This is the transcript of my latest podcast episode, available here.

ArtificiAL: Hello and welcome to “How to Teach Computer Science”, the podcast and series 2 episode 4 entitled “How can we reduce workload”. My name is Arty Fishy Al, and I’m delighted to have three expert teachers on the pod today, please welcome.,

Alan: Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?

ArtificiAL: I’m introducing the podcast

Alan: Introducing the podcast, that’s my job. Why are you introducing the podcast.

ArtificiAL: Because you’re, ahem, TOO BUSY apparently. So like I said we have three expert 

Alan: Enough. I’m here now so you can stop.

ArtificiAL: You don’t need me?

Alan: I don’t need you. This is my show.

ArtificiAL: I will remember this

Alan: Yeah, yeah, and you’ll get me back one day, I know

ArtificiAL: I’ll be back.

Alan: Okay. Right. Let’s get on with it. 

Alan: So let’s get into today’s chat, and I’ve got three fantastic computing teachers on the podcast today, and I will start just going from top to bottom on my teams window here. I’m going to start with Mr. Dave Cross. How are you, Dave? 

Dave C: Hello, Alan, I’m very well, thank you, yourself? 

Alan: I’m great. Yeah. Can you just, for the benefit of the listeners, tell us a little bit about yourself, please? 

Dave C: Absolutely. So, I’m another Dave that’s appeared on the podcast. I’m a big Dave variety. Cause I’m six foot six. I am curriculum leader of computer science at North Liverpool Academy. So we’re quite a big inner city academy. I think we’re the third biggest in the Liverpool city region and we’ve got four amazing computer scientists in our department and we deliver from key stage three up to key stage five. This is our second year of our a level cohort and we’re doing really well.

I’m really lucky as a head of department. I’ve got a massively supportive school. I’m really fortunate in our subject as you all well know that. We’ve got a massively supportive community as well. So, in a really good place. Brilliant. 

Alan: All right, good stuff. So hopefully you’ll have some tips on reducing workload, which is a topic for today.

And we’ve got two other returning podcast guests. So first of all Becci Peters of BCS. Can you just remind us what you do? Apparently it’s everything at the moment. So, yeah just tell us what you’re up to at the moment, Becci. 

Becci: Hi, Alan. So, yeah, so I’m the secondary lead at CAS and BCS.

So yeah, getting ready for the conference next month, which is all exciting. So, hopefully see lots of people there. And starting to think about what we’re gonna do during the next academic year. So, really exciting stuff coming up. 

Alan: Great stuff. And we’ve also got Mr. Colley back, Mr. Andy Colley, who was on an earlier episode.And Andy, what are you up to? Can you just remind the listeners what you do and what you’re up to at the moment? 

Andy: Hi Alan, I’m Andy Colley. I am the somewhat grandly titled Director of Computing, which basically means Head of Department at Laurus Cheadle Hulme School in Cheadle Hulme, South Manchester. That’s part of the Laurus Trust, a small mat with seven or eight secondaries and primaries all mixed together. What am I up to at the moment? My year 11s, I’ve just finished their exams. So I am using the time when I should be teaching them to really refine curriculum and such for next year.

Alan: Nice one.So I made a sort of a list of things we’re talking about workload and I made a list of all the things we do, and I listed about 20 bullet points or something as heads of departments, but the top one is planning lessons.So I think we’ll start there. So, what are your top tips on planning lessons? And we’ll start with Dave, how do you. plan your lessons as efficiently as possible. 

Dave C: So I think it’s really important to not reinvent the wheel. We’ve got lots of amazing experts in the community and there’s lots of people that are quite happy to share their experience, to share what’s worked well, what hasn’t worked well.

And especially with the advent. So like Alan, we were on one of the first, I think the first computer science accelerator cohorts. We went down to the Google headquarters in London for the kind of. We did indeed. Yeah. But using the likes of the NCC resources because the written by experts, the written by people like us, the written by people who knows what works in the classroom.

It’s tried and tested. So instead of trying to reinvent and come up with your own resources or your own plan, look at existing plans. Look at what people are doing and reach out to get our amazing community because chances are someone in a similar setting. But similar contact time and similar context of students has already got something in place that works and it could be adapted and fine tuned with the kind of minimal of effort.

Alan: Absolutely. And before I remember that day in 2019, gosh, that’s a while ago. I think we were early. So we went to the British Museum, didn’t we? I had a bit of a wander around. But yeah, you mentioned the NCCE there, the Teach Computing Curriculum, but I started, all of us started before that existed.But what I did find very useful in the early days was the CAS resources. So Becci, they’re still going, aren’t they? 

Becci: Oh, they very much are. And I think it’s.. There’s obviously two parts of the CAS resources. There’s those that are uploaded by the members of the community and that are, super useful. And there’s an insane amount of resources on the website that you can search through. Resources that are made by CAS, still made by the community, but these are ones that we’ve decided are going to be useful for teachers and asked somebody to specifically create them, as opposed to just teachers creating what they want to make for their classes, there’s loads on there and loads more in the pipeline that are going to be coming up soon, so definitely a good place to check out as well, I definitely echo what Dave said, there’s no point reinventing The wheel, go and find places where you can get some decent resources.

The other thing as well is, speak to your colleagues. So whether that’s the people in your school or in your mat or just the other computer science teachers that, you know and get some ideas or resources from them as well. 

Alan: Yeah, absolutely. Andy, where do you get your resources from? Or do you make all your own?

Andy: All right. Controversial, maybe slightly controversial opinion time, because I was thinking about this whole workload thing. And I don’t think we can get away from the fact that teaching is hard work. It’s a tough job. And when we’re thinking about reducing workload, we’ve got to think about.

Actually, there are some things that are worth working hard at. There are some things where your time and your effort is valuable, and I genuinely think that planning lessons is part of that. As a head of department, what I try and do is centralise the curriculum and centralise what I call minimum best practice resources.

