In this post, Helen Richardson from Seely Primary School in Nottingham reflects on representation within the primary curriculum.

As an LGBT+ school leader, and in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, I have reflected on the vital role primary schools can play in eradicating discrimination and fostering an understanding of differences amongst our children.

A call to action

In the days following the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, I remember seeing news reports of the black community being frustrated with white protesters because they felt they were angry at this one specific event when the bigger issue was deep rooted racism and discrimination. In that moment I wanted to do something to contribute to change that was not waving a placard for an afternoon, before returning to my privileged existence.

At the same time as George Floyd’s murder, I attended the special case review of a 14 year old child who was murdered in London in January 2020. This child had been a pupil at my school; a football-obsessed, family-loving child whose life had taken several significant turns from the 8 year old, happy child that I remembered. His death hit me hard and made me really consider where we were failing our young people and what more I could do as a school leader.

It occurred to me that I was, in fact, the ideal person to initiate a change. As the deputy headteacher of a primary school of 540 pupils, I could make the changes to teach all of our children, starting from our three year-olds in the nursery, the importance of acceptance and understanding of each other and the citizens of the world they would meet in the future.

Nesrine Malik wrote in the Guardian at the time:

True solidarity, the one that helps in the long term rather than merely buys a sticking plaster for the short term, is in those moments. It is in the daily discomfort of taking risks, of challenging a system that subtly but emphatically excludes black people, when there is no reward for doing so, and of making way and giving up space where it counts – at the table where power sits – and when no one can see you do it.

The ultimate tool to end racism, discrimination, homophobia, misogyny, race inequality, biphobia, sexism, hate crimes and transphobia is education and that made me the ideal person (or one of them) to help.

Action for representation within our school

At Seely Primary School, we started an anti-racism working group. We looked at our curriculum and made changes (teaching about the black Tudors, pre-colonial Benin and the injustice of Edmund Hillary receiving the accolade of reaching the summit of Everest first over Tenzing Norgay). We changed our assemblies to educate and recognise significant days such as: International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; Britain and the Slave Trade; Remembrance Day – the contributions of the British colonies to the World Wars; Links to Women’s History Month – women in the police and in healthcare.

We learned about diverse role models during a topic of Amazing Muslims: Nadia Nadim, Noor Inayat Khan, G. Willow Wilson, Nadiya Hussain, Jawahir Roble, Dr Hawa Abdi.

We also learned about the contributions of black role models: Claudia Jones, Olaudah Equiano, Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Mary Seacole, Walter Tull, Lilian Bader, Ulric Cross, Sislin Fay Allen, Karpal Kaur Sandhu, Emma Clarke, Anita Neil.

We spent significant amounts of money on our libraries, ensuring our books reflected all Seely pupils and citizens of the world.

A personal journey

At the same time as our curriculum changes and anti-racism work, I started to reflect on my own school experience. I knew I was gay when I was 10 years old. I grew up under Section 28 – a law formed by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government to prevent schools from teaching about the existence of homosexual relationships. The UK Diversity Timeline is a useful resource tracing many of these developments.

There was nothing in my childhood, my teenage years or even as a university student that taught me that it was OK to be me. I was not represented anywhere in the curriculum, in books, or on TV and the internet was not the support network that it can be today for teenagers struggling with their identities. I could not envisage ever telling anyone about my sexuality. I was convinced that my family would disown me, that my friends would abandon me, that I would have no one left. I felt very alone, and I felt a lot of shame. I never envisaged a future where I could be happy and living in a same sex relationship. I would have literally done anything as a child and young person to be what I considered ‘normal’. I did not tell a single person about my sexuality until I was 23 and I met my wife. I spent 13 years hiding who I was and feeling ashamed.

The opportunity to see other people like me, and to feel accepted, would have made all the difference to me growing up and moving through the school system. My feelings are supported by research from many LGBT+ youth charities and in particular this statistic from The Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ mental health:

LGBTQ youth who reported having at least one LGBTQ-affirming space had 35% reduced odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year.

We can make schools the LGBT+ affirming spaces that our children and young people need. And while we are doing so, why not make EVERY single child in our primary classroom feel seen, heard, recognised and valued in our primary curriculum?

Despite being ‘out’ to colleagues at work, I had never shared my sexuality with the children and took measures to avoid talking about my partner. As our anti-racism work developed at Seely, and in response to some homophobic name calling on the playground from our pupils, I decided to share my sexuality with older pupils at school. It became important to me to become the role model that I never had at school and the role model I was trying to inspire children at Seely to look up to. Diverse Educators is a site offering support and resources for schools and teachers on this journey.

The impact was significant. The homophobic name calling stopped almost instantly. Calling someone ‘gay’ on the playground started to have the same impact as calling someone a racist name. It was met with horror by the other children, who would report it to staff immediately. We also became a safe space. Staff reported children in Years 5 and 6 sharing worries about their own sexuality, either with the whole class or privately to staff members. Parents reported being able to have conversations with their children about their own sexuality or how their religion teaches acceptance for everyone in the world.

The defining moment of our diversity journey for me was the parent of a Year 6 boy, who had struggled with his own sexuality and identity, telling his Year 6 teacher that she genuinely believed that me coming out at school had saved her son’s life. In that moment, I knew I had achieved what I had set out to do.

The journey continues

Our diversity journey will never be finished. We will never stop working to make every child who attends Seely Primary School accepting, respectful and understanding citizens of the future. We will continue to celebrate major festivals from the main religions and many others such as:

• Women’s History Month

• World Hijab Day

• LGBT+ History Month

• Black History Month

• World Afro Day

If it matters to one child at Seely, or one child in the world, it matters to all of us. As a staff we all have the passion for inclusion and diversity, but if you ever have the chance to be given a tour of our school by our pupils, no one talks with more pride of our journey than they do.

Transforming your school

What happens when children in your primary classroom do not see themselves represented in your curriculum?

• Shame

• Feeling like the classroom and the curriculum are designed for anyone other than them

• Some children feeling that the children who ARE represented are ‘right’ and those who are not are ‘wrong’

• Racism, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, sexism, discrimination, misogyny, hate crimes

• Lack of ambition

• Lack of self-worth

What happens when children in your primary classroom do see themselves represented in your curriculum?

• Respect for themselves

• Respect and acceptance of others

• Understanding of each other’s lived experiences

• Less likely to demonstrate discrimination now and in the future

• Kindness

• Enjoyment of the curriculum

• Acceptance of themselves

Knowing all this, why would you not want to make your classroom the most inclusive and accepting place it could possibly be? Everyone should have the opportunity to be where they are celebrated, rather than where they are simply tolerated and everyone should have the chance to feel like they truly belong.

The post What happens when children in your primary classroom do not see themselves represented in the curriculum? appeared first on Primary Education Network.

As Primary teachers, we are tasked with leading a subject within our schools. In this post, Emma Twomey from James Peacock Infant School in Nottinghamshire uses the example of Science leadership to reflect on the value of engaging with stakeholders.

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I have had the fortunate task of leading Science at several different schools within Nottinghamshire for some 12 years. Each school has brought new challenges and adventures to the role.

According to the PSQM (Primary Science Quality Mark), the key to the role of subject leader can be neatly categorised into 3 aspects. It is:

• enacted through a mentoring and evaluation cycle which informs development

• created through working strategically with leadership and other school stakeholders

• enacted through engagement with CPD and wider expertise related to development principles

Although these aspects of leadership are written with Science development in mind, there is no doubt they can be applied to any subject leadership role.

I want to dive a little deeper into this second aspect: the role of subject leader working with ‘stakeholders’. In practice, I think many subject leads within Primary schools feel that their role works in isolation; they are holding the flag for their subject, working tirelessly to promote their curricular area in a battle ground of subjects, all fighting for prime position on the weekly timetable of events.

So, who are these mystery stakeholders? How do we engage with them? What might this engagement look like?

Who are the Stakeholders?

Stakeholders can be pupils, teachers, senior leaders, governors, parents, SENCO, subject leaders (both within your school and outside of your school), secondary schools, university leads, teaching assistants and school business managers etc, and this is not an exhaustive list. These people all have a role to play within your subject area, a role to support, challenge, enhance and engage with both yourself and your subject. A strong subject leader will realise that, without the support of these stakeholders, their subject has the potential of being sidelined, new initiatives and development of the subject will be harder to maintain without the full support of the team.

Engage the team and suddenly they are all travelling with you and not against you.

How do we engage with stakeholders?

To understand how we might engage most effectively with stakeholders, we must first think more carefully about our role as subject leader. Broadly speaking, when we are developing a curriculum development plan, jobs sit in two camps, there are things which are operational and things which are strategic.

• Operational jobs are the day to day, present jobs which need doing e.g. lesson support, resource managements, timetabling, communications – or making sure the day-to-day curriculum area is running smoothly. The operational responsibilities involve the day-to-day management and implementation of teaching and learning, focusing on practical aspects of, in this case, science education, ensuring it is delivered effectively and smoothly.

• Strategic areas are those things which you are planning for the future, ensuring sustainability and moving towards further goals e.g. resource planning, monitoring and evaluating, networking, curriculum design etc. or the longer-term goals of the subject area. Strategic responsibilities involve long-term planning, vision setting and ensuring, in this case, the science education aligns with the school’s overarching goals and priorities. They are about focusing on the bigger picture and developing initiatives that drive sustained improvement in science teaching and learning and curriculum design.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) stresses that leaders require strategic insights to drive decision-making, while operational responsibilities are more relevant to implementation initiatives.

Once we have a developed plan of action, incorporating both areas of implementation, we must now get stakeholders on board. So how do we communicate effectively with these stakeholders?

Effective communication, in particular with governors and senior leaders ensures that they understand the value of your subject within the curriculum. The Wellcome Trust (2020) states that any communication that is provided about the impact of science teaching on pupil outcomes can enhance support from leadership. Therefore, impact is key, any communication that is provided by leaders should ultimately identify intended or actual impact on pupil outcomes, driven by data –  both qualitative and quantitative.

What might this process look like?

For the rest of the article I want to talk about my experience and how I have used the PSQM framework to support the way I have engaged with stakeholders and developed Science at my school.

