Growth Mindset

These posters are a great way of reminding my students about growth mindset concepts. I have had these ( and a few more) up around the room and each week we have take one and looked at what it might mean. The students have loved discussing about 'Growth Mindset' and the clips on ClassDojo are great to consolidate these ideas for students. 

As a teacher you always get 'warm fuzzy' when you hear students talking to others and discussing these Growth Mindsets and re-phrasing their wording! 

Writing inquiry - Week 1 examples

Examples of my students writing.

Students were given the screen shot and watched the animation again. Also included was a range of vocabulary which students were encouraged to use in their own writing.

Students took part in shared writing and then were asked to go and write their own opening. Students were supported and guided when needed.

Year 4 student

Year 3 Student

They say the question is critical.

This term I have had to embark on this based around writing.

My head is full of wonderings. I can't say ideas as I feel I don't have anything concrete at all to even justify as an inquiry question.

The hurdle started when our advisor for the school asked me a number of question about what I do in class for writing. Everything she was asking me - I  already was doing and with success! I felt no closer to an idea and a little disheartened.

Everyone around me seemed to be coming up or developing questions and I began to feel  I was making the task harder than it was.

My main issues is I already reflect a lot about my own teaching and how this impacts the students I am teaching. Having just had my appraisal I have had a lot of food for thought and have been thinking a lot about how my teaching and learning has changed so much since moving to year 3 and 4.

This term, I have (nearly) a whole new writing group most are students who have yet to meet national standards therefore are a great target group for a teacher inquiry! Like maths I am working with levels and writers I am unfamiliar with.

I started to think I could base my inquiry around what I have done in the past with my students who have been writing at Level 2 and 3. In the past I have good success with my students and writing. I began to wonder was it because they were able and keen writers or was it the way I was teaching them? There fore I began to see this as a inquiry question.

The question they say is  critical. Get this right, and everything else is easy.

My Question : Can I motivate my writers (who are not 'yet' at national Standards) and increase writing quality so they can experience success as confident, connected and actively involved writers using media and picture book as a stimulus?


Edited: Thanks to feedback from Sonya I have edited my wording of low writers.

Why can't they spell?

We were given some professional readings last week and one being a hand out form e-shortcuts.

One article in there caught my eye as it was all about spelling. Lately on many teachers forums the discussion of spelling has popped up with many teachers wondering how to teach it.

A lot of the questions were about the best spelling programme and this notion that todays children don't seem to spell as well as on previous years.

We seem to think these days children can’t spell like the used to. So it was interesting when I started reading Was it ever thus that this was being challenged. The main question was how do we know?

There will always be a number of students who can’t spell. They will never master the spelling rules and systems. But do students of today spell any worse than say fifty years ago?

It seems that we link texting and the way today students abridge everything to their lack of spelling abilities. But where  is the evidence?

In his article Dennis Sleigh questions all of the above and ask a valid question- when it comes to spelling performances just how much do we really know?

He questions where the evidence is or if it is merely judgements of various individuals who themselves mastered the skills and today resent the weakness of current youths (Was it ever thus?)

A great way to explain this is John’s McWhorter Ted talk who explains that texting is a not a writing skill but a speaking one. I agree with him purely because when I text or even tweet anyone, I feel I am talking to the recipient rather than actually writing. And I am someone who does remember life before mobile phones!

People are always going to worry about spelling and I love how McWhorter actually highlights this right back to 63AD and even then people were complaining about spelling and literacy standards.

So is it really a modern day issue?

This article concludes that there will always be a significant number who will never master spelling no matter how much we teach them. He also highlight this will be the same for someone trying to learn a language, play a trumpet or even cross stich.

The article goes on to say that yes, we should still keep up the efforts to improve spelling and grammar but do it without beating yourselves up (Was it ever thus?)

Are we spending too much time worrying about the unsolvable?

Original article came from Was it ever thus? Dennis Sleigh  e-shortcuts July 2015

Male, Female or just an effective teacher?

