Education technology is the combined use of computer hardware, software and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. It creates, uses and manages technological processes and educational resources to help improve academic performance. There are new technological tools which can be integrated in school’s for efficient and effective school management, and this is a trend every country should adopt in order to achieve their educational goals. How well does Nigeria’s educational system maximize such trends? Let’s dive into the state of EdTech in Nigeria.

EdTech is essential in school management if we are to achieve efficiency and effectiveness. The world has evolved from traditional methods of learning to digital patterns and every school administrator and educator are advised to adapt to such digital methodologies in order to be more productive. This will foster accuracy, accountability, development and achievement of the school goals.

Education in Nigeria is faced with a lot of problems. These include: Poor funding and thus poor infrastructures, inadequate classrooms, lack of teaching aids (projectors, computers, laboratories and libraries), lack of quality teachers, and polluted learning environment, to mention but a few challenges facing Nigerian schools.

The use of EdTech in this country is completely discouraging, especially for government-owned schools, which hardly learn in a conducive environment – let alone making available tech gadgets that will enhance teaching and learning. Some private schools are the leading pioneers of EdTech, especially for administrators that understand how paramount it is to yield desirable output. Examples of this can be found in top cities like Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcort. 

Nigerian EdTech companies leveraging technology to make education seamless and accessible to millions of Nigerians includes the following:

• uLesson: This company aims to provide adaptive and interactive tests that help students master concepts. Their mission is to recommend lessons, promote practice sessions, and work closely with students to achieve the kind of growth that transforms lives, both in and outside the classroom.

• Gradely: This company helps schools and parents deliver a personalized learning experience for K-12 students in Nigeria.

• PrepClass: This is a company that focuses on connecting potential learners with skilled tutors. They provide tutors for basically anything a client may wish to learn.

• Pass.ng: This is a web and mobile platform that helps candidates in Nigeria practice and prepare for national examinations, by way of suggestive coaching and adaptive testing.

• Passnownow: This is a social interaction website that supports learning by providing curriculum-based test materials to users at very little charge.

The benefits of EdTech cannot be over emphasized. The education system in Nigeria will be better off if every school integrates tech into their core curriculum. The government will need to play a great role in ensuring this comes to realization, that education will be made available to all regardless of social status.  Teachers are responsible for preparing students for the 21st century world: Knowledge is power, after all -therefore, the need to embrace new methodologies is a must. 

As I put pen to paper, I’m almost loathed to start writing ‘yet another article’ about COVID-19; as educators, we all know the dreadful impact that it’s had on schools and young people across the UK and how it has fundamentally changed how we engage with our students. 

What has been a constant source of inspiration and hope over the last year are the amazing stories of adaptation and innovation on the part of teachers, school leaders and 3rd party education providers (not to mention parents and young people themselves) to make remote and online learning work as a viable alternative to the classroom. 

For around 15 years, Collingwood Learning has delivered The Smashed Project, a ground-breaking alcohol education programme for young people, designed to engage Key Stage 3 students in healthy discussion and debate around the effects and impact of underage drinking.

From humble beginnings as a UK-based Theatre-in-Education touring programme the project has evolved, with the support of our sponsors Diageo, into a truly global movement encompassing 25 countries worldwide. Over 900,000 young people have been engaged by the project and we have ambitious plans to reach 5 million by 2025.

Faced with the sudden inability to deliver live workshops in schools, we had to respond rapidly with an engaging and educationally credible alternative to face-to-face interaction with young people.  As the originators and global leaders of the programme, we also felt a responsibility to develop and trial a solution which could be considered for adoption by our international delivery partners who were facing the same challenges presented by COVID. 

Smashed Online has become that solution, dedicated to:

• Increasing knowledge and understanding of the effects of underage drinking
• Helping young people understand social influences that may cause underage drinking, particularly peer pressure
• Promoting healthy lifestyles, healthy relationships, and informed decision making

The hour-long online programme combines filmed theatre-based episodes from our live workshops with interactive activities for KS3 students to complete and is fully linked to the PSHE Association’s Programme of Study and CCEA guidelines in Northern Ireland. We’re also delighted to say that we are able to offer Smashed Online throughout the UK entirely free of charge. 

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Thus far, we have seen over 16,000 users engage with Smashed Online either as self-directed remote learning or teacher-led whole class sessions. What a result when you consider that in March 2020 we were staring into the abyss!

