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National Strategy: Effective teaching and learning

The Key Stage 3 Strategy promotes the following features of good teaching:

• High expectations and clear objectives conveyed to pupils in simple language: ‘What I am looking for is pupils who can …’;

• Structured lessons, often with an engaging starter, with new skills and ideas introduced in well-planned stages, and always with a summary at the end;

• Challenging and engaging tasks to interest all pupils, coupled with appropriate
   interventions by teachers, including:
– practical work to develop the technical skills capability;
– oral work to develop pupils’ knowledge and understanding;
– activities to plan, evaluate or document work;
– problems to encourage pupils to think for themselves, including opportunities to carry out
   extended development work;
– research into topics.

• manageable differentiation based on work common to all pupils in a class, with targeted support to help those with less experience or ability, and real challenge for the more able;

• interactive teaching of whole classes, small groups and individuals, using a combination of exposition, demonstration, modeling, instruction and dialogue;

• Task setting related to pace ensure that the task(s) set for children to complete during individual or small group work sessions are clearly paced. Children have a defined set of objectives to achieve as a result of the teacher input;

• Effective questioning, giving pupils time to think, air views and hear others’ views, with an expectation that they explain and justify decisions and reasoning;

• Time for pupils to reflect on their learning and progress, and to evaluate their own and other pupils’ work.

The Strategy also promotes pupils’ learning through helping them to:

• Acquire and use new learning and study skills, building on those that they have
  acquired in Key Stage 2;
• learn independently;
• integrate new learning with prior learning;
• solve problems on their own and in groups;
• reflect on their successes and failures, and accept that learning can involve uncertainty  
  and difficulties that can be overcome through perseverance.

Focus on interactive teaching and active learning

You can achieve good interactive teaching and active learning by balancing different approaches:

• Directing and telling: sharing your teaching objectives with the class, ensuring
that pupils know what to do, and drawing attention to points over which they
should take particular care.

• Demonstrating: giving clear, well-structured demonstrations using appropriate resources and visual displays: for example, showing a certain technique or method for a practical activity.

• Explaining and illustrating: giving accurate, well-paced explanations, and referring to previous work or methods: for example, giving the meaning of a technical term; using models and analogies to assist understanding; explaining how collected evidence leads to an acceptable conclusion.

• Questioning and discussing: questioning in ways which match the direction and pace of the lesson to ensure that all pupils take part; using open and closed questions, skillfully framed, adjusted and targeted to make sure that equal numbers of girls and boys, and pupils of all abilities, are involved and contribute to discussions; asking for explanations; giving time for pupils to think before inviting an answer and deciding when it is apt to have a ‘no hands up’ approach; listening carefully to pupils’ responses and responding constructively to take forward their learning; challenging their assumptions and making them think.

• Exploring and investigating: asking pupils to pose problems, suggest a line of enquiry to investigate for themselves, or identify anomalous results; equipping pupils with the skills required to plan and carry out tasks, including opportunities to extend the range of hardware and software they can use successfully in their work.

• Consolidating and embedding: providing varied opportunities to practice and develop newly learned skills. While children are working developing these skills such periods should be clearly paced against the task(s) set. Through a variety of activities in class and well focused homework; asking pupils either with a partner or as a group to reflect on and talk through a process; inviting them to expand their ideas and reasoning, or to compare and then refine their methods and ways of recording their work; encouraging them to use and apply their ICT capability to solve problems or complete tasks in work across the curriculum.

• Reflecting and evaluating: discussing pupils’ justifications of the methods or resources they have chosen; evaluating presentations of their work to the class; giving them oral feedback on their documentation; identifying pupils’ errors, using them as positive teaching points by talking about them and any misconceptions that led to them.

• Summarising and reminding: reviewing during and towards the end of a lesson the ICT that has been taught and what pupils have learned; identifying and correcting misunderstandings; inviting pupils to present their work and picking out key points and ideas; making links to other work in ICT and other subjects; giving pupils an insight into the next stage of their learning.

Structured lessons (e.g. 1 hour)

1. Starter activity including the Aims of the lesson
2. Main body of lesson. Task(s) clearly defined for children to achieve
3. Individual or small group work clearly paced to help children achieve their objectives
4. Plenary

Starter activity (about 5 to 10 minutes)

Each new lesson can begin with setting the scene and a short activity to help pupils to tune in, interest them and engage their attention.

Setting the scene involves clarifying the objectives in simple language and explaining the purpose of the lesson. You might want to look back, discuss homework and, when the main activity spans more than one lesson, consider how a lesson develops from the previous one. Outline the sequence of the lesson so that pupils know what to expect, say why a certain activity is to be done, and indicate where the lesson fits in with others. All this helps pupils to
understand why they are learning these new ideas and to make connections.