Like some other teachers last night I watched the Sunday programme and the discussion about ‘Boys only classes’. To be honest none of it convinced me at all. What frustrated me straight away is that the class had a male teacher. Why did the school feel that a male teacher compared to a female teacher would be more affective? Are we then saying that all female schools should only have female teachers as they will perform better?

While the environment in which children are nurtured clearly affects the way they turn out, research into gender shows that there are significant physiological and behavioural difference between boys and girls from birth. (Anne Moir & David Jessel: Brainsex). Brains play a lot in this but it is the makeup of it. They have the same functions like vocabulary, mechanics of language, Visio-spatial perception and emotion (bearing on performance at school) but research has shown that the male brain is more specialised, with each of these four crucial functions being located in just one hemisphere, whilst in female’s three of the functions take place in both hemispheres (Anne Moir & David Jessel: Brainsex).

At five a boy is typically less able to sit, to concentrate, to listen or to communicate than a girl and has a greater need for variety, stimulation and physical activity. Therefore, the early years of schooling girls do perform better than boys.  And I am in no doubt that schools acknowledge this and play to both sets of strengths so that all pupils are able to achieve well. The problem is by the end of year 1 some boys have already switched off education. Girls typically do this by the end of year 4. (This is UK research I am not sure if it would be the same in NZ).

Even before my own son I have always been interested in Boys Education. I taught in East London and usually was given the more ‘disruptive’ boys in my class and (when we used to set) taught most of them for Literacy and Maths. If result were anything to go by, I as a female teacher did extremely well educating these boys. But it wasn’t just their results, they also socialised better and were in less trouble then they have ever been before. I not talking about silly antics on the playground I am talking about full on fights, chairs flying, knife welding 10-11 year olds that on many occasions I had to restrain.  As my head teacher said, they left our school as a completely different child to the ones that entered.

Typically girls will be keen to learn; boys need a little bit more convincing.  I spent years planning the majority of my lessons especially writing around the boys in my class and what they enjoyed. Due to the makeup of one year group, I changed a whole scheme of work and re wrote the entire Year 5 units for every subject so that it focussed more around the boy’s interests.

I’m not doing this to ‘brag’ but to highlight a point Does the gender of a teacher really matter? These research findings revealed that the gender of teachers had little apparent effect on the academic motivation and engagement of either boys or girls. For the majority of the children, the gender of the teacher was largely immaterial. They valued teachers, whether men or women, who were consistent and even-handed and supportive of them as learners.

As I only have 28 minutes I am stopping. In the end as many mentioned on Twitter what it comes down to an effective teacher regardless if it is male or female.

Steve Biddulph, Bill Rogers, Lucinda Neall, Ian Grant, Celia Lashlie are all great authors who have written about boys education. Well worth a read.

If you've been teaching for around 14-and-a-half years, you could be about to ask your one millionth question.

Having spent the weekend couch surfing on Twitter (literally) following #edchatnz I began to question myself and my teaching. Not in a negative way but in a positive way. I began to realise that a lot that was being tweeted, I was doing or knew about.
It made me realise that maybe I need to be more open and share my teaching journey. So the idea is to write a few blogs about what I have done in the past and doing now.
This one came about while reading all the tweets during Steve Mouldey presentation at the Edchat.
Having spent the last 10+ years with Ofsted breathing down my throat you do develop some nifty skills and questioning was one of them. When observed, inspectors needed to consider whether: “teachers use questioning and discussion to assess the effectiveness of their teaching and promote pupils’ learning”
Therefore headteachers in our very regular observation used to follow a lot that was outlined here so that we all could ' be 'outstanding' teachers. Yes, many did turn up with the class list to make sure you asked every child!
Teachers are great at asking questions!
• Teachers ask up to two questions every minute, up to 400 in a day, around 70,000 a year, or two to three million in the course of a career
• Questioning accounts for up to a third of all teaching time, second only to the time devoted to explanation
• Most questions are answered in less than a second. That's the average time teachers allow between posing a question and accepting an answer, throwing it to someone else, or answering it themselves.