Feedback from teachers has been particularly encouraging, which to us is the most telling sign that we’ve managed to hit the right mark with the online resource:

“It was a fantastic resource for our students during lock down. It covered issues which we know were challenging for some students at that time, and the professionalism of the resource package meant that my teachers could focus their energy on adapting follow-up challenges to specific student needs.”

Most importantly, we’re so excited to be using storytelling and theatre in a brand-new way as we embrace online; helping teachers deliver Personal, Social and Health Education and offering students an engaging programme which makes the risks of underage drinking impossible to forget.

As a result of the success of the UK launch of Smashed Online, we are now actively working with 5 other countries to bring their versions of the resource to life, with plans for 10 more countries after that. It’s fair to say that 2020 was a transformative year for both Collingwood Learning and the Smashed Project and one which has left us stronger and more adaptable than ever before.

Try out Smashed Online for yourself at: www.smashed-online.com

I decided a few years ago that we needed to change our approach to staff development and so I introduced Class Visits. I had read about “Appreciative Inquiry“, and the power of positive questioning to move people in a positive direction, and I found that answers to the question above provided great opportunities to dialogue with teachers and help them move forwards.

Class Visits

Class Visits are all about celebration. I take a camera and questionnaires for both teacher and students. I also have a blank observation sheet that simply divides into Student Learning and Effective Teaching. I am trying to “catch them doing something right” – students and teachers.  

The teacher distributes the questionnaires to students, then they come back to me once the teacher has read them. The teacher completes their own questionnaire. I then email feedback, copying in their line manager, and I aim to do a lot of appreciation.  “When you used this technique…”, “The students really learned…”, ” The students obviously really appreciate…”.  And then I celebrate what I’ve seen in a staff meeting or on my weekly blog.

Alongside Class Visits, we part-funded the distribution of Teach Like a Champion for any teachers who signed up to a project where they would get half-termly feedback on a teaching strategy from the book they were practising. I used staff meetings to introduce a new technique each half-term, though some teachers were happy to go their own way with the book.  

It was a breakthrough. Your open questions to the class did elicit some good answers but if you try using cold call it will enable you to target students who may not have understood. Or: Students answer your questions quite well, and if you use stretch it you will then be able to take them even further. Doug Lemov’s book gave us a shared vocabulary and 62 tried-and-tested techniques to discover as a school.

We’ve gone on to totally redesign our entire Staff Appraisal around the Appreciative Inquiry model.  

Ongoing Professional Development Form

First comes a review of strengths. For this I used the VIA Character Strengths Survey (https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register) , which is free, and has credible research and application behind it.

Next is a review of collaboration and relatedness. This asks teachers to review the teams they have worked well in (appreciative enquiry again!) and their relationship with their line manager. In each case, the questions are open and there is an invitingly-sized box to encourage a developed response (and I’ve had some wonderfully developed responses from teachers!).

The next section focuses on contribution to school, and of course the progress of students in exam (and other) classes is part of .

There is a section only for line managers to complete, which asks about development they have seen in the people they lead, the challenges they face, and their plans for the coming year.

This leads logically to the final section, which looks exclusively forwards. Here the line manager can make suggestions about strengths, competencies and knowledge to be developed (linking back to the person’s first entry on strengths). The person completing the form adds their own responses.  

Then it moves on to collaboration and relatedness to be developed, again mirroring the themes of the first section, again with a box for the line manager and a box for the person whose form it is.

And finally, contribution to the school. I present a table. On one side is “If this changed…“, and on the other is “…the benefits to the school might be…”.

Outcome of the Project

Line managers and staff needed to be given more time than I anticipated to complete these forms well. If someone manages 5 or 10 people, that is a lot of work.

The returns have been amazing: I received detailed accounts from many staff, highlighting all sorts of things I would never have known about. Their pride in their successes shone through.  

I have made a point of emailing each person individually about their form: I annotate the form it as I read it and give feedback along the lines of  – “This sounds great…”;  “Thank you for doing that”;  “I would be interested to know more about that”;  “There are budget limitations with that idea but if you tell me more we might be able to make a small start with it.”

