Online Teaching
I feel like I am in the routine of teaching online now, after 8 weeks. It is not ideal, and I would rather be in the classroom, but given the situation I think I have found my flow. There are still some things I need to focus on improving:

1. Involving all students in the lesson. Some students don't really engage by asking questions so Cold Calling is even more important in this situation. All students must be participating for me to hear their voice.
2. Smaller tasks. Especially with the younger students, some are struggling with the longer periods of individual work, and are drifting off task. I think it would be better to break them down and do a couple of questions, then feedback with the whole class. Normally I would wander round and talk with those students individually, but that can't happen now.
3. Explore Desmos. Many people have mentioned how good the teacher dashboard is in desmos. Whilst I have used it for the premade activities, I have never made one of my own, so that is the next step.

Key Skills
I have been thinking a lot about the key skills of my students, especially those I am teaching in the IB AA Standard Level course this year. I have started to put together a generator with these key skills at different levels, which I can use as a starter, to create worksheets, or at this time, get students to use it independently to keep overlearning these key skills so they can do them fluently.

Reflect, Expect, Check, Explain
A full post will come on this once I have finished reading the whole thing, but as I get close to finishing Chapter 1 (which could be a full book in its own right), I have already been struck by the amount of thought that Craig has put into this process.

I am planning to ask my HOD to bring the Estimated Means sequence of questions to a departmental Zoom meeting soon so we can all do them and discuss the benefits of these kinds of connections.

The structure of Reflect (what has changed), Expect (what do you expect to happen), Check (do the algorithm to see if your expectation was correct), Explain (can you explain the relationship) is a really helpful way to think about mathematical thinking. This is the behaviour we go through when answering questions, so we need to explicitly teach our students this behaviour too.

I am excited to try some elements of this out in the next few weeks.

CPD
There is soooooo much CPD available at the moment. Seneca Learn courses. ResearchEd Home videos. The usual blogs and articles. Books piling up. Complete Maths webinars. Inner Drive Academy. And with a 2 year old at home and teaching a full timetable via Zoom, I am not managing to get much done (other than slowly working my way through books). Keeping track of all the opportunities is difficult, and I want to do them all, but I just need to file them and come back to them when I have the time.

Instructional Coaching and Playbook
We launched our new instructional coaching programme in February this year. 3 weeks later, the whole of Peru went into lockdown, and coaching hit the backburner as we all got our head around teaching from home. But now I am trying to restart the programme in some way. It is difficult to get people on board when you can't go and speak to them directly about the possibility of being coached. I am relying on people letting me know when I keep mentioning it.

But whilst I am waiting for somebody to coach, I have made a start on putting together an instructional playbook (as Jim Knight calls it). This is the set of instructional strategies that the coaches become experts in so they can share them with teachers. I will be pulling on three books to bring it together: High Impact Instruction by Jim Knight; Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov; Teaching WalkThrus by Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli.

But before pulling the actual strategies together, I have started by thinking about how I want to break them into groups. Each of these books does this, and I thought hard about our context and what groupings would work for us. I came up with this model, which also fits with our Principles of Great Teaching.

Teach Like Nobody's Watching by Mark Enser is a call for teachers to take control of their teaching, rather than pandering to outside entities (be it Ofsted, SLT, parents). It is based on two underlying principles: that we should do what is effective (do things that work) and what is efficient (don't do things the long way if there is a shorter way). It is the antidote to the fads of education: things that either don't work (teaching to learning styles), or have been morphed from what does work in such a way to make them useless (plan lessons in three parts), or they do (partially) work but are not worth the time investment in most cases (discovery models of learning).

Efficiency, as the author points out, is a term that is often viewed with disdain in education. "There is no place for efficiency in schools" is something I have had said to me, implying that efficiency is about stripping back and reducing the level of education. But that is not what efficiency is about. It is about reaching the same level with the least possible resources wasted. Those resources are not paper or electrical devices. Enser is talking about time costs of certain tasks. Every minute of teachers time spent doing something that could have been achieved in less time is time not used to prepare lessons, feedback to students, improve their own practice. Being efficient is about using our time wisely to achieve the best results, in the shortest time.

And Enser argues that an efficient and effective teacher follows four stages. He compares these to "real world teachers", such as driving instructors, who follow these stages naturally.

There are a lot of benefits to having a simple structure around which to base your teaching: it is easy to remember, meaning you are more likely to do it; it cuts out unnecessary stuff that has little impact on student learning; it reduces teacher stress and workload, and so makes them better at their job.

In Part 1 of the book, Enser goes into detail on each of these four aspects of effective and efficient teaching, linking to research and classroom practice. There are some suggestions for activities, but mostly it focuses on why these are important and the guiding principles of each.

Part 1, which is about half the book, is, in my opinion, an essential read for all teachers. It overviews what simple, effective and efficient teaching should be based upon, and gives teachers the springboard to take control of their own practice. It celebrates the classroom teacher.

Part 2 moves on to look at the curriculum and assessment. It looks at the taught curriculum and how we sequence it, the "super-curriculum" of things we want our students to know/experience/learn outside of structured lesson time, and how we can go about assessing if we have been successful at this. Again, all these are addressed from a viewpoint of being effective and efficient, and not wasting time on tasks that do not improve the learning of the students. 

