Improving Classroom Performance

Spoon Feed No More, Practical Applications For Effective Teaching and Learning

Stephen Chapman, Steve Garnett, Alan Jervis

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781845906948
• eBook ISBN: 9781845907396
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A Long awaited first book from one of the biggest teacher training companies in the UK. Dragonfly Training was founded in 1999 and has established an excellent reputation internationally for providing inspiring, realistic and practical training courses for teachers. In this, their first book, three of their top trainers provide some of the very best hands-on approaches to teaching. Dragonfly's six key principles are: Promote effective starters and plenaries; Provide constant reinforcement as a means of embedding knowledge and provide on-going revision; Introduce a variety of ideas; Do first, teach after - whenever possible; Encourage students to create teaching materials themselves; Demonstrate and articulate success by modelling the desired outcomes.

Part 1

Key Principles

Key Principle 1

Introducing effective starters and plenaries as well as ‘da Vinci moments’

The terms ‘starter’ and ‘plenary’ are now very much embedded in most teachers’ vocabularies and we consider this to be a good thing. The case for starters and plenaries is made especially convincing when you try this simple memory exercise with colleagues or your students. You need a minimum of twelve participants to do this effectively. You could also do this exercise with a class of thirty and try out all the variations we suggest. You will be amazed at how the graph of results will conform to the patterns described.

How to carry out the exercise

Read out the following twenty words to your students or colleagues:

curtain chair window iron paper pen carpet crisps envelope ruler Leonardo da Vinci book kettle coffee cake

Then say ‘five to go’ (we will explain later why this is important) before reading the final five:

bag shoe plug watch ring

When you have finished, ask your group to write down as many of the words as they can remember. Make sure they don’t sneak a look at their partner’s words! After about a minute ask them to stop. Typically most people will have remembered about twelve of the words. Now ask your group to put their hands up if they have any of the following words on their list and to check who else in the group has also put their hand up.

• The words you are asking them to look for are the first and second word from the list (in this case curtain and chair) – you should have a very high hand count on these.
• Let them know that it is very important that they don’t have a sneaky look at anyone else’s list as this will distort the results.
• Then ask if they have the word before Leonardo da Vinci (which was ruler) which should have a much lower hand count.
• Now ask if they have the word after Leonardo da Vinci (book in this case) and again the hand count for this should be low too.
• Ask who has the penultimate word on the list (watch) and then the last word from the list (ring). The number of hands raised for these should be quite high again (as long as you said out loud ‘five to go’ before reading the last five words).

Your results should produce graphs that, by and large, look like this.

If you don’t include Leonardo da Vinci but do say ‘five to go’:

If you didn’t say ‘five to go’ your graph would look like this:

If you do say Leonardo da Vinci and also say ‘five to go:

What the results show

The results of this memory exercise are clear. The students’ attention is highest at the beginning and at the end of lessons – if they are alerted to the fact that the end is coming. The benefit of starter and plenary activities at these times is evident.

More radically, why don’t we have more ‘starts’ and ‘ends’ within lessons? For example, if an hour’s lesson is split into three twenty-minute episodes, we could have three start phases, three da Vinci moments and three mini plenaries. This would be a powerful lesson where concentration and energy would be very high indeed. The da Vinci moment has the important effect of potentially stopping the mid-lesson dip.

If you have lots of clear starts and ends within lessons you would produce a graph looking something like the one below.

Multiple starts and stops in lessons:

This is known as chunking and chunking learning in this way within a lesson allows multiple effects. Another approach could be to divide up the topic focus in a lesson into the three parts A, B and C. Spend twenty minutes of the lesson focused on A, twenty minutes focused on B and twenty minutes on C. Repeat this over three lessons. Teachers tell us that pupils remember far more of all three parts A, B and C than if they simply focused on A, B and C for a whole sixty minute lesson each. We think that the effectiveness comes from mixing up the topics in each lesson rather than spending all hour on one subject. Also the revisiting three times impacts on memory and recall as well as increasing the pace of learning.

Some teachers have noted that when they use the da Vinci moment, the second half of the lesson has been more productive with re-energised and engaged students. It is important, however, to ensure that the lesson content is sufficiently challenging if it is to be delivered within a twenty minute session. There are occasions where it is more appropriate to deliver a section of the curriculum over a longer and more protracted period of time, and in this case splitting the one hour lesson into three parts is not suitable.

Where is the proof that this works?

The primacy and recency effect is a phenomenon that has been known for over one hundred years (see Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve c.1890). TV advertising exploits this phenomenon most effectively and it is an interesting exercise to analyse how an advert is constructed, but also to note that the premium for the first and last advert within a commercial break is considerably higher than for those in the middle.

Further evidence of this technique being used, and therefore supporting the case for structuring lessons in this way, can be gained from analysing the construction of a fifty minute news bulletin, such as Channel 4 News. The ordering of items tends to follow this pattern:

1. The headlines
2. An introduction to the news
3. Summary of the main stories/news items
4. The main news items in order of importance
5. A summary of what has happened and a promise of what is going to happen next
6. The lesser news items presented in a progressively shorter format
7. An off-kilter human interest story
8. A summary of all that’s happened
9. Goodbyes and a reminder of when the programme is on next.

This structure has been developed as a result of millions of pounds of research into what makes for the most effective programme order to maintain viewer interest. This is why a lesson structure based on the primacy and recency effect and the da Vinci moment works so well – and makes for better teaching.

Key Principle 2

Delivering constant reinforcement as a means of embedding knowledge and providing on-going revision

It could be argued that the single most powerful educational strategy is constant reinforcement. The simple premise for this principle is that if you do something once, but not again, you will forget it (whatever ‘it’ was). This would seem to bear out the adage that you have to do something quite a few times before:

a it really sinks in, and

b you can store it in your long-term memory bank.

Some information or events are so memorable you simply understand and memori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part 1 : Key Principles
• Part 2 : At the Chalkface
• Part 3 : Tools of the Trade
• Part 4 : The A to Z of Teaching
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Personal thanks from the authors
• Praise for Improving Classroom Performance
• Copyright