Have your students missed the learning bus?
Imagine a school trip. Imagine you are in charge of the children on the school trip. One thing you know you’re going to be doing multiple times per day, almost obsessively, is head counting. You’re going to be checking you’ve got all the children with you; you’re going to be checking that no one has wandered off in the wrong direction, and you’re going to make counting them as easy as possible by employing strategies that make them clearly visible such as putting them in Hi viz jackets. You know where the trip is going; there are clear stops and waypoints that will form part of your trip, and you’ll no doubt be doing head counts at those key points. You’re going to check that the children are on the bus all the way to the right destination and you’re going to head count constantly to check you’ve not lost anyone.
And that’s one key factor of great teaching – checking we’re all on the learning bus.
When we teach anything, we need to be mindful of a couple of key underpinning ideas:
- The one who does the thinking does the learning.
- We learn what we attend to.
When we teach, we are therefore constantly endeavouring to ensure that all our children are attending to the content that we want them to be thinking about, and that all children are thinking throughout. They need to be on the thinking and participation bus, and we as the teacher need to be doing this cognitive head count.
This is why strategies such as no hands up, cold calling, voting, mini whiteboards are so useful as not only do they ensure participation i.e. getting and keeping children on the bus, but they provide information for the teacher as to are they still “with you” in terms of understanding.
When we look at why we do what we do in lessons, one driving thought for us should be, “Who’s on the bus?” and a second, “Have I left anyone behind?”. If we don’t get children on the bus and then keep them on the correct journey towards understanding then we gradually lose pupils along the way. We may have started with 30 neatly lined up children on the cognitive playground but at each waypoint, transition, key learning moment, we may lose children until we end up in the land of final assessments and realise there are only 60% of the pupils still on the bus.
When we are checking for participation and understanding we need to do this with relentless frequency and precision. Often I ask teachers to imagine freeze framing their class in time; who would they bet their car on in terms of who they believe understands the content being taught and who are they unsure about? If there’s anyone they are unsure about this is a potential child about to step off the bus. This is then where the responsive magic happens. Thinking about “who don’t I know about?” or “Who am I unsure about?” can illuminate potential next steps for within lesson adaption or directed questioning. Assuming children are all on the bus and still with you throughout a complete lesson is a dangerous strategy. We wouldn’t take 30 children to the aquarium all day without constantly checking they were still with us; it’s exactly the same principle whether we’re teaching fractions or erosion or fronted adverbials. If we’re not checking they’re on the bus and doing a head count, we can’t be sure they’re understanding content or not simply being left behind.
This is why overlaying techniques or bolting them on to existing approaches is unlikely to work. A deeply embedded understanding of the importance of checking if children are on the bus needs to underpin curriculum structure, lesson sequencing, individual lesson structure and then individual responses within a single lesson.
We need to have a carefully mapped route that allows children to incrementally build their understanding across a well sequenced curriculum with key foundational concepts and knowledge clearly identified – these are the waypoints. We also then need a detailed approach to individual lessons where we are focusing on ensuring that at each individual new idea, knowledge, skill practising opportunity or potential misconceptions junction that we hard wire in head counts. We can’t then be OK with saying oh well, I started with 30 but now I’m down to 27.. onward we go. Neither can we be satisfied by thinking “I’m not sure what Sammi is thinking or why they put a 7 there but onward we go.” If we don’t ensure all the children are with us, or we then don’t delve deeper into potential misconceptions along the way, we might as well stand at the bus doors, hear the hiss as they open then wave to the child as the bus pulls away from them and leaves them at the roadside.
Checking for understanding is therefore not a chance to show off a Pokémon card collection of techniques to an observer, it is a foundational principle of teaching.
Ensuring all of our children are on the bus is what great teaching is. “A good solider never leaves a man behind” (said by many but my favourite from the toy soldiers in Toy Story) is a phrase that should underpin our approaches. Just like their valiant efforts, we should endeavour to ensure that our teaching is punctuated by multiple cognitive head counts followed by direct action and exploration of any emerging misconceptions. We need to ensure our children are all, “On the learning bus”.
Thinking Flexibly 