The final chapter in part 2 is all about running department meetings and how to use them to develop one of the most important parts of great teachers: their subject knowledge. This chapter in itself is a must read for any head of department (or line manager to a head of department) as it is a treasure trove of simple ideas to help make departmental CPD time more effective, and less based on administrative tasks.

Part 3 looks at the wider school, and what role school leadership has to play in allowing teachers to do their job without interference. The thorny issues of behaviour, data tracking, non-negotiables, CPD and feedback policies are tackled, with Enser again arguing to cut these back to what is actually useful for teachers. Each of these is accompanied by a short case study from somebody in a leadership position from schools across the UK.

The whole premise of the book is to allow teachers to Teach Like Nobody's Watching, and at every turn Enser brings our attention to things we do which are not essential, and the things we could be doing that would make us more time efficient in doing our jobs. 

Making the time to read this book (and reflect on it) would be an effective and efficient way for all teachers to keep improving what they do, and help our students do the best they can.

My Takeaways
The simplicity of the recap, input, application, feedback model of teaching is great. I have been guilty of over-complicating things in the past, both as a teacher and T+L leader, and this call to simplify what we do has struck a nerve with me.

My teaching does (now) largely follow this approach, though reading this has made me more aware of the importance of each stage. It can be easy to skip recap, for example, when pushed for time. But building in the stereotypical "Last lesson we..." has been something I have implemented immediately, even in live online teaching.

But here are a few highlights from each chapter:
Recap - importance of connecting new learning to old material explicitly; Cornwell notes; show students the puzzle box to help them fit new knowledge in the right place.
Input - requires attention and good behaviour; the importance of good subject knowledge; limits on working memory; dual coding; interactive through questioning; don't rush!
Application - get students thinking hard; break it down and bring it together; ensure understanding before application; make the task focus on what you want them to learn; importance of modelling; is the purpose of application to perform or to practice.
Feedback - feedback is not the same as marking; reduce the need for feedback (careful input, give success criteria); reduce time (verbal, whole class); make it count (have a purpose, action points, make it specific).
Programme of Study - the curriculum is the journey you wish to take your pupils on, so make it a conscious choice; build upon previous knowledge; identify and keep coming back to threshold concepts.
Super-curriculum - avoid a scattergun approach and link to the main curriculum; increase cultural capital with general knowledge within classes; better than a reading list is to set reading homework and link to curriculum.
Assessment - designed to make learning visible; be careful about what you are assessing (does language cause the issues); consider the types of validity (does it cover everything, would two tests on same topic produce same results, would a test on something different produce different results); benefits of rank assessments.
Department meetings - develop subject knowledge (audit, address gaps, adapt practice); develop curriculum (question, map, evaluate); common culture (expectations of student work, collaborate).
Leaders supporting teaching - it is impossible to teach well when there is poor behaviour; there needs to be an understanding of principles to avoid cargo cults; separate CPD from meetings and focus on why before handing to departments. 

In terms of leading T+L, the model has given me an idea for developing our new coaching programme, which I will write about soon. It has also made me reflect on the overly complicated nature of our own Principles of Great Teaching (...) which contain 16 different aspects. I wonder if collecting them under bigger terms would be useful? Again, building this in to the Coaching programme is on my to do list. This year was meant to be about departments going away and looking at how the Principles fit in their subjects, and what they look like, but the lockdown has pushed that back. I still need to ensure these conversations are happening when we get back. 

There has been plenty of debate on twitter the last few days over the effectiveness of teaching live online lessons vs setting work for students to complete in their own time. In other words, whether we should be teaching in a syncronous or asynchronous way in the current school closures.

Mark Enser goes into detail of why he thinks the asynchronous model is a better approach here as a response to some rather antagonistic tweets from a former Schools Minister. Enser accepts that different circumstances will mean that each model will be more effective in different situations. At the end of the post he asks for anyone who has been teaching live online lessons to share how they have made it successful, so that is my plan for this post.

My situation
First I want to state that I know that what I am doing would not work for everybody. Even those in a similar school situation have different home lives. I am not sharing this to say others should follow my lead, but rather that here are some things that have worked for me.

At the start of the lockdown I posted a blog with 5 tips. I stand by those now, though there are certainly things I might add!

As I write this we have been doing online teaching for 7.5 weeks since the schools were closed here in Peru. This started 1.5 weeks into our new school year. We are currently on a week's break before starting the second term of 9 weeks which will be done online too. It is very possible we do not return to school premises until 2021.

I mention this to make it clear that we are in this position for the long term, and so suggestions of just reviewing and mastering content students have already studied are not appropriate for us.

I work in a private school. This brings two things into the mix. Firstly, our students largely have their own devices (year 9 upwards all have laptops in school normally, and years 7 and 8 use them in certain lessons, so most also have their own) and Internet connections are not an issue (well, no more than are usually an issue here). Secondly, our salaries are dependent on parents continuing to pay the fees, and so there has to be a large element of 'pleasing the customer' at this time (more so than usual).

