Updates

The Wavell School in Hampshire was visited by Ofsted on the 9th and 10th November 2021. They saw English on the first day and you can read the full report here.

Megan Hill is English KS3 Co-ordinator and Pastoral Assistant at Wavell School. She started teaching Let’s Think in English in 2015, is a regular attendee at the LTE Network meetings and is a member of the LTE Steering Group.

In the following blog post she reflects upon Ofsted feedback on Let’s Think in English, how LTE has supported students through post-Covid challenges and how student and teacher confidence were developed and sustained in the programme.

‘Let’s Think sessions help to develop pupils’ confidence to question, debate and reflect on the world around them’. (The Wavell Ofsted Report November 2021).

I can honestly say that this little gem was in the main, the result of our Ofsted Inspector’s discussions with students. I had talked about Let’s Think in my interview with her, amongst other areas such as curriculum intent and implementation, encouraging reading for pleasure and our Covid recovery programme, but she did not observe any Let’s Think lessons. She was very interested in our observation that our classes have not been afflicted with a common post-covid ailment – refusal to speak or participate in discussion in the classroom, and that we credit the students’ familiarity with Let’s Think and discussion-based learning as a reason for this. She was also interested in the wide range of texts used in Let’s Think and how these benefit students’ reading skills and their confidence with approaching unseen texts.
Students and the teachers that she spoke to must have confirmed what I told her as she saw fit to include this in her summing up. I credit their confidence and enthusiasm for Let’s Think as the result of the following factors:
• Metacognition of the ‘rules’ and ‘benefits’ of Let’s Think lessons as on-going each year i.e. what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how it will benefit the students themselves.
• Students like Let’s Think as they know the lesson is discussion based (they also like arguing and airing their opinions!).
• We run refresher training for staff and new staff every year, as well as monitoring the teaching of Let’s Think lessons across key stage 3 – this ensures equality of opportunity for all students (one Let’s Think lesson a fortnight) in terms of their Let’s Think lesson experience.
• We attend Let’s Think network events so we are up to speed with new lessons and pedagogy, which we disseminate across the Faculty via training sessions.
• We measure the impact of LTE through Student Questionnaires each year.
• SLT are very supportive of our LTE programme, and at their request we have also run a Let’s Think training session for staff during CPD sessions to allow staff to experience an LTE lesson for themselves and for us to explain the pedagogy and the pillars of LTE. This may have enabled staff to begin to use the open questioning style in other curriculum areas, so the style of Let’s Think teaching is familiar in areas across the school as well as being exemplified and led in English.

Let’s Think online? A conversation with Myfanwy Edwards
by Leah Crawford

Let’s Think is a classroom intervention whose powerful ticking engine lies in the social construction of understanding. The safe, meaning making community that we work so hard to develop over time, is built on carefully mediated dialogic exchanges. Yet we know there are dimensions of communication beyond the words spoken: body language, eye-contact, tones of voice, the positioning and creation of groups, the sharing of resources.

Even on the return to live teaching in school in September 2020 there were additional challenges to teaching Let’s Think with restrictions on the seating, grouping and movement of students and teacher. Michael Walsh, LTE lead tutor helpfully blogged about ways we might manage these restrictions here.

Some schools have understandably felt that Let’s Think lessons will be on pause for the early Spring Term whilst we are teaching remotely. So, when I read on the Twitter grapevine that Myfanwy Edwards, English Subject Leader at the new Richmond Upon Thames School in Twickenham, would be continuing to teach Let’s Think in English remotely, this small case study felt like something worth capturing for the whole LT community. It’s a work in progress, but Myfanwy and I captured the story so far via a Zoom interview at the end of January.

So Myfanwy, let’s just set this in context. How long had you been teaching Let’s Think before you moved to your current subject leader role?

I taught LTE for 4 years at my previous school. I felt lucky that there was a core of us who were really committed to the programme and to continued teacher development. We were in and out of each other’s classrooms, observing and reflecting and adapting practice. I think this helped me to establish some key principles that I still believe in.

