The Visualiser is Magic
You need to use it tomorrow.
Some Context
(Yes, I’m just telling you about myself, so maybe jump to the next heading)
When I trained as a primary school teacher, getting high on the purple of the banda machine was an occupational hazard and perk.
Life was simpler then. I drank Guinness, because I hated the taste, and it would take me all of Friday night to drink three pints. This was all my weekly budget would allow.
I did two years of a primary B.Ed course before deciding I was just too unsuited - impatient, irreverent, without any interest in being mothered by the many women in the staff room, and just incredulous that I couldn’t get the students to remember what I had taught them.
I jumped ship and went to university for two years to finish an English degree and, in a blind leap of faith and an effort to get a job in Swindon, where my girlfriend lived, I became a tax inspector. In my memory, I was the only candidate at the two day selection who had a BA from a redbrick university, but I made up for it with what I would like to call self belief and others might call cockiness. Anyway, I unexpectedly showed an aptitude, passed the psychological tests and joined up to a life of ever-increasing complexity in identifying fraud, unforeseen loop holes, relevant case law, book-keeping errors and slights of hand, and clues to hidden income and profits.
I tell you this so that you know, in many ways, I was an unnatural fit for teaching, which I leapt into, 4 years later, with no training and plenty of chutzpah. This was a fantastic blessing, because I knew that I knew nothing; my confidence was simply this: look at the effects of what you do on what the kids do.
What the kids do and don’t do will teach you how to be a better teacher.
Enter the Visualiser
I’ve written before about how brilliant the visualiser is for learning. You can make your instructions and examples absolutely clear. Students can see exactly what you want them to do, and how.
It is also a brilliant way to teach from students’ books - showing their skills and understanding, unpicking misconceptions - demonstrating live how to deal with these. Learning is so much quicker, because almost nothing is an abstract idea - it is something students can see evolving on the page.
But What if the Visualiser Was the Key to Behaviour for Learning?
All my teaching career I have got in my own way.
Many aspects of my personality are a great fit for teaching. When I applied for my first Assistant Head post, one question was: “What do the students at your current school think about you?”
“They call me a legend.” This was totally true. My tutor group called me Auntie.
(Online, I’m often called G.O.A.T.)
But I was way too fond of the provocative comment, and had a sense of humour which was sometimes insensitive. Building relationships with enthusiastic students was easy, and incredibly rewarding. I loved smart kids, and kids who didn’t think they were smart, but I could guide to top grades. I could take a second set and get as many A* grades out of them as the two top sets combined.
But what I really struggled with was disengaged students.
I’d try to be the adult in the room, suppressing my emotions, but beneath the calm exterior, my heart rate was going crazy (I wore a heart rate monitor one day, just to find out). My stomach would tighten. I’d apply the behaviour policy as calmly as I could. (It took me my first 15 years of teaching to stop reflecting that in the real world, a quick slap would do the trick - that was 19 years ago - I’m ok now).
But, on a bad day, especially after over 20 years of teaching, I’d think, why? Why am I bothering? Am I making any difference? Wouldn’t my class make twice the progress if 4 of these students never made it into the classroom? (The answer to that was yes, definitely, 100%).
Alternative Provision Might be the Best Place for Them - But the Visualiser Will Help You Because They are Coming to Your Class
I have no problem with Alternative Provision. But the SEND agenda is not driven by moral authority about inclusivity and equity, that is just the Trojan horse of cost cutting. SEND needs to be cheaper, so SEND is going to flood mainstream schools. Inclusion has nothing to do with opportunity, and everything to do with budgets.
At AP, students gaining a couple of grade 4s, and a few more grade 3s and 2s there would certainly have done no better in mainstream, while those with a handful of grade 2s might have got at best a couple of extra 3s in mainstream. They lose very little by being excluded. But their classmates lose dozens of grades 6s, 5s and 4s, if we keep them. And this is a kind of robbery - our tolerance and kindness to the few really, really harms the many.
Those AP kids, most of them, are going to stay put, in your classroom.
I could easily cope with 1 or 2 really disengaged and disruptive students in the class, but suddenly I was teaching in a school where some classes had many more. Post Covid, you might find the same is true in your school already.
Now that I am a school improvement partner, I’ve supported several special schools. I’ve helped train 15 special school head teachers to become school improvement partners, in each of the last 5 years. 75 of them have rubbed off on me.
My visits to APs reveal lovely students, by which I mean students who are lively and interesting, but who just have a lot of triggers which make them act out. They are brought back into the fold by brilliant personalities - teachers with patience and calm.
In many mainstream schools there are a dozen or more such students in a year group - they might act out in these ways once a day, or twice a week, instead of two or three times a day. They are AP adjacent kids. Or they navigate the behaviour policy by not swearing or storming out every lesson, but battling you over every other way they can disrupt learning, garner attention, or opt out with their heads on the desk or their hands on another student.
It is these students who benefit most from the visualiser.
