ABSTRACT
This stage of the lesson is where the most amount of learning by the students takes place. The students are now aware of where they are heading and what they will be learning. Sharing outcomes is key in helping the students to ‘buy in’ to the learning. As teachers, we feel more focused if we are told at the start of meetings or a training session what the main aim of the session will be and what information we should leave with. Therefore, if you have successfully set up the introduction to the lesson then this stage will be much easier to plan and share with the students. When planning this stage of the lesson, it might be helpful to ask ‘what will the students know when they leave the classroom that they didn’t know when they entered it?’ However, how are you going to present this information to the students? How long are the activities going to be? How are you going to know that they have learned anything from them? Are there some key questions that need to be answered? Do you need to share success criteria with the students? How are the students going to be grouped during the lesson? Outstanding teachers are able to plan for these areas but then facilitate the learning by adapting to the needs of the students as the lesson progresses. Outstanding teachers can ‘read’ a class and the level of engagement of the students. Listening to the noise level of students is a good indication of when an activity needs to be stopped or explained again. Outstanding teachers can hear the ‘key change’ as in a piece of music and use that as the sign that they need to intervene in some way. Equally, if there is no ‘key change’ then they know that the activity might need to be extended longer than they had originally planned as it is apparently more challenging than they had thought. Being a ‘lighthouse’ in the classroom and scanning the students is also another strategy that outstanding teachers use. Standing to one side of the classroom and looking at the students, observing what the class looks and sounds like when the students are engaged in learning is also an important part of being an outstanding teacher. It is too easy to think that intervening
with individual students is one of the key ways to ensure that learning is taking place. However, it can be just as important to stand back and scan the students and work out where your intervention might be best placed to help facilitate the learning for all students. Another strategy is to tell the students that you will not answer any questions for the first three minutes after you have set up a learning activity. This allows the students to filter their own problems and hopefully solve them. It also enables you to adopt the ‘lighthouse’ and see where the lack of a pen is hindering a student from starting their learning or to observe which student appears to have a genuine misunderstanding or challenge with the task. You are then able to place a few pens on the tables where they are needed and move swiftly to the students who clearly need assistance to start their learning. This kind of targeted intervention ensures that outstanding teachers use their time and give their expertise to those who need it to make progress.