So what were those principles?

For me, they are the principles on which all good teaching of English is based and actually, we used them as principles for planning and teaching in the rest of our curriculum. The importance of talk for collaborative meaning making is foremost: it didn’t take much persuasion for me to believe in this. It’s strange now looking back, I started Let’s Think with a Year 7 group that first year and I took them all the way through to Year 10. Although we did not use the KS4 lessons, they were so well versed in how to build meaning together, they understood that English is not individualistic or competitive and that they would benefit from building understanding together, that it was so easy by Year 10 to just set a group task or question and I knew they would make something from it.

Now having done more training with my new department, the aspect that I did not fully grasp the first time around was the discipline of the Reasoning Patterns: having just one conceptual focus for each lesson. For every rich text in English there are so many angles you could take, but a Let’s Think lesson takes a disciplined route through one concept, yet still gives room for students’ own route to understanding this. I like the way that the Concrete Preparation section lays the ground-work for this direction in thinking, and offers you ways you can use in other lessons. I think I’ve particularly learned how introducing the context or even the author does not have to be at the start or before reading a text, but can be woven in later to add a new dimension to thinking. I like that sometimes context and author are not introduced at all and that lack of resolution keeps thinking open and bridgeable to the next context, like in ‘By the Sea.’ So I think overall, I like the disciplined, structured plan, but with enough flexibility for students to make their own meaning.

Another school of thought is to ask students what is of interest to them, what they notice in a text and work with this. I think if this is used in tandem with Let’s Think, the students learn how to use the freedom. So just last term, my Year 7s having worked though The Bridge introductory lesson, were confident in working through who was to blame for a tragedy in their set text, because they had internalised the process. That’s the metacognition principle. It really works if you plan that disciplined training, then an opportunity to reapply.

So my next question Myfanwy was around your decision to ask Michael Walsh to train the whole of your new department in September 2020, even though it could not be a face to face development day and had to be remote training on Zoom. I can extrapolate from what you’ve said that it was about the importance of collaborative meaning making, the disciplined training of reasoning, the metacognition and bridging to reapply that thinking. But why did you not wait until the training could be in person?

It was linked to the lockdown.

Kids had been sitting alone in a room, maybe talking to siblings or friends on social media, but nothing like the disciplined collaborative meaning making we manage in class, say around a poem. We felt we needed to retrain the students and I wanted to give the staff in my new department the structures and development and confidence to manage this. Michael is great, too, he helps you enter the programme on all sorts of levels: the pure cognitive growth angle, the democratic principle, the nature of literary making meaning. I’m interested in what students have to say.

So the way we have taught The Tempest with Year 7 remotely has shown that they know how to ask good questions of a text without the need for us as teachers to front load all sorts of colonial context. In fact, the main contextualising I did was to imagine what it would be like to be in a shipwreck. Then we read the opening scenes and they needed no prompting to ask why Prospero feels it is his right to be ruler of the island and that saving Ariel doesn’t necessarily give him that right. It then felt like a natural development to move to questions of Colonialism and slavery.

So it sounds like you were already seeing an impact on Year 7 from teaching Let’s Think in that 2020 autumn term?

Absolutely. The exchange of prior knowledge is so much more noticeable in pure mixed ability classes. I’ve done some recordings where you can hear the ripple in the Vygotskian shared ZPD! But also how quick they have been to become more aware of how they are reading and can reapply a process.

Did you hear teachers talk about their practice shifting?

Yes, I have a teacher with 11 years experience, who asked if we could adapt the whole Year 10 poetry GCSE unit using the principles of Let’s Think, interleaving some of the GCSE lessons with anthology poems, like the George the Poet and Blake lesson on London. I wondered if a more experienced teacher might be harder to convince but that wasn’t the case because she was so encouraged by the level of interest and understanding in the students’ responses. Then there is my reading co-ordinator who is using Let’s Think as a lens through which to view her teaching of A Christmas Carol for her MA, again because of the quality and independence of responses.

