Modelling is a pretty important part of teaching. We are, in effect, constantly modelling stuff; how to behave, how to speak, how to write, how to think. I don’t think it is controversial to say that modelling in the classroom is a process that can often be enhanced through the use of technology. Whether it be a teacher led demonstration of how to approach a piece of work, a student explanation of how to tackle a particular problem or a deconstruction of a of student’s work, each of these important classroom practices can be aided by the use of technology.
I’ve been reflecting recently on how modelling is one of the key classroom uses of the many iPads we have in school. When attempting to categorise the uses of technology in the Maths classrooms of myself and my colleagues as part of a recent project, it was found that in the vast majority of cases the technology was being used for some form of modelling.
Let’s be clear what I don’t mean by ‘modelling’: I am not talking about modelling through the creation of augmented reality puppet videos with smiley talking faces somehow demonstrating learning about angles within the pseudo-context of Angry Birds. In a large number of cases, it is simply the teacher handing out worksheets or individual questions and selectively display students’ work to the class for discussion and critique. The technology allows teachers to do this important classroom activity quickly and efficiently.
Our most recent staff CPD session was looking at modelling and metacognition, with strategies for the classroom that involved making use of the technology which we have available to us. Lots of the ideas in the sessions were adapted from the excellent chapter on modelling in Making Every Lesson Count by Andy Tharby and Shaun Allison.
Here are some ideas that we discussed that might be useful when considering modelling strategies to help with deconstructing student work:
- If only the teacher has a web enabled device available, as if the case on our KS3 campus, photographing student work and uploading it to Google Drive (other inferior cloud storage is available) will quickly make it available for display to the class using a web browser or desktop client. The device is effectively acting as a visualiser. Deconstructing and discussing student work with your students can be incredibly powerful; displaying a student’s exemplar work to a class causes each student to assess their own work through comparison, providing feedback on how to improve and an excellent platform for deep questioning.
- A particularly great idea in Making every lesson count is the building of banks of exemplar student work. Too often student work is thrown away when it represents a potentially valuable resource. Archiving student work by storing it using some form of cloud storage solution allows it to be shared within your department, saving time and the duplication of effort in the long run.
- One option for archiving student work is to use a scanning app for iPad to create multipage PDFs (see Genius Scan, DocScanHD, Scanner Pro 7 etc – there is a lot of these things). Another is using photocopiers that have the ability to scan and send high quality documents to your email address – we recently acquired some of these and they are great. Both can be used to recreate exam papers by scanning pictures of the best answer to each question, or simply to collate a variety of responses to each question that might be of use in the future. As part of my regular exam feedback to students, I send out a copy of the ”students’ exemplar paper’ (via Showbie) so that they can review their own papers accordingly. Being able to annotate the scanned paper with the name of the student who provided the answer has the additional benefit of providing an additional ‘topic expert’ who can be approached by others about to explain how they answered the question. This is an example of the Goldilocks principle: students often benefit from observing work that has been produced by their peers as well of that of teacher; it sets a suitably challenging standard whilst not appearing unachievable.
- Exemplar student work can be particularly useful in the context of new GCSE and A-Level courses when it comes to interpreting (often non-existent) grade descriptors and giving students a standard to compare their work to. Indeed, exam boards often provide teachers with a small number of exemplar responses to help clarify particularly abstract grade criteria. Such exemplars can be useful for students and teachers alike. By storing student responses that have achieved a variety of scores and grades, students are able to acquire some understanding of what each GCSE grade looks like, whilst also being able to compare their own work to each piece of exemplar work.
- In a classroom full of iPads, projection of student work can quickly be achieved in-lesson by AirPlay to an Apple TV or AirServer. This will usually take one of two forms; the teacher using their iPad to project student work, or a student connecting to the Apple TV to demonstrate their own work. This is another option that some teachers benefit from that allows student work to be modelled with incredible ease in a classroom.
- Many iPad 1:1 classrooms use Showbie for distributing and collecting work. When the teacher’s iPad is projected, the in-built ‘quick-marking‘ feature allows you to quickly cycle through selected examples of student work as the basis for class discussion. This speeds up the process of modelling student work considerably. It also provides the additional benefit of keeping all students on track since they know how quickly their work can be displayed to the class. It doesn’t, however, provide you with an overview of all student answers beforehand (like a Nearpod or Classkick), so requires the teacher to ensure that they have circulated to identify ‘interesting’ answers that will provide some value when discussed as a whole class and accompanied by the students’ own explanation of their thinking. In the Maths classroom, this is often either a brilliantly executed answer, a ‘different’ approach to a problem or a common misconception. As is always the case with technology, there is a judgement to be made: would you be better off asking the students to complete the task in their exercise books (and then discussing their responses, possibly after copying a few answers onto the board or photographing the interesting ones) or asking them to complete it on their iPad so that their work can quickly displayed to the class? As is always the case, it depends on the situation, but it is a nice option to have available.
- When teaching certain topics in any subject there are particular misconceptions that teachers expect to encounter. But what if nobody suggests that you always find the 20th term of the sequence by doubling the 10th? Having examples of student work that displays important misconceptions can also be a valuable resource for any teacher. In addition, handing out work that has previously been archived for students to mark and correct is a great way to reveal any underlying misconceptions and encourage students to think about these misconceptions. Another way to do this is to collect in a piece of work digitally (probably via Showbie again) and then instantly redistribute it to the rest of the class to be annotated and analysed. This is another example of a simple process that is made more efficient by the use of technology.
- I’ll steer clear of unnecessarily fancy video content where possible, but occasionally getting students to create videos of their understanding can be useful. Since the aim of much of the modelling of excellence is to model how experts think, asking students to model their thinking in this way is both an excellent way of assessing understanding and helping students consolidate their learning into their long term memory.
I’m not suggesting that iPads are worth the investment for their usefulness in aiding successful modelling alone. In isolation, each individual use of an iPad doesn’t make them a worthwhile investment, as Jose Picardo points out several times here. Clearly none of the suggestions above are ‘transformational’, either. They certainly don’t allow for the ‘creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable’. Instead, they are each small examples of how technology can be used to make minor improvements to the process of modelling student work; small examples of how technology can help to make some processes more efficient in our classrooms.