I am not someone who believes that everything in education is quantifiable, though I am accountable for very quantifiable things. But just as when we stare directly as stars in a dark night we actually see less, so when we over-obsess with measurable outcomes we can sometimes blind ourselves to the real, less quantifiable causes. This approach to staff development puts the emphasis on people’s strengths and relationships, because many studies have shown that this is how people grow.

If you like the sound of this approach, be bold, embrace appreciative inquiry, and rethink staff development.

Torquay Academy is an 11-18 state-funded secondary school with almost 1,500 pupils in the Devon seaside town of Torquay. Some parts of Torquay are amongst the most deprived areas of the country, and at 35% the proportion of our pupils attracting pupil premium funding is way above the national average.

The school has undergone a rapid transformation over the past five years, driven by our principal Steve Margetts. A significant upturn in results across the school, combined with an emphasis on world-leading facilities, resources and teaching & learning has led to the school becoming heavily oversubscribed – this year we received more than 800 applications for 240 places.

It’s been a pretty dramatic journey and Tassomai, an online learning programme that gives students personalised daily practice activities to identify learning gaps, has played a major role alongside the recruitment of the right teachers and big improvements to resources in the science department under the leadership of associate assistant principal, John Mellitt. 

We were one of the first schools in the country to adopt Tassomai as a homework tool about five years ago, but its use was limited to Year 11 pupils and of them, only really committed students were using it. The students that embraced Tassomai made big strides in their performance. It’s only in the last two years when we’ve taken a much more strategic approach to use of Tassomai that we have seen a positive impact on a large scale.

I was head of Physics at the beginning of our journey with Tassomai; I’m now head of Online Learning, leading the use of the Tassomai system across the academy. I think this shows just how big Tassomai has become here.

We had our challenges at the start. At first it had a negative energy about it, and we had lunchtime detentions full of students who had not done the work. Then I began to read blogs from Tassomai founder Murray Morrison, and these inspired me to take a different tack. I decided to incentivise the use of Tassomai and created a competition in which every science class participated in a league table, with the winners receiving small prizes. It was transformational.

The magic of Tassomai is the algorithms that underpin it. The questions a student gets wrong come up more frequently than the ones they get right and their understanding is reinforced by asking the same questions in slightly different ways. It’s a form of targeted, adaptive mastery practice, done in an engaging, energetic way that keeps the student’s attention.

Our forward-thinking principal approached me with an idea to apply the power of Tassomai across all subjects across the school that contained a written examination component. The positive part of lockdown was that it gave me the chance to really drive this idea into reality. In a unique collaboration with Tassomai’s content team, we trained all teachers online in the process of creating questions using a question generator given to us by Tassomai. Within four weeks our team of expert teachers had written 26,500 questions, covering the entire curriculum.

Fast forward to September 2020, and the fruits of our labour began to take shape. We now give our students daily goals to complete in subjects across the curriculum on Tassomai as part of their compulsory daily homework. In a 7-day cycle, they will be expected to complete between 9 and 16 goals a week, depending on their year group. We make a big deal celebrating those that hit all of their targets; currently 60% of our students hit 100%. That’s pretty impressive at this stage. Our goal is to increase participation so all students complete all of their Tassomai. To achieve this, a lot of our attention over the next year will be on eliminating the potential obstacles that a small minority of student’s face that may make engagement on Tassomai difficult, such as disruption at home or difficulty getting hold of devices.

Lots of schools set exam questions for homework but for me that is totally flawed. These should be done in class with the expert – the teacher – in the room. Homework should focus on reinforcing knowledge. Our philosophy is to work the hard stuff in lessons and reinforce it on Tassomai. 

I was gutted about the lockdown, because we don’t have data on how our use of Tassomai would have influenced results in the 2020 GCSEs, but I’m certain it would have had a huge impact. There certainly was a clear correlation between the 2019 GCSE results and student engagement with Tassomai. It’s so obvious to us that if students do Tassomai regularly, they will know their facts and they will have a solid foundation to apply their knowledge correctly under pressure. 

Our students know the importance and value of Tassomai because they can see that they have made clear progress in their assessments compared to two years ago. The stats show just how engaged they are; our students have answered more than 3 million Tassomai questions this year, with 320,000 being completed in just one week this term.

Our teachers, meanwhile, are buying into Tassomai because they can see that the more students can build their base knowledge the more they are able to apply it. We’ve already made big strides with Tassomai, but there’s more to be done. I think the potential is huge.