All subject leaders know that to develop a subject we must first understand the point to which we are starting from. The PSQM framework represents a cyclical approach, using the stages of audit, implementation and review to assess, develop and evaluate both the teaching and learning of a subject, as well as its curriculum design.

So let’s begin with the audit:

We start with what we know about our school – the context, location, the many voices that make up your school. Who are the stakeholders? The pupils, teachers, parents, SENCO, office manager etc, anyone who has any sort of vested interest in your school, its curriculum and its pupils’ outcomes.  Think critically about what is going well and what areas you wish to develop. When I took over as Science lead at my school there was an off-the-shelf curriculum, a lot of textbook-led lessons, little to no additional stakeholder engagement other than the teachers. Science was a subject taught each week, but it stood alone, boxed in a prescribed weekly hour. Teacher, pupil and parent voice spoke of Science but parents knew little of what was being taught or the engagement of their child wanting to be a scientist, or what, indeed, a scientist actually was. It was fabulous that curriculum areas were being covered, with clear progression from Foundation to KS2, but what impact was there on pupil outcomes?

The voice of stakeholders was suddenly informing my audit and from this, an action plan could be made. Drawing on the input from the different stakeholder sources, I drafted a plan with clear strategic aims, which centralised everyone’s focus on the subject and highlighted the impact to be measured. The plan was refined with the aims agreed with staff and senior leaders. Everyone had a stake in it moving forward, they felt heard and had vested interests in its success. For example, teachers felt they were going to be supported through mentoring and modelling of a new curriculum. Pupils felt engaged with the movement towards more practical and physically engaging lessons. English and Maths leaders supported areas for more cross-curricular learning, whilst parents and governors supported the move to welcome experts into the classroom to build our science capital as a school.

The next phase was then implementation. Through careful liaising with all stakeholders, I had the support of a team and was working towards a shared goal for science. This wasn’t my personal project, but a whole school approach. Implementation can only be success if everyone is on board. The EEF produced a review of effective implementation, its guidance focusing on three key elements:

1. The behaviours that drive effective implementation

In other words, we first must engage those people we want to bring along with us (i.e. the stakeholders), invest time in talking to them, making sure they are shaping the overall direction your curriculum takes and how it will be implemented. Staff at my school wanted mentoring and support with practical ideas to engage children, so we worked together to make this happen. It’s also important not to  be afraid to adapt and improve as you go. Some things didn’t work – we wanted to increase links with the local country park, but unfortunately this could only happen at certain times of the year, so we had to be flexible with planning.

2. Contextual factors that facilitate implementation

When implementing any ideas you must put the context of the school at the centre. We are an infant school and, while we initially used evidence from books, as a team we quickly realised that books did not showcase our pupils’ learning. Instead we adapted and turned to floor books and floor displays, where every child, teacher, etc. could quickly see from one classroom to the next the impact of the new curriculum and way of teaching. This also empowered teachers to teach more practical lessons as they could spend more time doing, rather than writing in books.

3. A structured, but flexible process to enact implementation.

Our school is by no means a finished product. We are constantly in this cycle of audit, implantation, review. However, as we have built up a strong link between our stakeholders throughout and across school, we work as a team, thus adapting and reviewing and then implementing again as a whole school approach, where everyone works towards and for the best outcomes of all pupils.

Finally then we reach the review stage:

This is where we as a team look at the impact, evaluating the strengths as well as the areas for further development moving forward. This can be:

• impact on pupils (e.g. engagement, enjoyment, knowledge, skills, outcomes)

• impact on staff (e.g. subject knowledge, confidence, collaboration and consistency, reduced workload)

• whole school impact (e.g. cross curricular links, cultural capital, quality of opportunities)

All these areas of impact can be reviewed and evaluated to set new goals and actions for the next development cycle. As previously mentioned, regardless of which subject area one leads, it is important to keep going round in that cycle of audit -> implementation -> review. We still have areas we wish to work on but we stop, we reflect and we set new goals based on a whole school approach.

Next steps:

After several years of this development cycle, Science at our school is running smoothly, pupil attainment is good and teachers feel positive in their teaching. However, we know as subject leaders we are constantly looking for ways to find lasting impact and development in our curricular area.

The Ofsted Research Review of Science from 2021 highlights the importance of integrating science into the wider curriculum and ensuring it contributes to cross-curricular goals such as Literacy and Numeracy development.

Lots of schools will have Mathematics or Literacy on their school development plans; last year our school had ‘improving the reading outcomes across school’ and ’embedding learning opportunities outside of the classroom.’ Science wasn’t mentioned on the action plan. However by thinking strategically, Science was seamlessly incorporated. I asked for Science books to be provided at the reading fair, daily ‘BookFlix’ books to contain a range of fiction and non-fiction texts and classroom texts and book cases to incorporate a range of Science along with non-Science books, age-appropriate to the reader/ class. Time was given during lessons to research and read Science texts or articles and vocabulary lessons within English lessons could link to Science topics being covered that half term. Science week itself was linked to the story Too Much Stuff by Emily Gravatt, and was used across school for the week to link Science, English, Maths, Geography, Art/DT and even Music.

Outside  the classroom, friends of our school developed a garden area, where children have begun a gardening club. They have also designed and created all weather areas, thinking carefully about which materials were suitable for the area. The introduction of OPAL play and a sand pit, mud kitchen and water play has enabled opportunities for scientific language to be used at playtime. In doing away with exercise books, pupils have spent more time investigating and experimenting in their environment, taking material and plant hunts outside, creating bug houses and bird boxes and learning about the changing seasons first hand.

A final thought

My one piece of advice for any subject leader, is to talk.

Speak with those many stakeholders who make up your school community. You will find they are incredibly supportive when they feel like they too have ownership and thereby lasting impact on the development of pupil progress within your subject area.

The post The importance of stakeholders within subject leadership appeared first on Primary Education Network.

This year has seen the introduction of Intensive Training and Practice (ITAP) as a requirement for all teacher education courses in England.

How does ITAP relate to existing teacher education practices?  How might ITAP be integrated in a way that aligns with existing principles on a course like a one-year PGCE? In this post, Rupert Knight, Esther Fulton and Rachel Peckover reflect on the University of Nottingham primary team’s response.

The ITAP requirement

As part of the reforms guiding the recent reaccreditation of English initial teacher education (ITE) providers, the DfE introduced a requirement for four weeks of ITAP time:

To help consolidate trainees’ knowledge of key evidence-based principles for effective teaching, and to enable them to practise their application and integration into their developing professional practice… to ensure effective integration between the different types of knowledge and skills.

ITAP involves exposure to evidence and expert practice, alongside opportunities for beginning teachers to enact and refine an aspect of that practice in ‘low stakes’ environments and then live classroom settings.

In one sense, then, ITAP is a recently mandated innovation in England but it can also be seen as part of a long tradition of practice-oriented approaches within teacher education.

Working with theory and practice

ITAP, in essence, is a response to an age-old challenge of teacher education: how best to integrate knowledge for teaching arising from both theory and practice. The complex relationship between the two in the context of becoming a primary teacher is discussed in this article by Knight. The attempt, through ITAP, to bridge the worlds of research and practice has echoes of ‘research-informed clinical practice’, as summarised over a decade ago by Burn and Mutton, who argue that it involves:

Bringing research-based understandings of teaching and learning into dialogue with the professional understandings of experienced classroom teachers (p.3).

This implies a practice-driven form of learning, with relevant theory and evidence brought to bear immediately on classroom contexts, as seen in Ellis and Childs’ account of the Oxford Internship Scheme from some decades ago. Beyond simply an immersion in practice, however, the ‘dialogue’ referred to above by Burn and Mutton can be seen to relate to two well-established and related ideas: practical theorising and pedagogical reasoning.

1. Practical theorising , summarised here by Burn and Mutton, involves subjecting ideas from practice to critical examination, including through reference to theory and research evidence. These ideas might involve big issues, such as grouping pupils by attainment level. However, in the context of ITAP guidance, which emphasises ‘granular’ aspects of practice, beginning teachers might for example, explore how to encourage responses to teachers’ questions: having seen a variety of strategies in school, including ’cold calling’ they might investigate and evaluate these practices.

2. Pedagogical reasoning, as originally conceived by Shulman, is a cyclical process of understanding principles, transforming and enacting those principles in practice, and then evaluating and reflecting with a view to improved understanding. For example, beginning teachers might be introduced to principles of modelling, such as thinking aloud and choosing suitable examples. They might be asked to adapt and trial the principles, initially in a simulated scenario and then, after refinement, in an authentic context. Crucially, the access to ‘expert’ feedback also allows an insight into the usually tacit and intuitive reasoning of the more experienced practitioner.

These ideas of simulation, trial and refinement bring us to another concept cited in the DfE’s guidance: ‘approximations of practice.’

Approximations of practice

Approximations of practice involve identifying, decomposing and rehearsing complex representations of a teacher’s work in a safe space and have long been an important part of the practice-based teacher education movement in the US. Much of this approach has centred on the idea of ‘core practices’, detailed, for example, in this article by McDonald and colleagues. As explained in a previous blog in this series, core practices are not simple recipe-like routines, but complex, high-frequency aspects of teaching that involve the exercise of professional judgment.  In this context, Grossman and colleagues suggest that approximations of practice are:

Designed to focus students’ attention on key aspects of the practice that may be difficult for novices but almost second nature to more experienced practitioners (p.2078).

Their work also envisages a variety of approximations on continua such as less authentic to more authentic, depending on:

• The facets of practice being rehearsed

• The resemblance of the scenario to a real context

• The degree of involvement of the instructor

Returning to ITE in England, a number of ITAP designs are therefore possible. This article gives an example of one ITE provider’s response and we now turn to illustrating the approach taken for the University of Nottingham Primary PGCE.

Our approach to ITAP

At the University of Nottingham, we had some existing ITAP-like practice to build on. Focused exploration of four core practices, including low-stakes opportunities for rehearsal with peers and guidance for follow-up discussion and enactment in school were already in place. We had also used ‘immersion days’ on behaviour and bilingual learners, which featured university input, classroom observation and collaborative reflection. Rather than using the name Intensive Training and Practice, we have used the term Immersive Practice Day (IPD). This fits more comfortably with our commitment to Initial Teacher Education, rather than Initial Teacher Training and acknowledges the complexity of learning to teach.

