I think most teachers will have felt like this at some point in their career and may make some knee jerk changes to their practice, but how do we know what the best course of action will be? Perhaps you could think about undertaking a lesson study to see what impact one change will have on the class.
Peter Dudley defines lesson studies as ‘groups of teachers collaboratively planning, teaching, observing and analysing teaching and learning in “research lessons”...[with the aim to] innovate, or refine a pedagogical approach’ (Dudley, 2011). In Unleashing Great Teaching (Clay and Weston, 2018) we see an enquiry question based approach, “what is the impact of [evidence informed strategy] on [particular learning need] for [particular group of students]?”, an approach which allows the teacher to isolate one particular approach, to be applied in response to one particular need, for one group of students.
Reflecting on a lesson study undertaken previously with colleagues across both the music and English departments, there are many things I would do differently next time but it was still a very useful process and it did lead to an improvement in learning.
What was the study about?
Working in conjunction with the English department, our enquiry question was:
What impact will ‘planned oracy’ have on the academic articulation of ideas from middle-achieving boys?
Which students were targeted and why?
We targeted MAP boys as this was an area of focus across the whole school.
What was the area of focus and why?
We identified academic articulation of ideas as being an area of weakness across both music and English lessons and therefore focussed out interventions on this area. Boys across the school had been observed speaking colloquially in lessons and struggled to use academic language in both verbal and formal written answers,
What were the interventions?
We utilised mini whiteboards, thought stems and tier 2&3 word lists to help boys to organise their thoughts before verbalising answers.
How did you measure the impact of the interventions?
Impact was measured against a ‘planned oracy’ assessment grid which was created in line with the school assessment policy, making it easy for staff to administer.
Boys were assessed against these statements at the start of, during, and at the end of, the lesson study.
Boys were also asked to complete a questionnaire at the end of the lesson study, with teachers recording their observations throughout.
What did you discover?
We discovered a number of things, including:
- I went a little off-piste and ended up encouraging all students to improve their use of academic vocabulary in both written and verbal answers, not just my target group.
- All teachers reported an increase in the use of academic language by the target boys and a decrease in the use of hesitation words, although this wasn’t recognised by the boys in their reflections on the interventions.
- On a scale of 1-5, 3 was the most common answer given by the boys when rating their progress. Overall, the median score for the impact questionnaire was 3.5. Perhaps we should have asked the boys to answers a baseline questionnaire before we started the interventions.
- As music was taught on an arts carousel we only had 12 weeks with the target group. If I were to repeat this, I would do it across a longer period of time.
Have you undertaken a lesson study with your students? How did it go?
Tweet @teach_music_ldn and let me know!
References:
Clay, B and Weston, D. (2018) Unleashing Great Teaching. Routledge from https://victoriahughesed.school.blog/2019/12/25/a-professional-learning-focus
Dudley, P. (2011) Lesson Study: A Handbook, www.lessonstudy.co.uk
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