In terms of my technology I have a work laptop which I am using for the Zoom call, and then have my personal laptop set up beside this so I can do registers, see classkick progress, view the worksheet without having to jump between tabs on the work laptop. This has been an incredibly important part of my work flow solution.

Working at a private international school also has an impact on the number of periods we teach. We have 40 minute lessons and there are 40 periods a week. The maximum teaching load is 28, and most do not have more than 25/26. I also have a post of responsibility so have a lighter timetable.

I have a two and a half year old at home. He has not been able to leave the house for 7 weeks and is going stir crazy because of it. But fortunately my wife stopped working when he was born, and so she is taking the brunt of looking after him. Of course, he doesn't completely understand and finds it hard for me to be at home and not be able to see me, and this does lead to some interruptions.

But my school have been incredibly understanding of home situations from the outset. We are sticking to the normal timetable, and the only requirements on staff have been that they must have at least one live sessions with each class each week, and they should be available during timetabled class periods, but this can be via email/Google Classroom.

So given that many of the practical problems with live teaching are not an issue for me, I have decided (as have our whole Mathematics department) to teach all lessons live through Zoom.

What I am doing
This year I am teaching two year 7 classes, a year 12 IB standard level class and a year 13 IB Higher Level class. I have taken a different approach with the different age groups, but I do a Zoom lesson every period.

With the IB classes I have broadly followed what I do in school normally. As we are working towards and external qualification, there is an element of needing to cover the content, and this is taking a little longer than it normally would. I have cut the retrieval starters down for this reason, doing one question in single periods, and then following the Spacing Concepts I started this year in the double period.

In terms of the rest of the lesson, I am still using the lesson sheets I produce for IB classes. Students either print these or have them open of their screens and write in an exercise book if they have no printer. I do not have a printer at home, so I am writing in an exercise book.

I use my visualiser and screen share with the class my book, and work through examples as I do in class. Sometimes I will bring out a mini whiteboard under the visualiser to answer tangentially questions. Then students do a your turn. Where in class I can wander around to see their work, in Zoom I am making more use of cold calling students to talk through their entire solution, and asking if anybody did it differently. For shorter questions I get them all to type their answer in the chat function on Zoom, which I have set so that only I see their responses.

I am more reliant on them asking for help than I would like, but it seems to have worked well, as the quieter students are asking through the chat.

After some input, they generally work on some independent practice. I am making use of Classkick (I made this guide for our staff) and Desmos activities which both allow me to see student responses, but mainly for IB they have questions to do from the textbook, which have answers they can check. One of the mistakes I made early on was not ensuring they knew where the answers were, but now they are in the habit of checking themselves.

Keeping them on the Zoom call but muted has become the norm here. This was a request from the students who said they were too easily distracted working in their rooms without it. This also enables them to ask questions if they get stuck, and sometimes I will put them in a Breakout Room to discuss it with somebody else from the class.

With my year 7 classes I am taking a different approach. I am uploading a presentation to Classkick, and producing an assignment in Classkick for each lesson (labelled week 7 lesson 3 etc). The first slide is the starter activity which is Numeracy Ninjas. I have found this more important for the younger students as they arrive to the Zoom call in dribs and drabs, and this gives them something to do straight away. One benefit of Classkick is that I set it to mark automatically after 5 minutes.

After this I will usually introduce the idea for today's lesson through an example. I have mostly been doing this by editing the Classkick assignment live. If they are on the page they see my edits appear immediately. I then talk through these on the Zoom call. Whilst doing this I lock the assignment in Classkick so they cannot edit it. Then they do some practice. This will probably involve some your turns first which I check before they can move on to the main exercise (in Classkick they can call me to check their work). The main exercise is from the White Rose Maths resources (we changed our scheme of work to theirs this year), and I have set it to self mark where possible. I then keep a view of the whole classes work and can see their work live. I will check questions that can't be self checked (written answers) and answer questions which they can ask through Zoom or Classkick.

Some concluding thoughts
Some of the benefits of doing lessons live have been:

• Less work out of class as I do not have to mark every piece of work submitted. I can keep on top of this during class time like I would in school.
  
• Students can ask questions when they are stuck or unsure, like they would in class.
  
• I can monitor misconceptions more easily and address them earlier, through classkick and targeted cold calling. Again, more like being in school.
  
• The social aspect for our kids is important. They have not been able to leave their houses for 7 weeks now, so the normality of school and social interactions is really important.
  
• The kids and parents have asked for it. I have sent a couple of emails to parents explaining my process at this time. I have also sent a survey to kids and their parents. My school is doing the same on a whole school level. In all cases, the majority want Zoom classes if possible.

As I said at the start, I am not saying anybody else should go down this route, and I accept that the practical limitations could get in the way of this being a reality for many teachers. But I have found a way to make it work for me, and I feel like I am able to meet the learning objectives for the students this way in a more effective way than through an asynchronous model.

The biggest problem with online teaching (in either model) is checking for student understanding at the time of input. Through Classkick, questions and answers through Zoom chat and cold calling explanations of answers I think I have managed to make a good stab at being able to do this fairly effectively.