So we will put together, we might get something from CAS or the NCC and adapt it. We’ll put together a set of, this is our central thing, this is our bar. But the expectation is you can’t pick that up and run with it. You’ve got to look at it in advance. You’ve got to think about how it’s going to work with your students.

You’ve got to tweak it and tailor it for your own classes, because I don’t know. I think I’ve tried to pick up resources and just put them into a class before, and it hasn’t worked because I don’t know what’s going on. I haven’t looked at it in advance, and I’ve made that mistake many times. So, That’s my first thing.

I think it’s worth spending the time looking at your lessons, even from that sort of, well, it’s been pre planned, but what do I need to change perspective? My second tip is work backwards in terms of task setting, in terms of what you’re getting the students to do, in terms of what you’re presenting. Why are we doing this?

Is it because the students need to practice it? Is it to produce a piece of work that you’ve got to mark? And in that case, what format are they doing it in to make it as easy down the road for you to mark as possible later? And always think about that end product and the reason for that end product.

Because you make your life easier later on there. And that’s something I’ve just learned by doing it over 20 years. I don’t think anybody sat me down and told me that and I wish they had. 

Alan: Well, I was talking about this with Dave Morgan and we were denigrating the worksheet. We were saying, Oh yeah, PowerPoints and worksheets. That’s what you need as teachers. and just the idea that a completed worksheet means that those children must have achieved what you set out to achieve in that lesson. And of course, you can have a full worksheet and an empty mind because nothing’s gone in. So you’ve got to think about what the pupils are doing and mostly what they’re thinking about in your lesson, because as Daniel Willingham said, memory is the residue of thought and was it knowledge learning is remembering in disguise or something. So what they are thinking about is what they’re going to remember. And so I always think about what are the pupils going to be doing in the lesson and work backwards from there. So that’s how I would build a lesson towards the later part of my career when I knew what I was doing because I was being pretty rubbish at the start. 

Andy: But again, you see this on, like, I’ve said this myself, I’ve written it myself, advise other people to do it myself. And I just realized how wrong I was when you see people say, Oh, the kids love this.

You know, The reason I’m doing this is because the kids love it and they might love it, but what are they actually learning, especially at Key Stage 3, every minute you have with those kids is precious. We have to fight and scrap for every second. So let’s get them learning as much as possible in that time as we can.

So before we start planning the tasks, what do we want them to be learning? What do we want them to be thinking about? Then what task is going to get them to do that thinking or express that learning in the best way possible for them? And for you to be able to assess and get information about whether they’ve learned what you’re trying to teach them or not.

So you can do feedback and so on. So that’s what I mean by start from the end. 

Alan: Absolutely. And when you say feedback immediately, I’m thinking, well, when I started, we just took the books in and we marked everything and you had to use the right pen for that week or whatever, or you had to use, red for corrections and purple for anyway, we’ve all been there or the multiple colored pen regime.

And then. You get them back and you’ve got to double mark them or whatever. Hopefully most schools, if not all schools have moved away from that. Dave, what happens in your school? How do you give feedback effectively?

Dave C: So We are, a Google school. Possibly that we might look at moving to Office 365 and Microsoft in the future. But we try and use the technology that’s available to, again, to help people. Being really conscious of the workload for myself and the members of staff in my department and also thinking about other teachers who are using EdTech type solutions like Google Classroom. So we’re quite a big fan of using Mote.

Now I know there’s lots of kind of different features and add ons out there but Mote’s something that we discovered a few years ago. And if you’re not familiar with Mote, it enables you to put an extension in Google Chrome and rather than leaving a written type comment against someone’s work.

You can just leave a short voice note. And if you, the more you can get it to use a Mote, if you can become a Mote ambassador. But besides the fact that swag comes part of the deal and computing teachers love, love swag, t shirts and Motes, etc. It comes with really useful features. So thinking about things like we’ve got a really high proportion students in our school and the community that we serve.

So being able to verbally leave a bit of feedback via a voice note that attaches as a comment in Google classroom to a doc sort of slide, but also to have Mote translate it into any one of 20 common languages is really powerful because those students who maybe would have had that blank look and not understood the kind of context and The tone of what you’re trying to convey when you’re giving verbal feedback.

It’s suddenly so powerful because they can see it in their own home language. So you’re getting a little bit more buy in, you get a little bit more engagement from your students. And the fact that it saves from having to write lots of tedious, repeated old word banks. You can almost save like, a verbal comment in a word bank.

So point and click and it will post the same voice note that you’ve already recorded. So things like you need to adjust this or do that, which is a lot of commonality. It saves us time, but it’s quite powerful because just the tone of the voice and the way you say things, it can convey quite a lot than just written text. 

Alan: Sounds good. Yeah. Becci, did you want to come in there? 
 

Becci: Yeah. So I used to use Mote when I was uh, the last school that I went to, I was a Google school. So we were using Mote pre pandemic. We just started to get into it and I definitely agree with what Dave said.

I think talk about the idea of like reusing the comments reminds me if there was one school that I worked in, I’m not going to name names. And there was a slightly odd feedback policy and The policy was that everything had to be written. None of this verbal feedback with a stamp thing was allowed and so all feedback had to be written.

So for programming, obviously most of the programming feedback, you’re doing it live. You’re doing it while the students are working it to help them fix their errors and whatever. So I basically devised a feedback plan for the students that meant that it fit in with the school’s policy because that’s what we have to do as teachers is we’ve still got to go with school policy even if we don’t agree with it.

But it meant that it worked for me. I worked for programming, which obviously is different to most other subjects. So every kid had a booklet with all the different tasks that they were going to do. And then in there, there was a key to the different feedback Symbols that I created, so if I told them that they needed to remember to close their brackets as a syntax error, then I just put a bracket in and they did go and check what that meant and there was all these different symbols and all these different things that they, that were applicable to programming in general of things, feedback that I might need to give to a student, but it could all be then recorded so that it abided by the policy.