Additionally, rather than timetabling isolated focus weeks, IPDs are interwoven as days within our spiral curriculum across the academic year, allowing beginning teachers to revisit and build upon core themes progressively. Each IPD is part of one of three themes:

1. Classroom presence and communication (to support high expectations for all)

2. Building positive relationships and learning environments (to ensure all pupils are able to learn).

3. Pedagogical practices (to ensure all pupils can make progress)

Immersive Practice Days (IPDs) planning and principles

The design for IPDs was rooted in our existing values and ethos, and the principles embedded within our Strands and Phases curriculum, which can be explored further in this article by Knight and Sullivan. Throughout development, we met termly with our management board made up of primary colleagues, to discuss the themes and shape of the days.  We aimed to build on these foundational principles, maintaining the complexity outlined both above and in Janssen et al.’s discussion of decomposition and recomposition in teaching practice. We based the structure of our days on this model, which included:

Decomposition: through observation of expert practice (both in the moment classroom observation, prompts, and videos of expert teaching), developing a shared professional language and understanding of key practices.

Approximation: offering opportunities for practice in low-stakes environments, such as rehearsals and role plays for beginning teachers to integrate conceptual and procedural knowledge.

Recomposition: encouraging beginning teachers to incorporate learned strategies into high-stakes classroom practice through lesson planning and application in their own placement contexts and with their own pupils, enabling them to see progression over time.

The IPDs are also underpinned by a wider theoretical foundation, including:

• Inclusive Pedagogy, as explored by Florian et al.

• Social Justice, as seen through the work of Thomson;

• Funds of Knowledge, as proposed by Moll et al.

The design and delivery of these days is therefore shaped around recognising the diversity within our partnership schools and there is an overarching commitment to inclusive pedagogy. At the heart of this is the belief that beginning teachers must hold a strong sense of social, emotional, and intellectual responsibility towards their pupils. We aim to cultivate educators who can:

• Recognise and respond to diverse pupil needs.

• Develop attitudes and beliefs that support inclusive, accessible, and relevant learning opportunities for all.

In order to support this, we have created our own virtual classroom of diverse pupils, called the ‘Dearing Class’, complete with pupil profiles and extensive class data, which we draw on to practise these skills in a more contextualised way.

Some IPDs take place in school and others at the university, each with a clear rationale for its place in the learning journey. We offer here an example of each.

Example of school-based IPD

Building positive relationships and learning environments: managing low level disruption to ensure all children are able to learn.

This topic came near the start of the first teaching placement, allowing beginning teachers to become familiar with how their schools’ behaviour policies  were enacted by experienced teachers in different classrooms before taking responsibility for creating positive learning environments in their own classes.

The purpose of the immersive practice day was to allow our beginning teachers to investigate an aspect of school life in depth by integrating reflective activities and consideration of some theoretical perspectives, thereby immersing themselves in this aspect of practice.

Aims of the day:

• Understand the reasons why low-level disruption happens in the classroom

• Learn how experts respond to low-level disruption

• Practise managing low-level disruption in a familiar setting

• Understand the importance of positive behaviour approaches to ensure the inclusion for all pupils

Plan for the day:

Introduction and expert input: beginning teachers talked to their school mentor about key features of their placement school’s behaviour policy that they were looking out for during observations such as rewards, sanctions and routines.

Observation and analysis: beginning teachers observed rules, conventions and routines in two different classrooms. They also observed how pupils were behaving around the school e.g. in the corridors, the playground, the dinner hall, at the start and end of the day etc. Using an observation schedule for each lesson,  beginning teachers recorded the expectations and routines used by different teachers to help with low-level disruption.

Opportunity to practise: beginning teachers worked with a small group of pupils for 30-60 mins on a learning activity agreed by their school mentor. They focused on how they could make their behaviour expectations clear and ensure that they were following the school /class behaviour policy during the activity.

Research and theory: in preparation for a group reflection, beginning teachers read the Ofsted publication regarding approaches to low-level disruption and recorded notes.

Reflection/ Impact on practice: beginning teachers completed a written reflection on how their understanding of managing low-level disruption had changed and how they may approach it differently (or in the same way) during their first placement. They then drew up a short behaviour for learning action plan to share with their school mentor. An online group tutorial was then held for the beginning teachers to discuss and share their learning from the day and how they were going to move forward in their practice.

Example of university-based IPD

Classroom presence and communication to support high expectations for all: communicating with parents and carers.

This IPD appeared during the second teaching placement: a time when beginning teachers are often confident in developing positive relationships within school, but can still be less secure if interacting with parents and carers.

Aims of the day:

• Recap benefits of home-school links

• Explore dynamics within the parent/carer-teacher relationship

• Practise effective communication with parents /carers through parents’ evening and report writing

• Understand the importance of positive relationships to ensure the inclusion for all pupils

Plan for the day:

Research, theory and expert input: throughout the session, beginning teachers engaged with policy documents, such as EEF reports on homework and working with parents, and used research articles to consider their own positions and responses to a range of scenarios. They were supported by academics working in this field to reflect on videos of parents helping their children at home.

Observation and analysis: beginning teachers developed their understanding through discussing and sharing their observations of parent/carer – teacher interactions in their various placement schools, as well as analysing a range of school policies and report templates.

Opportunity to practise: beginning teachers used the Dearing Class resource, which includes pen portraits of pupils in a fictional Year 4 class, their census data and progress across all areas of the curriculum, as well as pen portraits of fictional parents to role play parents’ evening scenarios and practise report writing skills. Guided by school-based tasks, these skills were then developed further in the authentic context of the placement class.

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So, while ITAP as highly structured and prescribed content is new development, when seen more generally as a form of clinical practice, it has a long lineage within ITE generally and our own programmes more specifically. The DfE vision of expert input and feedback to ‘build the interaction between evidence-based theory and practice’ is something we will continue to develop in principled ways as our IPDs evolve over the coming years.

The post Learning to teach through immersive practice appeared first on Primary Education Network.

Many primary school lessons – mathematics lessons included – include use of a PowerPoint, Google slides (or similar) presentation. Popular schemes of work provide slide decks (e.g. NCETM PD materials, White Rose, and Oak National Academy), and also include all of the resources, worked examples, explanations, and pupil tasks needed for lessons. Teachers supplement the existing slide content with their own modelling, explanations and demonstrations, annotating directly onto the slides where they have working interactive whiteboard or touch screen technology. In this blog post, Bruce Lander, Marc North, Catherine Gripton, Balbir Kaur, and Geoff Wake consider how this shapes teaching, through a ‘PowerPoint pedagogy’.

PowerPoint pedagogy

The benefits of using prepared presentations are significant for teachers, particularly in terms of reducing workload (as identified by the DfE in 2016). They are often perceived as enabling teachers to focus more on teaching quality and less on planning and resource development. However, there are also some potential drawbacks, particularly in responding to formative assessment and making adaptations where the scale of changes needed can be time-consuming. It can also be difficult for the teacher to access the design-thinking behind the resources, without professional development or teacher guide resources to provide this.

An often-overlooked challenge of presentations is that their potential to shape pedagogy. Marc Isseks suggests that:

The root problem of PowerPoint presentations is not the power or the point, but the presentation. A presentation, by its very nature, is one-sided. The presenter does everything—gathers information, eliminates extraneous points, and selects the direction and duration of the presentation. The role of the audience is to sit and absorb the information.

Following this line of thinking, ‘PowerPoint enhances, quite literally, the ability or power to point.’ (Adams, 2006, 398). By using slide presentations, teachers can point accurately, vividly and quickly to important information presented in different forms – as text, numbers, pictures, videos, and so on. But, by enhancing the teacher’s power to point, the technology reduces the children’s involvement in the construction of knowledge as the organisation and formatting of information has taken place without them. The children are not afforded the opportunity to share in and learn from the sequencing and structuring of information, reducing their ability to do this for themselves.

An additional challenge with PowerPoints is that each slide can only contain a limited amount of information, and once a teacher has moved on from one slide the information captured on previous slides is no longer visible or accessible to the children. The ‘learning journey’ of the entire lesson isn’t easily captured in this one-at-a-time format. Children can find it difficult to hold previous information in their heads and make connections between content when they don’t have access to the entire learning journey. For some children, this can hamper their ability to recall and draw key information together when applying it in their group or individual work. In a small number of schools, every child has a tablet and can move forwards and back through the slides for themselves, but still they have to navigate information which is in a fixed sequence of single slides.

On a recent trip to Japan, we observed several powerful mathematics lessons that didn’t include PowerPoint presentations, and this has led us to reflect further on the importance of children having full view of the learning journey across the lesson. The Japanese elementary school teachers that we observed used ‘chalk-and-talk’, writing extensively and almost exclusively on chalkboards, working left to right across from the beginning to the end of the lesson. We believe that this board work which is referred to as ‘Bansho’ in Japan has some potential advantages over a ‘PowerPoint pedagogy’.

Japanese Bansho

Japan is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. However, in most elementary (primary) classrooms, teachers still use a chalkboard as the main resource for recording, organising and presenting information to the children. These typically span almost the entire front wall of the classroom, filling the children’s field of view.  The dimensions of a typical chalkboard in Japan are a width of 360cm and 120cm in height. This provides a surface area 5-6 times the size of chalkboards in schools in England that were mostly phased out in the 1990s.

Fig. 1. Typical Bansho layout of a year 4 maths class in Japan.

The board work – or Bansho – component of a Japanese maths lesson is a central element of the learning experience. The board work is more than just a record of the key learning concepts. Instead, it captures the learning journey that the children have travelled on during the lesson, carefully orchestrated by the teacher. For this reason, the Japanese word ‘Bansho’ actually means more than just ‘chalkboard’ or ‘board writing’; it also encapsulates the importance of the process and the product. Bansho is about the deliberate and purposeful chalkboard organisation, sequencing, coherence and structure to enhance learning for the children.  The use of the board in this way plays a crucial role in showing a complete record of the lesson from left to right (Stigler and Hiebert, 2009). As Stigler and Hiebert suggest, the role of Bansho is paramount to student learning, ‘as each feature of the story within Bansho fits together to form a whole’ (2009, p.75) and aid in children’s learning.

