So we worked with, well I work with St Vincent college the Isle of Wight college and Plumpton
college as part of our network, so we had four teachers involved in total. So when we
first met everybody came with lots of ideas so we decided in the first cycle to have a look at four
different things and then see which one we can take forward and investigate further in cycle two.
So college a looked decided to look at coaching, they had just received some funding for coaching,
so they involved 48 students and one teacher both gcse and functional skills
and I will go into a little bit more detail in a moment. College b wanted to look at
representations and manipulatives in particular on compound measures because they wanted to see
if it makes any difference in terms of student engagement and attainment. College c
decided to look at a new skills check which basically is an initial assessment, but,
they wanted to rebrand it and kind of make it in a much more nurturing approach for their students,
less threatening at the beginning of the year and a little bit more relaxed, and college d wanted
to look at the Plickers app, so that particular college, in cycle one, we wanted to use the app
primarily for summative assessments but wanted to also take a little bit further later on.
So the college a looked at coaching basically wanted to use the coaches that they now had
access to in to bridge gaps, skills gaps, with the students and decided that each student
would get 30-minute coaching session in between assessments unidentified topics
and then they were asked, the students were asked after each session to fill in a little google form
on how they're feeling, are you feeling better the same or worse? Following their intervention so
for this particular cohort 77 percent of the students reported that they felt better
about the topic after session, 23 reported that they felt about the same, 23 percent, and only one
out of 48 students, reported that they felt worse. So here's some data I've got quite a few slides so
in terms of the data I will click through it quite quickly because you can access them later on on
the padlet as well. So this is after the first intervention round one early on in the year.
Then there's already an increase in terms of how many students felt better
and then we have a last intervention which has now
jumped up to 71 percent I think are now reporting that they're feeling better about a topic,
which we thought was really really positive feedback from the students. So college b
wanted to have a look at representations or manipulatives and they weren't quite sure how to
go about it but they knew that one of the topics that their students really struggled with was
compound measures especially speed, distance, time. So they wanted to have a look at this they
basically chose two different styles, after doing a little bit of research
so the simple multiplication division method and the magic triangle method
all classes or both classes, sorry, were predominantly grade three students and after a
period of three weeks all classes were presented with the same selection of past exam questions.
The results initially were pretty similar to both classes and there is a lot more going into
how this was delivered and I'm quite happy to answer questions, but I am aware of that
we did quite a lot throughout the year so I won't go into too much detail but,
ultimately at the end the teacher found that there wasn't much difference between those
students having something physical to play with or just learning a method off by heart which was
really interesting for me because I'm a big fan of the manipulatives, but it was something that
we wanted to have a look at a little bit further later on, again here's a little bit more data.
So on the top left it's the initial figures and then bottom right is after the intervention right,
and again I can answer some question on those so that's fine. So then we've got college c, who
basically felt that the initial assessment or diagnostic process wasn't working for the students
and yes it was something that we needed to do in terms of tracking you know it was a requirement,
but they wanted to look at it a little different way, so what the team did was, they put out a
student survey, where they basically wanted to gauge how students felt about their examinations
in the first place because they haven't sat any in the past and we wanted to see where
abouts they're at and only 13 percent stated that they felt confidence, so the team then decided
we need to look at an initial assessment that's inclusive and it's a little bit more nurturing.
They then asked the students in terms of their center assessed grades process
from wherever they came whether they were returning or new students to the college
and 69 percent of the students stated that 'book work would be their preferred way of
being assessed for the centers grades', and with that in mind the assessment would then
be based partly on book work and at the end the students gave some feedback on how they felt about
the initial assessment and it was a 3.58 out of five stars so again a little bit of pretty data,
so here on the right was the initial questionnaire where the college wanted to know where the
student's done in terms of confidence of sitting the exam, here was the feedback from the students
about what method would be their preferred with a second coming assessment in class.
And that was the rating for how they felt about the initial assessment or as they're
called skills check okay so college d looked at the 'Plickers' app so this particular teacher
had worked with plickers in his previous role and I don't know who's familiar with plickers,
again I can answer some questions, but it's basically you've got qr codes
with four different orientations that students can use they, students, don't need their own
devices which is quite nice and but you can still collate all the information. So
to start with this particular teacher used it as a kind of assessment at the end of the lesson to
see where the students are at, and it proved quite useful. The feedback from the students was really
really positive, they quite liked it, and it was really nice to also identify anybody that maybe
not naturally, would kind of, join in big class discussions or contributions in class actually
showed quite a lot of aptitude and possibly could set the higher tier paper and also a
part of the thinking for this particular teacher is that it would allow to collate quite a lot of
data should there be another center assessed grades process at the end of the year, because
they couldn't run as many in-class assessments as they wanted to due to absences covid mainly. So
once we had all finished our individual bits and we fed back and we shared resources and we
all kind of tried little bits um and took it back to our own teams we then sat down
and decided that we needed to look at something for the second cycle that feeds off the initial
cycle and we needed to agree on something, now the person that picked plickers was quite keen to to
do some further work on that because he did say that you know potentially there's there's lots of
stuff that we could utilize that at the moment I'm not so we did decide to go plickers for cycle two,
which was a bit scary for myself because I'm a little bit of a technophobe.