In a traditional teaching classroom, the questions are very teacher centred. Hands go up, teacher picks a frantically waving hand (which is usually accompanied by noise??), question is answer, response is usually a' no' (if they got it wrong) moves on to next waving noisy child who answers it correctly to which the teachers responds with either a ‘yes’ or ‘ well done' and then quickly moves on as they are aware they need to get this lesson done.
But has any real learning taken place? Has any of the class had the opportunity to reflect on their own thinking and learning? Have the children had the chance to ask questions as well? How do we then go about appropriately checking for understanding?
We end up ‘pinging’ all these questions out into the room but all that is coming back are ‘general’ answers. We also don’t allow children to ask questions. Majority of the questions asked in a classroom are from the teacher!
Effective questioning can be used to:
• Identify where pupils are currently in their learning
• Expand and deepen their learning
•Develop critical thinking skills.
•Increase motivation or interest
•Nurture insights
•Stimulate independent learning
"Good learning starts with questions, not answers," says Guy Claxton. The consensus is that questioning leads to more effective learning - and more enjoyable teaching - than explanation alone.
So how can we improve our questioning techniques?


Questioning is an integral part of a teachers everyday life. But if you're going to be asking millions of questions, it's probably worth making sure you ask the right ones in the right way.
I love asking questions! A colleague of mine will tell you I tend to great him most days with a question.
These are just a few things I do in the classroom. I am no expert and all these ideas have come from readings, professional developments other teacher etc.
• Ask fewer questions- As they always say 'less is more'.
• Prepare key questions
• Involve the whole class (multi choice, on line, moving to a place etc)
• Think, pair, share
• Provide think time- 5- 10 seconds. If you’re asking deeper questions you need to allow the class to have time to think and ponder their answer.
• Try no hands up
Stop now and think of your class and I bet you can name those same 3 who always put their hands up? How often do you go straight to them for the answer? The 'no hands up' is great. I was one of those students who hated putting my hand up to ask a question- the fear of being made to look silly not wrong. Research shows that student's main fear is not of being wrong, but of looking silly. Such "peer fear" is the main obstacle to students answering and asking questions Lots of children are like this. It also means that you are more likely not to always choose the same students as well, meaning you are engaging everyone. Try using lollipop sticks (where you have the entire classes name on sticks and randomly pick one out) or the IWB that randomly picks children names or like me, I just pick. Even if they are not comfortable at answering the question, offer two or more options and let the student choose one e.g. 'phone a friend' where they get to ask someone else to answer the question.
• Avoid NO!
We can't always be right but what we need to do is foster an environment where children feel safe to answer questions. Reward every answer regardless by the way you respond.
“What do you mean by…?”
“Can you give me an example?”
"What are your reasons for saying this?”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Let me see if I understand you. Do you mean…?”
“Could you explain your answer further?”
“Can you rephrase your answer?”
• Ask more ‘open’ questions, question the answer, develop deep thinking questions, Ask why?
Blooms Taxonomy provides a structure for developing questions that encourage students to think on different levels. In order, the levels are:
Knowledge (facts, recall, recognition)
Comprehension (translation, interpretation, extrapolation)
Application (to new or unfamiliar situations)
Analysis (break into parts)
Synthesis (combine elements into a new pattern)
Evaluation (apply criteria to defend the conclusion)

Throw the ideas around the room. Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce is a great technique.
"Asking good questions is the basis for becoming a successful learner," says Guy Claxton. "If children aren't asking questions, they're being spoon-fed. That might be effective in terms of getting results, but it won't turn out curious, flexible learners suited to the 21st century."
It is about getting students to think more critically enabling them to have a better understanding of what they are learning. Effective questioning isn't a one-way process. If we asks the kind of questions that stimulate thought and debate, there's a strong chance our students will also start to ask more.