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What were lessons like?
In an earlier study, IAMP we found that every lesson we observed, from every teacher, was different and it was more productive to find out about teachers' intentions and principles than to report all the varied ways they put their principles into practice. (www.atm.org.uk/mt/archive/mt187files/DeepProgressEls.pdf In this study, we started with the knowledge that we would not end up with any recipes or formulae for good lessons, so we set out to describe the lessons we observed and video-recorded as illustrations of the diversity of practice.
We also asked teachers how typical the observed lessons were and probed further by using to find out what they claimed was typical about their teaching. To do this we used an instrument developed by Malcolm Swan www.niace.org.uk/publications/C/CollabMaths.asp and compared answers from all teachers. This gave us insight into common features of the teaching and the table below describes the level of agreement between teachers about their typical practice:
| Task type | What the teachers said |
|---|---|
| Exercises | Disagreement; most do not use except occasionally for basic fluency |
| Work on own plus neighbour | Most use this; some find it hard to manage |
| Use my methods only | Most teachers want students to choose sensibly from a range of methods; one felt that giving a single method was less confusing |
| Progress from easy to harder | Most immersed students in challenging tasks and questions; one teacher simplified tasks |
| Students choose their questions | General agreement |
| Encourage to work slowly | Strong agreement |
| Compare methods | General agreement |
| Assume they know nothing and start from beginning | Most tried to find out what students already know and work with that |
| Teach whole class | Some teachers found this hard to manage so kept to group work and 'going round the room' |
| Cover everything in topic | Most teachers focused on key ideas and areas of difficulty |
| Show links between topics | All agreed |
| Am surprised by their ideas | All agreed |
| Avoid mistakes, clear explanation | Most believed that mistakes were an important part of learning and showed that students were working with the difficult bits; one teacher wanted to avoid mistakes at these 'knocked their confidence'. |
| Textbook closely followed | Only one teacher did this |
| Discuss their ideas | All agreed |
| Collaborative work | Nearly all agreed |
| Invent methods | All agreed |
| Substantial tasks | A few teachers only set small step-by-step tasks |
| Tell which questions to do | Several teachers allowed students to choose which questions to pursue |
| Teach individuals differently according to need | General agreement that students may need different forms of access to ideas |
| Stick to maths content planned for lesson | Several teachers were happy to deviate if interesting ideas or difficulties cropped up |
We analysed lessons from the first two years of the project, but we are only reporting findings from the second year as they represent confident developments of practices which may have only just started in year one. This is especially true for new teachers and for teachers who were changing their practice radically.
(for more details, and analytical tools, click here)
Pages in this section:
- How did teachers help students
- How did teachers use questions
- How was discussion managed
- How were ideas shared
- How were right answers dealt with
- How were wrong answers dealt with
- Lesson structures
- Lesson structures details
- Observations about lesson comparison
- Public writing in lessons
- Questions and prompts
- Strategies to support independent learning
- Task types used
- What habits have been established
- What ideas were emphasised
- What questions were answered quickly
- What was said about what is important
- What were lessons like
- What were lessons like details
- What writing were students asked to do
