KS4 Case Study

I have a standard lesson plan pro forma, which is common throughout the school and I would start with writing what I need to teach in terms of content and what I need to develop in terms of skills, being sure to include some literacy and numeracy elements to that.

I also consider what has already been taught in previous lessons. So if, for example, the last lesson was marketplace activity, then I would probably look to include an individual task for the next lesson. Alternatively, if the last lesson involved note-taking and putting the information into some sort of mind-map, then I might include some hot-seating instead. So I balance across what I want to cover content-wise and what I want to develop skills-wise.

I won't plan a GCSE lesson in its detailed form before I've finished the lesson before. Your planning should be as a response to the previous lesson, especially with KS4 because you're often teaching units, which may take 3-4 weeks, so you can't just plan on regardless.

For example, say I plan next Wednesday's lesson and I have also got one on Monday, how do I know what the outcome of the lesson will be on Monday? How do I know that that lesson worked OK, that the technology worked and that everybody achieved the learning objectives and are ready to move on?

Of course you have your long-term planning aims and goals, you might even have plans to break a particular topic down into six lessons, but actually planning lesson number two in its detailed format, well I wouldn't do that until after teaching lesson one.

To promote collaborative work, peer assessment and students self-assessing, a really good thing to use is a wiki. You can use tools like wikispaces.com, which is a way to set up free wikis, and you essentially give the students access to that virtual learning environment, both inside and outside of the classroom.

You might have a wiki where you have eight topics, and you have got different students working on different topics- so more than one student may be working on the same page at the same time. And you can do this in real-time, so you can see people typing on the page as you have it open in front of you.

Another effective tool for collaboration in real-time is Google Docs, which is an outstanding teaching and learning tool! Every single student has got their own Google email account, managed from inside the school, so only people within school can email or message you and vice versa. Documents can be created and shared by anyone – with anyone – and these are hosted via cloud-storage, so can be accessed on any internet device, from anywhere. It's also great for writing reports as a teacher because a number of us can collaborate on writing the same report, instantaneously.

When I am trying to add more of a creative element to the classroom, I like students to use the iPad as a creative tool. One fantastic app for this is Explain Everything, it's absolutely brilliant. You can use it as a teacher to create short video files to explain a concept to students, or give instructions for a task and they can replay it as often as they need. It's great for differentiation, in that you can make two or three different clips and can share one with some and another with others. It's also great for students to use to create an Explain Everything from the information they have learnt during class, using the video creation software.

You will find that you have got some students who have every bit of gadgetry possible, and then you have got some pupils that have nothing. You cannot presume that the students can access or continue work outside the classroom. So at the end of the lesson, you have got to make sure that you transfer everything to Google Drive, or some other cloud-based storage, so that it's there for next time someone needs to access it from any available device.

I also think that when we use technology with students, we need to build in time to experiment and ‘play’ with the app or the tool before we start because there may be some students who have experienced the app before and some who have not. If you have planned ahead, and you know you are going to be using an app or tool in another lesson, you can say, "We're going to use Explain Everything next lesson. I've made a little YouTube clip about Explain Everything, here's the link to it, and I'll also share it on your Google Docs so you can watch it at home".

KS4 students really appreciate short tasks. If you have an hour's lesson, and you say, "Right, we'll have a starter, and then for fifty minutes of the lesson we're going to do another single task," then you are potentially going to lose students after quite a short period of time. A series of shorter tasks increases the pace of your lesson, adds variety and challenge, and gives you several opportunities to assess progress.

I think a little bit of collaboration with the students can help you assess the progress of the lesson. For instance, maybe you have planned for a ten minute activity, but at the end of the ten minutes, you look at the students' work and realise that they haven't achieved everything and you need to allow them more time. You have got to have that degree of flexibility in your planning that allows you to change a lesson’s direction and thus affect planning for the next lesson.

I think the iPads have really helped. We have sets of 15 at a time and although that's clearly not enough for one class of students to have one each, it works for one between two. I have found that it reduces unnecessary talking - the students just seem more tuned in to the sort of work that we are doing.

I also think it's widened the students' skill-base for problem-solving. Rather than suggesting, "There's only one set way of doing this," teachers can now say, "This is what we want to achieve. We've got the iPads today, how are we going to make that happen?" I think it's about not being too rigid with how you want to use technology. It's about the learning objectives you want to achieve, how you get there should be a bit more flexible- especially if people are from different backgrounds and have different abilities.

For KS4 in particular, technology also gives pupils more of a sense of responsibility for their own learning, especially if they are going to use what they have produced with technology for revision materials later on.

Finally, I think completion rates of work have increased with technology and I think that is down to what technology the students use at home. For instance, if there is a laptop on next to them and it's a choice between writing an essay in an exercise book, or doing it online, where it can be written quicker and with Facebook tabs open at the same time, then perhaps they would prefer to do it like that. Certainly giving them that choice is useful.

There is one book I would say is a complete bible for lesson plan interactivity and that is Teacher’s Toolkit by Paul Ginnis– everybody still talks about it even though it came out about ten years ago. I think it has still not been rivalled for a bank of superb tried-and-tested lesson activities. There's another great book called The Lazy Teacher's Handbook by Jim Smith and that has got some really great tips for getting the students to do more learning and assessment for themselves.

I read a lot, I am a great advocate for this, but I don't have time to spend on anything that's not of any value, so I find Twitter is a complete Godsend! On a Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm, I take part in, moderate or chair discussions under the education in Wales hashtag (#addcym) and these are great. For example, as a teacher you may tweet one good thing that happened in your classroom, and you may then have sixty or seventy people sharing what has worked for them and what tools have been useful in Teaching and Learning, or which articles or blogs are worth reading. You can always trust that this advice is good because people don't tweet about articles which have little value.