The development of the board work as the lesson progresses

As part of the pre-lesson planning process, teachers in Japan plan what they will write on the board and how the information will be organised. There are even suggestions in textbook manuals that suggest what could be added at each stage of a lesson in the Bansho process. Teachers also plan for how they will include and engage children in the development of the chalkboard writing.

As a result, the development of the board work throughout the lesson is an immersive and collaborative process, which actively involves the children in the knowledge construction. Children in older year groups also note important aspects of the board work in their maths jotters as a record of the key learning points. The fact that children can take notes at any point of the lesson that they feel would be helpful to them, means they are in control of this as a sense-making process. They draw out what is important in the lesson for them so recording is personalised, and helps to present notes in a manner which will aid their later recall of content. That children are able to distil information in the format most useful to them and make notes of things they are unsure of is paramount in the process of Bansho.

The board work is the well-laid out story of the learning in the lesson and not for the children to copy or recreate in their books. The process of interpreting the teacher’s board work and creating their own notes enables children to better remember the maths content.

Fig. 2. Child’s notes written during the lesson.

Whilst the sequencing of information (and how this will be presented) on the board has been carefully planned in advance by the teacher, it is committed to the board as it arises in the lesson. This presents the opportunity to adjust the sequence, add in an additional steps or use a child’s representation if this is how it plays out in the classroom. As Tan (2023) explains:

From a student’s perspective, seeing the board slowly fill up with interactions between teachers, classmates, and learning materials shows how the Bansho is built collaboratively as a classroom artefact. (Tan ,2023)

Crucially, children see the teacher constructing the information in real time. They watch how to layout ideas with the teacher explaining their thinking in this live-modelling.  They may also take note of suggestions and ideas that other classmates have raised during the process which logged on the board and attributed to that child. Having a record of children’s ideas, strategies or solutions that are tagged as theirs, enables children and the teacher to discuss and refer back to these as the lesson progresses.

An example of Bansho in a mathematics lesson

The chalkboard images shown are from a Grade 5 (Year 4) primary school class of 8- and 9-year-olds. The lesson focus was on the angle properties of triangles, investigating the angle created when two different right-angled triangles (one isosceles and one with angles in a 1:2:3 ratio) are combined corner to corner. The teacher encouraged children to make angles by manipulating their own triangles cut out of card and calculate the angles created in degrees. The lesson progressed to recording all of the possible combinations of angles that could be created using the two right-angled triangles and involved deriving unknown angles from known angles.

This is a chalkboard in a typical school classroom in Japan.

Fig. 3. Bansho board work with translations of Japanese text.

The flow of text is from left to right using the full surface area of 4.32m². Blank-spaces are purposefully left to allow for children’s contributions.

Fig. 4. Bansho board work with further translations of Japanese text.

Children’s contributions are recorded and labelled with their name to show whose idea, strategy or solution that contribution was. This is helpful to children as it provides a form of shorthand to refer to the entries on the board as belonging to a specific child which is useful when they articulate their thinking about them. Key ideas are summarised so they can be referred back to and children are able to refer to the board work to scaffold their thinking, meaning they have to hold less information in their heads. The whole learning journey is available to them simultaneously.

Fig. 5. Bansho board work showing children’s nameplates to label their ideas, strategies and solutions in the lesson.

A ‘whole learning journey’ pedagogy

Teachers think carefully about how they sequence information in maths lessons, and digital presentation software can be helpful in supporting this sequencing, but this does not guarantee that this sequencing is apparent to the children. It is tempting with prepared presentations to have many slides, not wanting to delete them in case they are needed, or not having time to edit longer slide decks. The benefits of using a single board means being selective in recording the information which is most important for learning.

Use of colour, lines and arrows means that particular representations can be highlighted, sometimes in the moment and sometimes when returning back to this key information later in the lesson. Adding manipulatives and annotating around them can also draw attention to key relationships. Sticky notes or blank pieces of card can be stuck on as missing information for the class to generate. These can also be moved to new locations or ordered so children see the physical transfer of an answer into a new context or to form a pattern, helping expose mathematical structure.

Strategies for effective board work

Shirley Tan has some helpful advice on how to use board work effectively to capture and support the children’s learning journey in maths lessons which we have summarised:

• B – Balance: Think about the way in which the information is organised and segmented (‘balanced) on the board. Perhaps plan to divide the board into different parts of the lesson so each section is clear.

• A – Attention-grabbing: Manipulatives, cutouts, and photos are helpful for grabbing the children’s attention and to draw attention to connections between maths concepts (so are much more than decorative).

• N – Name: Stick name cards or initial/label children’s ideas or contributions that have been captured by pupils in the class on the board.

• S – Space: Have a tidy board, leaving space for adding connections or annotations later in the lesson. Leave sufficient blank space to give children the sense of the possibility of further contributions or additions.

• H – Highlighting: Highlighting using arrows, lines, and colours to draw attention to key learning points and to connections between ideas. Where possible, use the same colour or box for a specific feature, e.g. cloud around a generalisation, blue for a key connection.

• O – Order: Sequence ideas on the board to support coherence and maintain the learning focus. Provide scaffolding using the board, deliberately including prompts, worked examples, deliberate mistakes, and possible misconceptions at strategic points in the board work structure.

Reflections on your own board work

There are a range of alternatives to slide presentations which can offer teachers in England similar opportunities to the Japanese chalkboards. Long or multiple whiteboards or, more cheaply, writing on sheets of flipchart paper which are stuck or pegged up sequentially, can be used to build the learning journey of the lesson. Whilst a scheme provides PowerPoint or similar presentation material for lessons, we can use this to plan but choose to create the presentation with the children ‘live’ in the lesson using boards or a series of flipchart paper sheets. Using sheets has the added benefit over chalkboards or whiteboards of permanence and portability so these can be displayed to referred back to in future lessons.

Reflecting on the effectiveness of board work on learning is also important. These questions might help prompt further reflections:

• How much time do you spend ‘presenting’ learning to children and how much is spent actively involving them in the construction of knowledge?

• How much live-modelling do the children experience, where they watch the teacher write down the mathematics and can contribute to this and be part of the building up of knowledge and learning?

• How accessible is your board work to the children so that they can work confidently and independently during independent work?

• How much do the children contribute to your modelling and how are their contributions valued and recorded?

• How much information is presented to the class during a mathematics lesson and could this be reduced? Could important information be highlighted or summarised in one place?

• How is the journey through the maths concept represented in a lesson and is it clear to the children?

• How often do you move back to earlier content to point to or highlight previous information which is relevant to the current problem or application?

• At the end of a lesson, how is the learning journey summarised?

• How are generalisations captured when established, and how will children be able to refer back to these in the future?

• How and where is the learning journey captured for the children to use as a resource to support their independent work and for retrieval and revision in future lessons?

• Which children might most benefit from seeing the whole learning journey of the lesson at once and having it to refer back to throughout the lesson? How can these children be provided with the opportunity to refer back regularly and check agreed key information to help them as they learn new mathematics content?

The post Crafting mathematical learning journeys for children: the power of board work appeared first on Primary Education Network.

Initial reflection on the relationship between technology and the development of writing might have you thinking they are not natural soul mates.  However, schools across Transform Trust have been integrating technology into the writing process and this offers a dynamic way to engage students, supporting each stage from idea generation to final publication.  Trust Associate Headteachers, Phil Herd (Digital Lead) and Helen Fordham (Writing Lead) have worked together to develop a collegiate approach to ensure the effective integration of the two aspects in order to improve outcomes for children.

During a recent Primary Education Network session, examples of effective integration of digital tools to enrich the writing process were shared.  This integration is guided by Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model, which encourages using technology with purpose at each phase.

An overview of the Transform writing process

Our process is based on several pieces of research, such as the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) work on literacy at KS1 and KS2 and Ofsted’s Research review series, as well as these books:

The process is a framework designed for primary education, offering a clear system to foster both creativity and technical writing skills among young learners and including the following stages to support every aspect of writing development:

• Engage: Purpose, audience, hook

• Discover: Saturate, deconstruct, dabble

• Compose: Plan and draft

• Evaluate: Revise, edit, assess

• Publish: Share

During the Engage phase, students’ interest is sparked, establishing a real or imaginative purpose for their writing. In the Discover stage, students learn from reading modelled examples, pull apart texts and experiment with sentence construction and grammatical techniques needed for the final piece of writing.  During the Compose stage, students plan their discussions, making it easier to translate these ideas into writing, so they can later Evaluate and Publish.

The diagram illustrates how each phase of the Transform Writing Process enhances both the depth of engagement and the quality of students’ final work. By effectively combining these methods, teachers can foster a love for writing and raise writing standards across the curriculum.

The SAMR model

The SAMR model is a powerful framework that guides teachers in selecting the most effective tools for enhancing learning experiences and helps them consider how technology can be integrated into their lessons to achieve different levels of impact.

Image Credit: https://www.edweek.gr/montelo-samr-enas-tropos-ensomatosis-tis-tehnologias-sti-mathisi/

• Substitution: technology acts as a direct replacement for traditional tools without changing the task itself. For instance, using a word processor instead of pen and paper. In writing lessons, this might involve students typing their stories instead of handwriting them, which can be particularly useful for children who struggle with fine motor skills.

• Augmentation: technology still replaces traditional methods but adds some functional improvement. For example, using spelling and grammar check features in a word processor to enhance writing quality helps students identify and correct errors independently. Another example is using text-to-speech functions, allowing students to hear their writing read back to them, which supports editing and refining their work.

• Modification: a more transformative use of technology, where significant redesign of tasks is possible. For example, using collaborative online platforms like Google Docs allows students to work together in real-time on a shared writing piece. This fosters peer feedback and cooperative editing, making the writing process more dynamic and interactive. Teachers can also provide comments and guidance as students write, offering immediate, formative feedback.

• Redefinition: teachers create entirely new tasks that were previously impossible. For example, students could use digital storytelling tools to create multimedia stories, incorporating images, audio, and video to enhance their written narratives.

By applying the SAMR model, teachers can make informed decisions about which technological tools will most effectively enhance their teaching objectives. It encourages educators to go beyond simple substitution and explore deeper levels of engagement and creativity, ultimately leading to richer learning experiences for students.

