What were these points for? Where were they leading? Could I really maintain their interest in the competition without a suitable prize? This, as it turned out, was fairly simple. I decided that the winning group by the end of term would have a whole double lesson to plan for themselves – our last lesson before the holidays. They could prepare a lecture on something they’re passionate about; they could make everyone design Christmas decorations and dance the lambada; they could stick on a movie and fall asleep in the back or bring in an old Atari and make everyone play Tetris for 120 satisfying minutes. Provided they stayed within the laws of the land, and had a budget of exactly 70p, we were fine. As it transpired, even this was unnecessary planning. By the time we’d decided on a winner for the term, the winning team didn’t even care what we did. Ultimately, they let a different group choose what film to put on.

But the passion and the ferocity of the competition during the term was so fierce! Why did they care, if it wasn’t about the prize? Like I said, humans are a competitive bunch. In fact, what did I care about their motivation? As long as it gets them remembering Staub’s stages of genocide or Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis as though their lives depended on it, I’m happy just playing the host to this bizarre gameshow.

In the end I realised that the easiest way to get the best out of my students was not to change who they are, but to use their tendencies as a positive boon. Young people in particular are brimming with passion and a competitive spirit, so why not just use that and redirect it towards the things you need them to be passionate and competitive about? I’ll phrase it in the form of a charming metaphor: If you’ve had a few too many shandies and can feel your guts about to be purged, your friends don’t try to tape your mouth shut and tell you not to blow. They chuck you out of the taxi and point you in the direction of a suitable hedgerow. They’re not saying don’t do it; they’re giving you a more suitable, and less costly, outlet.

So that’s my approach to teaching: make them vomit in the shrubbery instead.

[pointsofpedagogy]

Striking a work-life balance

It is now July 2014 and I am an NQT at a low-achieving but highly ambitious comprehensive in North London. Over the last 2 years or so of teaching, I feel I’ve learnt a surprising amount about the difficulties in striking a work-life balance. I am of course still a young teacher, and I have no children to raise or a family to support, so by all means ignore anything that I could possibly have to say about genuine struggle.

Most of my advice and observations will probably be of more relevance to fellow NQTs and similar, but I would like to be of as much use as possible even to more experienced teachers.

Now, the overworked, underpaid, underpraised and underappreciated teacher is one of the biggest clichés of our profession. That the British public, and seemingly half of the cabinet, regard us with something approaching disdain merely adds to our feelings of righteous self-pity. I could, and almost did, write another post entirely about getting past the pig-headed public perception, but let’s just take it as read that you are big enough and strong enough to take their tabloid-induced prejudices. Our next challenge then is overcoming our own workload, for our own sake not to mention that of our students.

I don’t need to tell you that teachers are overworked. What I can tell you however, is one or two ways of dealing with that workload – some from my own limited experience, and others I’ve picked up elsewhere. What was it Tuco says in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly? “If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working? “

1 – Give yourself some personal time

Hopefully you were advised to do this during your training, but it’s something worth repeating. Give yourself some personal time. For some, this means having a set window in which you must not work. It could be your Saturday afternoons, your Friday evening or your Wednesday lunchtime. For others it’s about deciding there and then that you won’t work that evening. Whatever the weather, and whatever your To Do list demands, this time is sacred.

So, you might ask, what should you do in this time? Well this leads us to point 2:

2 – Get a hobby

The biggest temptation after a busy day/week/term/career is to do absolutely nothing; to switch off. This is one of my favourite things to do. But don’t switch off. Do you know how many millions of years of evolution it took to switch you on? Let sleep help you to restore the batteries, don’t waste your waking life. So once you’re done for the day, do something new, something that awakens a part of you that teaching doesn’t. For me, it’s football and occasionally spoken-word poetry. For you, it might be embroidery, it might be hiking, or it might be writing outrageous obscenities on £5 notes. Whatever it is, enjoy it! This leads me to point 3:

3 – Don’t feel guilty

When I first started taking my personal time and playing football a couple of times a week, all I could think about was the pile of marking I had to do, or tomorrow’s double that I’ve not quite planned. My advice is to just forget about it. If you’ve decided that this is your personal time, then take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Of course we’re highly accountable professionals and we should hit every deadline we can; we should be aiming for Outstanding every time. But guess what, we still only have 24 hours in a day and we are no use to anyone if we suffer burnout. If it’s your personal time, then it is your personal time whether or not you spend it worrying.

So how do you achieve Outstanding, and keep your sanity? (side note: I’m not an Outstanding teacher, but I’ve long suspected that this is how they do it).

4 – Find methods that work, and re-use them

I am currently Teacher in Charge of Psychology (by virtue of being the only Psychology Teacher) or, as I like to think of it: The *default* Head of Psychology Department. This gives me an enormous freedom over schemes of work, lesson plans, unit combinations and so on. It also means I’ve had to plan everything on my own so far. I love this freedom and wouldn’t like shared classes, but it puts a certain pressure on me to come up with a wide variety of teaching techniques and lesson formats. What I learned to do towards the end of the year, when my creative juices were drying up, was to recycle techniques I’d used earlier in the year and repackage them. Don’t think, I reasoned, that just because you’re teaching the same class for 150 hours in a year that each hour has to be unique.  In fact, some routines can be invaluable. If you find the perfect starter or plenary format, then feel free to use this in every single lesson. During my observations this month I’ve noticed this very strongly in the MfL department, and I would recommend it across the board. This will save you untold hours or planning time over the course of a year. Speaking of which…

5 – Find alternative teaching techniques which require minimal preparation

We’ve all been there: you spent more time than you’d care to mention on a resource (be it a worksheet, a wall display or an elaborate Whodunit?) only to be greeted by a class of ungrateful swines who didn’t even realise that you are the one who had to make it. So you bottle up the rage and the regret and you add it to the growing stomach ulcer of resent that you’ve naturally accumulated as a teacher. By all means continue creating wonderful resources – most classes will appreciate them and they’re wonderful to have in your repertoire. But if workload is becoming a problem, then limit it to once or twice a week. Find techniques which put the emphasis on them, the learners. I’m sure there are 50 books full of tips on this side, so I’ll just leave you with one recommendation: Jim Smith’s The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook. You’ll find a sample here: http://www.lazyteacher.co.uk/samplelazyteacher.pdf

6-10 To be continued…