Skip to main content
This is a new service – contact continuing-professional-development@digital.education.gov.uk with any feedback

Self-Study Activities

Review: 10 mins

Read the Research and Practice Summary on this week’s topic. As you read, reflect on:

  1. the practices that you are already doing well
  2. the practices you are doing some of the time, but could do more of/more consistently
  3. the practices you don’t use in your teaching yet

Plan: 10 mins

Self assessment

Reflect on your classroom practice since the start of the year. Look at the bullet points below and consider whether you do each never/rarely, sometimes or often.

  • ‘Think aloud’
  • Time for pupils to monitor progress
  • Peer- and self-evaluation
  • Thinking in similar ways for different tasks
  • Set myself as an example of a learner
  • Self-target setting
  • Monitor how they do homework

Be ready to share your thoughts with your mentor and to talk about one or two examples of how you have supported metacognition and self-regulated learning.

Theory to Practice: 20 mins

Use your self-audit from the start of this module and the checklist you just completed when deciding on which of the following options to select.

1. Scripting

Identify parts of a forthcoming lesson where explicit modelling is required. Develop a script for sharing your implicit thought processes in a way that makes your thoughts clear and explicit to the pupils. Have you made any common assumptions around concepts that may need to be explicitly highlighted to pupils?

Have a look again at Christine’s Year 1 science lesson for an example of a script.

2. Practical activity

Look ahead to the next piece of homework that you will set for your class. When designing the homework, create a written model or worked example that demonstrates the implicit thought processes needed to successfully attempt the task. Pupils can use this model to scaffold their own thought processes.

To support this practical activity, you could look back at Week 2, when you considered worked examples.

3. Analyse artefacts

Review a series of homework tasks you have previously set. It would be useful to bring a small set of homework with you to your mentor meeting, where you have annotated in the margin:

  • What range of learning tasks did you adopt?
  • What did you learn about your pupils when they completed the homework?
  • Was your (and their) focus more on the quality or the quantity?
  • Was there evidence of pupils regulating their own learning?

Next Steps: 5 mins

Be ready to share this, and your other learning from this session, with your mentor in your next meeting with them.