A short, stimulating starter activity, either before or after the scene setting, helps to get the lesson off to a brisk start and prepare pupils for the main activity. It can also allow for pupils arriving late to join the lesson before the main part is under way.

The main body of the lesson (about 25 to 40 minutes)
Building on the starter, the main part of the lesson is characterised by high levels of direct, interactive teaching and probing questioning, regardless of whether pupils are working as a whole class, in groups or individually, or whether the lesson consists of practical work, an extended investigation or written work.

The main part of the lesson will depend on the objectives but might include:
• whole-class discussion led by the teacher, or discussion by pupils in small groups, so that they can air views, suggest ideas and hear the ideas of others;
• software demonstrations or video illustrations;
• teaching specific new skills or knowledge;
• practicing particular technical skills or techniques;
that task(s) are clearly defined for children to achieve and that this is related to pacing them to help them achieve these objectives;
• collecting and analysing information for use in a task;
• planning, reviewing and deciding how to improve work;
• developing or modifying work in progress.
 
Organise the class so that you can interact with as many pupils as possible. Match the particular activities that pupils will do to their previous attainment and your objectives for the lesson. You may want to allow some choice here.

Effective lessons might have several cycles of main activity and plenary; mini-plenaries during the main part of a lesson allow errors or misconceptions to be identified and dealt with quickly. Throughout the main activity, encourage pupils to make predictions before any demonstrations, especially those that give unexpected outcomes. Look for gains in understanding, together with misconceptions. Use opportunities for both you and the pupils to report back, clarify, model and review.

Teachers should encourage their classes to:
• ask questions, predict and hypothesise;
• find, organise and use information that is fit-for-purpose;
• work and think creatively and analytically;
• seek patterns and relationships;
• interpret results and evaluate evidence;
• present and communicate their findings in a variety of ways;
• review their work critically with a view to improving it.

Concluding plenary (about 5 to 10 minutes)
Short plenaries may take place during the main activity, while the concluding plenary rounds off the lesson. It is far more than ‘logging off’ after a practical session and should be just as dynamic as the starter. Help the pupils to reflect on the lesson, say what was important about it and consider the progress they have made. Draw out from them and highlight the key learning points, such as facts, ideas and vocabulary. Get them to think about how they might apply the new ideas, by showing how the ideas can be used and where they fit in. The final plenary can also look forward to the next stage of learning. It should make pupils think and anticipate what the next steps might be. The homework you set should help pupils to consolidate or apply what they have learned, or prepare for the next lesson.

In plenaries throughout and at the end of lessons, you can involve pupils in assessing their own and others’  work, acknowledge class and individual achievement and effort, and remind pupils about their targets. Plenaries are also a good time to firm up short-term assessments by asking probing questions to judge how well individual pupils have understood new work and to check again for any misunderstanding or misconceptions.

In the main part of the lesson there is scope for considerable variety and creativity, with a different interplay of work with the whole class, groups, pairs and individuals in different lessons, although each lesson should include direct teaching and interaction with the pupils, and activities or exercises for pupils to do. For example, at the start of a new unit of work you might need more time for demonstration, explanation and discussion with the whole class, interspersed with very short exercises for pupils; the plenary may be very short. On the other hand, when you have identified general errors or misunderstandings in the main part of a lesson, you may need several mini-plenaries during the lesson to sort them out, as well as
a final summing-up. Later in a unit of work, pupils might start the main part of a lesson by continuing to work in pairs on a previous problem. Once they have refocused on it, you might hold a mini-plenary with the whole class to share ideas, highlight important results and structure work from there on. At the end of a unit of work, it can be helpful to use the plenary to review a number of lessons to draw together what has been learned and to identify key points and methods that you want pupils to remember and use in the future. For this kind of plenary, you may need a much longer time than usual.

Effective assessment for learning

It is important to assess regularly what pupils know, understand and can do, not merely record what they have been taught.

The Key Stage 3 Strategy promotes these features of assessment:
• pupils understand and take part in the assessment of their work and progress;
• teachers and pupils jointly assess pupils’ strengths and difficulties in their learning, where they have reached, what they need to aim for next and how to take the next steps;
• assessments include informal observations, oral questioning and occasional tests or special activities designed to judge progress;
• teachers make use of the assessments and information passed on by previous teachers, particularly when pupils transfer from another school, so that work is planned to build on what pupils have already achieved;
• recording systems give teachers the information that they need to plan and report successfully, but are not too time-consuming to maintain.

  Schemes of work

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