So there was enthusiasm, there was quite swift influence on the curriculum and teaching beyond Key Stage 3. But teaching Let’s Think via remote live contexts presents a whole new challenge: what made you want to continue?

I think if anything having to teach online has sharpened all of our principles. What is really important to us and how can we ensure that that still happens online? So, we have a focused teaching and learning department meeting every fortnight online. So far, we have discussed: How can we incorporate Assessment for Learning? How can we enable collaboration? and How can we include personal response? There is no point in having principles if they go out of the window as soon as they are challenged. So one of the most important things has been keeping the idea of the ‘third turn’ – avoiding the closed shop of teacher initiation, student response and teacher feedback, but instead folding student response back in to the thinking and further responses of the whole group.

That’s hard in the chat box, I’ve found, particularly when some students don’t have a microphone or are in a context where they can’t unmute and say more about their answer.

It is, but we have worked on us using the chat box comments to summarise where their thinking is, to make links between what students have said ‘So, Louis seems to be saying something similar to Ashton there.’ Then asking ‘Do you agree or disagree with that shared point’. It’s not the same, but they are contributing and it gives the sense of a conversation and a communal effort. You can also offer provocative statements related to the question to open up the level of contribution. The London, Blake and George the Poet lesson worked particularly well with Year 10. It was easier to do online with the video link, so that I could set this as an independent task – a breather – in between. We said, go away then post in the chat what you think. And that level of contribution feels even more important at the moment for student well-being. The idea of moving straight to an analytical paragraph, on your own with a grid to scaffold doesn’t feel right, when we could be asking: What do you think and feel about this?

So let’s just pause here for people who might be reading this and thinking of trialling a Let’s Think lesson online. You have mapped one lesson across two, to give thinking and reflection time?

Yes, so the London lesson was across two lessons. I will give them a screen break to reflect, then return and there is a shared Google doc with the text broken into sections and the student names in groups next to a section of the text, so they can add their thoughts on that section and begin to respond to each other. And I can nominate one student in each group to get ready, come off mic and summarise the group’s thoughts from what has been typed into the shared document, just as we would in a classroom Let’s Think. Another of my colleagues encouraged and gave the students time to text, phone, or Snapchat before entering group thoughts. I think that’s the reason I would most encourage other teachers to try Let’s Think, is that you are encouraging, you are making the space in the school day, for students to talk to each other about something rich and share what they think.

So the idea of walking away, or writing reflections between lessons might even be facilitated with shared software. I have experimented with Google Jamboard (an electronic post-it board) and with Padlet – which is available to everyone – where students can respond to each other’s posts like a dialogue string.

The important thing is we are locked down but not locked in. Our teaching is based on asking questions that matter and listening with genuine interest to the responses and using those to frame the next question. What’s interesting is that lockdown teaching has opened up another skill, if you like, of sharing and drafting more informal written responses in an exchange. Some students are actually more willing to do this than they are to talk. The interesting thing is going to be how confident they will be to talk with the same elaboration that they have in writing. I imagine it will take us some time to find that confidence again.

Yes, I think in post lockdown Autumn 2020, at least where I teach, we had more prevalence of extremes than we would normally. We had students who found it hard to ‘unmute’ and those who were overexcited by the communal context for learning again and offered too much too soon, without thinking. Is there anything else we should be mindful of as a difference teaching Let’s Think online?

Spoken interaction is multi-modal – not all responses are verbalised, we read body language and gestures. And when students do unmute to the whole class online, we hear everything they say and so do other classmates, so that small group drafting of ideas in a safe, small forum has been lost. We are simulating some sense of social construction, but it is different. I’m actually hoping that some of the elaboration I’ve had in informal writing will translate to greater confidence in writing in class. I think there may be some benefits. I even wonder if some will have thought harder about this poem I’ve put in front of them in a room at home with nothing else to think about than they would at school with all sorts of distractions.

