Doug Lemov's field notes

Katy Mills is the Team Leader for English at Westbourne Academy in Ipswich (UK). She recently shared some video that she shot from her classroom. Mostly, she was looking for feedback, but in watching it I found myself really impressed, so I asked Katy if she’d be willing to share some examples of her teaching.

 

The first clip I’d like to share is from Katy’s year 9 lesson on Romeo and Juliet.  As you can see, the pace is brisk and academic expectations are high.  How does she do that?

The overlap of two things make those expectations evident: rigorous content and engaging teaching that fosters and expects full engagement and effort.

 

The topic of course is Shakespeare–and not a gist reading of it, but a careful unpacking of its key lines, a close reading. The questions are tough and they come quickly. Many teachers respond to apparent or presumed student disinterest by pandering—simplifying the content on the assumption that students are bored by what is “too hard.” The result is less rigorous and less demanding lessons, which bore students and convince us that they can do even less. We end up close reading television commercials instead of poems and plays. Katy instead ratchets up the energy and expectations with teaching techniques while keeping the content challenging.

 

In Katy’s class, you have to be on your toes and fully engaged. Students strive. One of the key tools she uses to create this culture is Cold Call.  Melissa, Ashley and Mia get called on in this sequence even though their hands are not raised. To be in class is to be part of the discussion. And the fact that Katy might call on you is fairly predictable—kids can reasonably guess it might happen. This predictability, combined with the fact that Katy asks a real, genuine, and worthwhile question that feels important and scholarly, her students are ready and do their best.

 

The answer she gets from Melissa in response to the first question Katy asks is telling. Asked what techniques or literary devices she sees she says, “I’m not sure, but is there a metaphor there?”  This is one of the great benefits of Cold Calling.  Melissa is in the midst of figuring things out. She’s not sure enough to raise her hands and offer that she’s spotted a metaphor. She’s at the edge of her knowledge. All the more important to participate then—to wrestle with the idea, find out you are right, and be pushed to expand it. When you have a notion but aren’t totally sure, it’s arguably a more productive time to participate than when you know you have the answer. The Cold Call causes this.  It’s one reason I think Cold Call is so inclusive.

 

And Katy does push. When Melissa conjectures that there is a metaphor in the line “where civil blood makes civil hands unclean,” Katy challenges her to go farther with a Stretch It–“Why is that a metaphor?” Melissa knows it’s there but she can’t quite find it, so Katy calls on her classmate who explains why what Melissa found is indeed figurative language.

 

The idea of pushing students at the edge of their knowledge is a key part of what I like about the clip.  If questions are worthy of students—if they are hard enough to be worth their time—they won’t get all of them right. Full stop. So Katy has to have a strategy, or a set of strategies, in place for when they struggle. Her approach is to challenge students, be respectful of their efforts and when they falter ask a peer to “play the hero” and fill in the missing knowledge. She does this again when Ashley struggles: “What do you think is on their conscience?” Ashley seems stumped at first, so Katy rephrases the question. She makes it a tiny bit easier but not too much. Ashley makes a solid point they have ‘taken life,” but Katy still wants more so she directs a follow-on Cold Call to Mia. “But also, Mia, what were they forbidden to do?”  This question asks Mia not only to do her best to add to the discussion, but to build off of what Ashley just said. To do that Mia has to be listening. And in the aggregate, the message is clear: you always have to be listening carefully to what your peers say.

 

A last observation about this clip: Cold Call is especially useful as a tool to Check for Understanding.  Katy’s class just read a tricky passage. Were all of her students able to understand it? If she had relied only on students who raised their hands to answer—the boy in the front for example—she’d think they all got it. But students who offer answers are more likely to know than students who don’t offer you anything. To really know what your class knows, you have to do what Katy does: pick a few students out of the crowd—a random sample of the group, say—and ask them a series of targeted questions to assess what they know.  Katy ends this very short clip with a much better sense of her students’ ability to read the prologue than most teachers you’ll find and Cold Call helps her to do that.

 

A last point. When Katy Cold Calls her students, they are utterly unsurprised. They know from frequent exposure that this is how class works and so they are ready. Predictability and consistency are key elements.

 

Thanks to Katy and her students for sharing their work!

 

 

cold call, Katy Mills, Romeo and Juliet, Westbourne Academy