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www.tassomai.com

By exposing our students, in the English classroom and beyond, to these pieces, we are opening their minds to the possibility of understanding and interpreting an era with a greater level of depth and understanding. However, this glimpse into the past can’t be the only exposure that our students have to society. What we need to do is nurture and develop the past by presenting them with the present and the possibilities of the future. 

We often mention that a true and realistic curriculum cannot be fixed. It can never be labelled as complete, as the curriculum needs to be reviewed in order to reflect the demographic. Over time, society, cohorts and current affairs change and we need to ensure that these changes are reflected in our classroom teaching. 

I’ve written before about the need for students to be provided with the skills and knowledge that they will have to exhibit when they leave the protective embrace of education, and venture into the uncensored world of the many. They will no longer be in an environment where mistakes will be highlighted and rectified by others. Instead they will have to reflect and consider the persona that they exhibit to audiences and the communication skills they demonstrate. 

Because of this, there is something that we need to remind ourselves of:

Domain-specific conversation may be had with the few, but the ability to discuss and reference current affairs opens communication with the many. 

Students should be able to write a speech or a presentation for work because they have been provided with the words of the greats (and the not-so-greats for a diverse reference). They should be encouraged to participate in debates about subjects that actually matter to them. Subjects that result in an emotional response being charged up and developed into a refined articulation of emotions. 

Students should be able to communicate effectively with colleagues or their employers, because they have been given the skills and knowledge to do so through the exposure to current affairs. By providing them with knowledge, we therefore provide them with the confidence that can be sustained long after education has left their rear-view mirror. 

In order to do this, there are a few simple, supportive approaches that can begin to open this dialogue:

• Start off small – Current affairs can’t necessarily be embedded into the curriculum, because they haven’t necessarily all happened yet! Larger topics or tasks may need to result in more of a reactive response as opposed to an intricately laid plan of objectives and outcomes. This is why verbalisation and the encouragement of oracy skills are so effective in these circumstances. You could consider strategies such as:

• Having a weekly allocated time where you watch the news and discuss or share a newspaper article discussion. 
• Encourage independent research and opportunities so that students can begin to lead the discussions. This approach is definitely more of a facilitative strategy. 
• Introduce ‘devil’s advocate’ statements that you know will encourage an emotional response, and allow them time to plan their arguments/viewpoints before a discussion.

• Be sensitive, not redacted – We would be doing a disservice to our students if we ignore or redact the truth. Obviously, there may need to be some censorship and understanding when considering contextualisation. It’s important to recognise that the most talked about current affairs are often the most controversial topics. Whether this is racial equality with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, or gender equality with the ‘He for She’ campaign (as just two of the many examples), it’s important that students are constantly provided with the opportunity to discuss these matters, by being provided with the most suitable facts and resources for that particular demographic. What we should then be able to see is that these open and honest discussions pave the way for a more open and reflective society. 

• Set the bar of excellence with evidence – We need to champion the individuals that do the right thing. Sometimes students become cocooned in this shelter of school life, and they consequently have difficulties with relating skills with real life scenarios. By changing the dialogue, we can therefore change the way that students see a task, and how it can relate to post-academia. For instance, instead of ‘write about an individual’, it’s ‘write your personal statement’. 

At the end of the day, our students have a right to a broad and balanced curriculum. Part of this curriculum has to be their ability to function in everyday life, but that doesn’t mean that we have to change the game and add another piece. We can just change and position them so that everything can begin to piece together. 

After all, only by looking at the present with a critical eye, can students begin to truly evaluate the impact of our great literary heritage.

As an IB PYP school, we have 6 units of inquiry across the year. Traditionally, teachers guide students through the central idea, lines of inquiry, and key concepts of each unit, while trying to provide as many options and opportunities for inquiry as possible. As a grade 4 team, we have almost 100 Studio 4 students in 5 classes, and a dedicated EAL teacher for the group. 

We decided to explore an option we call “inquiry groups”. Our why behind this is so that all of our students have the opportunity to dive a little deeper into an interest of theirs, related to the unit. It also makes it easier for teachers to guide a group of students who are generally interested in similar things.

Choosing inquiry groups can be an interesting process. There needs to be a balance of providing new opportunities and using interests the students already have. Usually we do this by having a week or two of tasters for many concepts within the unit so students are exposed to new ideas they might hold on to. After that, we usually send out a Google Form asking for their first and second choices.