but I embraced it nevertheless. So part of the reason for going with plickers was
we looked at what showed the most interest with students, what we could use to identify
and address skill scopes further all the interventions that we used in cycle one were
had positive outcomes more or less and showed promises in terms of you could take that further,
in terms of research. But the app was something that I think the majority lean towards, because
it could potentially be used as an additional teaching tool, not to replace anything else
but make things a little bit more interesting. So we had a look at possible applications now
at this point some of the full colleges are always starting to look at revision for the upcoming
exams so we decided that one of the things that students struggle a lot with are those big mark
kind of multi-step questions and we were wondering if we could utilize plickers for that. So
we listened to our colleague that had used plickers before and he had said that
it provided a lower barrier for participation for less confident students, it was a nice low-tech
alternative compared to kahoot or socrative and it also allowed him very well to identify and measure
progress, so the students also very much enjoyed it, so we decided to pick five big mark questions,
but we then threw a little bit of a spanner in the works and decided for it to be a little
bit more objective that we would also use five different methods of delivery.
So the reason for that really was that if we just use plickers we felt that you know we
either get it, we like it or we don't like it we've got nothing really to compare to unless
we then have a control group, as well, and we didn't quite have enough students for that. So
basically what we did is we picked those five big mark questions and the five methods were the
following: so one was the traditional chalk and talk, all right and the second one was plickers.
The third one was prepared videos,
scaffolding strips was number four and model answers was number five. So we basically got
students to look at the five questions one at a time obviously and they would try and answer
those questions and then when we go through them we would use one of the five different methods,
Now, college one and two did exactly the same, so each class had a different
pairing of questions or methods and there was a reason for that I'll get to that in a second.
Whereas college three and four gave exactly the same pairings of questions and methods.
So we then asked students afterwards to fill in a little form on their phones and and just
rate from most useful to least useful and again I won't go into too much detail in terms of how
we coded it all, but again I can answer those questions and the results were interesting,
so if I break it down a little bit I'll give you these first, so college one on the left here
so average raw score show that chalk and talk overall was their preferred method
plickers was the second and then videos, model answer is last and scaffolding strips were fourth
and then we also were aware that we needed to look at the fact that perhaps one of the
questions was preferred to another question so we then had to recode and rearrange our data again.
But it was really, really interesting in in terms of outcome, that
most students across the board preferred chalk and talk to any of the other methods and we are still
discussing that now, whilst I'm writing a report because our conclusion, we're still arguing about
why that could possibly be and we had looked there's a little bit more data if you want to have
a look at these first i'm talking, we had looked at things like covid being out the classroom,
needing that kind of nurturing, you know, needing a person, rather than a computer screen or phone
screen. The feedback in terms of the videos was quite good as well because a lot of them said
well I can stop and start whenever I want to so I quite like that so if I don't get something
I can go back and re-watch it, but we were surprised about the outcomes of plickers being
not as high as we had hoped to be, so we would like to investigate that a little bit further,
perhaps next year, a bit more data so question by question -
So to just finish off really so plickers we all all of us including the students
agreed that it was a really nice method to use, they could stay anonymous and they could hold
it up and because each card is different no one can tell if you're holding up a, b,
c or d and the only issue is really it's really time consuming initially printing all the cards
and assigning them and putting them on the back of folders, as well as the free versus the licensed
version, so two of us worked with a fully licensed version and two of us worked with a free version.
So one of the things that we pulled out of it was that it is really nice to have new and creative
resources but the so-called 'old-fashioned' method of chalk and talk still has its place and
some colleges once we sat down and had a chat are really driving forward being wonderful and and
having loads of new creative things but actually student feedback was from this very very short
time frame that actually they quite like being talked through.
Involving the learners into the planning process I think has shown you know
if you want to get them motivated and engaged one way of doing so is get them in
involved and get asked them you know what do you like? Which of these bits do you prefer? And
I'll just leave that with a little quote at the end,
and I am aware, I just talked very very fast, but we did so many things I had to get it all in.
But the PowerPoint will be available and I'm more than happy to answer any questions.