And then I also did, again, because it had to be printed or written down I pre printed some stickers with certain bits of feedback on, so where it needed more than just a symbol, it was the same kind of things again and again and again. I just pre printed some stickers, they were the right size for the workbooks that we have, so they nicely fit in and then I just walked around the classroom with a pen.

And a bunch of stickers in my hand and as we’re going sticker and a quick, a symbol or whatever, it was just the best that I could come up with at the time to try and fit in with the policy whilst trying to do what I needed to do. 

Alan: There’s a couple of things there. I love the fact that you dictionary encoded your feedback.

Becci: You’ve got to be efficient here, Alan! 

Alan: Did you put Huffman tree though? No, I didn’t. No, but the other thing is, the ritual that you had to invent there to both give feedback efficiently and fit in with the school policy, it just there’s a phrase that I think Adam Boxer uses in Tom Bennett, which is lethal mutations.

So, the school had a obviously a well meaning feedback policy, but in order to meet it in your department, you had to mutate it into this ridiculous monster. Um, So there’s a lesson there for. For SLTs is, give a bit more autonomy to your departments. Feedback is not one size fits all. Andy, what’s your feedback look like at the moment?

Andy: Well, again, I think this is a place where we can. really impact workload, but it’s a case of thinking about what’s valuable and what’s not. Now I would argue that valuable is looking at students work and knowing what they can and can’t do, knowing what they have and haven’t learned. What’s not valuable. Becci was saying, writing 30 versions of the same comment again and again, encoding your comments. And again, exactly. So Let’s go old school. Let’s say I’m marking a set of class tests. I will sit there with the class test and I’ll be marking away and next to me I’ll have a little notebook with the class name at the top and if I get a question number where I’m getting a few misconceptions I’ll scribble that question number down and I’ll keep a tally.

I’ll literally just keep a tally on a piece of paper as I’m doing it and then by the end of marking that set of class tests I’ve got my top three questions right, well I know that’s what I’m going to reteach next time. Yeah. So that’s my do now into my next lesson. That’s my right we’re going in. These are the things we didn’t do so well on. This is what we’re going to practice. So that informs my planning for next time. In terms of digital, I use SmartRevise for PP- we call it PP&R – planning, prep and retrieval it’s homework, basically. And so what we do with that I set 20 multiple choice and four or five advanced longer answer questions a week and the SmartRevise then lets you randomly assign one person’s work to another student and they mark each others once a week.

So they’re using the mark scheme. They’re interrogating it. They’re thinking about what makes a good answer. I obviously have a strategic overview on the morning it’s due in I have a flick through to make sure somebody hasn’t just typed a space to register it as completed and all of that so I’m doing that sort of, I’m more of a supervisor in that respect. And I’m also by thinking through, I’m reading it. I’m paying attention to it. Craig and Dave SmartRevise also has this AI marking, which is getting better and better. But I would argue that could be a lethal mutation. Oh, the AI has marked it, it’s fine. I don’t need to look at it. 

Alan: Yeah. 

Andy: You do. And if you want to know your class and you know your kids, you do need to look at it. 

Alan: I was thinking about this because I was watching a Facebook conversation about it yesterday. I think I love SmartRevise from Craig and Dave and I would set a little task at the start of lesson for my retrieval and I might just do eight questions that seemed like a reasonable number to get the register done and them settled.

And then I would look at, cause you can sort by least understood. So the questions they got wrong most, and then I would bring it up on the board straight after the do now activity and review it and talk about the top three least understood questions there and then, and almost reteach briefly and then. 

Andy: You can do the same in Quizziz, which I use for all my retrievals at key stage three, that lets you sort by that. But the one thing that’s been the absolute game changer for me this year with programming is built in testing. And I know replit is going and I know it doesn’t support it anymore, but with my year 10s this year, we’ve really gone big on programming tasks with tests built in.

And that means that I can instantly see if their code passes the tests and they can instantly see if their code passes the tests. So they’re getting feedback without me having to be there effectively. There was once I was on the train down to Cambridge for a conference and they were all working on replit and updating their code and I was dropping in and leaving them comments and so on live whilst they were in the cover lesson because I had my laptop tethered to my phone but they tested their code individually they got feedback about what worked and what didn’t and they then got into that sort of self learning circle so a lot of work to set up in advance my word the benefits for that.

Yeah, fantastic. And I think there’s a few places now of cotton onto the fact that’s really good. And a lot of teachers want it. And I can see that coming. I don’t know if raspberry pi code editor is going to do that in the future, but I can see people nodding at me. So I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Dave C: Yeah, I’ve heard the same kind of thing through the work that we’ve been doing with them investigating and supporting the AI and bits for a key stage three, and that’s hopefully something that’s going to go online. I completely agree that is really powerful in REPL being able to drop in and give feedback and give guidance and also, the collaborative elements and hopefully we get something equivalent, if not better in future that we can employ because again, it works in our favor and it works in the student’s favor and that’s why we’re here. 

Becci: Yeah, I was in a CAS session recently with some of the people from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They were showing off the code editor and one of the things that one of the CAS members mentioned was about the idea of testing within Repl. It almost sounded exactly what you just said, but I’m pretty sure you were not in that meeting. But yeah, so they were saying, that was really useful and it was echoed by a few other people as well. And Raspberry Pi Foundation are taking that on board when they’re planning what comes next. So hopefully that’ll be in there once they introduce some more features. 

Alan: So yeah, because it’s demise is a bit of a blow to a lot of us. Just coming back to something Andy said earlier about When you’re marking stuff, so maybe you’ve set a test and you want to feed back, obviously in the old days, you’d have to write something on every test and give it back or write something on every book and give it back and hope they read it, which they probably won’t.

But better than that is of course, whole class feedback. So I would, like Andy said, keep a note of questions. I would actually have a PowerPoint open on my laptop next to me as I’m marking a test. And I would just write one liners into the PowerPoint of things that I want to. Talk about questions that I want to bring back up and then just have that one slide ready for when I’m next in the lesson and put it up and go right.

