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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 2: First half-term: inquiry into developing quality pedagogy and making productive use of assessment (part 1)

    • Learning Intentions and Introduction

    Session Elements

    • action planning
    • analyse artefacts
    • discuss with pupil
    • self-assessment

    Learning Intentions for this session

    The focus of your inquiry for Module 8 is on an element of the Early Career Framework (ECF) from Standards 4, 5 or 6. You might have chosen a focus which combines different elements of these standards.

    The teachers in the case studies remind you that you have learned that:

    Case Study A
    4.9 Paired and group activities can increase pupil success, but to work together effectively pupils need guidance, support and practice.
    4.10 How pupils are grouped is also important; care should be taken to monitor the impact of groupings on pupil attainment, behaviour and motivation.
    5.5 Flexibly grouping pupils within a class to provide more tailored support can be effective, but care should be taken to monitor its impact on engagement and motivation, particularly for low attaining pupils.
    Case Study B
    4.3 Modelling helps pupils understand new processes and ideas; good models make abstract ideas concrete and accessible.
    4.4 Guides, scaffolds and worked examples can help pupils apply new ideas, but should be gradually removed as pupil expertise increases.
    Case Study C
    6.5 High-quality feedback can be written or verbal; it is likely to be accurate and clear, encourage further effort, and provide specific guidance on how to improve.
    6.7 Working with colleagues to identify efficient approaches to assessment is important; assessment can become onerous and have a disproportionate impact on workload.
    Case Study D
    4.5 Explicitly teaching metacognitive strategies linked to subject knowledge, including how to plan, monitor and evaluate, supports independence and academic success.
    4.6 Questioning is an essential tool for teachers; questions can be used for many purposes, including to check pupils’ prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems.

    Introduction

    At the start of this term, you reviewed your development needs in relation to Standards 4, 5 & 6 with your mentor, using the Module 8 audit (this was based on the audits from Module 3 and 4 that you completed last year). You also constructed with them an exploratory inquiry question, which will be your focus for the first part of this module. Last week, in your ECT Training session, you looked at how to design different types of inquiry questions, about the advantages of collaboration on an inquiry and how to present your findings so that others can also learn from your inquiry.

    Next week, you have another mentor meeting. To prepare for that you should use your self-study time now to define what your normal practice is like in your inquiry focus area, and to collect evidence of impact of your practice upon your pupils.

    A note on evidence and workload

    Schools are already data-rich environments.

    Practitioner inquiries first of all make use of what we call here ‘naturally occurring’ evidence. They are in the pupils’ work, and your assessment of it. They are in the words and reactions of the pupils, and what you have heard or seen of this.

    When we refer to evidence-collection, in the main we mean: look at what the pupils have done, and listen to what they are saying.

    A practitioner inquiry invites you to be more systematic about how you do this looking and listening, so you might deliberately ask a few questions of a few pupils for five minutes at the start of breaktime, or you might share lunch with a colleague and quiz them about how they approach a problem in their own class.