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Lessons Learnt from Year 10

The honeymoon period is over and the learning gap between the students is emerging. This week I want to reflect on a lessons learnt from my Year 10 class. 

Despite having been teaching for 10 years now, every year I struggle with a Year 10 class and my Year 10 class this year is no different! They are a mixed ability class and when I say mixed ability my gut tells me their likely GCSE outcomes will range from grade 7 - 3.  I say 'gut' because our systems are still being re-built from our cyber attack and I have very little information about their prior attainment. They are also very mixed in their behaviour and levels of engagement so I have to pull every trick out of the box for meaningful learning to take place. 

Which brings me to my lesson learnt this week and building on my last post about the use of modelling it is also the use of scaffolding that has given me some success with this class. 

One of Roshenshine's Principles explains how rather than setting lower expectations of some students we should support them to reach ambitious goals using a range of scaffolding processes to guide them. For this particular lesson on 'Ionic Bonding' I had a resources that I would expect most students working at a grade 6 to be able to complete unaided - so certainly not suitable for everyone in this class.


I knew that if I gave this to the class too many students would need my support to complete it even with my explanation and worked examples to the class. So I turned the resource into what one of my colleagues calls a 'faded worksheet', where you give some answers that remind/explain to the students the concepts but this 'fades-out' allowing the students to fill the gaps.

This allowed a significantly higher percentage of the class to complete the task 'independently'. Successful completion of the first task led them on to the second task and had many students completing the extension task I had added on. I used a model answer for the extension task which once again allowed students to crack on independently of my physical support. 



Obviously the metaphor of 'scaffolding' is that is should be removed and students should be able to complete the tasks without it. Tom Sherrington writes how 'if the scaffolding has achieved its purpose then this can be a confidence-boosting moment'. I believe that in this lesson this is exactly what the scaffolding did. It enabled all students to reach a similar outcome when all too many students in this class could have given up at the first stage without support. 

Scaffolding can take many different forms but this week take a resource and add in some 'scaffolding' and let me know how it went.





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