Directing student attention (with gesture and more)...

↓ What our students attend to is what they learn.

Removing distractions, promoting participation, and optimising thinking time can help orchestrate attention…

30 of most interesting edu-threads from the last 3 months:

↓ 1/ @xpateducator with his fav evidence-informed teaching papers

https://twitter.com/xpateducator/status/1782977003047764205

On thinking time:

↓ What our students attend to (and when) is ultimately what they end up learning about.

One way we can orchestrate this is by maximising the proportion of pupils who participate.

On the (playing-field-levelling) power of high participation teaching:

↓ Attention is the gatekeeper of learning—what our students attend to is ultimately what they learn.

However, the things we teach in school are not always inherently interesting for students, and so we must pro-actively orchestrate student attention.

Summary of @Barker_J & my presentation at #EducationFest today:

(Another beast of a thread)

↓ @Barker_J Teaching has the potential to be the Best Job in the World (BJW).

EXHIBIT A → Superhunk @Mr_Raichura in full flow, loving his job, living his best life.

In many ways, teachers are 'orchestrators of attention'.

When we do this well, not only do we help students learn but we level the playing field...

↓ What we attend to is what we learn about.

Attention is the currency of the classroom, the gatekeeper of learning.

As such, it should be a core consideration in any act of teaching. The two-fold challenge of attention in school is that:

5 ways praise can go wrong in the classroom:

(and how to make it go right for our students)

↓ First up, in school, different kinds of rewards can serve different purposes.

For example, one long-term goal of schools is to build intrinsic motivation, yet extrinsic motivation can be useful to generate initial momentum in that direction.

Concreteness fading can help build abstract understanding:

(in some situations)

↓ Like building a physical structure, building understanding is not something that happens instantaneously.

We can't just implant a fully complete idea in the minds of our students.

Warming up student prior knowledge makes it sticker:

↓ One of the goals of education is to foster meaningful learning.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to help students make connections between what they are learning and what they already know.

Sequencing ideas from more general to specific can help build meaningful learning.

Here's how:

↓

(bonus points for identifying the diagram) The short answer (popularised by David Ausubel) is that making learning meaningful is largely the result of...

building connections with what we already know.

✨

Summary of my presentation at the Directors of Improvement conference today.

(Strap in, it's a bit of a beast)

↓ First up, expertise matters.

The most expert teachers help their students to learn at multiple times the rate of the least expert.

Improving teaching is the biggest lever we have for improving the learning and life chances of the young people in our care.

The 40 finest edu-threads from the last 4 months:

(a mere glimpse of the vast intellectual talent alive across our profession)

↓ 1/ @dazzalee127320 on the (under-rated) power of choral response

https://twitter.com/dazzalee127320/status/1733211763376595185

Mining for student mistakes (& misconceptions) isn't just good for learning.

Done well, it can also strengthen classroom culture. Here's how:

↓ One of the most powerful ways we can flip failure is by constantly being on the lookout for when students make mistakes or misconceptions...

and then taking the opportunity to highlight them, analyse them, and ensure that everyone (not just the mistake maker) learns from them.

The anticipation of success (aka 'expectancy') is vital for student motivation.

BUT it's easier to destroy than develop.

3 ways to flip failure:

↓ Success is a powerful force in school.

However, despite our efforts, students will sometimes fail.

It is an inevitable part of school, and an important aspect of life.

Great teaching is not enough—we also need to *frame* success for our students.

6 strategies that can help:

↓ Success is a powerful motivating force in school.

It's primarily the product of great teaching. However, great teaching—by itself—is not enough...

because success is highly subjective.

10 of the best teaching-related research papers from the first 10 weeks of 2024

(all open source 🔓)

↓ 1/ Article on the limits of applying general cognitive science principles to specific school contexts

→ also serves as a helpful overview of the evidence around the value of several core #cogsci principles

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23…

Success is one of the most powerful drivers of motivation in school.

Why is this and how can we secure it?

↓ First up, it’s useful to understand that our brain uses unconscious ‘rules of thumb’ (aka heuristics) to make decisions about where to invest our attention and effort.

One of the main rules it uses is our anticipation of future success.

This is called 'expectancy'.

Feedback can enhance learning. But it can also inhibit it.

Here's what we know:

↓ Feedback is simply any process where students get information on their thinking or performance.

However, not all kinds of feedback lead to improved learning—some can even be detrimental.

We all have an (implicit) theory of learning that guides how we teach.

Here's mine:

↓ First up, a reminder of why having a theory of learning is useful for teachers. It can help us:

→ Better understand how our teaching strategies 'work'
→ Deploy them at the right time and in the right way
→ Adapt them for novel situations (and avoid lethal mutations)

Exit tickets. Let's go...

↓ Responsive teaching entails regularly checking for understanding, in valid and efficient ways.

But *when* exactly should we do it?

At Steplab, we're *obsessed* with codifying great teaching.

Eg. we've just spent 3 months re-organising our steps around a 'simple model of teaching'.

This is to help...

A. Coaches make better diagnoses
B. Teachers develop more expertise

A geeky thread:

↓ IMPORTANT

We're not saying that this is an accurate model of teaching...

(teaching is WAAY more complex than this)

...only that having a model, and one that is sufficiently simple and aligned to the evidence of how people learn, is more useful than not having one.