Mentor materials
Review and looking forward
Intended outcomes
The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:
Learn that:
- Questioning is an essential tool for teachers; questions can be used for many purposes, including to check pupils’ prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems.
- High quality classroom talk can support pupils to articulate key ideas, consolidate understanding and extend their vocabulary.
- Effective assessment is critical to teaching because it provides teachers with information about pupils’ understanding and needs.
- Good assessment helps teachers avoid being over-influenced by potentially misleading factors, such as how busy pupils appear.
- Before using any assessment, teachers should be clear about the decision it will be used to support and be able to justify its use.
- To be of value, teachers use information from assessments to inform the decisions they make; in turn, pupils must be able to act on feedback for it to have an effect.
- High quality feedback can be written or verbal; it is likely to be accurate and clear, encourage further effort, and provide specific guidance on how to improve.
Learn how to stimulate pupil thinking and check for understanding, by:
- Including a range of types of questions in class discussions to extend and challenge pupils (e.g. by modelling new vocabulary or asking pupils to justify answers).
- Providing appropriate wait time between question and response where more developed responses are required.
Learn how to avoid common assessment pitfalls, by:
- Planning formative assessment tasks linked to lesson objectives and thinking ahead about what would indicate understanding (e.g. by using hinge questions to pinpoint knowledge gaps).
- Drawing conclusions about what pupils have learned by looking at patterns of performance over a number of assessments (e.g. appreciating that assessments draw inferences about learning from performance).
- Choosing, where possible, externally validated materials, used in controlled conditions when required to make summative assessments.
Learn how to check prior knowledge and understanding during lessons, by:
- Using assessments to check for prior knowledge and pre-existing misconceptions.
- Structuring tasks and questions to enable the identification of knowledge gaps and misconceptions (e.g. by using common misconceptions within multiple-choice questions).
- Prompting pupils to elaborate when responding to questioning to check that a correct answer stems from secure understanding.
- Monitoring pupil work during lessons, including checking for misconceptions.
Activities
Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)
Welcome the ECT to the final mentor topic in this module. Offer praise where appropriate for the hard work undertaken in the module.
The purpose of this topic is to review what the ECT has learnt throughout this module through the lens of observations. They should come to the topic having carried out one or more observations of colleagues based on Activity 5.5 in the self-directed study materials.
Ask the ECT who they observed, and with which focus. They may have completed more than one observation.
Pose the question: who did you choose to observe and why? What was the focus of the observation?
Reflection on observation(s) (20 minutes)
Ask the ECT to reflect on the following questions related to their focus area of the observation(s)
- What did you notice?
- What surprised you?
- What did you learn?
- How did X affect the pupil’s learning?
Implications for practice (10 minutes)
In light of the previous discussion, focus now on what the ECT will do as a consequence.
Pose the question: what will you do differently in your practice as a consequence of this observation?
Review of the module (20 minutes)
Use the final activity in the self-directed study materials to look through all the statements that have been covered by module 5. The ECT will have considered two key questions as part of this activity:
- What have you learned in this module?
- What do you need to learn more about?
Ask the ECT to share their responses. Support the ECT to come up with an action plan for how they can address the areas they identify in question 2. Some prompts to support:
- Which colleagues could the ECT go to learn about X?
- What might be the focus of further reading?
- What might ECTs need to work on in terms of their classroom practice moving forward? How could they be supported to do this?