From this, we balance the groups. We try to give everyone their first choice as often as we can. This means that as an adult, WE need to be the flexible ones. It is great to teach to our own strengths and interests, but if there are two groups worth of students interested in one area, we make two groups for that area. If there seems to be a group of mismatched interests, maybe one group is a bit of a mismatch group. If no one is interested in one of the areas, we don’t run it. 

If you are familiar with the exhibition at the end of a student’s journey in the PYP, I feel like the process is sometimes similar to that. We don’t always have the celebration of learning at the end, of course, but we have many groups of students working under the same central idea that is modified for each group. Sometimes we have even had blank spaces in our central idea, that depend on which group they learn with.

As a studio, we believe in providing a balance of opportunities for every learner to flourish. Opening up a unit so students have these focused groups and the support of a teacher is one way we create this environment.

Cindy’s Top Tips for Inquiry Groups:

1. Keep your unit broad – this way, many groups and pathways can be taken
2. Play to your own strengths and interests (..but, #3) – this makes teaching inquiry groups way easier, and way more fun!
3. (#2, but…) Shift based on student interest – remember that the students are your priority. Their interests come first. Be flexible.
4. Innovate inside the box – Have standards you need to stick to? That’s fine! See what standards could fit into each group, and document that. Try to give tasters of these at the beginning of the unit as well.
5. Change as needed – We change things up all of the time. While the same basic idea might work, the structure of a unit might change, depending on the content. Do what works for you and your students in your setting.

Interested in more? Check out Cindy’s blog innovativeinquirers.weebly.com for more reflections about the studio model.

My father spent five years relentlessly trying to persuade me to do my PGCE and, for most of that time, I had no idea how I would explain the reasons why becoming a teacher filled me with such dread. I genuinely could not think of anything worse.

I did not have a happy school experience. It has taken years of reflection and deep soul-searching to understand why, and when I eventually became a teacher nearly 16 years ago, things became very clear. I was bullied, which was never taken seriously, and my teachers had very low expectations of me. How could I tell? The way they spoke to me, the written feedback in my books and the fact that even when I had achieved better grades than some of my peers in assessments, this was seen as a ‘fluke’, so I was moved to lower sets instead of them. 

Trying to convince my teachers I was more than they thought meant that I never felt I truly belonged. This led to years of seeking validation from people I didn’t need it from to believe I was good; a good mum, a good teacher, a good friend, a good wife, a good senior leader, a good person. 

So, why did I choose to become a teacher? I chose to be the teacher I never had. My first six months were arduous. I clashed with the same ‘challenging’ students week in, week out, and by the end of some lessons, I would be in the crying corner of the staffroom wishing the weeks away. Something needed to change, and it wasn’t going to be my students. I observed some wonderful, experienced teachers around the school to find ways to make a difference. 

One day, after another pitiful lesson with 10X, I was asked a simple question: “Have you tried to build a relationship with them?” 

It was an honest question, but I was deeply offended. “Erm, yes?” I replied, not quite keeping eye contact. 

“Okay, so tell me what you know about them personally. What do they like? What is their favourite music, colour, book, food?” 

Red in the face, I knew I was busted – I didn’t have a clue! Advice during my PGCE and NQT year varied. Many people had told me not to smile for the first term and to take on a no-nonsense approach before considering letting my guard down. On reflection, I could see that this was precisely the reason why I struggled to connect with some students. To them, I was unapproachable, and when I tried to be fun, they never believed I was being ‘real’. 

Making the decision to build positive, meaningful relationships was easy. Building them, however, was a whole new ball game. Just when I thought I had cracked it, something would happen and I would be back at square one, feeling deflated, hurt and exhausted. Relationships are not built in a day: they are built daily, and one thing I have learned is that this needs to be done alongside an unconditional, positive regard, especially for children and young people that have suffered adverse childhood experiences. 

So what does it look like when you build relationships with your children and students?

