Subject Week 8 | Sharing Academic Expectations

Duration: 40 minutes

Mr Jones is gaining confidence in his planning and wants to assess his pupils’ progress. However, he is unsure how to give them the best opportunity to perform well and demonstrate their understanding. He finds that describing the components of a strong piece of work is useful but often insufficient to convey the key ideas. How can he share his academic expectations for pupils concretely and clearly?

2. Key Idea

Effectively directing pupil attention to high-quality models helps pupils succeed by clarifying subject goals. Practice and metacognition help them apply these to their own work.

3. Models show pupils how to succeed

Conveying academic expectations to pupils is challenging. Effective teachers set goals that challenge and stretch pupils, while providing enough support to make it likely pupils will succeed (Coe et al., 2014). Previously, Mr Jones has focused on describing to pupils what they need to do to succeed. However, he has found this problematic: he invites pupils to structure sentences “carefully”, to select the “most telling quotations” and to approach their work “methodically”. Some pupils seem able to do this but for others his advice appears not to help. Mr Jones realises that these concepts may be too abstract to be easily applied by many pupils so he needs a better way to convey them (Christodoulou, 2017).

Models can show what pupils need to do to succeed. Mr Jones has already encountered the power of a concrete example in making abstract curricular concepts and ideas accessible. He realises that they can also be used to show pupils how to succeed in a specific task. He can use models to demonstrate the components of a good response and the process behind constructing one. One approach is to show pupils completed models, such as a finished calculation, sentence, or essay paragraph. He can also show pupils the process of creating an answer, either by showing finished worked examples (Sweller et al., 1998) – for example, the stages of a sum or an edited document – or by live modelling: completing a task or editing an answer in front of pupils and talking about his thinking process (EEF, 2017). This is a chance for Mr Jones to share his subject expertise with pupils, by describing the choices he is making and the reasons for them as he is making them.

4. How teachers use their models matters

5. Promoting metacognition

Models can also promote pupils’ metacognition by helping them to get a clear sense of what their work should look like. This makes it easier for them to plan and monitor their work – comparing what they are doing to the model – and to evaluate their approach by making adaptations if they notice that their work does not exhibit key features shown in the model (EEF, 2017). This may be particularly important where a teacher anticipates common misconceptions may arise about a topic. Pupils may have acquired ideas, either in school or from everyday experience, that are ‘in conflict with’ the to-be-learned concepts (Chi, 2009).

Mr Jones can use his models to draw pupil attention to misconceptions as well as ways to overcome them. For example, as he models how complete a problem, he might ask pupils “What trap are we going to avoid falling into here?” and emphasise that “I’m going to avoid falling into this trap”, showing them what he wants them to do instead. Knowing what is expected of pupils and what they should avoid is therefore a powerful way to help pupils to monitor and evaluate their own work.

6. Nuances and Caveats