There could be some silver linings…

In Let’s Think in English (LTE) we support teachers to review their practise providing recommendations for them to trial and reflect upon while teaching our lessons. Without doubt the recommendation that creates the greatest emotional response is adopting a neutral stance in LTE lessons and avoiding explicit praise. This is met with immediate cries of “I don’t think I could do that” or quizzical looks. Yet many teachers conclude the course seeing the virtues of neutrality and start to consider more carefully when and how to use praise in the classroom.

Pause to consider praise

I think it is fair to say in general teachers believe praise has a positive effect on children. We tend to praise pupils’ accomplishments and believe this will act as a boost to their motivation and self-esteem therefore leading to further accomplishments. We use praise to draw attention to a behaviour or process we wish to encourage.

However our intention when praising and the consequence of the praise can be quite different. Praise is not a simple one-way transaction. It is a complex social communication where the recipient’s role is as important as the giver. As Alfie Kohn suggests in his article “Criticizing (common criticisms) of praise” (2012):

“Praise is a verbal reward, often doled out in an effort to change someone’s behavior, typically someone with less power. More to the point, it’s likely to be experienced as controlling regardless of the praiser’s intention.”

Consider when another has praised your efforts or accomplishment but left you feeling cold. Why might that be? One reason may be due to the how fitting the praise provided is. Was the last response you offered really “brilliant”? If not, the praise is unlikely to have the desired motivating effect and may cause you to doubt the authenticity of the giver. The Sutton Trust’s 2014 report: “What makes great teaching?” highlighted the following as an ineffective:

“Praise for students may be seen as affirming and positive, but a number of studies suggest that the wrong kinds of praise can be very harmful to learning. For example, Dweck (1999), Hattie & Timperley (2007). “

Stipek (2010) argues that praise that is meant to be encouraging and protective of low attaining students actually conveys a message of the teacher’s low expectations. Children whose failure was responded to with sympathy were more likely to attribute their failure to lack of ability than those who faced criticism. As Stipek explained:

“Praise for successful performance on an easy task can be interpreted by a student as evidence that the teacher has a low perception of his or her ability. As a consequence, it can actually lower rather than enhance self-confidence. Criticism following poor performance can, under some circumstances, be interpreted as an indication of the teacher’s high perception of the student’s ability.”

It’s a term I use in almost every blog post but praise has to be used judiciously and with all research findings we need to give teachers the support and time to consider the implications in their setting with their pupils. Praise should provide specific feedback on learning goals rather than hyperbolic general praise like “brilliant”. Arguments against generic indiscriminate praise was raised by Carol Dweck (2007) in her article “The Perils and Promises of Praise”:

“The wrong kind of praise creates self-defeating behavior. The right kind motivates students to learn.”

Let’s Think in English and the neutral classroom

The explicit intent of Let’s Think lessons is to develop pupils’ thinking processes initially in a specific domain. In LTE we seek to develop pupils’ cognition when reading texts. When we started the programme and considered how best to teach the lessons the role of praise didn’t feature. In fact, Laurie Smith and I along with the teachers from the early research/development group in 2009 would use praise freely.

However when observing LTE lessons we started to notice a number of issues. Firstly, pupils explicitly sought praise from their teacher; they were trying to guess what was in the teachers’ mind so they would be rewarded whereas our interest lay in hearing and assessing the pupils’ own thoughts rather than their attempts to please their teacher. We felt pupils’ thoughts were valuable and should be shared freely.

Secondly, when teachers praised a pupil’s answer it frequently stopped their line of argument with the pupil seeing no gain in elaborating or developing their point further. The praise was seen as the end of the learning journey; a final destination reached. Furthermore we started to realise pupils with opposing or different thoughts would usually drop their idea once the teacher praised an idea especially if the pupil being praised was viewed as high attaining.

We started to experiment with a more neutral response to student responses. In effect we would respond to pupils by asking them to tell us more seeking elaboration or ask other pupils for their views. A common response to pupil contributions was to thank them rather than explicitly evaluate their responses.