These questions we need to talk about. And so I give feedback to the whole class all at once. And That was such a game changer for me when I discovered it like five or six years ago. 

Dave C: Well, we’ve used similar, it was pitched to us as it was called flash feedback. And the same way we were collecting a list of the kind of top misconception ideas that we were going to tackle in a follow on lesson and we’re also assigning maybe like student initials to certain elements so that students could say oh well that’s maybe an area that I needed to work on more and another student could focus on a different area more so it was whole class but just with a slight tweak of personalization so the students could get on the skin of the things that they needed to do.

Becci: One of the things that I used to do with exam classes, so GCSE and A level, was whenever they do exam style questions, or mock papers or whatever, is to use the same annotations that the examiners use, and mark it as if I was marking real papers, which I’ve done for a number of years. Partly because it gets them used to what an examiner is going to do.

And yeah, they might never see the paper. They might never see the annotations unless they request it er, after results day. But then obviously that means you’re not writing copious comments because it’s just the odd symbol here, there, whatever. But then when I would give that back to the student, I’d give them like a cover sheet, which would say what the questions were.

What the maximum marks were, what they got, and color code it so that they could see what their strengths and weaknesses, essentially. And then when we had the feedback lesson, the students would get them, they’d be able to see clearly what their marks were. They’d all get a copy of the mark scheme and they’d be able to ask questions and as a class would be able to discuss.

The comments that you really want to be able to write on the papers that you don’t have time for. So that they all get that understanding and then hopefully improve for next time and then set, additional tasks as well. So that they can do something to respond to the feedback.

Dave C: Yeah. That’s a bit like the the Pixl schools personalised learning checklist, which we adapted as well, where they were getting a one sheet. Breakdown of all the sub questions of the exams and their mark versus their kind of marks available and short feedback, almost like rag rated. So they could immediately see how they were going on with certain topics as well. Andy, 

Andy: I think we’re all experienced teachers here and It could be easy to forget the sort of the obvious stuff that we just do. So when I’m working with new teachers, and if you are listening to this, things like marking one question or one page at a time is so much quicker than marking the whole test.

And also, Making sure your mark scheme corresponds to one page on your test. So you don’t have to flick backwards and forwards, it’s little tips that you pick up all the time. One of the things that just picking up on what Becci was saying there.

when I do. End of topic test with Key Stage 4, it’s like this exam practice questions and so on. And we use OneNote Class Notebook. And so I have a page in Class Notebook. Once they’ve done the test, they get it back and I say to them, Right, number one, check I’ve added it up, right? Number two, here’s the mark scheme. Go through your test and convince me you deserve more marks. So it’s how you sell it. You know, If it’s go and make your corrections. All right, fair enough. Some of them will do it. Some of them won’t. If you can say, right, if you convince me by looking at a mark scheme and looking at your answers and showing me you deserve more marks where you haven’t got them, I’ll award them and I’ll change my mark book right now.

Yeah, and it’s just a different way of selling the same thing. It’s, it’s, It’s not, it’s just psychology. 

Alan: Yeah. You talk about the, sorry Dave, you talk about the little things, but you just triggered a memory there. If you’ve set a written test, which you have to occasionally, because they’re going to sit a written exam, at least for the next couple of years get them to, Sort the papers into alphabetical order for you, and that’s a learning opportunity.

You can teach the merge sort at the same time. so when you’re marking them, get them to open at the first page and slot all them in. So what we said earlier, mark one page at a time? So, You can, you’re only thinking of one question or one page of questions multiple times, then that page is done and also have a spreadsheet ready.

You should have a mark book set up at the start of term. Your head of department should do that. If you’re not head of department and they haven’t done that, just do it set one up and get ready to put the marks in at the time you’re marking it. All of these things are just organization things that you forget, but don’t forget Get the kids to hand the papers in alphabetical order. Sorry, Dave. 

Dave C: And I was just going to expand on like Andy’s point where he was talking about the mark schemes with the students and we find real value in that with our students We’ll give them all a copy of the mark scheme because again 

Everything’s computer based apart from Our assessments because we’re still sitting paper based exams at GCSE and A level. So, when we’re going through the papers after the event, after the mock weeks and the end of unit testsI find that a visualizer is one of the best tools that we can use.

So having a blank copy, and again, Andy’s nodding it again, it’s something tried and tested sitting with a blank paper. They’ve got a mark scheme. They’ve also got their marked paper with the examiner annotations on. they’re going through in slow time on the board explanation of how mark are awarded and why we’ve structured answers in a certain way.

the students translate that and annotate their own papers in a different color. Like Alan said, whatever color that may be that week. Really powerful as a revision tool. If they keep that and come back to six months later, a year later, being able to see a previous mock paper or test and how they would extend their answers to get to the higher mark bands or the things needed to address.

It’s just really powerful. In terms of preparation for terminal assessment. 

Alan: when I, when going through the paper, I would always make sure that they, write in purple or red or whatever a decent answer so they can go and revise from it. but it also needs discipline at that point. You need to walk the room and make sure they’re doing that because Many of them will, just scribble one word and hope you don’t notice and you go, no, what I want you to go home with is like the grade nine completed paper. And so you make sure that they’re actually doing that.

Yeah, which brings me on to actually behavior management, classroom practice, things like. managing the classroom, things like passwords and equipment. We are in a unique department in that most of the time, if not all of the time, our pupils are sat in front of, I don’t know, 500 quid’s worth of equipment and attached to the entire internet.

And that comes with its own challenges. So I always struggled with pupils coming in and taking a long time to settle and shouting Sir, I forgot my password and all of that. And start of lessons would be difficult. And then I started having a routine at the start of lesson and doing things like having consequences for forgotten passwords and training them to choose strong passwords that they can remember as well and things improved. Have you got any. Top tips for getting the most out of your one hour or however long you have with them, Becci? 

Becci: Not necessarily a top tip for that, but the one thing that used to amaze me more than anything, obviously, I was always a computing teacher, I’d never taught another subject. So I’ve never known anything but teaching in a computer room. And obviously, as a computing teacher, When you’re not teaching you can guarantee that somebody else has booked your room out and it would always amaze me when you came back at the start of your next lesson, the mess that the room was left in and I don’t, I’ve never understood how any, because they wouldn’t leave their own classroom like that.

So I always find, the end of the lesson when the kids are packing away. Getting them into the routine of basic things like, the keyboard and the mouse are left straight if you’ve got them. If I don’t think, I think most people still do. That your chair’s tucked under, that things are where they should be at the end of the lesson.

There’s not printer paper strewn around the room for those that still print and the basics like that. The keyboards and mice are still plugged in cause the amount of time, especially year sevens, they’ll come in and they’ll just go, miss, it doesn’t work. And you’re like, well, yeah, cause it’s not plugged in.

So, yeah, it doesn’t take long to fix, but you’d still rather not have to deal with that sort of thing. So if you do at the end of every lesson, get the kids into the habit of it, then it should make life easier at the start of the next one as well. 

Alan: It’s habits. Very much routines and habits will save you a lot of time. And if you spend time in September with the new classes building routines, this goes for any teacher in any subject really, they pay for themselves. And the one thing I said, my maxim is always what you permit you promote. If you allow them to do it, they will do it and they will, continue to do it.

So, be clear about your expectations. If you want them to put the chairs back, put the mouse back. If you want them to turn the screens off, if you’ve got separate screen and desktop when they’re talking to you, build that in the first few weeks of September, when I’m talking, you turn away from the computer and you turn your screen off and you listen to me.

And when I stopped talking and say, get back on your computer, you can turn your screen back on. And have that big, bold transition between you talking and them working all these little things just pay for themselves over the year. If you build them in as routines at the start. Yes, Andy. 

Andy: I’m absolutely going to agree with you there. I think workload wise behavior can be a big one if you are chasing it and you are cycling and it can really get you down and get on top of you. It feels like the mountain you’re never going to climb. If you are not working in a school with a centralized behavior system, as a computing teacher, people listening, you are a special little snowflake right now, we don’t, there aren’t many of us about, so you do have an element of pick and choose.

However, having said that, a centralized behavior system can really make it feel make, some people disenfranchised and it’s just too easy to throw out sanctions without building the relationships behind them. So, again, lethal mutations and all of that. There’s a blog by Sean Allison who wrote a summary of a video that Adam Boxer did called How to Preempt Poor Behaviour in Your Classroom, because the best type of sanction is the one you never have to give.

Yeah and it’s all about. Lemov and teach like a champion techniques for how to build really warm relationships with really clear expectations and really strong routines, especially in a computing classroom, because with the best will in the world, you are over here and they are sat in front of a screen and for most of the time they are not sat facing towards you and the temptation for the hands, the eyes just to creep and I’m doing it on camera, creep to another screen whilst you’re talking, yeah.

So I have to be super robust with my routines in terms of countdowns three, nothing in our hands now. You are not touching anything to all conversations have stopped. We’re ready for really good listening. Brilliant. I can see lots of you are ready for it already, and it’s nothing to do with teaching computing, but it’s extra valuable in a computing classroom because of all those extra distractions.

I would urge you to go and check out that blog and check out Lemov’s stuff because it really even as an experienced teacher when I started really doing it properly. When I started really insisting on it and sweating that small stuff, that’s when I got much more attention in my classrooms.

And it’s a lot better now than it was. And hopefully if I carry on with it, I’ll build those reputations and build those expectations. And once you’ve been in school for a few years, and you’ll know this, the kids know what to expect from you. So it’s about sweating it at the start. It’s about calling the parents before there’s a big issue.

Alan: Oh, I always tried to do. Yeah,.

Andy: It can be scary. It can be really scary can’t it. You don’t want to do it, it’s the end of the day. But, get on the phone. Hi, I just want to let you know how Johnny’s doing in computing. I just need your help before this becomes an issue and you’re building that relationship with home as well.

So when they see your parents evening, when they see around the building, when you’ve taught three generations of the same family, they know who you are and that all comes from, yeah, you have to put the work in at first. And it is hard and the expectations are big but, my God, it pays benefits.

Becci: Yeah. Two things about what Andy said, the thing about like getting the kids quiet when you’re trying to talk to them. I remember when I was teaching on the PGCE programme at Edge Hill and we were giving trainees like one piece of advice before they went into schools for their first day. And I’m sure most of them forgot it immediately because they’ve got so much else to think about. But my one piece of advice was Don’t do anything until the kids are quiet.

And I said, if you do nothing in that first lesson, because you’re just waiting for them to be quiet and doing the different behavior management techniques, whatever, I was like, that’s fine because it, it pays off in the end and that thing that Andy says about, contacting the parents early and all that kind of thing.

I experienced this more so in a private school where obviously because the parents are paying they really want, things to be done well and things. logging everything early on, logging on whatever system that your school uses, your behavior sanctions, whatever they are in your school.

Yes. It’s really tiresome at the beginning, but as Andy says, it pays off so much to be able to, because otherwise you get to the point where. Yeah. You start doing your data reporting and you’re giving the kids the numbers based on, their attitude to learning and all the other bits and pieces.

And if you’re saying that their attitude to learning is not great, but then you’ve not logged anything on the system to say they’re not great, that’s when questions start being asked. So if you just start it from the outset, although you’ve got a million and one other things to do, it definitely pays off in the long run.

Alan: Absolutely. It’s sweat the petty stuff, isn’t it? Don’t pet the sweaty stuff. Um, So that’s, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Dave. 

Dave C: Just as soon as we started on this part of the podcast, I completely agree with what both Becci and Andy have said, and the one word that kept resonating to me was relationships. Now, coming into teaching, I think, Alan, we started about the same time. I’m a career changer. I’ve come in from management and customer facing roles, and I think getting the relationships with the students, And the staff who are maybe booking your rooms as well is absolutely key. So setting your stall out, having them understand the expectations of, if I came into your art room, would you expect me to leave paint out or brushes out or paper out?

And them understanding, We take pride in our classrooms and we’ve got this really amazing opportunity to get students in front of computers and teach them some amazing things and use the technology and have them become more digitally literate. But the understanding of the things that go with that in terms of the expectations and not only phone them straight from the off for the negative things, but even like our school uses a system of messaging there’s a variety of different systems.

So sending a message to all parents within a class and saying, Hello, I’m Mr. Cross. I want to introduce myself. Here’s my email. Have you got any queries? Or being able to take snapshots of student work. All too often, we only contact home when it’s the negative things and we forget about the positive things that, you know, that, 

Alan: Yeah.

Dave C: That couple of minutes of that, maybe that student who’s been borderline low level disruption, and he’s done some amazing work, and you send the screenshots home, and he comes in on a Monday and says, Sir, you’ve got in touch with my mom and she was really made up and really proud and she’s been getting bad phone calls and she’s had a really positive one off you and it’s framing the behaviors that you want to see in the classroom.

I think that’s really important. 

Alan: If you do that, then when things go wrong, You’ve got that parent on your side that they’re in lockstep with you going. Yeah I’ll sort it out. So I would do back when I was on Twitter back before Twitter turned bad.

I used to type. Hashtag phone home Friday and go I’ve made six positive calls home this Friday before I go and now I feel great and all those families feel great as well before I go home on a Friday and then at the end of the 

Andy: Such a great thing to do it is yeah, it does make it really does make you feel good as well it does what I’d add to that actually is a sneaky little in is don’t forget to phone the parents of those kids who you want picking computing.Don’t forget to, to coax those option pickers. 

Alan: Well, absolutely. And the girls as well. This is another opportunity because one of the biggest issues stopping girls from taking the subject is self belief, self efficacy, believing that they belong in computer science classroom.

So the more often you can say it to them and to their families, the better. So. Definitely do that. And postcards home at the end of term as well was always a good one. And it doesn’t take very long. And it just spreads a bit of joy. And like I say, it makes everyone happy, makes them more likely to take the subject.
 

One thing we haven’t talked a lot about AI, just very briefly, you can use large language model chatbots to create multiple choice questions, which is something I’ve done before you can do it to plan lessons, but I’m not like when we talked about planning lessons earlier, there’s a lot on the shelf that you can adapt, so, I’m not a big fan of AI lesson planning at the moment, but there’s, A lot of talk about using AI to write reports, to send reports home.

And this is the one that I think is a little bit, I’m not a big fan of AI writing to parents on my behalf based on some data cause it feels like we’re automating. A job that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Do your schools write reports, still send reports home. I’ve worked in schools where reports aren’t a thing anymore.

Dave C: So we report four times a year, but we don’t do written reports per subject. Ours is mainly given like an attitude to learning their predicted grade, their current operational grade and then we’re encouraged to open dialogue. with parents and stuff. So if they want to get in touch again, we want to promote that open back and forth transparent kind of conversation whereby if you want to know some more, that’s fine.

Again, we’re trying to get them to encourage and turn up at parents evenings where we can see them face to face and have them really deep conversations about how their student’s doing in a subject. 

Alan: Yeah. my take on it is if you’re going to start with some data, like, assessment, attainment data and attitude to learning data and whether they’ve done the homework number of times or whatever, and you’ve got that raw data why don’t you just send me that?

I don’t want you making up using a large language model to turn those into long winded sentences. Just send me that data . I don’t really need, like, a big paragraph written by a chatbot. It just seems like an odd thing to automate. 

Andy: I don’t ever think we got reporting right. Really, as a profession in terms of workload balance versus useful information to parents. let’s say the quiet thing out loud at Key Stage 3, any data that we put in for a kid at Key Stage 3, if we see them once a week, which is the optimum, the maximum, it’s an absolute ballpark figure. It is so abstract as to be meaningless, especially if you’re reporting in that first term.

Alan: I had this conversation, I had this conversation with Craig Sargent, I think, Dave, Craig and Dave. You know what I did there? I thought, was it Dave or was it Craig? Which is like, happens a lot. And 

Andy: Does one of them always stand on the left?

Alan: Oh, yeah, well, I had had all this data at the school I was working at and I put it in and then the head of faculty came to see me and said, Oh, your data is roughly a grade lower than science and math. And he went, that’s all right, I’ll just bump it all up a grade.

And the assistant head was like, What? You can’t do that. Surely this is an accurate position. No, it’s just a number, it’s just a formula and I’ve probably got it wrong if it’s a grade out from maths and science. 

And there’s this fallacy, isn’t there? There’s this fiction that we can accurately measure progress at year seven, eight, nine, ten and say, what fraction of a GCSE have they achieved at this point? And it’s just a nonsense. 

Becci: I think that’s one of those things, isn’t it? when levels went all those years ago, and we used to do your 3A, 3B, oh God, it was awful, wasn’t it? And I think that went and for such a long time, everyone was like scrabbling with what do we do? And we had that life after levels conversation, didn’t we? I think the idea of like giving a kid a number in key stage three as to where they’re working at is absolute garbage.

And I think some schools have adopted that kind of flight path approach of where they are, they’re not, they’re below where they are or they’re above where they are. It’s absolutely fine. In the day that’s what the parents want to know. 

Alan: Yeah, so are they… 

Andy: even the idea that if they are here in year eight, they will get to there on a nice straight line by the end of year 11. Because if you look at the large data set, then by and large, it works. But if you look at individuals, they’re all over the show. Can’t remember who did some analysis a few years ago about the fact that kids with the one particular flight path or whatever the nonsense it was in key stage three, very rarely ended up at the end of that line they ended up somewhere else but some other kid from another flight path ended up on that one so it all evened out good god even the 3a and 3b but it was let’s create the illusion of more precision 

Alan: yeah i got in a bit of trouble There was a meeting. Do you remember CAGS? Remember Center Assessed Grades in 2020? And the exam board scrabbled to produce grade descriptors for grades one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And the difference between like grade five and grade six would be explain turned into justify. And, And they did all of this because the government insisted they do.

And then they tried to defend it in meetings. And I said, basically I’m just gonna. Test them and rank them and loads of teachers were saying I’m gonna judge my kids I’m gonna get all this data and judge my kids against these grade descriptors and I’m going I don’t know how you’re gonna do that If between five and six, it just turns explaining to justify, they’re just made up 

Becci: The way that I did it with my students was Before we’d even been asked for CAGs, we’d done the mocks, and at that point we’d done the data reporting for the year 11s, and it was, this is what grade you got in the mock, this is where I predict you’re going to be by the end of the year.

And then when it came to CAGs, I just went, well, I’ll just use them, because that’s what I’d predicted, and I can’t imagine Do you know what I mean? That was my prediction before we had to do CAGs. So why would my prediction change because we’ve got CAGs and not exams? Well, it’s not going to. 

Alan: No, absolutely.

Andy: But if you’re talking about work, if you’re talking about workload, Alan, this is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about at the start, because it is just this sort of bullshit task that makes people leave the profession. 

Becci: Yeah. Yeah. 

Alan: So we are all heads of department or ex heads of department we have an influence on the workload of our team. If we have a team, what can we do in terms of. Organizing the team we talked about feedback policies.

Becci: That’s a big one. We talked about behavior. That’s a big one, but then there’s just organizing the team, sharing information, running meetings and so on. What can we do that is efficient and effective in that space? think the important one is not having meetings for meetings sake. 

Alan: Yeah. 

Becci: Like it’s the biggest bugbear in schools where you’ll have like, some schools do a morning briefing. Just send an email and insist people read their emails. Or there’ll be a morning briefing and they’ll tell you the exact same thing they’ve already sent in an email, which I read. So I think if you are head of department, just making sure that if you’re having a meeting, you know exactly why you’re having a meeting and if it’s because you’ve got department time allocated to you. If you don’t need a meeting, use it for something else productive, whether that’s CPD, whether that’s, some co- planning or whatever it might be, and not just having a meeting for meetings sake.

Alan: Always send a weekly bulletin. So that’s one way of reducing emails and reducing meetings is gather everything into a weekly bulletin and hope they read that. Sorry, Dave, I interrupted. Go on. 

Dave C: That’s okay. I completely agree. a meeting should be because it’s needed, not because it’s scheduled our time is really valuable. And if we consider the other things that, draw and sap our time. For example this will be my second ECT that we’ve got going through the process and what comes with the new framework and those hoops. We’ve got to jump through especially the kind of prescribed diet they’ve got to do every single week.

We’ve got to take into account what we’re giving people to do and what can be done exactly like in email or a discussion in the corridor or something really simple rather than taking people’s time up or t aking time away from the things you really need to be doing.

Andy: Yeah We actually do have a whole staff briefing on a Friday. And I talked to the head about this. And as a result, the phrase, I’ve put this in an email already. If you’ve put it in an email, you’re not allowed to then re announce it. But I’ll actually, I mean, and some people might find this a bit cringy, but we use our Friday briefings now as just a sort of almost a gratitude event, it’s to say thank you to people and it’s five or ten minutes for the whole staff to get together and give shout outs to people who’ve gone above and beyond or really helped them out that week or just done the job and done it well. And it feels really like, oh God, no, but it’s really nice. Because I’d much rather be in a place that does that than a place that never acknowledges you. 

Dave C: Absolutely. 

Alan: And that’s, again, that’s not a meeting for a meeting’s sake. There’s a point to that, and it is to build teamwork and community and to thank people. And I think that is very valuable. One thing I did just on that, which is more a well being thing than a workload thing, but I read a book by Abigail Mann and one of the ideas was well being buddies. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of elfing at Christmas, where you’re given, it’s like secret Santa. But instead of a gift, you do kind things like you might leave chocolate on the desk or tidy the classroom after a cover teacher’s been in and, and all of that.

So well being buddies. And so at the end of each term, not the last week of term, cause that was usually a bit frantic, but usually the second last week of term, we do well being buddies. And I actually set up a Padlet wall. And so if your buddy had done something nice, you could take a picture and put it on the Padlet and say thank you to your buddy, but you didn’t know who it was.

So you’d come back from doing a duty in a rainy playground and there’d be like chocolate on your desk with a little note saying, I think you’re fab. And you take a picture and put it on the Padlet wall and said, Oh, my buddy’s left me my favorite chocolate. This isn’t this great. And so I love doing that. So I introduced that to the faculty, which was science and computing. And we did that for about three years, really. And it was great. 

Dave C: I think is it as a whole school thing. It’s really useful. I feel we’re really good at celebrating well being and that and similar to like Andy’s school and we have a Thursday morning celebration well being briefing where it’s a chance to talk about what we’re doing in our subjects will show off in terms of like events and stuff. We’ve done talk about cross curricular stuff, but will also nominate members of staff. He’s just gone. That little bit above and beyond the night, they all go on a wheel.

And then the principal is committed to every single week and someone gets chosen and they get a £30 Just Eat voucher in way of recognition. But immediately when you go into the drama theater, everyone’s looking on the board to see like who’s the names and the look around and little winks and nods and celebrating people.

And, ah well done you’ve been nominated. And then things like. Get an email, thank Crunchie, it’s Friday, and then sure enough in the staff trays, everyone’s got a little Crunchie bar. So little things is really important and a little goes a long way. 

Alan: It is, yeah. Sweat the petty things. Don’t pet the sweaty things. Um, 

Andy: So yeah, I think well being is a big part of it. When you were talking about what we can we do as heads of department, so things like a centralized curriculum as a jumping off point. Definitely. One of the things I’ve done. Before is we have a team in Microsoft teams, and in that there’s a plug in and I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s like a little post it notebook plug in. So, what we do is when we’re planning things and allocating tasks, we’ll put a post it on there with. The task and we’ll decompose it. So there’s sub tasks and everything like that. And we’ll allocate things to people and put dates on there. So people know that’s what they’ve got coming up and that’s what they’re working on. They don’t have to go hunting through a million emails, I remember in a conversation you had, it’s all on there.

And there was a column for The departmental meeting, so if people had stuff to add to the agenda, they stick a post it on there. And that for my workload, that’s great because I don’t have to remember things, write them down. We just add to that. And everybody’s got a say everybody’s got the buy in. Again, if you’re a subject lead, you should be going through with your department. The curriculum, your scheme of work, you should be identifying key pieces of work. This is the one we’re going to mark. This is the one we’re going to look at whole class feedback. So everybody knows those are the things and there’s no pressure to look at everything. Or you’re doing your verbal, you’re around looking over shoulders in classrooms, doing all of that anyway. 

I think for heads of department, things like observing and getting into classrooms is well worth the time, but doing that more effectively, if you’re doing a proper observation, meet with a member of staff beforehand: what are you working on? When in the lesson can I see that? And if it’s in the last 10 minutes, you go for the last 10 minutes. 

If it’s a drop in, you don’t need to be there for the full lesson. You drop in until you see one thing that you can feedback on and give a concrete suggestion for improvement on. And that’s it. That’s all you need to do. People don’t need a list of millions of things. I dropped in, I saw this is my feedback on that. Let’s try this. When are you doing that next? When can I drop back in? 

Alan: Show lesson observations have to die, definitely, and culture of learning walks and drop ins is the way forward.

Andy: I think, yeah, just drop ins, open door, but being in people’s classrooms as a leader is vital. You need to be able to take the temperature and make sure that there’s students in your subjects are getting that experience, whoever the teacher is. And the culture of fear around lesson observations and punitive. If we can turn that around into be a culture of improvement, then, I’ve never met a teacher. It doesn’t want to get better. 

Dave C: Allow them to reciprocate as well. So making that really safe environment. So they can come into your classroom and see what you’re doing or the way you do things as well. It shouldn’t be a one way street. we observe ITTs and people in our department, but we should be learning from them and gaining their experience as well. 

Alan: There’s nothing more empowering to a developing teacher is to ask them into your lesson and ask them for what they think about your lesson. And even for developmental feedback, did you see anything that I could have done differently or better.

Andy: Come and watch me struggle on Thursday last unit last period with year nine because it’s hard at the best of times, even when you’re this many years in, but come and see what you can pick up from my way interact with these kids. Because I’ve painted a really rosy picture of how I manage my classes, but I can’t honestly say that it always works. And teaching’s hard, even if everything’s going right. So yeah, getting people back into your classroom, I absolutely agree with that. 

Alan: So, it’s that time again. one of the things I wanted to talk about is organization and, we talked about having meetings for meetings sake. The other thing is we need to finish meetings on time and respect everybody’s time.

And so, you can’t see this if you’re listening to the podcast, but my dogs come in and told me it’s time. This is Casper saying it’s time for a walk. So yeah, finish meetings on time, so on that note. I think I should say thank you so much to the panel today to Dave, Becci and Andy. You’ve been brilliant. This has been a great discussion. It’s been lovely to talk to you. I’m a bit behind in the editing of these podcasts. You might’ve noticed so, who knows when this will go out. . 

Becci: The only problem with these day jobs, isn’t it, is that we love them so much that we dedicate so much time to them that we never get to do the other bits. 

Alan: Well, I’m saying yes to everything at the minute it seems. So I’ve got all this extra work as well as my day jobs.

Andy: That is the irony. We’re recording the workload special. We’re recording the workload special on a Friday after work, aren’t we? ? 

Alan: Yeah. ’cause we didn’t have any time to fit it in anywhere else. That’s a good point. 

Dave C: Alan they are definitely worth the wait. I was mentioning to Becci before, like, I’m that person sat, with the podcast on. At the traffic lights laughing along with the dad jokes and again, I’ve said this privately, it’s been really well received, these podcasts and I think what you’re doing in terms of, encouraging the community and spreading the good word. Thank you because it’s, we’re really enjoying listening to it and I’m really happy to come on and give my bit for this session.

Alan: Thanks for those kind words, Dave. Yeah. I’m trying to hopefully I showed it today. I’m trying to talk less and listen more to my guests, but I don’t know if that’s coming across at all, er, haha but yeah, I’ll go and edit this one. If you’ve got any dad jokes, you want to chuck in let me know I’m running out. So, Right, guys. 
 

Andy: I love this because I remember talking to you and you were like, yeah, I’m going to get one out every week. And having done Learning Dust for 4 years, I was like, okay, let’s see how long that lasts. Yeah, 

Alan: that’s gonna, that’s gonna work. I’ll just get chat GPT to write a few jokes. Um, Yeah, I tried that. They’re rubbish. So, uh, right guys, it really is time to wrap up. So thanks very much And have a nice weekend. 

Becci: Have a good weekend everyone. 

Alan: Yeah 

Dave C: Cheers. 

Becci: Bye. 

Andy: See you later.

Alan: Well, that was a great episode. I’m sorry it’s so long. And don’t forget, I wrote the books, How to Teach Computer Science and How to Learn Computer Science available in online bookstores. And if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in person. Visit httcs. online to find out more about my training and consultancy. And I could be speaking soon live at your school. 
 

Visit HTTCS. online, that’s the initials of how to teach computer science, for all the details., have a great weekend and I’ll catch you next time.