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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 1: First half-term: developing effective classroom practice
    • Spring week 6

    Mentor materials

    Review and looking forward

    Intended outcomes

    The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:

    Learn that:

    • Effective teaching can transform pupils’ knowledge, capabilities and beliefs about learning
    • 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
    • Practice is an integral part of effective teaching; ensuring pupils have repeated opportunities to practise, with appropriate guidance and support, increases success

    Learn how to plan effective lessons, by:

    • Using modelling, explanations and scaffolds, acknowledging that novices need more structure early in a domain
    • Enabling critical thinking and problem solving by first teaching the necessary foundational content knowledge

    Learn how to make good use of expositions, by:

    • Starting expositions at the point of current pupil understanding
    • Combining a verbal explanation with a relevant graphical representation of the same concept or process, where appropriate
    • Using concrete representation of abstract ideas (e.g. making use of analogies, metaphors, examples and non-examples)

    Learn how to model effectively, by:

    • 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)
    • Making the steps in a process memorable and ensuring pupils can recall them (e.g. naming them, developing mnemonics, or linking to memorable stories)
    • Exposing potential pitfalls and explaining how to avoid them

    Learn how to stimulate pupil thinking and check for understanding, by:

    • Planning activities around what you want pupils to think hard about

    Learn how to develop an understanding of different pupil needs, by:

    • Identifying pupils who need new content further broken down.

    Learn how to provide opportunity for all pupils to experience success, by:

    • Adapting lessons, whilst maintaining high expectations for all, so that all pupils have the opportunity to meet expectations
    • Balancing input of new content so that pupils master important concepts

    Activities

    Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)

    Welcome the ECT to the final mentor topic in this module. Offer praise where appropriate for the hard word undertaken in the module.

    The ECT should have taught the lesson or part of a sequence of lessons that were looked at in the previous topic. The beginning of this topic is a good time to reflect upon how it went.

    Suggested dialogue for mentors: Last topic we looked at getting your pupils to think hard about the stuff you need them to learn. We worked on some lessons you were going to teach. Let’s catch up about those lessons now. How did they go? Were the pupils thinking hard about what you needed them to? What have you learned? What will you do the same/differently going forward?

    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 3.5 in the self-directed study materials.

    Ask the ECT who they observed and with which focus. They may have completed more than one observation. This might be linked to the goal they set for themselves at the start of this module.

    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?

    Implications for practice (10 minutes)

    • How did X affect the pupil’s learning?

    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 3. The ECT will have considered two key questions as part of this activity:

    1. What have you learned in this module?
    2. What do you need to learn more about?
    3. Have you achieved your goal? Ask the ECT to share their responses. Support the ECT to come 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 in order to learn about X?
      • What might be the focus of further reading?
      • What might the ECT need to work on in terms of their classroom practice moving forward? How could they be supported to do this?