This is not to say we weren’t evaluating their responses. We were continually evaluating responses but internally rather than verbalising immediate judgements. Instead of using praise to give validity to the “correct” response we would pause and consider “rich” responses instead. The “rich” response would be the response that would help the class better understand the text. We didn’t praise this response but we would slow the class down to pay greater attention to it by saying: “Let’s consider what X said” or “Go back to your groups do you agree with what X said, can you add to it?”. Where overt praise had led to a termination of further discussion, the nudge to elaborate and consider a response gave momentum to further thought and discussion.

We noticed a very quick change in the classroom once praise and judgement were removed. Pupils start to feel liberated and would offer their point of view without fear of being wrong. In fact, it led to an interesting change in the classroom dynamic where lower attaining pupils started to challenge the ideas of the perceived higher attainers. Once more it may be helpful to point out we didn’t claim there were no right or wrong responses in our lessons, we were clear there were likely to better responses. However, we emphasised that all responses would lead us to understand the text better even if we decided as the lesson progressed that some ideas were not “reasonable” and so removed them from further consideration.

Another consequence of removing praise was it encouraged critical evaluation of the thoughts shared. Once pupils adjusted to the removal of explicit praise from their teacher they started to engage with the points shared. It appeared teacher praise supported passive listening whereas now pupils had to listen more carefully as they would be asked their opinion on their peers’ point of view. Importantly pupils would still receive feedback but it was no longer judgemental but rather either supportive “I/we agree with” or “ I’d like to build upon..” or indeed challenging “ We think differently to …” “I’d like to challenge..”.

We know caring, supportive student-teacher relationships are linked to better school performance and engagement, greater emotional regulation, social competence, and willingness to take on challenges (Osher et al., 2018) . However removing praise doesn’t mean the classroom is less supportive in fact we’d argue it becomes more supportive as a community of enquiry is developed. We would end LTE lessons by asking pupils in their groups to decide: “Which contribution(s) helped you to understand the text best today and why?”

I’ll always recall when modelling a lesson, asking a Year 2 class in Rochdale the same question and a number of the pupils identifying a particular girl’s responses to the text as being helpful. The girl in question looked delighted with the feedback. At the end of the lesson I asked the class teacher her thoughts on the lesson she has observed. The teacher focused on the girl and explained she had very low self-esteem and had never seen her so buoyed at the end of a lesson. The power of pupil testimonies lies in their authenticity and the ease with which the intent can be understood. Removing praise from LTE developed pupil efficacy, led to greater critical evaluation and placed pupils closer to the text; they no longer sought praise as a means to an end but grew in confidence willing to share their thoughts.

As Alfie Kohn explains:

“Value judgments aside, though, praise has very real and unfortunate effects — again, just like other types of rewards. … The effect of a “Good job!” is to devalue the activity itself — reading, drawing, helping — which comes to be seen as a mere means to an end, the end being to receive that expression of approval. If approval isn’t forthcoming next time, the desire to read, draw, or help is likely to diminish. Praise isn’t feedback (which is purely informational); it’s a judgment — and positive judgments are ultimately no more constructive than negative ones.”

Let’s Think in English in Lockdown

By Leah Crawford

This blog grew out of a short email exchange with a very experienced KS2 English leader and teacher of Let’s Think, Tom Leigh, who works at Fryern Junior School in Hampshire.

Tom contacted me and a few other Let’s Think teachers in the Hampshire network to ask if we were teaching LTE to children in ‘bubbles’ back at school and how it was going.  He admitted he was finding it just did not have the same momentum as teaching a full class who can sit in small groups and in close proximity.  A few email exchanges, and a few weeks later, Tom came back having taught the lesson ‘Feathers’, to his Year 6 bubble and been deeply moved by the experience.  Luckily, he had recorded and transcribed the session, so that I could in some way relive what had happened.

I could tell Tom had a deep tale to tell, so we arranged to do an informal interview on Zoom to catch up and reflect together.

We talked about a particular upper KS2 Let’s Think lesson based on the short stop-motion film ‘Feathers.’  If you don’t know it – you might wish to follow the link and watch it before reading the blog.

Link to Feathers

So Tom, you’ve been back in school since the return of year 6, teaching a bubble of between 8-10 children?

Yes, I mean, even further back, when we went into lockdown lots of us felt a kind of release of stress and workload.  Someone in school told me their stress headaches had stopped, there were people saying how they’d managed to get back a work-life balance.  Then by the time we could get back in school with children, there was a feeling for some that it was a nicer pace, quieter.  But I found it really difficult.  It didn’t feel like we were doing anything that mattered.  In year 6 particularly perhaps, we were going back and consolidating skills already taught.  We found they really had remembered everything.  We had been really successful in consolidating the curriculum.  I had been looking forward to getting back to teaching but there was no buzz, lots of task completion, but without interaction it wasn’t real learning. The children have been more pleased to see each other, rather than excited about their learning.  I’ve realised how favourable a normal class size is.

Perhaps this reflects what the children had been asked to do in Lockdown, but they were happiest when they were given short inputs then asked to get on with something, rather than you as teacher leading and mediating them through a learning process.

Is this just you, Tom?

No I’ve been asking the team for reflections on being back at school and they all feel learning has become too teacher led, probably linked to the fact that there is less pupil to pupil talk.  It’s not just Let’s Think, but teaching reading and the initial stages of writing when your aim is for children to generate ideas in their own mind through interactions.

So when you contacted the group you had tried how many Let’s Think lessons?

Just one, but as I say, any English lesson that relied on the generation of ideas through talk  just felt flat.   Responses were short and there was little exchange across the group.

So why wasn’t it working?

We rely so much on the initial sharing and drafting of ideas being in a small group.  I could not sit them in small groups in close proximity – we could only try to share some ideas in pairs two metres apart.  There is an anonymity in belonging to a small group compared to sharing with a whole group.  The small group rehearsal and shaping of ideas builds confidence that they have something to say and something that has been tested out, built upon and is worth sharing.  In the bubble, all those little, tentative conversations can be heard by everybody.  They start to talk, then realise the whole group is listening in.  So it ended up with me trying to tease out each child’s thinking and drive it forward when they weren’t really ready to make ideas public yet.

So if we reflect more widely about what matters in Let’s Think, it’s that space for safe oral drafting of ideas.  I need to share an incomplete thought aloud to realise what I think and to shape it.

Yes – but also it not being only their thought.  A collection of thinking has already happened before it goes public which makes it safer to share.  In a group of 9 or 10 a thought is only what I am saying, it is my opinion and it’s more risky to share that.

I suppose what you’re saying is that the benefit of the small group is that the initial feedback comes from peers and does not have to come from the teacher.

 Yes, but not just the testing of a thought but how children often only share the beginnings of a thought, which grows through their interaction.  So often in Let’s Think, they are teetering on the edge of understanding what they are trying to say.  That’s what’s so great when you transcribe it because you can see the cyclical way in which their thinking develops over several interactions, and they’re getting so close to what they think they mean.

I think also, my favourite thing is to do with the slow reveal of texts in Let’s Think, the gradual building of understanding, a moment of reveal and then that moment of gasps and thick silence and stillness.  Then you ask a question and you hear this boom of talk and buzz.

And that really wasn’t happening.  They were too tentative, too uncertain.  You could see them thinking ‘Who’s listening and who can I turn to…’ – they’re set out in this grid in the classroom.

So this was the point you contacted me and a few others to see if we had any ideas on how to make the best of a situation we can’t change.  What changes did you decide to make when you taught ‘Feathers’?

I thought it best just to try a few things at a time.  So the first thing was to select those pupils who I knew were being most affected by the lack of a small group feedback, move towards them and act like their peer group to help them build an idea.  The other thing was through the lesson to cue in those ideas I knew they had said to me, that I knew could go somewhere if the group got hold of them, but the pupil would not think to offer to the group.  I normally don’t have to be so active in this process.  The other change was one of the suggestions you made which was to encourage the group to consider the lines of enquiry that had emerged so far and evaluate them.  Normally, this happens quite naturally, the best lines of enquiry are usually the ones that most children want to talk about, but with the smaller group it seemed like we were more easily going down a less interesting or valid path.