• Meeting and greeting your students at the door with a smile will make them feel welcome. For children with chaotic home lives, often difficult to navigate, this goes some way to making them feel wanted.
• A genuine feeling of belonging – students want to come to your lessons because they feel safe in the environment you have worked hard to build. Children and young people who talk about what belonging feels like will often say that they feel seen by their teachers. 
• They respect you because you have shown them what it looks and feels like to be respected.
• Mistakes are made and these are okay because everyone makes mistakes. That’s how we learn!
• Your students will trust you with their vulnerabilities knowing that you will not judge them or belittle them, even when they have got things wrong.
• Apologising when you are wrong. Not only does this show that you too make mistakes, but you own them and want to learn from them. If you see a young person’s face when you apologise, it often comes as a shock! How are we to teach children to behave if we do not model this when we really need to?
• You will care about them unconditionally and hold no grudges, ensuring that even when things have not been great in one lesson, the relationship will be repaired so that ‘we start a fresh’ the next.
• You have changed the language around the children you teach, which has supported your view of that child and the behaviours they display. A good way to think of this is: A difficult child is a child with difficulties. A child that is attention-seeking is actually attention-needing. 
• High expectations are consistent and routines in your class are clear – we all do this, including me as your teacher. 

It is important to remember that the culture and values you hold in your classroom will have a direct impact on the behaviour and the relationships you build with your students. Consider what they are. How will you ensure that you uphold these during every lesson, every day? Reflect on your own school experience. Who were your most memorable teachers and why? What did these teachers do to make an impact on you? And finally, consider how you would like to be remembered. What do you want your legacy to be?  Write this down and tell your students about this.

Relationships can be built regardless of the policies and systems in place. They will take a lot of time and huge emotional investment. There will be days where you feel on top of the world because you know the connection was made, and others where you wonder why you bothered. You will make mistakes, say the wrong things and sometimes feel so angry your eyes turn red, but I can assure you this. One day you will be spoken about by someone whose life you changed when they were young. Someone who saw you as their unconditional champion. 

You may receive a message in years to come that says: “Thank you. For everything you did for me. I know I wasn’t easy, but you never gave up on me. You made me feel like I wasn’t a failure and that I meant something. It meant a lot and I wanted you to know.” (Message received in February 2018 – young person last seen in August 2007). 

If you are new to the profession, when it comes to disruption, it can feel sometimes that you are not in control of how students behave. This is of course, partly true, but not entirely. There are a number of ways in which you can tackle poor behaviour before it happens.

In this article, I will explore a number of ways in which you can prevent instances of poor behaviour or deal with low-level disruption using my favourite kind of behaviour management: the silent kind.

Prevention is better than the cure

My theory is that, with practice, for you and for your students, you can eliminate a large percentage of behaviour issues before they happen. Here are a few ideas that work for me:

1. Set the tone for the lesson

• Stand at the door as students come in. Welcome them individually with a smile. Only students who are ready to come in (displaying good uniform and behavior) get your welcome. The others are non-verbally asked to stand to one side. They will soon realise what’s required to come into your room.
• Have everything you need ready before the lesson. If this is difficult, simplify your lessons.
• Where there is attention–seeking behaviour, talk over it and continue teaching initially, to convey the message that the interruptions aren’t worth your attention. If it persists, deal with it.

2. Plan for good behaviour

• Plan for good pace and clear progression, so students are engaged and stimulated at all times.
• Plan for simple activities that require little explanation, set up and intervention. Once students are trained in good behaviour, you can start to take more risks.
• Give meaningful objectives quickly.
• Plan so that there is no dead time in the lesson. How will you deal with early finishers? Can they self-test? Can they support others?
• Have a repertoire of calming, uplifting activities ready to use when students are in a negative mood (quick written tests with immediate feedback, short written puzzles, etc).
• Check/collect homework, detentions and do any other admin at the end of the lesson, not at the beginning.

3. Teach good behaviour

• Dedicate time to clarify to yourself and to your students what your expectations are in every part of the lesson. Design the routines you want for your classes and teach them to your students explicitly. Offer them plenty of structured practice before you require them to follow your routines independently.
• Talk about rules regularly at the beginning of the lesson for the first few weeks.
• Tell students clearly what you want them to do. Avoid “Don’t… !” and “Why are you…?”. They invite discussion and further disruption.

4. Deal with behaviour issues swiftly

• Deal with a behaviour as soon as you spot it and escalate your reactions.
• Give short, step–by–step instructions. Stop after every step and check that they are being followed. Don’t move on until every student has complied.
• Don’t deal fully with incidents when you should be teaching. Tell the student you will speak to them after the lesson.
• If there are too many instances of disruption, be prepared to stop the lesson and have a calm word with the class. Outline expectations and consequences and follow through.
• Tactical avoidance is a valid behaviour technique, but use it sparingly.

