The ultimate checklist for a perfect lesson
Can we build it?
#digimeet
Image credit: 'Checklist' by Stuart Chalmers. CC Licensed on Flickr
Firstly – what the hell was I thinking submitting that title? I’m not sure there’s such as a thing as a perfect lesson, but I am interested in trying to close the gap between the ‘showstopper’ lessons and the regular, run of the mill ones.
In this year’s Reith Lectures, Dr Atul Gawande spoke about the impact that checklists have had on improving outcomes in surgery. He’s well worth a listen to, and it got me thinking about whether it was an approach that we could use in teaching.
Now, I have an inbuilt suspicious of checklists in education, especially when they’re used for monitoring other people or reducing ideas (like AfL) to observation tick-lists. None the less, the thoughts been rattling around in my head for a while and I thought it might make a good topic for tonight – we can try and harness the staffrm hive mind to produce something we could try out.
I’m going to kick off with two, and then you can let me know in the comments and on Twitter firstly if you think I’m right, and secondly what else should be on our list.
Check 1 - We’re doing this so that…
I picked this up from one of the excellent Teachmeet Clevedon events that Mark Anderson used to organise and were always worth the drive from Swansea. I know this was fairly well established at Clevedon, and I can’t actually remember who I first heard it from, but the idea was to append any lesson objectives with the phrase ‘so that...’ and finish the sentence. If you can’t complete the sentence, or the completed sentence is, at best, a bit woolly you go back to the drawing board.
EDIT: Thanks to Mark for pointing out that credit for this needs to go to Zoe Elder - See here for more
Check 2 – What will they spend their time thinking about?
“Memory is the residue of thought”.
This quote was my biggest take away from Daniel Willingham’s’ excellent ‘Why don’t students like school’. His point is that what is retained in memory is the thing that the person spent longest thinking about. He gives the example of lessons where students can spend more time thinking about the animations in the PowerPoints they’re making than the content. It’s one I know I’ve been guilty of in the past – you design a lesson you know is going to hook and engage the students, but they’re hooked and engaged by something other than the main topic of the lesson.
So there’s my first two. Hopefully they serve as antidotes to the temptation to just dive in and pick up any shiny new teaching idea that we come across. But what else should be on this checklist. Simple things that will help make every lesson a good one.
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Comments
Aeschylus: “Memory is the mother of all wisdom. ”
Like our lessons to be like and the reality interests me... The great training you go to, the lovely resource, the ideas you talk about with colleagues and still that gap between what you want it to be and what it actually is...
How about a THIRD one: how will this change how these young people approach the world?
• To stimulate a sense of wonder about places
• To help you to make sense of the complex and sometimes crazy world around you
• To inspire and show you how you can change your world
• To help you to explore your geography
• To give you the skills to make it in the future – whatever your choices are
And we always aimed to allow our students to make a difference in the world.
Many of the ideas here are hard to disagree with, but are they are bit too big, broad and ambitious to work as a checklist. One I took out of the first draft of this was 'do you know their names or have a seating plan'. Seeing some classes once a fortnight meant that the answer to that without a seating plan was 'no' well into the year. And yet we all know the power of using a name.
Many of the ideas here are hard to disagree with, but are they are bit too big, broad and ambitious to work as a checklist. One I took out of the first draft of this was 'do you know their names or have a seating plan'. Seeing some classes once a fortnight meant that the answer to that without a seating plan was 'no' well into the year. And yet we all know the power of using a name.
I think pupil participation is key and before each lesson I try to think about how they are going to work harder and talk more than me