Yes – there was an example of them thinking the evil doctor wanted to turn her into a bird rather than to ‘cure’ her in some way.

 And that made me think about Let’s Think teacher training and how important it is to have mapped out purposeful pathways in the questions, or you can get real momentum in the dialogue and interest but it’s really not a purposeful line of enquiry.

I know we had wondered together whether some written sketch notes of ideas on whiteboards might help the ‘drafting’ and I was going to try that next but wanted to resist it as much as possible, because I know once they commit and write something down it becomes harder to redraft and rethink.

That’s really helpful.  So perhaps for all of us from September, when we are reconnecting groups with each other through Let’s Think, we might need to do a bit more work to scaffold the development of ideas like a peer, to cue in ideas with promise and to provide summaries as a springboard to the next phase if the group is losing the thread.

 Yes, so a good example in the transcript is a student, student S who is not a high attainer, he is not confident to share ideas and can be quite poorly behaved.  He asked me, it seemed to be just out of the blue ‘How old do you have to be to go on social media?’  And I could hear in that he was on to something about the girl’s age, and another boy next to him – 2 metres away from him – they started talking about being 18 and being a teenager.  At that point, in their minds I’m not sure the link with the meaning of the film was clear but something important was emerging.  So I could cue that in when the evil doctor theory was taking over:

Teacher:

So I cued them in to watch the rest of the film summarising what they had agreed: that the Mum seemed worried about her turning in to a bird and wanted the doctor to do something about this, and that her being a teenager might be important but we weren’t too sure why yet.

There was open jubilation when the girl spreads her wings and flies and as the film finished a beautiful collective pause for breath and silence.

I asked them to consider the final two questions:

At what point the girl is free?

and

What do you think the message of the film might be?

You can see I could barely speak at the end, they had just stopped me in my tracks: what they were thinking and saying was so moving.  This was the first time the mixed ability of pupils in the room were supporting each other.  You don’t want the K’s of this world to say too much too soon – but she was picking up on S and N’s comments and taking them further.

And I realised I literally had been pretty miserable teaching in school.  Then I taught Feathers and I thought this is what I’ve missed and this is why I’m a teacher at all, because, I was feeling like the children were changing and I was giving them something of value that would help them in the future.  You’re creating ways of thinking that are so transferrable, not just in education but in life.

Does this mean anything needs to change next year, Tom?

Retaining the dialogic method in reading, writing, maths is going to be harder but so vital.  We won’t be teaching in bubbles, but there will be restrictions on seating arrangements and on pupil movement.  The pupils also will need to be supported to connect with each other and to experience again how they need each other to think more deeply.  This idea of the catch-up curriculum could be reduced to prioritising a list of objectives and focusing down on those and this could lower expectations.  But if I think about what we’ve been doing since the need for test preparation disappeared: the skills are all still there of clarifying, monitoring, inferring, but we’re getting much deeper inspiration from the text to think and to write.  So that’s my reflection for the summer is how to keep the richness and buoyancy and teach skills through this and not go back to tick-boxing.

And I think we need to reflect on the speed in which the world was able to change itself in Lockdown.  So when we know change is necessary, there’s always the cry of,  ‘Oh this is just the way it is…’ Well, you can’t make that argument anymore.  You’ve just got to be open minded to it.  I sent out a few sort email prompts to the staff here on what it’s been like to teach English in Lockdown and it was amazing – I got pages and pages back – teachers deeply thinking about what they are doing and why.  We just don’t do it enough.  I want staff meetings to be about reflections.

Tom I think so many teachers in all phases will feel some resonance with what you’ve been saying here.  If we don’t use a crisis to reflect and reset, then what have we gone through this for?