“The irony of life is that it is lived forward but understood backward.” Soren Kierkegaard
It is true, we experiment, we guess, we hypothesize, but ultimately we learn through our mistakes, reflections and experiences. As teachers reflective practice is incredibly valuable but we must think about the future by asking ourselves ‘so what?’ in order to make best use of our reflections and attempt to ‘understand forward’ as much as is possible.
Following on from my cluster’s professional learning focus last year on visible learning and teaching in reading, I identified that I had elements of visible learning and teaching that were having a positive impact within my classroom but in order to achieve strong visible learning and teaching I had to re-think how I planned and delivered my lessons. Now, I attempt to focus more time on the thinking of ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘what if’ during planning, teaching and learning rather than just delivering teaching and providing feedback. The feedback I get from pupils is more positive when lessons are delivered in this way as they find them more engaging and enjoyable and also feel a sense of accomplishment as they are aware of what they have learnt, why they have learnt it, how well they have done and what they need to do in order to improve. With this deeper learning I observe that the pupils are able to apply this learning to other contexts and challenges and the language they use around this is more confident and succinct.
From further reflections after reading about the work of Hattie and Loughran I have identified 3 bits of learning to take forward –
- The time spent on visible learning and teaching is valuable and although I am constantly tempted to skip the discussion time in order to keep up with expectations of pace of work set by my school, I need to remember that the pace of work is not worth anything without visible learning and teaching, as the learning will end up being re-visited at another point.
- I am more confident with visible learning in literacy and social studies curricular areas and need to start applying this thinking to learning and teaching in numeracy and science. I plan to read work from ‘Jo Boaler’ to support this.
- I need to use the skills of the pupils in providing feedback to one another as the feedback will be useful in itself but the act of providing real, evidenced feedback will make learning more visible for the pupils.