To MWB or not to MWB?
This post is prompted by some great educationalists. On the one hand Phil Beadle, on the other David Didau, the OGs of English teaching bloggers.
And as a kind of referee we have Adam Boxer, science teacher and leader of CPD.
Phil Beadle says this:
In truth, I can see the point of them in empirical subjects perhaps, in the realms of yes and no, in the area of the unassailably correct and incorrect answer. But there’s not much point of them in English. English is quite an abstract subject. There’s rules and stuff, but the investigating moral ideas through speech, reading and writing doesn’t lend itself comfortably to the single word answer, to the yes or to the no. Our assessment of students is enormously fluid and sometimes quite an informal process. We listen for skills of articulation, mark books; sometimes we’ll get them to read things out. There are correct and incorrect answers, things that are right and are wrong, but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the quality of the language that we use to investigate ideas that really counts, and this is best if it comes in extended form. Mini white boards are too small for this.
David Didau says this:
They are, in my view, the most effective mechanism I have access to that can ensure all students are both participating in an activity and held to account for the quality of their participation. Because I can both see that all students are writing as well as being able to very rapidly see what they are writing, I can intervene as appropriate in the most responsive manner possible. If you want to check students’ recall of a fact or understanding of a concept, asking them to write the essence of it on their MWB is, I’d argue, much more useful than asking them to write it in their book. Equally, if I’ve asked all students to practise writing a particular sentence form I’ve just taught them, I could wander round and look at each of their books and spend a few moments with everyone who’d gone wrong to correct them or, in the same time, I could get through three or four examples with the whole class.
They expose all students’ thinking. If I pose a hinge question which I need to be sure all students understand before moving on I would typically set this as a multiple-choice questions where, ideally, the distractors exposed predictable misconceptions. This allows me to post the question and ask students to write down A, B or C on their MWBs. This enables me to scan the room and see at a glance whether an individual requires some bespoke remediation or that whole sections of the class are dangerously wrongheaded. There are other, arguably better ways of doing this (such as Plickers perhaps) but these come with other costs and fewer advantages.
When I pose a question which I intend to cold call students, allowing them time to commit a tentative answer, or at least a few thoughts, on their MWB increases the likelihood that all students will be able to give an answer. I’d recommend doing this in the Think stage of Think – Pair – Share: give students 30 seconds to jot down an idea before then telling their partner. I’ve found this seems to really support the quality and sophistication of verbal responses.
Adam Boxer says this:
As an aside, my list of things that can more easily work anywhere is long, but includes things like
MWBs
Name at end questioning
Lesson start routines
Centralised behaviour policies
Banning phones
Blank Canvas modelling
Phil is a fantastic teacher. I used to watch him on Teacher’s TV before Gove blew it up. You can easily imagine his students are highly engaged. But I have no idea about his progress 8. I’ve never watched David teach, and likewise I have no idea about his progress 8.
Adam Boxer teaches science in an extraordinary school. I agree with everything else in his list. Totteridge Academy is ranked first among its 50 comparator schools and (this is very rare) has been ranked there for the last 3 years. P8 of 1.32. That should swing my vote.
But the science progress 8 (1.11) lags significantly behind English (1.59) and maths (1.53), and significantly behind the whole school progress 8. Why is this important? The best measure of the impact of school culture on progress is the school progress 8. To put it in simple terms, the harder students work, the longer this lasts in the lesson, the higher their progress. The more routine and centralised the behaviour policy, the curriculum, the styles of teaching, the easier it is to help or make students achieve great results. So Adam’s advice is potentially brilliant, but also potentially wrong. Also, you know, not an English teacher.
I watch a lot of science lessons. Would I say that the MWB would work brilliantly in science? Yes, I’m with Phil on this. There are many threshold concepts in science - mass v weight, speed vs acceleration, you get the idea. But mostly I’m with Adam, because Adam is a science teacher in an incredible school.
When I led English teams, their progress always exceeded the school’s P8 or value added (indeed it usually exceeded that of every other department in the school) and my own value added nearly always exceeded the other teachers in the department.
Since then, I’ve become much more intentional about what I teach, and how the curriculum should be organised so that students make the greatest progress. I’m literally obsessed with progress. (When I work as a school improvement partner, or support and challenge partner, I measure my impact in improved progress 8 to see if I am doing a good job).
For my teaching, I want to show students that English is awesome, and that they too can be awesome - it is just playing with brilliant ideas and rejoicing in the awesomeness of words in ways which are not just awesomely American, like this sentence, but also fecund and flirtatious like a sultry Labrador on heat and galloping across the South Downs.
But the other part, perhaps sadly, is exam readiness. If I had to simplify the English curriculum I’d do it like this:
Make your students brilliant, or at least engaged and creative writers. Give them fascinating and challenging texts about which they can argue, write and think in depth, as though there were no GCSE and you just had a moral purpose to make students flourish. And then, from January of year 10, show them how to conquer the exams in the most efficient, playful and enriching ways possible.
What that would look like is a series of other posts, or indeed a coaching course on how to teach English.
But, what place in this for the MWB?
Without P8 to guide my thinking, I have to resort to logic (which for any teacher is a justification for ‘I do it this way, so it must be right’) - so I will proceed with caution, looking at it from every angle.
I’ve never seen a maths lesson which couldn’t be more efficient with MWBs. Every concept is a threshold concept. Any question can turn out to be a hinge question for at least one student in the class. But that is as far as I can go. For English? No.
Let me deal with David Didau’s advantages:
Why the Visualiser and Cold Call Surpass MWBs
They are, in my view, the most effective mechanism I have access to that can ensure all students are both participating in an activity and held to account for the quality of their participation. Because I can both see that all students are writing as well as being able to very rapidly see what they are writing, I can intervene as appropriate in the most responsive manner possible. If you want to check students’ recall of a fact or understanding of a concept, asking them to write the essence of it on their MWB is, I’d argue, much more useful than asking them to write it in their book.
Checking for Facts
Checking for facts is much faster with cold call. No one copies their neighbour in cold call.
If I have prepared my factual questions, because this is a part of my planned retrieval curriculum, I’ll ask the questions orally. In ten minutes I can ask the same 15 questions three times if I choose. I’ll do this if I expect a high error rate, because the spacing of retrieval is long.
But equally, I have time for 20 questions done twice, or 45 questions about recent knowledge, ‘peppering’ the class.
Identifying a lack of knowledge with MWBs and then retesting it is slow. Orally, I’ll cover many more questions, many more times, to match the spacings of my retrieval curriculum.
What will I do for gaps in knowledge? Research (the testing effect) suggests reteaching this is pointless. Just ask the question again and force the retrieval. Orally is simply more agile, and covers more ground.
Students will think hard and commit to answers because they know my selection is random, so it could always be them. It is habitual.
Checking for Understanding
Daniel Willingham tells us that “understanding is remembering in disguise”. So cold call questioning is still going to test understanding.
However, there are many times in English where understanding needs to be tested in sentences.
I’ll use all my examples in this post from An Inspector Calls. Here is an ‘understanding’ question:
Why does Priestley begin with Gerald’s engagement to Sheila?
Students might answer:
To place patriarchy before capitalism, showing that the power dynamics controlling women are even more damaging than the power dynamics controlling wealth.
To focus on female victims, because his audience who are going to vote for change will be overwhelmingly female – the males not yet having been demobbed.
To show how financial power automatically leads to sexual exploitation.
To show how even upper class women are oppressed by patriarchal power of rich men.
To characterise upper class men and women as living by amoral codes, in contrast to the moral code of the working classes, like Eva and the Inspector.
Students won’t articulate these ideas quickly in writing. I’ll have to build them through talk:
Think, pair, share
Turn and talk
Formal Debate
Class discussion
To stop these being ephemeral, I will also have to teach note taking. I’ll model this repeatedly, taking notes myself live under the visualiser from the student talk. Then cold calling students’ note taking in different parts of the talk.
These notes are not end products. They are brief but organised. Their sole purpose is to trigger the writing students will do next.
Once we have covered what I need them to think hard about, we stop the talk and the note-taking.
Now students have to write. This writing is not ephemeral, and must be in books. So, students write.
I can guide that writing: “use all your notes, but in particular make sure you include these words ‘patriarchal society’, ‘capitalism’, ‘discredit’, ‘exploitation’.”
They know, because this routine is constant, that whenever they write, some students will be selected at random to go under the visualiser.
This raises their game. Answering on a MWB does not compel a student to do their best. It asks for compliance, not excellence. Because the writing in books is likely (in their minds) to be displayed, they will bring their A game.
I can critique the writing itself with whatever success criteria I choose. But I can also critique the note-taking, and how well the student has organised this to transfer into that writing. This will improve future discussions and future note taking. We can then refer back to it in books when we repeat the process with other talk or discussion.
The MWB makes that critique much harder, and if the final writing is on the MWB, that too is lost.
Understanding of Sentence and Grammar
Too little time and thought goes into the teaching of crafting accurate, precise and impactful sentences.
If you want proof of this, look at how poorly most students use commas, and how they splice more frequently than a gardener at Kew. Conversely, if students understood exactly how to use commas, the placement of brackets, semi-colons and colons would need no new understanding. These occur instead of a comma or, in some cases of the colon, a full stop.
There is a strong case for using MWB to test this understanding. There is also no benefit in keeping the students’ attempts in books.
But writing is also incredibly slow.
If I am teaching from booklets (and yes, I am always teaching from booklets) I have anticipated that students will always have issues with commas. So, I plan a progression of punctuation activities teaching and testing comma usage. These can be separate, or as a complement to current learning.
An Inspector Calls Example
Where will you put the commas in these 3 sentences?
1. The Inspector may be a supernatural presence which is implied both by his name Goole and by the words which apparently summon him “a man has to mind his own business”.
2. Because Gerald has a key to his friend’s “nice little set of rooms” we can infer that he has gone to the Palace Bar to seek out a likely mistress or failing that a prostitute who is not yet cynically “dough faced” which we can also infer was the unspoken patriarchal agreement in the gift of the key in the first place.
3. Sheila having learned the Inspector’s lessons cannot accept her parents’ complacency and castigates them “it frightens me the way you talk”.
(These are more complex examples, and simpler ones would be used while progressively building confidence in comma use.)
But I present these because I also want to show the extra benefit of the booklet – these sentences teach higher levels of understanding of the text. I cannot afford for these to be ephemeral.
If working from MWBs, few teachers will bother which such detailed sentences – they will simply take too long to justify writing, and it will take longer to teach these higher level concepts.
How will I check for understanding? I’ll question from the visualiser – pick students at random – ‘where does the first comma go?’ ‘Tell me why’. Students will constantly compare this to their own answers. We are just wired that way.
How will I check learning and thinking hard? I’ll have room in the booklet for students to record their subsequent thinking: ‘what have you learned about commas that you did not know before? What questions do you still have about when to use a comma?’
They expose all students’ thinking. If I pose a hinge question which I need to be sure all students understand before moving on I would typically set this as a multiple-choice questions where, ideally, the distractors exposed predictable misconceptions. This allows me to post the question and ask students to write down A, B or C on their MWBs. This enables me to scan the room and see at a glance whether an individual requires some bespoke remediation or that whole sections of the class are dangerously wrongheaded. There are other, arguably better ways of doing this (such as Plickers perhaps) but these come with other costs and fewer advantages.
This is an excellent use of MWBs. But I have an issue with hinge questions. My understanding of a hinge question is that, without this knowledge and understanding, future understanding will be compromised. Worthwhile examples are hard to identify.
The use of commas above definitely qualifies as a set of hinge questions.
I could present them as shorter sentences, with commas in different places, in options A, B and C, as Didau might.
But having these pre-prepared in the booklet is even more efficient, as is the thinking space for them to record what they have learned or are still confused by. (By the way, it also means all my teachers will be equally proficient, as they will all be using the same booklet).
A similar process will also happen with hinge questions about figurative language – which of these is not a metaphor? – which of these is sibilance? – and so on. But again, having these in a booklet to refer back to will be way more useful.
If I’m delving into parts of speech – ‘which of these is a verb?’ is much less useful than:
Underline the three verbs in this writing.
Write 3 new verbs which are more informative.
Change 3 verbs so that the character becomes a negative rather than a positive character.
Underline 3 adverbs. Replace them with better verbs.
All of this is quicker and at a more advanced level if it is already in my booklet. Which of course will go under the visualiser.
Hinge Question from An Inspector Calls
It is difficult to pick a hinge question about a literature text – all quotes are potentially crucial, depending on the interpretations we bring to them.
The one area which is a level of understanding which determines grades is the thesis statement.
‘Write me a three-part thesis statement which focuses on Priestley’s ideas’.
Students need to know that there should be 3 ideas. They should pick ideas which are relevant to most questions. They might sequence these from the obvious – capitalism, class, to less obvious, patriarchal and/or Christian. They should know that ‘society’ is a non-negotiable Brucie Bonus word I expect in every thesis statement.
Will I require this in books? Of course. Both so students can correct their errors, and also so that they, and I, can see a visual progression over time.
I’ll also teach better by unpicking any errors under the visualiser – far easier with a booklet or exercise book than with a MWB.
When I pose a question which I intend to cold call students, allowing them time to commit a tentative answer, or at least a few thoughts, on their MWB increases the likelihood that all students will be able to give an answer. I’d recommend doing this in the Think stage of Think – Pair – Share: give students 30 seconds to jot down an idea before then telling their partner. I’ve found this seems to really support the quality and sophistication of verbal responses.
This is absolutely true. This is the sole use (or at least the main use) I can see for ephemeral writing.
Would I use MWBs just for this? No. This is why my classroom is always stacked with spare paper – the pages of unfinished exercise books, the detritus from the photocopying machines which litter the school, all beautifully guillotined to give it status and shape – even my ephemeral stuff looks purposeful.
If you are interested in creating a curriculum which combines joy and mastery, or in becoming an English teacher whose students make great progress, contact me. I’m developing an online coaching course for a small group.
Just send me a message:
Great read.