The importance of transcription and automaticity

As Anabela Malpique and colleagues state, transcription, the physical act of writing, is a fundamental skill that underpins successful writing. Developing automaticity in transcription is crucial, as it allows students to write fluently without being bogged down by the mechanics of letter formation, spelling, or punctuation. When transcription becomes automatic, cognitive resources are freed up for higher-order aspects of writing, such as idea generation, organisation, and elaboration. This fluency is key to enabling students to express their thoughts effectively, making the writing process more seamless and enjoyable.

Kaligo, a handwriting application, is an excellent tool to support the development of transcription skills. It uses AI to provide real-time feedback, helping students improve their letter formation and handwriting fluency. By practising regularly with Kaligo, students can build automaticity more effectively, freeing up their working memory for higher-level aspects of writing.

Impact was seen in only 6 weeks as shown by the two examples below.

Child 1 showing clear progress in the quality of their handwriting.

Child 2 showing progress in the quantity written in a similar time frame.

The Engage phase

Engaging writers from the start

In the initial stage, the goal is to get students ‘on board’ with the writing task by establishing a clear purpose and intended audience. Students are more motivated when they know why they are writing and who will be reading their work. This phase involves ‘hooking’ students with imaginative, real-world contexts that build excitement and make the task feel meaningful.

Using digital tools to engage

Technology can help in defining purpose and audience while making the hook more interactive and memorable. Tools like Showbie allow teachers to share student work with a broader audience, helping students write with the sense that their work will be seen and valued. Incorporating virtual reality (VR) can create immersive experiences that connect students to their topic in a way traditional tools cannot. For example, a VR environment related to their writing topic can make students feel like they are on location, sparking creativity and engagement.

The Discover phase

In the ‘Discover’ phase, students are immersed in high-quality texts that exemplify the purpose and structure of the writing task. This exposure allows them to absorb the language, themes, and organisation of similar writing and gives them the background knowledge to write confidently about the topic.

Using digital tools to discover

Using multimedia resources, such as videos, digital books or online meetings with experts, can make text exploration richer and more engaging. This phase often benefits from digital whiteboards or document-sharing platforms, where teachers can model analysis of texts and highlight key features interactively. These tools support collaborative learning, enabling students to annotate and discuss texts in real-time, making the deconstruction of model texts more accessible and engaging.

Image Credit: Created by Gencraft AI

Teachers can use ChatGPT to generate model texts that align with the writing conventions and features outlined in the curriculum. By providing specific prompts, teachers can create texts that demonstrate the desired structure, tone, and language features for different genres. These model texts can then be used for analysis, allowing students to deconstruct and discuss elements such as sentence structure, vocabulary use, and paragraph organisation. This approach not only provides students with relevant examples but also helps them understand the conventions they are expected to use in their own writing.  Further, it speeds up the creation of these texts which affords the teachers time to think about how the text might be most effectively used.

Dabbling and experimenting

The ‘Dabble’ stage encourages students to experiment with ideas, vocabulary, and sentence structures. This phase is about playing with language before committing to a full draft. Drawing inspiration partly from The Writing Revolution, this is where students practise foundational writing activities that help them craft stronger, more cohesive sentences and paragraphs. For example:

• Sentence expansion and combination: Students can expand simple sentences into more descriptive ones or combine multiple ideas into complex sentences. This practice helps them build confidence in manipulating syntax and expanding their ideas effectively.

• Digital tools to support: In the example below, Explain Everything and other interactive whiteboard apps let students practise sentence structure and grammar visually, helping those with additional language needs. Students can experiment by moving words and phrases on the screen, experimenting with sentence combinations and expansions in an engaging way. Additionally, using collaborative documents like Google Docs, students can practise these activities in pairs or small groups, sharing feedback and improving their writing together.

Image credit: Amy Hassall – Pear Tree Community Junior School

• Because, but, so: Using ‘because’, ‘but’, and ‘so’ to develop a basic idea into more complex thoughts encourages depth in students’ writing. For example, if they start with ‘The character was sad’, they can elaborate with ‘The character was sad because he lost his pet’, or ‘The character was sad but…’, adding reasoning and building logical connections

• Digital tools to support: Teachers can prepare these sentence openers on Keynote and three possible sentence endings.  Children then use Magic Move to move the sentence ending to the correct sentence start.  In our experience, children have found this more engaging and they are also more willing to have a go due to the ease in which it can be corrected.

The Compose phase

The ‘Compose’ phase is where students pull together their ideas, organising them into a coherent plan or outline. This phase emphasises the importance of structure and encourages students to build on what they’ve explored and experimented with so far.  Teachers can share their thought process for planning their writing using apps like Explain Everything to record their modelling and explanations. Children can then rewatch the video when necessary.

Photo Credit: Explain Everything

• Digital tools for planning and composition: Pagesor Showbie offer digital spaces for students to record their initial ideas and create outlines. Voice recording tools allow students to capture their spoken thoughts, which they can later review and build upon in their writing.

• Quizzing: Socrative provides instant feedback, helping teachers assess whether students understand the features of a text type, so they can adjust support if needed before students begin drafting.

Image Credit: https://dailytrust.com/software-pushing-textbooks-into-history-bill-gates/

• Drafting and revising:
  In the drafting stage, students develop their initial ideas into a complete piece of writing. Here, students focus on translating their plan into sentences and paragraphs, with a focus on maintaining flow, coherence, and voice. In the revision phase, they refine their draft by reordering sentences, expanding details, and rephrasing for clarity and impact.

The Evaluate phase

• Digital tools for drafting and revision: Google Docs and pages support drafting and make revision smoother by allowing students to work collaboratively. Teachers can use the commenting feature to give real-time feedback on student work without disrupting their writing flow.

• Editing and final checks: Editing focuses on the technical details, such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling, helping students polish their work before sharing it with an audience. This phase allows students to check for accuracy, ensuring their writing is clear and professional.

• Digital tools for editing: Grammar-checking tools provide instant feedback and help students identify and correct common errors independently, reducing the time teachers spend on minor corrections. Self-editing is promoted through tools like built-in spell check on word processing apps, allowing students to focus on detail and precision before the final draft.

The Publish phase

In the final stage, students present their finished work to a broader audience. This is a rewarding phase where students can celebrate their progress and receive feedback from real readers. Authentic publishing opportunities give their work purpose, reinforcing their motivation and sense of achievement.

Sites like Google Sites allows for easy sharing of an entire classes work, as can be seen from this example from Sneinton C of E Primary School

This example from Parkdale Primary School shows one child’s informative video teaching his teachers how to use the Sketches App

• Digital tools for sharing:
  Publishing digitally, whether on a class website, blog, or even a private platform like Showbie, provides an authentic audience and purpose. When students see their work shared beyond the classroom, they gain confidence as writers and feel a sense of pride in their accomplishment. It also allows peers, parents, and other teachers to engage with their writing, creating a supportive, community-based feedback loop.

Conclusion

The key to using technology successfully is to consider whether it will be more or less effective than an alternative.  Using the SAMR model as a guide, teachers can thoughtfully integrate digital tools at each stage of the writing process, transforming how students engage with and produce writing. By carefully selecting the right tool for each stage, teachers can create a writing journey that is supportive, engaging, and ultimately fulfilling.

The post Enhancing the writing process with technology: practical insights for teachers appeared first on Primary Education Network.

In this blog Esther Fulton looks at the importance of the sense of belonging in schools. Although there is a plethora of research around a sense of belonging for children, this blog focuses specifically on the role and responsibilities the teachers have in creating this belonging for themselves and the beginning teachers they mentor, before they can create it for the children.

Most humans want to fit in and be accepted for who they are. A sense of belonging is included in Maslow’s (1968) hierarchy of needs and follows the need for basic survival and safety. Having a strong sense of belonging underlies social-emotional wellbeing and the ability to learn new things.

For pupils to feel that they belong in a school context, they need to feel that they are accepted and are safe and trusted. The teacher’s role is to make sure this happens.

Kathryn Riley expresses belonging in these terms:

‘Belonging’ is a relational, cultural and geographic concept, a complex emotion triggered by a range of factors. It’s a sense of being somewhere you can be confident you will fit in, a feeling of being safe in your identity and of being at home in a place.
Young people’s sense of school belonging is shaped by what they bring to it – their histories, their day-to-day lived realities – as well as schools’ practices and expectations.

Therefore, I would argue that for pupils to feel like they belong, they need to have a teacher who also feels that they belong in that context.

This teacher needs to feel supported, accepted and valued for the work they do and to have a strong teacher identity (something I have touched on in a previous blog in this series).

Schools’ responsibilities: ‘building the village’

All beginning teachers who are embarking on their school placements of their training year may be feeling apprehensive about how they will be able to become a ‘legitimate member of the professional community’ (Maynard, 2000). As Ussher (2010) describes in their research, schools need to create a ‘village’ around each beginning teacher. This metaphor implies that the village should include all adults and children within the school context and its community. Building working reciprocal relationships within this ‘village’ will help the beginning teacher to show greater commitment and have a more positive perspective on teaching.

Following on from this, Pesonen et al.’s (2019) research has shown that it is fundamental to have warm relationships and trust amongst colleagues, leadership and the school climate for a sense of belonging to occur (see Figure 1).

These relationships should be built on mutual trust and respect and the beginning teacher needs to feel valued and accepted, even if they are not a paid member of the staff team. Further research from Maynard (2000) looked at the beginning teacher and mentor role and found that beginning teachers referred to ‘good’ mentoring as how the mentors made them feel, for example: welcome, accepted, included, supported and recognised as an individual. This shows that all teachers within a school community should be able to share their values and beliefs, gain job satisfaction and have the right motivation to do their job well.

Schools are diverse places and therefore, to allow beginner (and new) teachers to have a sense of belonging, school leaders need to make sure their schools are inclusive and fair communities. There are still prejudices around diversity (e.g. homophobia and racism) and teachers need to be the first bearers of inclusive messages. They hold a critical role in making sure children witness positive attitudes and view the world as a place of acceptance rather than seeing the world through differences. A beginning teacher needs to see this happening within the school context in order to also feel welcome and safe.

Beginning teachers’ responsibilities: being responsive to context

As the beginning teacher embarks on their next stage of teaching education, they need to think about how responsive they are being to their school context. During our teaching sessions here at the University of Nottingham, we talk to them about showing:

• commitment, by understanding the value of their mentor’s time;

• reciprocity where they should be accepting advice and sometimes criticism and responding to these professionally;

• vulnerability (being open-minded) by asking for help and support if they feel they are struggling and not to see this as a weakness.

Alongside this, we ask them about how ‘mentorable’ they are going to be by sharing this TED talk from Victoria Black with them.

All beginning teachers need to establish networks with the wider school community (and beyond) and build a rapport with their school mentor as well as the children in their care. They should witness effective teaching and be involved in professional reflection in order to become part of a community of practice. Wenger (1998) defines this as ‘groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.’

Beginning teachers will have their own preconceptions around the teacher role linked to their values and beliefs which they have already formed from their own educational experiences. However, to be part of the community of practice, it is important that they understand the preconceptions and expectations that the children they teach bring to school. They need to be careful not to undermine these by showing intolerance or lack of respect or imposing their own values and beliefs on the children (linked to Part Two of the Teachers’ Standards). Having a sense of belonging in any school context will have fundamental benefits for all involved. Beginning teachers need to view the school as a whole and make sure they are being as inclusive as possible with the children they teach as well as with the staff members they work with.

By working together, both school mentors and beginning teachers can build those positive relationships which will ultimately give everyone a sense of place, belonging and agency.

The post How can schools create a sense of belonging for beginning teachers? appeared first on Primary Education Network.

In this post, Brittany Wright from L.E.A.D. Academy Trust reflects on ways to improve educational outcomes for pupils from working-class backgrounds.

As teachers and leaders, we know how important our work is to the lives and life chances of our pupils. As well as providing a high-quality education for pupils during their school days, government policy has framed our work as key to making society fairer. In 2007, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown saw schools as “the greatest force for social progress” . Conservative Schools Minister Nick Gibb’s 2016 speech described schools as “engines of social mobility”  . Across the political spectrum, ‘closing the gap’ between pupils from working-class backgrounds and their more privileged peers has been an aspiration for decades and is a key aim of the new Labour government.

In this blog post, I’ll explore what my doctoral research tells us about how teachers can provide a fairer education for pupils from working-class backgrounds.

Social class in school

In England, socio-economically disadvantaged – or under-resourced  (Major and Briant, 2023) children are eligible for the pupil premium, a sum of money allocated to individual schools on a per pupil basis to offset the inequalities they face, as documented by the DfE. There is a significant gap in the levels of attainment between working-class young people and their more privileged peers. This gap widens from the earliest years of schooling through to Year 11 (Choudry, 2021).These inequalities manifest in various ways in our classrooms and schools. For example, during secondary school, working-class learners are more likely to be placed in bottom-sets (Archer et al., 2018).

Whilst conceptualising social class is challenging (Thompson, 2019), few would dispute the idea that children and young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds get less out of the education system than their more privileged peers (Reay, 2017; EEF, 2021).  Despite the evidence of an attainment gap, the term social class is slippery. In a recent study of social attitudes by Heath and Bennett, almost 1/3 of the highest earners described themselves as working-class .

If social class isn’t just about money, what is it about? Sociologists have signposted that cultural factors are tied to social class backgrounds too (Bourdieu, 1984; Skeggs, 2004).

What is social mobility?

Social mobility describes how people can move up – or down – the social ladder, gaining – or losing – wealth and status as they do. It can be defined by the OED as “the ability or potential of individuals within a society to move between different social levels… or between different occupations.” There are two types of social mobility:

• absolute mobility

• relative mobility

Absolute mobility refers to an improvement in living standards for all, but with inequality gaps remaining consistent. Life is better for everyone, but some still have more than others. In contrast, relative mobility involves upwardly and downwardly mobile trajectories, with some individuals experiencing improved living standards and others facing declining living standards (Major and Machin, 2018). For one person to move up the ladder, another needs to move down to make room for them. In my research, I referred to these journeys up and down the ladder as social trajectories.

Aspirations and social class

The term ‘low aspirations’ is unfortunately used a lot in schools. It is associated with low-achieving groups of pupils and their families, particularly those who are working-class. This can lead to a deficit view becoming embedded, with academic pathways being viewed more positively than vocational ones. Young people then internalise this hierarchy, reading their own hopes and dreams as inferior.

My research proposed a view of working-class aspirations as potentially being different rather than deficient.

Young people’s aspirations are tied to the opportunities that are available to them. If society is unfair – and rates of social mobility are low – then altering young people’s hopes and dreams will not change this. We need to ensure fairer access to a wider range of opportunities and that cannot be the sole responsibility of teachers and leaders in schools. As teachers, we don’t necessarily get taught about the opportunities available to different children and young people in the communities that we serve. To help us to connect what goes on in school to the world outside of school, we can use the following processes:

1. Map-making

Rather than imagining one person on a ladder, it is helpful to imagine several people undertaking their own journeys across the same terrain. These people may have different starting points and different destinations. They may also have different resources to help them make their journeys. They will choose different paths from those available to them. My research suggested that sometimes teachers presume that all pupils are navigating the same maps as they did, forgetting that social class, place, gender, ethnicity, and other factors can affect pupils’ starting positions on the map and the resources available to them

2. Path-finding

Choosing which path to take can be challenging. Pupils need help to make informed decisions, based on the resources they currently have and those they might need to pick up along the way. My research found that female, working-class teenagers in a former coalmining town felt that they were expected to go to university but weren’t given support to decide what jobs this might lead to or information about what other opportunities might be available to them.

3. Bridge-building

Children and young people need resources to build the bridges that enable them to move along different pathways. However, their access to these resources is unequally patterned, based on social class, gender, ethnicity, place, and other social factors. Resources are also culturally specific and firmly rooted in local communities, which means that they don’t always work in the same way in different places.

For example, the resources we need for a journey through a snowscape might be different to those for a journey through a desert. Working-class pupils’ resources are likely to be tied to their starting points on the map. In sociology, these resources are called capitals and take three forms:

• economic

• cultural

• social

(Bourdieu, 1986)

These resources can have significant effects on our journeys. If I have enough economic capital to travel by plane, then I will spend less time and energy than if I have to walk to the same destination. If I have a friend with a private jet, this social capital may help me to reach the same destination without even paying for a plane ticket.

Cultural capital is trickier to imagine, but still vitally important to the journeys our pupils undertake. Imagine that different people live in the different places we travel through. These different groups have different values and ideas about how we should live, but they all have their own forms of art, music, cuisine, philosophy, and religion. As I travel through these places, my cultural resources meet theirs. There will be similarities and differences, but also a hierarchy based on the power of the group in relation to other groups.

In our world, these cultural resources take three forms:

• how I look, speak, and behave

• the cultural objects I own

• the qualifications I hold

Qualifications authenticate something important about who I am to other people. They ‘rubber stamp’ my knowledge and skills, as well as showing a place that I’ve already been on my journey: an educational institution. Both adults and children accrue these resources. Schools are key places where pupils gain cultural capital, but we also need to remember to value the cultural resources that children bring from home into school too.

Social capital describes the connections and relationships we have with other people. For children and young people, complex webs of social relations can introduce them to different lifestyles and job possibilities. Whilst we often consider the ways social capital supports people from privileged backgrounds in moving into elite professions (Friedman and Laurison, 2019), working-class communities may also offer local forms of social capital that give some children and young people status in the places where they live and learn.

Sketching the three forms of capital helps us to think about the resources that working-class young people gain in their families, communities, and schools.

We need to value their pre-existing resources by building on rather than replacing them.

What can this look like in school?

If teachers and leaders want to put these three processes into practice, the following strategies might be useful:

Map-making:

• Scoping out local opportunities for education and careers

• Understanding the employment patterns in the local area

• Finding and celebrating the goodness in local communities

• Understanding the starting points of our students and helping them to see a greater range of options and travel greater distances without feeling that they can’t come back (socially and geographically!)

Path-finding:

• Ensuring curriculum alignment across key stages and schools – build from local strengths

• Ensuring transition is effective, supportive, and positive

• Tracing and celebrating former pupils’ journeys and making their pathways visible

• Building meaningful links with educational institutions and prospective employers

• Ensuring relevant staff are trained on the requirements and realities of particular pathways, so that they can advise students effectively and support if they have to adapt their plans

Bridge-building:

• Building positive relationships with pupils, parents, and local communities as the foundation for high-quality education

• Ensuring the curriculum builds bridges between pupils, their different cultures, and their social class backgrounds, rather than privileging one particular group

• Using responsive teaching to build bridges between what pupils know and can do now and what they should know and do next to make progress

Map-making, path-finding, and bridge-building help educators to tie together the ‘big picture’ of children’s aspirations and social mobility with the day-to-day world of the classroom. These three processes help educators to identify and celebrate local opportunities and ‘small steps’ of social mobility, without stigmatising working-class young people.

Schools in ‘left behind’ communities often perceive their role as helping young people to learn to leave (Corbett, 2008). My decision to use a ‘bridge’ in the model emphasises that young people should have the choice to travel away from home if they want but should also have the option to stay or one day return. A well-built bridge is a permanent structure that connects one place to another. We’re far more likely to walk along a bridge to a new destination we’ve never visited before than to hitch a ride with a passing sailor who might not travel this way again. The aspiration to stay and succeed at home should be celebrated as much as moving away, even if local pathways do not involve further and higher education. Opportunities are about choices. Schools should not associate living in the local area as an example of failure. We should not stigmatise working-class communities or places in a bid to ‘inspire’ the working-class young people we serve.

In my work as Trust CPD Lead for L.E.A.D. Academy Trust, I am lucky enough to see fantastic examples of these processes in action across primary and secondary schools. I want to emphasise how much incredible work already goes on in schools. The map-making, path-finding, and bridge-building processes help us to contextualise these existing pedagogical approaches, curriculum decisions, careers education practices, and so much more within our mission to make the world a fairer, more equitable place. I hope that it supports you in reflecting on the work that already goes on in your setting, as well as inspiring some curiosity about your ever-changing local communities.

Our goals as educators are not to make working-class learners act like middle-class learners, but to build maps, paths, and bridges for all, recognising the individuality and intrinsic value of all the children and young people we serve.

