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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 2: First half-term: embedding a positive climate for learning

    • Classroom practice

    An effective learning environment both allows and expects pupils to achieve and to struggle: this is part of the learning process. With this in mind, it is important to plan appropriate challenge for your pupils and support them to achieve. As we established earlier, succeeding in difficult tasks is motivating for your pupils and is likely to drive further success. We want to harness this and use it to drive learning forwards. You can support pupils to achieve through the learning activities you set, how you structure these and how you put them into practice.

    The following strategies will support your pupils to achieve success in the challenging tasks you set. When planning for this, you should set an activity which will support your pupils to achieve an existing learning goal. This should stretch them: they should be required to apply effort and to think hard. It will be necessary to explain this explicitly to your pupils to ensure that they persevere.

    As you start planning, ask yourself:

    1. What are the main learning goals for this group over the next period?
    2. What challenging knowledge, concept or skill will enable them to move closer to this goal?
    3. Which of the following strategies would best support them to master this concept?

    Scaffolding to support pupils to achieve success

    By trying this activity, you will…

    Learn how to: Communicate a belief in the academic potential of all pupils, by:

    1b Setting tasks that stretch and challenge pupils, but which are achievable, within a challenging curriculum.

    Motivate pupils, by:

    7m Supporting pupils to master challenging content, which builds towards long-term goals.

    If this is happening in your classroom, you will see…

    • Pupils have resources to support them in tasks.
    • Pupils understand the instructions they are given.
    • Pupils achieving success in tasks which may otherwise have been too challenging.

    Practise…

    Instructional strategies

    Novices benefit from explicit instruction. You could:

    • Use direct instruction to teach basic knowledge and concepts rather than ‘discovery learning’ or ‘problem solving approaches’.
    • Use modelling and worked examples, including ‘thinking out loud’ (explaining your reasoning/thinking behind what you are doing).
    • Break up lengthier tasks into smaller steps, making them more achievable.

    For example:

    • ‘Today we are going to be learning about the Cold War. I am going to start by giving you some key facts.’
    • ‘So I can now see that before I can work out the value of X, I am going to have to go back to the beginning of my equation.’

    Using resources

    We need to consider the resources we use within lessons and how these can contribute positively towards supporting pupils.

    • Use concrete resources (e.g. artefacts, apparatus) that aid understanding of abstract concepts.
    • Adapt task resources to scaffold thinking (e.g. using a worksheet to provide structure to a talk, providing word banks, using visual prompts, providing sentence stems, knowledge organisers etc).
    • Use resources (including technology) to enable pupils to access written tasks (e.g. mini-whiteboards, recording devices etc).

    For example:

    • ‘In front of you, you can see the spinning top. We are going to use this to explore angular momentum and gyroscopic motion.’
    • ‘Today you are going to write your description of the haunted house. You have a word bank and sentence starters to help you.’
    • ‘I am going to write three key words on your mini-whiteboard, George. I want you to cross off each one as you use it in your paragraph.’

    Managing cognitive load

    When our pupils try to make sense of new information, we can reduce the chances of overloading their working memory.

    • Provide resources to scaffold and structure learning (see above).
    • Ensure you give specific and manageable task-related instructions (refer to Block 1).
    • Being mindful of how we present information so that it is as clear as possible.
    • Break down complex information or activities into smaller chunks.
    • Use visual cues alongside auditory to support understanding.

    For example

    • ‘We are going to begin by planning our stories using the building blocks shown on your worksheet.’
    • ‘Firstly, I need you to open your books to page 20. We are going to read the next chapter thinking about how the author presents the character Mr Birling.’
    • ‘Similes use the words like or as. Similes are about comparison and focus on similarities. We can describe something unfamiliar by comparing it to something familiar.’
    • ‘We are all going to begin by writing our opening sentence using an adjective and an adverb.’

    In your notepad, reflect on your practice…

    In your notepad

    • which idea(s) for practice did you try?
    • what did you do?
    • what happened?
    • what will you do next?