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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 2: Second half-term: inquiry into engaging pupils in learning

    • Research and Practice Summary

    Case Studies

    These case studies explore how two teachers—improving their practice and without adding to their workload—conducted their own practitioner inquiries into promoting good progress and demonstrating good subject and curriculum knowledge. Both are interesting, but you should focus on the one most closely related to the development area you are working on and your exploratory question. The case studies set out the issue the teacher was interested in, how they gathered evidence about the impact upon pupils of their own normal practice, and how they decided to introduce an alteration to the way they taught.

    When reading these case studies, you will need to take account of your own pupils’ characteristics, the context of your classroom and the nature of the material that you are teaching.

    Embedding retrieval, practice and challenge

    Yemi is a chemistry specialist teaching a Year 10 class who are motivated and able to work independently.

    She notices that some students are able to finish sets of problems involving drawing the atomic structure of an element quickly and accurately, whilst others need support and are often left behind.

    She also feels that they are not able to then apply this knowledge in thinking about which elements are more reactive.

    She talks to a colleague who she shares this class with, and they suspect that recall of key points about atomic structure and the periodic table might be at play here.

    They decide they need to develop their practice in this area so come up with an exploratory inquiry question together:

    To what extent do we give pupils opportunities to recall key knowledge about atomic structure and the periodic table?

    The two teachers decide to work together to investigate this. In one lesson, they ask pupils to try to answer a set of problems which ask them to draw the atomic structure of a few elements and to then explain how reactive they are. They do not provide any resources for this and explain to the pupils that they are setting a very challenging task and that pupils should try and identify where they struggle if they can.

    In the next lesson, the other teacher gives them a similar set of problems but makes this ‘open book’, allowing them to draw on a textbook to help, but asking them to note down what they have to look up.

    From considering their exercise books and talking to the pupils afterwards, they find that:

    • pupils need to recall the basic facts of the structure of atomic shells
    • pupils who answer questions quickly already know ‘rules’ about which groups in the periodic table are more reactive
    • pupils who complete questions are able to relate their knowledge of atomic structure to their knowledge about reactivity

    Conclusion

    All pupils need to know the ‘rules’ about which groups in the periodic table are more reactive before they can answer questions with a high degree of success, or apply this knowledge to other problems; they realise that this is probably always true about the importance of core knowledge.

    What alteration to her teaching might Yemi make to improve her pupils’ recall of key concepts so they can apply their knowledge quickly and reliably to other situations?

    Yemi’s approach to embedding retrieval, practice and challenge

    Yemi and her colleague look at the Research and Practice Summaries from Module 2, in particular those covering ECF 2h, 2i, 2j and 2k; they realise that they need to build in retrieval practice as well as increasing the challenge of the exercises over time, and they decide to plan three revision activities, which they will spread over the next three lessons (whilst still teaching other content)—in them, they will:

    • repeat questions which ask pupils to recall the structure of atomic shells, and practise drawing structures (2i)
    • as their recall becomes more secure, ask pupils to make predictions about reactivity based on which group and element is in the periodic table, and based on the atomic structure (2j)
    • increase the complexity of the task, by challenging the pupils to consider reactions that occur between different (ionic) elements (2k)

    Supporting a class with reading comprehension

    Kishan is a Year 3 teacher in an inner-city school, and is pleased with how his class are developing fluency with reading. Having learned about this during his ITT year, and in Module 2 of his ECF year 1, Kishan has promoted reading for pleasure by reading aloud with his class and using a range of different texts and genres including fairy tales, poetry, fiction and some non-fiction.

    However, he notices that they sometimes struggle to comprehend and discuss the feelings and thoughts that characters might have and to draw on the texts to understand the motives involved. This becomes clear in his whole-class questioning and pupil written work around comprehension.

    Following a discussion with another Year 3 teacher, Kishan decides to consider the details of which texts they struggle with and which they find easy to comprehend or think critically about.

    He drafts an exploratory inquiry question:

    • under what conditions are pupils more likely to be able to comprehend the motivations of characters in a range of texts?

    To answer this question, Kishan and his colleague decide to review a sample of pupil work on reading comprehension and see if there was any relation to the types of texts being read.

    What they find suggests that:

    • when the pupils know the context well, they comprehend motivations more easily, and they can make critical connections
    • the pupils are able to explain the actions of characters more readily when they know the story and context well. For example, when it is about a child rather than a magical creature in a fairy tale, they also found a text more difficult when it was set around a farm
    • skills that pupils demonstrate in one area do not necessarily transfer to another. Pupils are sometimes able to make claims about the intentions and feelings of characters in fiction, including in fairy tales, but seem to really struggle in poetry
    • pupils can connect details more readily, and understand the relationships between them, when they appear more closely together. In non-fiction, pupils are able to infer motivations if they are described in the same paragraph as a description of the character, but struggle when reference to the character is a long way from the context which leads to the action. For example, a newspaper-style account of why an elderly lady is waiting by the letterbox is a long way from text saying that people receive a card from the queen when they are 100 years old

    What alteration to his normal practice might Kishan make to support his class in reading comprehension?

    Building critical thinking and transfer skills

    Reflecting on the evidence he had gathered so far, Kishan went back to the Research and Practice Summaries from Module 2, in particular relating to 3g, 3k, 3n and 3p. He found the useful reminder around how pupils need to be secure in their understanding before they can think critically or transfer their knowledge or skills from one domain to another. He thought it would be helpful if his pupils could experience models of how to question, make predictions or summarise to improve reading comprehension. He therefore decided to reorganise the next sequence of learning with the following principles in mind:

    • using himself as a model first, thinking out loud as he was reading: asking questions—‘Why do I think Biff did that?’, making predictions—‘I think Biff is going to find the key’ and summarising — ‘So I think that the children all got home safely because they helped each other when they needed it’ (3p)
    • make sure that pupils have a clear understanding of the context presented within the text, and support them in asking questions to do this (3k)
    • present the same type of narrative first (e.g. fiction) until they are confident in comprehending motivations of characters before introducing other forms (e.g. poetry)
    • as those new forms are introduced, be explicit about how the same skills of comprehension might still apply, despite the different form (3g)
    • use succinct texts to start with, and consider using more involved or lengthy texts for those pupils who seem to have a good grasp early on (3n)