References

Archer, L. et al. (2018) ‘The symbolic violence of setting: A Bourdieusian analysis of mixed methods data on secondary students’ views about setting’, British Educational Research Journal, 44(1), pp. 119–140. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3321.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste / Pierre Bourdieu ; translated by Richard Nice.: London: Harvard University Press ; Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.) Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–58.

Choudry, S. (2021) Equitable Education: What everyone working in education should know about closing the attainment gap for all pupils. 1st ed. Critical Publishing. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=6621700 (Accessed: 26 January 2024).

Corbett, M. (2008) Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community. Halifax N.S.: Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd.

Friedman, S. and Laurison, D. (2019) The class ceiling: why it pays to be privileged / Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison. Policy Press.

Major, L.E. and Briant, E. (2023) Equity in education: Levelling the playing field of learning – a practical guide for teachers. John Catt.

Major, L.E. and Machin, S. (2018) Social mobility: and its enemies / Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin. Pelican, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Reay, D. (2017) Miseducation. Bristol: Policy Press.

Skeggs, B. (2004) Class, self, culture / Beverley Skeggs. London: Routledge (Transformations).

Thompson, R. (2019) Education, Inequality and Social Class: Expansion and Stratification in Educational Opportunity. Oxon: Routledge.

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In this post, Lauran Doak reflects on current debates around the status of play in Early Years settings

Ofsted and play in Early Years

‘Play-based learning in Reception classes sometimes does no more than occupy children’s time. If it does not challenge their thinking, problem-solving, persistence and collaboration, it is ineffective in developing their executive functioning. Such poorly planned play keeps children busy but does not support their development: their hands and bodies are active, but their minds are not’. (Ofsted,2024)

The above critique of (some) Early Years practice has elicited controversy amongst practitioners online.  Taken from Ofsted’s recently published research report Strong Foundations in the First Years of School, it appears to place strong emphasis on the need for adult direction to ensure that children experience what the report calls ‘high-quality play.’  Teachers, it is suggested, ‘should plan and prepare resources for play that reflect children’s differing knowledge and broaden their interests’

It is further suggested that ‘teachers might plan for children to practise what they have learned in their play’, with the example given of children ‘learning to jump and hop with accuracy and control’ by watching an adult demonstration and then having a go themselves.

Two viewpoints

Much of the online controversy seems to assume a binary division between two opposing viewpoints.

On the one hand, the seemingly majority view online is that good play is ideally spontaneous and freely chosen by children, conducted between peers with minimal adult interference, and that such play is inevitably of developmental value anyway. Proponents cite Art.31 of the as evidence of the child’s ‘right to play’, free from adult concerns with outcome-focused agendas. Much literature supports this idea: for example, Truelove et al. (2017) propose a definition of play involving children expending energy in a ‘freely chosen, fun, and unstructured manner’ (p.164).

This contrasts with an online counter-position from a smaller number of professionals in support of Ofsted. Language development and cognitive development are valid goals in the Early Years, it is argued, and well-planned play opportunities structured by adults are central to supporting this trajectory for all learners.

This online binary division in turn reflects underpinning debates in research: ‘play’ has long been the subject of competing discourses around its intrinsic or instrumental value (Goodhall & Atkinson, 2017), the (in)appropriateness of adult-led interventions to improve play skills (Lester & Russell, 2010), and the increasing ‘pedagogization’ of play (Rogers, 2010).

This apparent binary is also reflected in the literature around play in the context of Special Educational Needs & Disability (SEND). Whilst the recent Ofsted report focuses on mainstream Early Years settings, the practices of ‘continuous’ or ‘free-flow’ provision described the report as being characteristic of Reception and Year 1 classrooms are also used with some older learners in special schools. The posited play ‘deficits’ of disabled and neurodivergent learners labelled with ‘SEND’ has been termed the ‘pathologisation of play’ (, 2010, p.499), with the subsequent proliferation of interventions promising play remediation.

Bridging the gap

In my own research (Doak, 2019), I have argued for the need to transcend this apparent binary distinction between ‘freely chosen’ and ‘adult-directed’ play. From a posthuman perspective, the play which is or is not possible in any given moment emerges from an assemblage of (amongst other things) available artefacts, the design of place and space, available human and non-human play partners, and so on. These visible, material elements of the assemblage in turn are inflected with traces of wider discourses around education, pedagogy, play, childhood, inclusion, safeguarding, disability and more.

For instance, in England where the existence of ‘special schools’ (segregated provision) has been constructed as an inevitability by successive governments, non-disabled peers are rarely accessible to disabled students in special schools and this profoundly shapes the (im)possibilities of the playground. In my own research, I have noted the effects on play when a class of minimally verbal and non-verbal learners had no opportunity to engage with children who use spoken language. Whilst their embodied, non-verbal forms of play may appear ‘freely chosen’ at first glance (there is no adult ostensibly directing them), the resultant play is nevertheless profoundly shaped by adult practices and discourses of segregation.

Looking ahead

I am no Ofsted apologist, and I share many of the concerns expressed online around the selective citation of research without robust methodology as well as the potentially chilling effect of this particular report upon play which brings joy, irrespective of measurable ‘learning outcomes’. Nevertheless, a posthuman perspective on play does inevitably implicate the adult(s), since adult discourses and agendas are ubiquitous in the settings where children attempt to enact play. It becomes difficult to argue for ‘freely chosen’ play by children when we think of play as emerging from complex entanglements of adults, children, artefacts, bodies, minds, material and discursive environments which together enable some forms of play to emerge but not others.

Perhaps it becomes more helpful to acknowledge that we are always implicated in children’s play, along with non-human elements of the play assemblage – and to reflect critically on which types of play are (not) enabled by our actions, and for which children.

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This month has seen the publication of We Need to Talk, the final report from the Oracy Education Commission. In this blog, I reflect on some immediate takeaway messages for primary schools.

The work of the Oracy Education Commission has examined a mass of evidence over a busy six-month period. I’ve been fortunate to have had some involvement on the fringes of the process and it’s been heartening to witness the breadth of perspectives and conversations involved. While the final report makes a strong case for oracy as ‘the fourth R’, there is, of course, a need to interpret at a primary phase level the many implications for action. At a time of intense pressure on primary curricula and resources, what might schools prioritise?

As a possible starting point, I focus here on four of the report’s messages and in each case offer a question for consideration.

1. Learning about talk (not just to and through)

A fundamental issue from the start for the commission was a lack of agreement about what oracy actually means. It’s a term new to some, but with a lot of baggage for others (as Alex Quigley puts it, what is oracy anyway?)

Debates continue over whether oracy education should be seen as a matter of curriculum or pedagogy or what might distinguish it from merely spoken language. The Commission settles on a broad definition. Oracy is characterised as:

‘Articulating ideas, developing understanding and engaging with others through speaking, listening and communication’

Oracy education, in turn, is therefore seen as cultivating oracy through learning to, through and about talk. Learning to and through talk have long been the twin components of Voice 21’s  ubiquitous oracy definition, but the Commission’s model gives a nod to a resurgence of interest in learning about talk.

Learning about talk implies children developing an awareness of language use for different purposes and in different contexts. Working ‘messily’ and provisionally through a problem with a familiar partner, explaining thought-through ideas to the wider class and making a case to an external audience all call for different linguistic approaches. An interest in learning about talk suggests a role for teachers in making judgments about varying things like register and vocabulary more explicit as teaching points.

This need for judgment and variety also brings us to the vexed question of the place of Standard (or standardised) English. The deficit-based starting point of correcting language which some associate with the original 1960s conception of oracy has been highlighted by Ian Cushing, for example. The Commission takes a firm stance, however, emphasising that oracy is not about ‘teaching children to mimic an idealised form of spoken language’. Broadening the repertoire for a range of contexts, rather than policing language is at the heart of this.  The report’s call for empowering students ‘to develop their own authentic voices’ is taken up in a previous blog in this series.

Question 1: What opportunities do you create for children to discuss and evaluate explicitly the use of different language for different contexts?

2. Four modes of talk

Learning about talk in different contexts links closely to another of the Commission’s offerings: a recommendation that pupils experience four different modes of talk:

• Building understanding

• Debating and persuading

• Negotiating and making change

• Expressing and performing

This focus on modes takes us beyond the familiar dichotomy of ‘presentational’ and ‘exploratory’ talk. It simultaneously avoids beginning with a list of skills to be covered in an arbitrary way (indeed, oracy as ‘a checklist of decontextualised skills’ is firmly rejected by the Commission).

In thinking about modes, we begin to engage with the purposes of talk as a starting point. As suggested in this Oracy Cambridge blog, beginning with the identification of contexts and purposes and working down to the requisite skills to teach is likely to make for much more meaningful talk opportunities than a bottom-up, potentially arbitrary, skills-led approach.

So, perhaps we can incorporate this idea of modes into a sequence of planning decisions such as:

1. Authentic contexts and purposes (How might we use talk to get something meaningful done?)

2. Audiences (Who do we need to talk to and why?)

3. Modes (What kind of talk will we be using?)

4. Skills (What skills, for example from the Oracy Framework, will need to be explicitly taught?)

5. Enactment (How and when will this talk happen in a sequence of learning?)

Question 2: What are the authentic contexts and purposes for talk across the curriculum that may yield opportunities to experience different modes of talk?

3. Oracy opportunities in every subject

So where will we find these meaningful contexts?

The Commission makes a strong case for embedding oracy across the curriculum.  In a primary context, transferring generic oracy strategies across a range of subjects is likely to come fairly naturally. Nevertheless, an important question here is the role of ‘disciplinary oracy’, as outlined in this blog from Amanda Moorghen.

To what extent do different subjects lend themselves to distinctive ways of talking?  On my own visits to schools, I have encountered examples such as:

• Mathematics: Sharing and capturing reasoning, supported by mini-whiteboards and digital recording

• Geography: Debating different perspectives on complex environmental issues

• Science: Developing tentative hypotheses and explanations

• English: Offering contrasting interpretations of fictional characters

• History: Asking questions and offering interpretations based on pictorial sources

So, while some of the foundational skills may be generic and transferrable, the idea of disciplinary oracy challenges primary teachers to think carefully about the contributions of oracy to particular aspects of learning and to make informed and deliberate choices about when and how talk is used.

Question 3: What distinctive uses of talk can you identify in each area of the curriculum?

