Zines
Like many of thetips in this guide, this is one that can become an excellent ‘go-to’ exercise once it has been established as one of your class routines. To that end, it is worth investing some initial classroom time in the development of pupils’ origami skills. All the pupils need is a single sheet of A4 paper. You can then take your pick from a number of YouTube videos - I tend to show either ‘How to make a one-page zine’ on the National Museums Liverpool channel, or ‘How to make a zine from a single sheet of paper’ by Austin Kleon. Once pupils have mastered the folding, they are enabled to produce their own summative document on whatever suits!
Other Stuff First
By its nature, a typical week in the classroom will churn up lessons that don’t fit into the neat boxes you’d imagined for them. Self-contained lessons - on paper, in your head, and in actuality - are a satisfying occurrence, but they’re rarer than you might expect. You will have to deal with a huge amount of ‘other stuff’. The other stuff might be generated by you (in the form of information you need to pass on about wet break arrangements, an upcoming trip, or required reply slips). Alternatively, it might be generated by the pupils, who arrive to your lesson with questions, dramas, excuses, requests, and incorrect uniform.
It can be very tempting to wait until the end of the lesson to deal with all this ‘stuff’. It sometimes feels easier to say, “see me at the end”, especially when your PowerPoint slide is readied, and everything is just so. However, this is most often the wrong call.
Those issues at the front of pupils’ minds aren’t going to disappear as soon as you start outlining lesson objectives. So, whilst on the surface your lesson will look like it has begun, the reality is that pupils will not be anywhere near as engaged as you need them to be.
You really need to free up their cognitive load. Therefore, the best approach – within reason - is to deal with as much of that ‘stuff’ as possible first. You want your pupils to be as settled and as free from anxieties as possible. So, if it’s obvious that a lesson can’t just ‘start’, stick to your opening routines (lining up, standing behind chairs, equipment out, register etc.), but then – in an orderly manner – answer those questions and deal with pupil issues swiftly and effectively before you begin your lesson proper.
Questions
Make it clear to pupils that the best type of notes they can make aren’t really notes at all, but questions. Writing a list of questions instead of notes is an incredibly effective method for learning and revising material. Once written, a list of questions becomes the revision itself. Pupils can then test their knowledge by asking themselves the questions and retrieving the answers (they don’t even have to write the answers down so long as they make a note of what they need to look up).
So, to exemplify, let’s say you need to learn the following information about condensation:
When cold air turns water vapour back into liquid, clouds are formed. We call this condensation. You can observe this process at home or in school by pouring a glass of cold water on a hot day. After a short amount of time, water will appear on the outside of the glass. This is because the warm water vapour turns to liquid as soon as it gets cold.
Instead of asking pupils to write notes or answer questions, ask them to write questions, like this:
1. What does cold air turn water vapour into?
2. What is formed when this happens?
3. What could you do to observe this process at home or in school?
4. What will appear on the outside of the glass?
5. Why has this appeared?
If, that night, or next lesson, or next week, or the night before the exam, pupils can answer those five questions confidently, then it will be safe to say that they have learnt it!
At first, it might not seem like an entirely natural process for the pupils – their default settings might prefer highlighting – but it won’t be long before they get it.
4. Scrapbooks
Give all pupils a scrapbook at the beginning of the year. If integrated into your routine, it becomes a great ‘catch all’ document. You can use them in a number of ways: as a place in which pupils can draft (often they feel freer to make mistakes here than they do in their exercise books); as a place in which pupils can consolidate their learning with answers to low-stakes quizzes or lists of revision questions (see above); as a place in which they can complete their own creative projects; or indeed, as a place in which they can do some good, old-fashioned, actual scrapbooking!
5. Batching
Batch! Batching is the process of completing all jobs of a similar type in one sitting rather than flitting between different types of jobs in the name of variety. It might be tempting to alternate between jobs; many of us do this because we mistakenly believe that - variety being the spice of life - it will keep our brains refreshed, alert, and producing higher quality work. However, research suggests that this is simply not the case; in fact, this approach is more likely to distract us from the tasks at hand, encourage us to procrastinate, and waste lots of our time as we strive to refocus.
So, in teaching, if faced with a workload that encompasses the marking and planning of several different classes for next week, rather than working through class by class, you could batch the following hypothetical jobs together like this:
Marking of all baseline KS3 spelling tests
Marking of all baseline KS4 spelling tests
Make ‘Strive for Five’ worksheets for all classes
Create all introductory PowerPoint slides
Plan key questions for all classes.
I often envisage this as ‘vertical’ planning. Once you have completed these tasks, you can revert to ‘horizontal’ planning by checking what else you need for each class, safe in the knowledge that the bulk of the work is complete, and you are simply completing some odds and ends that are particular to each class.
Thanks for reading,
Jon
P.S.
You can find the other 20 here!