5. Be consistent

• Use the school’s referral system every time.
• Never give up when chasing incidents up.
• Record incidents. Let students watch you do this. Attach consequences to them.
• Award achievement points or comments too.

Escalating your reactions

Making use of a full range of reactions can be a very effective way to avoid whole-class disruption. In fact, the most powerful tools in my behaviour management portfolio are my teacher stare (number one of my list of reactions) and saying the student’s name. Reactions 1-4 have saved me thousands of interruptions to lessons over the years.

As a young teacher, I would write this on the palm of my hand when I knew I was going to have a class that would demand a lot of my attention. They were an embedded routine before long.

1. Make eye contact with students.
2. Say the student’s name.
3. Tell the student what they are doing: “You are talking while I am trying to speak to the class.”
4. Ask students to remind the class of the rule: “What’s the rule about talking when I am talking to the class?”
5. Announce consequences for the student if they choose to continue with the behaviour.
6. Move seats if possible.
7. Isolation.
8. 5-minute removal.
9. Removal to a different classroom.
10. SLT removal.

Something works every time, but nothing works all the time

We will all face difficult behaviour when teaching our classes. It’s important to remember that it’s okay to struggle at times, and that is fine to ask for help. So, when everything fails, find someone you can trust who can help you with a student or a class and who can help you find your way. We’ve all done it.

In 1999, Roland released the song and picture album ABC Dino Xenegugeli to acclaim from the Swiss education sector, with the resource becoming used as standard in many Swiss preschools and elementary schools. In the 21 years since, the artistic sensation has become an consistently-evolving app – created with the input of a whopping 50 artists – helping teachers to engage thousands of pupils with their language learning in Swiss dialects, German, Spanish, French, and now English. 

With ABC Dino, pupils aged 2 and up are tasked with accurately writing letters and words on their Apple or Android device. Upon successful completion, the learner is rewarded with a new, animated animal friend along with an accompanying song.

“A wonderful app for learning the letters and how to write them,” recommends Primary teacher Urs Zuberbühler in one of ABC Dino’s many glowing EdTech Impact reviews. “Musically accompanied by wonderful songs, children and adults alike immerse themselves in the world of the alphabet. Since the app is available in different languages, it is also ideal for foreign language lessons.”

Ireland-based teacher Catherine Rhatigan, meanwhile, says that ABC Dino is “upbeat, very student friendly… enjoyment of the programme leads to a feelgood factor and a willingness to return for more learning.”

The app boasts 44 animals (drawn by artist Holger Schöpflin) and songs thus far, each one around 20 seconds long. What’s more, ABC Dino does not include any kind of hidden costs, and no data is being sent or collected – ideal for pupils who might be learning at home with their parents. 

Roland excitedly explains the innovate process thus:

“At the start, the app displays the X-animal on the screen and music can be heard. A simple swiping motion lets the first image appear and A, the first letter of the alphabet.

“The animals, which are presented to coincide with the letters, change. A total of 44 animals are called into action.

“The app presents a letter to coincide with the animal image. It pronounces the animal’s name, and repeats the initial sound in classical and phonetical fashion.

“When the children tap on the image twice it turns and displays the matching uppercase and lowercase letter. After that it is all about the correct way to actually write the letter. Numbered arrows show how it is done. If the children successfully trace the letter with their finger, or better yet with a stylus, the letter turns green.

“When the card turns around again the child is presented with a reward. The animal becomes animated, and is accompanied by its natural sound and a song clip. A complete set of music regarding the animals may be downloaded as an album.”

“Kids love the app. They want to see the animals in action again and again. By doing so, they learn the upper and lower case letters in no time at all. The complete journey through the alphabet takes approximately 40 minutes.”

So if you’re teaching pupils their letters, ABC Dino is a must-try. You can check out their homepage at https://abcdino.swiss, read user reviews at https://edtechimpact.com/products/abc-dino, and get in touch with the ABC Dino team via abc@rolandzoss.com to discuss further.

Get Set to Eat Fresh

The Get Set to Eat Fresh initiative teaches young people aged 5–14 about eating well, giving them the skills and confidence to cook fresh, healthy meals. 

