KS3 Case Study

It depends on the context of the lesson and it will vary from week to week. You may already have a scheme of lessons that you can follow, or you might have one-off lessons, formal lessons or coaching lessons (where someone will come and see you). We also now have software called IRIS Connect, where people can watch me through a video link, so obviously you'll plan a lesson differently for that.

For day to day planning, I've got my teacher planner, which is where I scribble my thoughts. I don't know if you’re familiar with my five minute lesson plan? I use that, but mainly for Ofsted purposes, in terms of evidence of a lesson plan, because you don’t necessarily need to do lesson plans anymore – Ofsted don’t require it.

As a school leader, I don’t insist on staff having a lesson plan. But some staff do have lesson planning requirements, in terms of their professional development. I would stipulate certain types of lesson plans for them, the five minute lesson plan being part of that.

So in answer to your question, my lesson planning literally is a scribble in my A4 teacher planner.

To reference my five minute lesson plan again, there's a box on there called 'Stickability', which is essentially the information you want the students to take away with them and bring back to the next lesson.

So the signs that a lesson plan is working include students coming back with that knowledge, that skill or that understanding, so I know that the information has stuck. Students can consolidate this information and use it as a building block.

During the actual lesson, you're looking for all sorts of signals: enjoyment; student interaction; kids taking risks, working independently, responding to feedback and responding to your questions.

I tend to 'consolidate learning'. So, I may stop, get the students to put their pens down and take them over to look at a certain piece of work. You also reference exemplary, high-ability work, as well as low-ability work and get students to add some feedback and peer reviews for each other. Your hope is that you consolidate what they do know while finding out what they don't, so that you can build on their weaknesses, giving them the knowledge and skills to be able to go off and get the work done.

There are three main pieces of technology I use. First, the interactive white board, which I think has a bad reputation amongst a lot of people and I would put myself in there as well, as I don’t use it enough. But there's one thing that I think is fantastic for it and it's called Triptico. It’s a highly interactive piece of software that you can tailor to suit your own lessons. For example, you might put a question on the board and with this software, the students can come up and press 'Yes' or 'No' and it produces an instant pie chart to give some feedback in terms of the work and where the students are at within the context of the lesson.

Another piece of software I use is a table top visualizer, which is great for taking pictures, zooming in on work and for producing live drawings on screen. I've also just purchased a smaller visualizer, which is portable, so you can plug it into a laptop or iPad, and through a WiFi connection. This allows you to move it around the classroom and hold it like you would a pen in front of the students' work, beaming it on to the classroom wall on the other side of the room for all the students to see. Using it takes away the chaos of moving the students around to different parts of the room.

The dichotomy with all this technology is to know when (and when not) to use it, so that you can have the training in place that enables you to use these tools competently. IT can always let you down, so it's important to have a back-up plan and not necessarily rely on it.

I'm a technology teacher by trade, so the vast majority of my lessons are visual, kinaesthetic and the audio aspect comes naturally through the introductions, instructions and things like that. But looking deeper than that, you then have to tailor your resources to meet the needs of your students. So for example, I have three students who speak Bulgarian and two that speak Polish, so straight away it's very hard for them to access the curriculum.

As a first port of call, I would look to use Google Translate on my computer. But if you didn’t have access to this software, then you would have to source suitable resources, do a quick translate or use teaching assistants that speak other languages to translate documents – these, however, all require medium-term planning that you would have to arrange in advance. But things like Google Translate seem to work very quickly and are very useful for allowing the students to interact with the lesson much more than using sign language or drawing pictures.

On a more sophisticated level, we'll have resources that are attuned to high-ability and low-ability students. 'Scaffolding', as it's called, allows a student to complete things one step at a time. You might also want to start giving students different objectives, or give them choices of resources to use. For instance, you might offer them a very difficult resource, piece of material or something similar, and then describe the possible outcomes of doing each. Visual cues work with any language, so I often find instinctual cues work best.

So it's about allowing the children to self-select, based on their ability or the level of challenge they feel like taking on. This is something that you could use for a one-off lesson, three or four lessons or perhaps even a whole scheme of work.

I also recently put up the hashtag #takeawayhmka on twitter. The idea behind Takeaway Homework is to make homework a bit more fun. So if you imagine a takeaway menu, there are tasks that are labelled starters, mains, desserts, and we also have chillies and vegetarian options to differentiate the task. You then either get the students to choose specific pieces of work in class, or direct them to choose a particular task. For example, if a student was absent, you might want to get them to choose a starter, main and dessert to catch up. Or, if they're wanting some extension work because they're really keen and they're doing really well, you might get them to choose a 'very hot chilli dessert'. So there are all sorts of things that you could do in terms of differentiation of classwork or homework.

One of my favourite warm up games is called Snowball. You choose some key words from the previous lesson and get the students to write them down as a spelling test. They would then write their name on the paper, crumple it up into a snowball and throw it across the room.

The students are then given 10 or 20 seconds to catch a snowball. If they don’t catch one, or it falls aside, they're out of the game. Once a ball is caught they open it up and spellcheck the word. I then give them three new key words, more complicated vocabulary this time and ask them for the definition, before repeating the same steps again.

It’s a nice way to warm up because it references what you did in the lesson before and what's coming up today. And that works really well with KS3. With KS4 students I do this once in a blue moon for a bit of fun.

Sometimes it's good to reflect, so on occasion I may get the students to put their heads on their desk and I'll then tell them a story. I do this because we all get tired sometimes and the students appreciate it.

In a curriculum subject like my own – technology – where you'll expect the students to use a hammer or work on a sewing machine, sometimes it's good just to stop and reflect. We don’t get to do that enough and it’s especially good for when the students get a lot of feedback in their work, either verbally or written. This is consolidation, and what we find is that teachers don’t do this enough as they are tied to the curriculum by time constraints

Personally I find at my school, our key targets are to give more quality time to reflect on feedback and give students more time to improve on a piece of work.

So, by getting them to put their head on the table and have a little think about what they're doing, you can put the lesson into context.

I might also think of ways to make the content apply to real life situations, by either bringing in my own personal experiences, or by finding something that would benefit them in relation to what's going on in their lives in Year 8. Sometimes just giving them a chance to relax is powerful enough, and then as soon as you've come out of that two or three minutes of reflection, you can then crank it up a gear and off you go!