Tweak of the week

I have had a great day. I didn't feel great about it through the entirety of the day, at times I felt hopelessly overwhelmed and depressed but am feeling good now. Today I was on an NQT course. Before I get to talking about the course I want to make a little note about after the course.

So the course ended at three and I was home by 3.30 - woohoo! I was eager to get on here to start this blog but it was the perfect opportunity to head into town to pick up my dry cleaning which I had been failing to do for a month. And while I was at it I managed to tick off a number of jobs and leave me feeling highly efficient. I

• bought 3 tickets for Rocky Horror Show coming to Oxford next week.
• paid in 2 premium bonds - one arrived today so was kinda handy I hadn't paid in last months.
• rang up Lizzie to see if she was in town and she was with a friend so they joined me for a bit of my shopping.
• bought a birthday card and going away card for friends - has reminded me I have to post bday card so running away to do it now... ... woah - was putting the card in the envelope at the station as the postman came to empty it - I put the card in the bag myself - result!
• picked up and dropped off laundry.
• asked at the camera shop about my camera. sadly it will need to be sent off and will cost about £50 - no easy fix there.

Then I smile-ily walked back and sat in the garden to blog. Am now actually inside as getting chillier. On to the blog proper.

Last week at school was asked by the deputy head if I wanted to go to an NQT day as part of the partnership, so I said... sure. After a lot of confusion over supply I headed to the day hoping it would be worthwhile and it sure was. It was run by Mike Hughes who it appears turns out to be quite a big dude in the education department. He talked about improving children's learning so we became wow teachers that everyone wants to come and watch rather than the teachers trained to be good. At times it felt like there was so much to do and at times I felt, yeah - that's such an obvious idea, I can do that.
We all had to say what we'd be taking away from the day and I decided on the 'Tweak of the Week'. Which in some ways is a kind of cop-out as that means I am taking away lots of things. In the morning he talked about tweaking. Saying we are good but with tweaks would be better and mentioned the phrase 'tweak of the week' as meaning adopting one thing each week so that you can focus on one improvement at a time and aren't overwhelmed. One of the candidates we had at school for the deputy head job talked about tweaking in her presentation on going from good to outstanding and it resonated with me then.

So I am aiming to make a list of the possible tweaks of the week that I have been told about today and can record my attempts at implementing them on here. After all, it started life out as a trainee teacher blog! I must confess already though, that this seemed a great idea during the day, but am already feeling slightly like I have set myself too much to do... and the feeling in my stomach is no longer so comfortable. Could just be that my housemate is cooking and at 6.30 I am ready for food!

Just opened up my notebook and the first notes I read were

'It's all the little things. Accumulation of marginal gains.'

That's basically what tweak of the week is in simple and posh language.

To be effective and make our tweaks habbits, they should be planned into our lessons/days and be repeated 21 times. Now that's seeming a tall order, but hopefully I'm heading in the right direction but thinking about them now.

Here we go:

1. ask 'Is she right?' rather than saying 'you're right' to a child. Gets the other children discussing and thinking. Could also try: 'how do we know she's right?' or 'what can you add?' type questions.
2. Double whats. Don't ask children 'why' when telling them off - as in 'why are you out of your chair?' Instead say: 'What are you doing? What should/could you be doing?'
3. behaviour management should be certainty not severity. children should know you mean what you say. I think this is a big failure on my part at the moment. and will potentially be a big thing to implement. Coupled with that is giving children choice and consequence.
4. Maybe... and... don't tell children you don't care about them. No more 'I don't care what they did/what the other teacher said'. Instead 'Maybe they were doing that and I want you to be sitting down now.' 'But' is the great eraser and people will forget all the good things you said before and only remember the negative after the but. that's why you use 'and' instead.
5. when...then... similar to above. 'When you have put those away, then you can go out'.
6. refrain. don't really understand what the word refrain meant in that context. But the idea was to give the children the reason to do the right thing. hmmm, my notes aren't making much sense at this point.
7. 'tell me about/describe it. Tell me again.' children will become more coherent and they'll gather their thoughts as they repeat it.
8. Pole bridging (i really don't get the name and am tempted to think of another one before implementing on the kids!) explaining something aloud as you are doing it. 'I am starting this sentence with a captial letter because...'
9. Commentary describing what someone else is doing. Can get children to commentate on what teacher is doing before they then pole bridge.
10. Listen. then listen longer to children to find out where they are stuck. Pause and let them fill it.
11. Chain explanation. Have one child start to explain/retell something and randomly have another child carry on at one point to get all the children listening to it and each other.
12. give children choice and control over what they can do so they start by saying 'I want to'. 'Do you want to do test A or B?'
13. Get someone to do a smile tally chart while observing you. how many times do you smile in a lesson and how many times does the teacher smile.
14. the 'difficult' children who rub you up the wrong way. as they come in in the morning 'how did you get on at the weekend, did you score? tell me at playtime'. starts it off on a positive note and they feel valued.
15. review with children. What's the one piece of info you are taking away from today? sum up in 3 words... keep reviewing at the key strategic review moments.
16. to keep children on task, give them a time limit.
17. meta-cognition - thinking about learning. if a child has finished their work ask 'which was the hardest? why? how would you do the questions tomorrow? how would you help someone learn them?'
18. get children to reduce information. start a lesson: 'out of 20 questions, do the 3 hardest, who's the main character? what's the most important bit?' Focus on the follow up questions to facilitate the learning/discussion. 'do you agree?, is that always the case?'. there's no right or wrong, your playing devil's advocate.
19. change the form of information get children to go from a map to a model, a graph to a description, a text to a diagram.
20. assemble information each child has some pieces of the puzzle but need to work together to find out the whole. we played a game i loved from the teacher's toolkit where you had a murder mystery to solve. it was ace!
21. arrange information for example diamond nines.
22. get someone to observe the question you ask in a lesson: open or closed. and how early are you asking the open questions.
23. plan in a question quadrant. have a question in each of the four quadrants. doesn't work so hot in a blog, but: one answer/many answers and from source/not form source.
24. get the kids asking questions. they can do question quadrants.
25. 'Normally I would ask a question now... what question might i ask?'
26. Reward for question of the week. possibly progressing to answer of the week.
27. Wonderwall
28. After every information input - reading/video etc - chn have to think of one question.
29. what to do when a child says 'I can't do it'. Use temporary and specific language to give the child hope that thing's will get better and puts it into perspective:

• say 'some people find this hard', 'this can be tricky', it may take a while to get'. It dilutes the problem.
• chunk it down: 'which bit didn't I explain well enough yet?'
• look at their can do's: 'I noticed you did number 5', 'tell me how you did number 5', 'what do you know about number 6?'

Then these are things I jotted down which aren't really potential tweaks, but might be useful to have recorded to refer back to at some point.

• Get children to describe something they have watched/read/seen as if there doing so to a blind person. You'll get so much more out of them. It's all about helping children go deeper in their learning.
• self-belief and motivation are the two things that affect behaviour. School's have behaviour policies and sometimes behaviour policies, but do they have motivation policies.
• then there was the speed dating activity
• noughts and crosses activity (too tired to go into those now. now 7.30 and have been writing straight since 6.30).

So 29 potential tweaks - and only 39 weeks in a school year - not going so bad! Too sleepy now to think which to start with, but pleased I have got this post out there so I can hopefully put it into action at some point soon!!!

In case I didn't make it clear. I think Mike Hughes did a fantastic job today and I would thoroughly recommend he came to speak to any group in the education profession. Thank you, Mike.


Longest blog post ever?...pictureless!