Let me show you.
I ran an intervention, back in my old school, this year, as a favour. (By and large, I don’t agree with interventions). I was teaching groups of 4 -10 who were targeting grades 3 and 4, and who were currently achieving grades 1 and 2.
It is incredibly rare that I meet a student who is cognitively unable to get a grade 3, and not that common to find those who couldn’t get a grade 4. (Yes, I know about 30% get grades 3 and below).
Grades 1 and 2 are, for the most part, a choice.
So, here I was running an intervention. There was a geography trip on, so most were not here. Those who were had a study skills lesson - presumably a slot on their timetable where they had been removed from a GCSE option, no longer entered for their exam, and were ‘supervised’ while they ‘revised’ the core subjects. I’ll let you decide what the words in quotes might mean in context.
You can imagine how boys might feel, removed from this environment, to come and do English exam practice with me. Who was I, anyway?
I had only 5 of them, and it was the last lesson of the day. 3 were fuming. One was amenable. Another arrived with a pastoral mentor, looked at the fuming 3 and refused to enter.
There was some toing and froing as 3 of them came into the room, tried to escape, came back in, and then realised I was neither going to get angry, nor give in to their demands to go back to the study room.
I was completely calm and my heart rate was totally fine. No knot in the stomach. I had the visualiser.
Half way through, the head arrived to check on the study room. I called her in. She sat with one for two minutes, and then withdrew him. He had an EHCP I hadn’t seen. The head told me later that 2 of the remaining 3 were the worst behaved in the school. My impression was that they were AP kids who, in another school might have been ruthlessly excluded in year 9 or 10. This school believes in every child.
On the face of it, my approach might seem unwise. I am totally frank, blunt. One boy (let’s call him Frank) put his head on the desk and then started making ridiculous noises. His friend, (let’s call him Warren) who up to that point had become engaged, stopped working. This was the intention behind Frank’s noises.
It will probably astonish you to know I let them both sit together, and deliberately didn’t split them up. I was not here to control them. I was here to help them learn to improve by two grades.
I called both boys out, with humour. Frank laughed, lifted his head, picked up his pen to work. Then he suddenly realised I had disarmed him, felt conned, paced the room and then sat down at his desk, burying his head once more.
I ignored it. The one amenable student (let’s call him Andrew) was completing my tasks - each timed, each 1, 2 or 5 minutes long. Each time, his work went under the visualiser and got feedback. Each time he learned something new. Each time he got better.
I told Warren that I noticed he had been writing well, but stopped working because Frank had. He was outraged at this affront to his status - the implication that he was a Beta male led by Frank’s Alpha was too much for him. He started to swear. Frank joined in. The school’s behaviour policy meant I could instantly have them removed and ‘parked’.
But I ignored them completely, and continued to set new 1 to 5 minute tasks. Andrew continued to get instant feedback and success under the visualiser.
My final task was a 6 minute sprint - how much could they write, based on what they had learned? How many marks could they accumulate? That left us 4 minutes for feedback under the visualiser.
At this stage Frank and Warren couldn’t help themselves. The power of the visualiser was just too great.
They wanted the only attention I was offering - meaningful feedback.
Praise for actual success. Clear next steps. The chance to do better in short bursts.
They both wrote as fast as they could, knowing that their work would go under the visualiser, desperate for feedback about what they produced.
And that’s how the last 10 minutes played out. The last 10 minutes were perfect. Frank and Warren also produced work which was better than they had produced in their mocks.
The Point of the Anecdote
I’m not skilled at building relationships with students who are wasting everyone’s time. I am too old to care about their feelings. As a child I dealt with circumstances at least as challenging as theirs, so I have only a little empathy with them. I don’t need the work, so I have no motivation to be better.
The first 40 minutes were therefore a complete waste of time for Frank and Warren. Anyone observing these 40 minutes would have lots of opinions about my teaching and behaviour management.
Let them. They might be right, but it doesn’t matter.
Because the final 10 minutes would have blown them away. The final 10 minutes belonged to the power of the visualiser.
If you use the visualiser to critique students’ work every lesson, behaviour problems will disappear. Not always straight away, but always over time.
The visualiser is a genie who has suddenly been released from its lamp. It will grant you these 3 wishes:
explicit understanding,
faster student progress
and much better behaviour for learning.
The superpower of the visualiser is the one that trained me as a teacher: What the kids do and don’t do will teach you how to be a better teacher. What the kids do and don’t do is constantly visible under the visualiser. But it is also constantly improved by being critiqued under the visualiser.
If you aren’t using the visualiser several times every lesson, I’ll tell you what I told Frank. “Stop being an idiot”.
(No, I didn’t use the word ‘idiot’ - that wouldn’t have made him and Warren laugh).
If you want dozens of top tips in how to be a highly effective English teacher, I’m running a live, in person course. With a visualiser. Click on the image if you are interested.
Or you can read my written guide here:
