How to help your learners better understand their feelings and fears around learning, so they can own them, share them, and help you differentiate in the process

General Introduction

This blog is part of my Differentiation and Adaptive Teaching Knowledge Base.

I use the terms differentiation and adaptive teaching synonymously. To me, they are the same, as genuine differentiation has always involved adapting your planning and your teaching to meet the needs of the learners in front of you.

For me, differentiation is all the practical strategies, activities and techniques teachers use to personalise learning.

For ease, we can break that down into my five categories of differentiation: Activities, Questioning, Words and Writing, Things the Teacher Can Do and Things You Can Ask Learners to Do or Use.

This blog falls into the category of things you can ask learners to do or use, also called self-scaffolding.

Confidence Indicators

If you know how confident your learners feel about the work they are doing, then you are in a strong position.

This is because you can adapt your teaching accordingly.

If, for example, you know that about a third of your class are struggling to grasp a new concept, then you can set the rest of the class off on an activity while you do some intensive catch-up work with them.

Here are five ways you can elicit information from your learners about how confident they are feeling.

(All of which help learners to self-assess, so they better understand their own feelings around the learning.)

Thumbs

Ask your learners to display their confidence levels to you by using their thumbs.

If learners are feeling confident with the work, they give a ‘thumbs up’.

If they are feeling OK about the work, they show their thumbs pointing horizontally.

If they are feeling unconfident about the work, they point their thumbs down.

Traffic lights

Provide each learner in your class with three pieces of card.

One piece should be green, one piece should be yellow, and one piece should be red.

Ask learners to display the card on their desk that represents their confidence level

Green = Confident
Yellow = OK
Red = Unconfident

You can get them to do this continuously, or at specific points in a lesson.

If the latter, cards could be held up instead of being placed on desks.

Four corners

Attach a confidence level to each of the four corners of the room (display these on the board so that learners can see them).

Invite learners to move to the corner that best represents where they feel they are at.

You can then team up confident and unconfident learners, ask the unconfident learners to work separately with you, or revisit the whole topic (if many learners feel low in confidence).

Write in books

As a plenary, ask learners to write in their books how confident they feel about the work they have done in the lesson.

You might ask them to rank themselves on a scale, or you might provide a list of the key ideas looked at in the lesson and ask them to comment on their confidence levels in relation to each one.

If using a scale, display this on the board as a scaffold.

For example, a line running from 1-10, where:

1 = I feel really unconfident about the work
10 = I feel super confident about the work

Exit boxes

Create three ballot boxes.

Label these:

Confident
OK
Not Confident

At the end of the lesson, give each learner three slips of paper.

Ask them to choose three things you have studied in the lesson and to write these on their slips.

As learners leave the classroom, they should deposit these slips in the boxes that represent their confidence levels about each item.

You can then collate the results and assess what patterns and trends are apparent.

For example, you might discover that many learners feel unconfident about a specific element of the lesson.

This is useful information.

You can use it to inform your future planning.

With all these techniques, there are two things at play.

First, the elicitation of information. You need to find out how learners are feeling. What their confidence levels are.

Second, using the information. Once you know how learners are feeling, you can use the information to adapt your teaching in the moment, or to adapt future planning.

It is there that the differentiation and the personalisation happens.

How do confidence indicators help you to differentiate?

If you know how confident your learners feel about the topic, you can adapt your teaching to suit.

This means you will be meeting the various needs of the learners in your class.

Learners who are less confident can be given extra support by the teacher to help them get to grips with the work.

Learners who are more confident can be given more challenging activities, questions or tasks to think about.

Give Your Learners a Mantra: Have No Fear

It is better to have a go at something and to learn from what happens then not to have a go at all.

Getting learners to think in this way is not easy.

Many learners will see the classroom as a zone in which things are either right or wrong, with praise and success attached to the first of these and failure and disapprobation attached to the second.

As such, we often find that many learners in a class are reluctant to try new things, to push themselves or even, at times, to complete a task they believe has within it the possibility of failure.

While a lack of fear is something that only learners can possess – we cannot give it to them – the teacher can cultivate an atmosphere in which such a disposition is easier to pick up.

Here are three ways you can increase the possibility that your learners will have no fear.

Use mistakes as a learning opportunity

When learners make mistakes, get something wrong or find themselves talking about something erroneously, thank them for bringing the matter up and launch into a discussion about why they think that and what the right answer or way of thinking is, as well as why this is the case.

Through doing this, you are putting forward the notion that mistakes are beneficial to individual learners and to the class as a whole.

Over time, they will come to be seen as great learning opportunities (which they usually are).

You can extend this idea by having a ‘Mistake-Maker of the Week’ award.

This goes to the learner who has made the most interesting, useful or insightful mistake.

If you do this, be sure to explain the difference between good mistakes (which are the result of putting in effort and embracing challenge) and careless mistakes (which are the result of not concentrating).

Another option is to create a ‘Good Mistakes Wall’.

Here, you can collate all the good mistakes learners make across a week or term.

You can then use this as a teaching tool.

For example, a maths teacher might collate good mistakes from their Year 7 maths classes over a term.

At the end of the term, they decide to create a lesson based on the good mistakes.

This gives learners a chance to revisit these, assess them, and understand why the mistakes were made in the first place, and what they now know that will help them avoid making such mistakes in the future.

Talk about your own mistakes

Easy reminiscences on which to call include:

Your own time at school
Your time at university
Driving lessons
Work
Bringing up children (if you have them)
Playing sport

By showing that you frequently make mistakes and then learn from them, you further normalise the process for your learners.

If you still have your exercise books from when you were at school (maybe in your parents’ loft?), bring these in.

Share them with learners.

Let them see that you (the person who is the expert in the classroom) learned through a combination of getting things right and getting things wrong.

You could even create a wall display that is a combination of mistakes made by you in your old school exercise books, and mistakes made by learners in your class.

Plan activities that include trial and error

Or trial and improvement, as you might like to rename it.

Trial and error plays a fundamental role in learning.

If you never get things wrong, the level of challenge is too low.

Planning activities that include trial and error means giving learners opportunities to make mistakes and to learn from these.

You can then reflect on the process with your learners and encourage them to extrapolate this to other areas of learning (and life).

When you start thinking about this, you’ll notice that many of your existing activities can be tweaked, so they include an element of trial and error.

Another option is to use starter activities that are wholly focussed on trial and error.

Whizz through these with your class then, before you move on, have a brief discussion about trial and error.

This primes learners for what comes next – the main learning – setting them up to think about mistake-making in a positive way.

How does getting learners to shed their fear of failure help you to differentiate?

If your learners have no fear, then they will not be bothered about making mistakes.

If they are not bothered about making mistakes, then they will be more likely to have a go at all the tasks you set and to engage with the learning.

If learners recognise mistakes as an opportunity to learn, they will begin to see that learning is not a make-or-break process.

Such a mindset encourages all learners to engage with the work (as it changes their perceptions of what success looks like and how accessible success is), and to embrace challenges.

A positive approach to learning, where error is not feared, leads to greater motivation.

No matter where they start from, learners who are more motivated are more likely to access the work, to make progress and to put in maximum effort.