Learning Intentions and Introduction

Session Elements

• self-assessment
• practical exercise
• scripting
• analyse artefacts

Learning Intentions for this session

You will learn that:

• Effective teaching can transform pupils’ knowledge, capabilities and beliefs about learning.
• Explicitly teaching pupils metacognitive strategies linked to subject knowledge, including how to plan, monitor and evaluate, supports independence and academic success.
• Homework can improve pupil outcomes, particularly for older pupils, but it is likely that the quality of homework and its relevance to main class teaching is more important than the amount set.

Introduction

In the previous mentor session (week 3), your mentor guided you to extend your knowledge of how to introduce new material in steps, making links to pupils’ prior knowledge, with an emphasis on expositions (explanations), for example the use of concrete representations for abstract ideas. In that session, you explored practical examples of using questioning for different purposes, in order for pupils to secure knowledge and understanding (for example, with ‘stem questions’ as a supportive tool). Finally, you were given guidance in order to consider expositions and questioning when introducing new material to pupils.

In this self-study session you will extend your knowledge of how to transform pupils’ knowledge, capabilities and beliefs about learning through modelling the effective use of metacognitive strategies to enable pupils to self-regulate their learning. You will also reflect on the role that setting homework plays in the transformation of pupils’ capabilities and knowledge about learning.

You can apply insights from these exercises to examples from your own past experience with pupils, and to future lesson plans.