Self-Study Activities
Review: 5 mins
Read the case studies on this week’s topic, or the one that is most relevant to the exploratory question you are investigating. As you read, reflect on:
- how similar this scenario is to your own situation
- how, despite any differences there may be to your own context, this case study may still be relevant to you
- what lessons there might be for the way you conduct your own inquiry
Plan: 5 mins
Action planning
At the conference, you decided with your mentor what your exploratory question would be and how you would collect evidence of the impact upon your pupils of your normal practice.
Plan out how you are going to do that; for example:
- If you are going to collect some pupil voice feedback, from whom will you collect it, and when will you do it? Will you be able to collect it during a lesson?
- If you are going to ask a colleague to observe a part of your lesson, who will that be, and when will they observe you? Are there more time-efficient ways of doing this – for example, if they could observe you for 10 minutes, which 10 minutes should they watch?
Remember, this is a very short inquiry, so you should not attempt to collect large amounts of data. However, do try to ensure that the data you collect are valid for your inquiry (i.e. that they offer evidence to help you answer your question).
Theory to Practice: 40 mins
How you collect your evidence will depend upon the area of practice you are developing. However, it is likely to include the following:
1. Analyse artefact and reflection
Your question may have been something like:
- ‘What do my pupil data say about the progress of high prior attaining girls?’
- ‘Which parents are more likely to engage in their child’s learning?’
- ‘In what conditions do my pupils behave well so that they can learn productively?’
Data for all of this will be near to hand; you won’t need to look hard to find these data.
Schools retain data on all sorts of aspects pertaining to the behaviour of pupils and how they respond to the culture of expectations around them. Your data management system will store much of this; administrative staff may help you access data on attendance and punctuality; other colleagues, including pastoral staff and specialists such as the SENCO, can tell you about previous behaviour patterns, levels of parental engagement and support the pupils have received in the past.
When collecting these sorts of data, it is helpful to bear in mind:
Validity
The sources you analyse will contain much more data than you need for your inquiry. It may be interesting, but don’t be distracted: only collect the evidence that helps answer your question. For example, if you are investigating the boys in a class, look for the data only on them.
Reliability
The data you find might be true for a particular time in the past – are they still true now? For example, is a pupil’s past behaviour record reliable evidence of their behaviour patterns now?
Manageability
For a short inquiry such as this, you must be selective: don’t attempt to analyse all possible sources. Look first for the naturally occurring data: those which are available to you as a normal part of your job.
Meera looked at the behaviour data on the school’s system relating to all her classes but noticed that most problems were occurring in her Year 8; hence, she decided to look further only at those data. By doing so, she noticed a pattern that most of the pupils she regularly set detentions for were boys who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL).
2. Discuss with pupils
Your question may have been something like:
- ‘What do my pupils say about the expectations I have of them about the quality of their work?’
- ‘When are my pupils more likely to respond positively when faced with challenging problems?’
- ‘In what conditions do my pupils behave well so that they can learn productively?’
When collecting evidence of pupils’ attitudes in a short inquiry, it is helpful to bear these three rules in mind when asking your questions:
Are they valid?
Only ask the questions that you need the answers to for your inquiry.
Are they reliable?
Make sure your pupils understand the questions and that you understand their answers. Can you trust the answers they give you? Pupils might give you more honest answers if they can do it anonymously. Are you asking the ‘right’ pupils? Try to ensure that they are representative of the group you are interested in. Ask enough pupils, but…
Is it manageable?
Don’t collect more data than you can handle in the time. If you teach 30 pupils, it might be sufficient to ask 5 of them; if you teach 7 classes, you could collect data from one of them. When can you collect pupil voice data? Can you do it in your lesson by a show of hands, or by speaking to a small group for 3 minutes while their classmates get on with independent learning? Do you need 5 minutes of a break time? don’t use up more of your – or their – time than is strictly necessary.
Sam decided to give his class a short, hand-up survey. Because he wanted to be sure he understood those findings and could rely on them, he then interviewed a small, representative sample of pupils in focus groups over three morning breaks.
3. Self-assessment
In preparation for your mentor meeting, write a simple evidence statement to describe what the evidence seems to be saying about your normal practice. This does not have to be definitive: it just describes what you think the evidence is saying about your practice now.
e.g.,
Sam, in Case Study A, said:
‘The feedback from my pupil survey seems to indicate that my pupils like me, and they feel safe in my classroom. However, some of my pupils also feel that I let them get away with producing work of a lower standard than I should. One lower-attaining pupil said that I seemed to be satisfied if he just “made an attempt”. Other evidence – from the last pupil progress meeting – also showed that my higher-attaining pupils’ work is not yet at the same level as similar pupils in the other class. The pupil survey suggested that my higher-attaining pupils would like me to model for them with more clarity what a high-quality outcome might look like for them. Overall, I need to have higher expectations of my pupils and make those explicit for them.’
Meera, in Case Study B, said:
‘I am exhausted after every lesson with this class because I am struggling to manage their behaviour effectively. I had the impression that every pupil was misbehaving but, of course, that wasn’t true. Our data management system tracks the behaviour points and merits for all pupils. I realised that my difficulties were mainly in Year 8. I noticed that, for this class, 90% of the behaviour points I was logging was for boys, often boys with EAL. Also, other teachers were not logging so many behaviour points for the same boys. This seems to suggest that there are things I could do to more effectively manage their behaviour, which would help the whole class.’
Next Steps: 5 mins
Bring your simple evidence statement and any supporting data to your next mentor meeting. Be ready to discuss this with your mentor. In that meeting, you will discuss with your mentor any alteration to your practice that might make a positive difference to your pupils.