Intended outcomes

The intended outcomes of this activity are for you to:

Learn that:

• Effective teachers introduce new material in steps, explicitly linking new ideas to what has been previously studied and learned.
• Modelling helps pupils understand new processes and ideas; good models make abstract ideas concrete and accessible.
• Explicitly teaching pupils metacognitive strategies linked to subject knowledge, including how to plan, monitor and evaluate, supports independence and academic success.
• Pupils are likely to learn at different rates and to require different levels and types of support from teachers to succeed.
• Seeking to understand pupils’ differences, including their different levels of prior knowledge and potential barriers to learning, is an essential part of teaching.
• Adapting teaching in a responsive way, including by providing targeted support to pupils who are struggling, is likely to increase pupil success.
• Adaptive teaching is less likely to be valuable if it causes the teacher to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils

Learn how to:

• Using modelling, explanations and scaffolds, acknowledging that novices need more structure early in a domain.
• Narrating thought processes when modelling to make explicit how experts think (e.g. asking questions aloud that pupils should consider when working independently and drawing pupils’ attention to links with prior knowledge).
• Exposing potential pitfalls and explaining how to avoid them.
• Identifying pupils who need new content further broken down.
• Adapting lessons, whilst maintaining high expectations for all, so that all pupils have the opportunity to meet expectations.