4. An intellectual community

The report is also clear about the importance of teacher development. Although oracy is now named in the forthcoming update of the ITTECF for beginning teachers – a welcome recognition – this framework is by nature a somewhat blunt instrument of universal ‘Learn that’ and ‘Learn how to’ statements.

It is telling that the Commission refers to teachers needing:

‘The capacity to exercise their professional autonomy individually or as part of an intellectual community of practitioners’

This vision implies moving beyond one-off training events towards a culture of oracy and an ongoing conversation across school. As an example of an ‘intellectual community’, a local oracy interest group, based on collaboration between university and school colleagues from different settings is outlined in a previous blog in this series. This collaborative work involves powerful features such as:

• Regular meetings

• Visits to different schools and age groups

• Analysis of practice

• Collaborative planning

‘Professional autonomy’, meanwhile, may also be promoted by a focus on common principles rather than prescribed practices.

At School 21 in London, for example, a fire triangle analogy is used to illustrate three core components of planning for oracy and nine ‘building blocks’. Common expectations and understandings are established but judgment about context-specific strategies are left to individual teachers.

Question 4: How can you create an intellectual community and ongoing oracy conversation?

‘It’s time to make it happen’

So, at what might be a moment of opportunity for oracy education (as the report says, ‘It’s time to make it happen’), this blog offers four questions to begin considering.

Finally, however, one last takeaway message from the work of the Oracy Education Commission: something important is at stake.  This is not just about promoting children’s personal wellbeing and prospects, or raising attainment. It is also about civic empowerment, social cohesion and perhaps even social transformation.  Let’s start talking!

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In this post, I contrast higher-order questions with questioning for higher-order thinking and suggest some principles for developing this aspect of practice.

Why ask questions?

Let’s imagine a visit to a Year 5 class where pupils have been studying Roman Britain for the last few weeks. It’s the penultimate lesson in the unit and time to put all of that knowledge to work. The teacher stops the class to pose a question. What happens next? What might they ask and why?

Well, we know that there are lots of purposes for classroom questioning. Some of them are managerial in nature. The teacher might, for example, ask a rhetorical question as a reminder about routines (“What do we do in this classroom to show we are listening?”) or something to do with organisation (“Is there anyone without a partner?”)

In terms of questioning to promote learning, however, we might identify two broad purposes:

1. checking or consolidating knowledge and understanding

2. deepening thinking and understanding

Both are essential, but the majority of the focus in schools seems to be on the first of these two.

As a starting point, for example, the DfE’s Early Career Framework, as a specification of the expertise for beginning teachers, states that ‘questions can be used for many purposes, including to check pupils’ prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems.’ This list seems consistent with a prevailing focus on retrieving, consolidating and checking children’s knowledge with a view to its long-term retention.  This is an emphasis reflected in the enduring popularity of lists like Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction with its reminder to ‘ask large numbers of questions and check the responses of all students’ and to ‘check for student understanding’.

Perhaps, in our Year 5 history lesson, the teacher is going to ask some specific factual questions about Roman villas or something more open about the legacies we still find around us today. Doing so will give valuable information about next steps and may serve as a form of retrieval to aid retention of key facts. Ascertaining and securing knowledge is important, of course.  There has been lots of attention paid to streamlining efficient question and answer routines, but it can sometimes seem that this is at the expense of that other broad purpose for questioning.

Asking questions is also a way of growing children’s understanding by promoting deeper thinking. At the heart of ‘higher-order’ thinking, therefore, is an intention get the pupils in this class to do something with this knowledge base about the Romans: to apply their knowledge to a novel task.  David Perkins, for example, has written about developing habits around questioning to make thinking visible.

Here’s where it’s tempting to start classifying questions with a view to identifying ‘higher order’ questions. But what is a higher order question?

What do we mean by higher-order questions?

In the interests of pace and precision, lots of questions designed for factual recall tend to be closed.  So are higher-order questions simply more open questions? Not necessarily. As Peter Worley points out, there is a difference between grammatical openness and conceptual openness.

”What can you tell me about Roman Britain?” is a grammatically open question, suggesting a range of possible answers, but conceptually fairly closed because, as Worley argues, it ‘contains or invites no tensions, conflicts or controversies’, It is therefore not particularly likely to generate deep thinking.

Perhaps it is more helpful to go beyond categorisation as open or closed by exploring things like:

• divergent questions (seeking diverse interpretations and responses);

• speculative questions (going beyond what is known to the hypothetical);

• command terms like some of the verbs in Bloom’s Taxonomy (synthesise, analyse, apply, etc.)

• moving towards the abstract (drawing on specific experiential knowledge to think more generally)

“What if the Romans had never come to Britain?” seems to be a pretty good question by these standards. Its speculative nature invites the controversy we’d associate with something conceptually open and it also requires application and synthesis of knowledge to a multitude of end points.

However, this focus on the question itself as the indicator of ‘higher-order’ may be missing the point.

Quite apart from the danger that some questions come to be seen as more important than others (potentially devaluing those securing the pre-requisite knowledge base), this is a decontextualised view of what is going on. So, here’s another speculative question:

What if we broadened our unit of analysis to questioning rather than questions?

Should we focus on questioning rather than questions?

Adam Boxer’s 2024 blog, raises this very issue of whether we can label a question ‘higher order’ in any meaningful way. His contention is that the level of a question is dependent on factors beyond the wording itself, specifically:

• Task quantity: the number of steps or degree of complexity of a question

• Abstraction: the degree to which a question requires the learner to go beyond direct experience

• Domain knowledge: the amount of relevant knowledge the learner has available

• Support: the amount of support provided for the learner

I would go even further and suggest that it may be more productive to think about questioning as a process, rather than questions themselves. By this I mean that the challenge and deepening of understanding lies not only in the question and contextual factors like those above, but also in what happens next – or the whole episode of interaction.

We can think of questioning, therefore, as a process and perhaps it is helpful to consider it as a core practice, an idea discussed in this previous blog in the series. Core practices are frequently occurring and powerful moves used by teachers with a focus not on scripted, micro-level routines, but on the complexity and judgment associated with teaching.  So, here our practice is questioning for higher-order thinking – the word ‘for’ reminding us of the purpose driving the practice – and our focus is on the sequence of judgments involved.

How might we think about questioning for higher-order thinking?

One useful reference point here is the work of Martin Nystrand, Arthur Applebee and colleagues in the US. In their large-scale analyses of classroom language correlated with literacy performance, three features of language were associated with attainment gains:

1. Authentic questions (those without a pre-specified answer)

2. Open discussion (an opportunity for free exchange of ideas)

3. Uptake (teachers building on pupils’ responses and establishing connections)

So, while conceptually open questions are important – not least because they signal that the teacher is genuinely interested in what children think – it is really the questioning practice as a whole which determines their ‘authenticity’. This is commonly thought of as a process involving three turns, or moves: an initiation, some form of processing or response and then a teacher follow-up.

There are many ways to seek pupils’ responses, but when questioning for higher-order thinking, it may be less important to hear from all children or to somehow systematically sample from particular groups. Giving an opportunity to pause for thought and to rehearse ideas first, perhaps by making some individual notes or trying out ideas in the relative safety of small groups might be more appropriate than only ‘cold calling’ or seeking quick-fire brief answers from as many as possible. All of this can help to create an environment for recognising and constructively engaging with differing perspectives: what Rupert Wegerif refers to as opening up dialogic space.

Other research confirms that the third turn is an especially powerful moment. Christine Howe and colleagues, for example, associate attainment gains with moves based on querying (“But do you think that all Romans lived in houses like that?”) and elaboration (“Can anyone build on Rav’s point about place names? What else might they reveal?”). Indeed, there are lots of possible teacher turns here which go beyond a simple evaluative comment, including asking children to ask their own follow-up questions. Sarah Michaels and Cathy O’Connor give a helpful list of nine ‘talk moves’ to serve a variety of goals. For example:

• Seeking evidence

• Offering a counter-example

• Asking a pupil to explain what a peer meant

As another way of thinking about questioning as a process, we can return to Peter Worley’s work on open and closed questions. Worley argues that grammatically open questions (“What can you tell me about Roman Britain?”) often lack focus and specificity. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they may not deepen the thinking or move learning on in a purposeful way. He suggests, therefore, sometimes starting with a grammatically closed but conceptually open question and then opening up the dialogue with an invitation to elaborate in some way. In our scenario, we might imagine initial questions like the following:

“Did Britain benefit from the arrival of the Romans?”

“Was it possible for a woman to be a leader in Britain in Roman times?”

The closed phrasing of these questions will probably yield a simple yes or no response, initially. However, there is still a sense of authenticity in the ambiguity of the issues they address and the deepening of thought can then be prompted through the subsequent moves around open discussion and uptake. For example, here is another initiation and follow-up:

“Should the Romans have stayed in Britain even longer? Take a moment to think about your answer…now tell the person next to you and see if you agree about all your reasons.”

[Partner talk]

“Emily says yes. Did your partner agree with you, Emily?”

[Emily’s turn]

“I see and what was your evidence for saying yes? Did you have exactly the same ideas?”

[Emily’s turn]

“Yes, I see what you mean about all the other things they could have achieved.  I wonder, though, if we could also think more widely about the Roman Empire and take ourselves beyond just thinking about Britain.”

Is this a more holistic view of questioning practice?

In thinking of questioning in this way, we are complementing brief checks of individual understanding with more sustained collective episodes of dialogue. They will be episodes full of contingent judgments in response to emerging ideas but nevertheless ones that can be broken into a number of partly planned-for moves.  The focus here has been on questioning as a practice, rather than questions as discrete units of focus.

Finally, in offering this counterpoint to the more familiar practices of questioning to elicit or consolidate knowledge, two caveats are important. In making its argument, this post has made a deliberate distinction between two broad purposes for questioning. Firstly, in everyday classroom reality, this is of course a somewhat artificial division. Questioning which promotes thinking also reveals existing knowledge, while questioning to check knowledge may yield new insights for learning. Similarly, the very term ‘higher-order’ suggests another unhelpful over-simplification. As critics of Bloom’s Taxonomy like Ron Berger have noted, models and labels which conceptualise learning as discrete processes or as a hierarchy risk overlooking the complex, simultaneous and reciprocal processes which underpin work in classrooms.

What questions would open up the dialogue in your classrooms?

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