“I don’t understand what happened. The reading went fine but the second I turned round to put a picture up on the screen it all went wrong. They started talking and messing about and didn’t take the next activity seriously at all. I told them off but they just carried on being silly. What’s wrong with them? Why can’t they just be patient for the couple of seconds it takes me to find the Armada portrait on google?”
Less experienced teacher in a post lesson discussion – fictionalised.
Over the years I’ve seen many trainees and inexperienced teachers encounter issues with what I’ve come to think of as ‘cracks in the walls’; points in lessons in which pupils move from one activity to another. This could be a moment when a teacher asks pupils to move their attention away from a piece of reading to a picture displayed on a large screen, or it could be when pupils shift from a questioning session to a part of the lesson in which they are expected to write or to balance some equations.
Less experienced teachers typically don’t spend very much time thinking about these moments, probably because they are so short and seem much less significant than the tasks pupils are expected to do.
But things can go awry in even the tiniest of cracks.
A settled class can quickly become distracted and these distractions breed quickly.
What should be a quick, easy transition can become a source of antagonism and conflict, which then feeds on itself and may develop into a damaging vicious cycle.
Many experienced teachers develop techniques to minimise disruption in these parts of the lesson through trial and error, but then automate these, robbing them of the ability to consciously understand and clearly explain what they do and why.
This post is designed to make a sometimes invisible process a little clearer.
But of course nothing I’m going to include here is really new.
I am indebted to the many teachers I’ve observed deploying these strategies, to those who’ve written about similar issues before, and to Doug Lemov and his team for providing a shared language to discuss this with.
Before moving on to strategies, it is helpful to think about why these transitory moments are actually much more significant than they appear.
For this Nuthall’s Hidden Lives of Learners is very helpful in its exposure of just how much is going on in a class which isn’t seen by their teacher. There’s a really mind-boggling amount of stuff; shifting friendship groups, petty enemies, grievances, friendly social media bants and fallings out. Invitations to sleepovers and parties, hormones and crushes.
And so on.
These things are important to those involved in them. Every second a child is in a classroom they are navigating these sometimes sunny and sometimes troubled oceans, making alliances, jostling for status and brooding on their triumphs, secret fears and desires.
It is hard for children to stay on the line. It is hard to focuson their lesson at all times and every unstructured second allows the possibility of any one or combination of concerns moving attention away from the important but not obviously urgent to the very urgent and – to children – very important.
The cruel thing Josh said to Ruksana over Snapchat last night, and what everyone thinks about it is privileged over the water cycle by its immediacy.
A look flashed across a classroom is rarely just a look. A whisper is rarely just a whisper. One word said in less than a second can be a source of joy or a devastating, cutting insult. Each interaction contains layers of meaning.
The moments between activities need to be carefully managed to avoid all this stuff spilling into attention we want focused on Henry VIII’s annulment, or the economy of Ethiopia, or quadratic equations or whatever.
How do we do this?
- Plan ahead and be organised.
While no teacher can expect to understand even a fraction of the dynamics in the classes they teach they can minimise opportunities for these to intrude on learning by making sure transitions are fast and clean. It can be as simple as making sure a picture is loaded up ready to flick straight to once you the lesson reaches the point it’s needed. It might mean including line numbers on booklets or worksheets so it’s easy to get children from reading, to a questioning session and then straight back reading without fuss.
While the way in which transitions might be managed are context dependent, the questions to ask are almost always the same; where in the lesson are these points? How does the teacher make sure these are as short as possible? What might go wrong and what contingencies are in place?
Before finishing on this it is worth pointing out the obvious; people are more likely to respond positively to competence. Regularly fiddling around on google in the middle of a lesson can look unprofessional, which has a negative knock on effect.
2. Brighten Lines.
Stop reading this now and have a look at this super post from Lee Donaghy.
Welcome back.
Lee is absolutely right to highlight the importance of Lemov’s Bright Lines.
Discussion around efficient transition is helped by this conceptualisation.
Sometimes it isn’t possible to avoid a lengthier ‘crack’, for example when needing to shift things around in the middle of a practical science demonstration. On such occasions it’s important to make this explicit so pupils know what’s going on, how long it will take and what will happen afterwards. The simplest way is usually just to tell pupils what’s going on – for example, “I’m now going to take thirty seconds to put away this guitar and pick up another one, after that I’m going to show how the chord progression sounds different.” This reduces uncertainty and provides a structure which makes wandering attention less likely.
More experienced teachers might find it possible to clearly talk the whole way through transitions, turning them into learning activities in if themselves. For those who find they aren’t yet at the point they can do this, telling pupils ‘what to do’ during the break might be a better bet
3. Say ‘what to do’ and manage means of participation at the end of transition.
If a transition of more than a few seconds really can’t be avoided it is wise to consider giving pupils something to do during it. It’s surprising how much can fit into even just a minute. In my lessons I use these as opportunities for mini retrieval practice, as in “while these worksheets get handed out I want everyone to write one simple, clear sentence on one way industrialisation was connected to colonisation.”
Saying what not to do never works very well. Saying “and no messing about while I hand these out” doesn’t make it clear what pupils should do while they aren’t messing about, and even more importantly it invites problems for the same reason telling anyone “don’t think about an elephant” always fails.
At the end of a transitory period pupils benefit from being told what exactly they need to do to participate in the lesson. This can be very simple – just saying “now the portrait is on the board I want you to sit up, put down anything in your hands and look carefully at the dress Queen Elizabeth is wearing. I’ll be asking questions about it in a minute’s time.”
If, for whatever reason, avoidable or unavoidable, there has been any disorder or disruption regardless of how supposedly low level then it’s important to address it, even if this is just saying ‘there was talking while I was setting up. I want you to stop now, sit up, listen and face me now.”
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So there we have it. Transitory points in lessons; often overlooked in planning, particularly by less experienced teachers but deserving much careful thought. If we aren’t mindful and proactive the best of lesson can fall into these cracks.
Ben Newmark 