All Get Set to Eat Fresh resources are packed with a wide variety of flexible, curriculum-linked content, including films, downloadable student sheets and lesson plans alongside online content for students, teachers and families.

Each of the Get Set to Eat Fresh resources have been designed to allow you to pick and choose activities to suit your lesson, class and wider school community.

Kevin’s Christmas Resources:

The latest Primary addition to the programme’s bank of free, downloadable resources is ‘Kevin’s Christmas Journey’, a series of festive, cross-curricula challenges to use in the classroom.

‘Kevin’s Christmas Journey’ sees Kevin and friends join young people aged 5–14 in a selection of 15 quick, flexible starter activities and six longer cross-curricular activity ideas that offer links to PSHE, Science, Design and Technology, English and Maths. Whether it’s solving recipe-related Maths problems with Kevin or creating their own healthy advent calendars, these resources are designed to engage pupils with problem-solving and creative tasks.

The challenges each focus on a different subjects including: Food Technology (cooking skills), Maths (problem-solving), Science (nutrition and plants), Design and Technology and Art and Design (producing 2D and 3D works), Physical Education (active play), and PSHE/PSE/Health and Wellbeing (healthy eating and appreciating other cultures). Take a look at the diverse range of festive activities the new resources have on offer below.

Activities

• Kevin’s Christmas Journey presentation: Use Kevin’s Christmas Journey presentation to inspire your pupils with a series of fun and festive challenges. The presentation contains a series of cross-curricula challenges to use in the classroom, inspired by the story of Kevin the Carrot and his Christmas Journey. They explore Kevin the Carrot’s story through a wide range of subjects, creating opportunities to build problem solving and higher-order-thinking skills, alongside some longer creative tasks. Activities vary from quick 5–15 minute starter activities/brain breaks to a selection of longer activity ideas to build on the initial discussions.

• Kevin and Katie festive decorations activity sheets: Ask students to create their own festive keratin-filled festive decorations by downloading one of our colour-in sheets. Choose your favourites or create a whole set for the Christmas tree! The Kevin and Katie cut-outs can also be affixed to a piece of card with a lollipop stick to create Kevin and Katie stick puppets. Use these to challenge pupils to create their own Kevin stories.

• Festive Fresh Bunting activity sheet: Challenge pupils to create their own Festive Fresh Bunting featuring their favourite fruits and vegetables. Pupils can colour in the example vegetables and/or create their own designs.

A Christmas Campaign:

The latest Secondary addition to the programme’s bank of free, downloadable resources is ‘A Christmas Campaign’, which challenges students aged 11–14 to create a persuasive advertising campaign.

As part of the ‘A Christmas Campaign’ resource, students can take a behind-the-scenes look at the techniques, skills and roles needed to create an Aldi Christmas campaign, and are challenged to apply this knowledge by developing their own advert for a school celebration or to inspire people to stay active and/or eat well over the holidays. This adaptable resource offers cross-curricular links to English, PSHE and Media Studies, and can be used both in the classroom and at home.

Key learnings from this resource include listing key persuasive and creative techniques that help create an effective advertising campaign, naming different skills and careers linked to creating an advertising campaign, identifying and analysing a target audience, objective and platform for a campaign and how to create your own persuasive advertising campaign.

Activities

• A Christmas Campaign: Use the Christmas Campaign presentation to explore Aldi’s Christmas advert and guide students in creating their own campaign. Discuss examples of Christmas adverts and watch the Aldi Christmas advert to explore the purpose and features of a Christmas campaign. Ask students to develop their own Christmas or celebratory advert to persuade others to either attend a school Christmas/celebration event or stay active, and eat well, over the holidays. Activities vary from quick 5–15 minute starter activities/brain breaks to a selection of longer activity ideas to build on the initial discussions.

• Advert Brief: Use this activity sheet to help students analyse their chosen brief. Students can consider key questions on defining objectives, considering their target audience and considering any problems they might face in the development of their campaign.

• Advert Planner Activity Sheet: Use this activity sheet to support students in planning their advert. In this sheet, students are asked to consider planning questions for the advert such as what is their key message, what is their slogan and where their advert is set.

Where can I find the resources?

For more information about Get Set to Eat Fresh and the new Christmas resources visit https://getseteatfresh.co.uk/resources

You can also share your excitement by tweeting @AldiUK and @TeamGB using the #GetSetEatFresh hashtag.