Mike Gershon’s Effective Teaching and Learning

• ✅ Take control of feedback in your classroom. Use it to improve outcomes for your learners, without letting it run rampant over your workload.

• ✅ Understand why your expertise, your knowledge, and your understanding is the core driver of effective feedback, and what this means for how you teach and plan.

• ✅ Discover how to almost guarantee learners implement your feedback, whatever form it takes. Whether that’s verbal or written, delivered in the lesson or when you mark books.

• ✅ Unlock the secrets of metacognition, and learn how you can weave it into any activity, in any lesson, often with no planning at all. All for the benefit of your learners.

• ✅ Become a master of metacognitive modelling. Recognise the true power of opening up your expertise. Discover how the insights you possess can instantly speed up learners’ progress.

• ✅ Start using proven strategies that enthuse, engage and inspire learners to think about their thinking and take ownership of their learning.

• ✅ Stop wondering why your learners aren’t independent and start using strategies that shift their mindsets from wanting to be spoon-fed to wanting to work it out for themselves.

• ✅ Achieve a more independent classroom in which learners delight in taking on challenges. One where persistence, resilience and determination become the norm.

• ✅ Shift the balance so learners do more of the heavy lifting in your lessons, freeing you up to focus on the things that matter.

• ✅ Gain certainty over what effective differentiation really looks like in practical terms, and why high-quality differentiation has always been synonymous with adaptive teaching.

• ✅ Use my five categories of differentiation to recognise the high-quality personalisation you already deliver, and to give yourself clarity over how to do more.

• ✅ Create improved outcomes for your learners by tailoring the questions you ask, day-in day-out, so they closely match their needs. Little or no planning required.

• ✅ Instantly transform your understanding of why learners struggle by unlocking the secrets of working memory. Once you grasp this, you’ll never see learning in the same way again.

• ✅ Find new ways to think about scaffolding. Change the dynamic in your classroom and give learners the confidence to embrace and persist with challenges.

• ✅ Break down literacy barriers for any learner using proven techniques to boost confidence, drive engagement, and speed up progress.

• ✅ Take the complexity out of assessment for learning and discover the simple, timeless truths that sit at the heart of this ageless approach to teaching and learning.

• ✅ Plan lessons that flow beautifully from start to finish, underpinned by a profound understanding of your learners’ needs, and a deep knowledge of how to use AFL in your lessons.

• ✅ Use questioning with newfound purpose to drive learning in your classroom and create a level of interest that supercharges learner engagement.

• ✅ Experience a fundamental reappraisal of the power of discussion. Understand how to use it to engage learners, improve outcomes, and create the conditions for exceptional learning.

• ✅ Discover the remarkably different patterns of discussion you can use to maximise the impact of classroom talk, no matter what you are teaching.

• ✅ Find out why structure is the single most important element of effective oracy, and what that means for your classroom, your learners, and the future of your planning.

• ✅ Start using collaborative learning in a way that brings a new level of engagement to your lessons, and that creates the conditions for truly memorable learning experiences.

• ✅ Unlock a tried and tested toolkit that ensures any group work you do is focussed, meaningful and successful, maximising the benefits of collaborative learning for your learners.

• ✅ Give free reign to your creativity and use it to craft activities that are innovative, exciting, and huge amounts of fun. Not just for your learners, but for you as well.

• ✅ Discover how to look at deployment afresh so that teaching assistants in your classroom have a bigger impact and get greater satisfaction from their work.

• ✅ The four golden rules of behaviour management any teaching assistant can use to deal with any situation (and that every teacher can call on as well). Use these to help your TAs manage behave more effectively and more enjoyably while you get on with teaching.

• ✅ Thirty classroom-ready strategies for improving TA-learner interactions, all of which you can share with your TA and use to finesse your own teaching.

• ✅ Empower learners to feel fully involved in the life of your classroom and see the benefits this brings to their engagement, focus, and determination to succeed.

• ✅ Ensure equity in your pupil voice by breaking down the barriers that prevent some learners from having the confidence to share what they really think about life in school.

• ✅ Understand the different approaches to pupil voice and choose the one that is best suited to you, your learners, and the goals you want to achieve.

• 🎯 Editable and downloadable course workbooks.
• 🎯 Activities you can use to analyse your teaching and develop your practice.
• 🎯 Reflection questions that take you deep into pedagogy and put your thinking about teaching and learning front and centre.
• 🎯 Course certificates that recognise the time and effort you’ve taken to develop your skills, extend your thinking, and take control of your career.
• 🎯 And, of course, those 900 practical strategies (as well as all the bonus materials😊).

‘When you know what you need to do to be successful, everything becomes simpler.’

• ✅ The simplest way any teacher can help learners develop a better understanding of what they need to do to be successful (Part 2 – Articulating What Good Looks like).
• ✅ An approach to success criteria and marking that immediately visualises where learners are succeeding and how they can quickly and easily up their game (Part 3 – Colour Coding).
• ✅ Three examples of how you can reframe success criteria for your learners and instantly change how they view their role in your classroom (Part 5 – Criteria Variations).
• ✅ A peer-assessment strategy that ramps up learner engagement, bringing interactivity and focused evaluation into your lessons through nothing more complex than a sheet of stickers (Part 6 – Coloured Dots).
• ✅ How to use the power of deductive reasoning, Sherlock Holmes-style, to get your learners thinking deeply about one of the most important types of feedback they’ll ever receive (Part 7 – Mistakes Feedback Match).

‘Embedding metacognition is all about habits. Getting learners into the habits of reflecting on their learning, thinking about their thinking, and monitoring their own efforts. When that happens, good things follow.’

• ✅ Five powerful ways you can weave metacognition into any lesson, with little or no planning, so learners start diving beneath the surface and exploring the hidden depths of their learning (Part 2 – Metacognitive Check-Ins).
• ✅ Why many teachers spend most of their career talking as if there is only one type of mistake, when they could be talking about the different types of mistakes that exist, and letting learners in on the secret as well (Part 3 – Delineating Mistakes).
• ✅ How to turn your learners into metacognitive detectives who sleuth through their work in search of hidden insights they can use to supercharge their own progress (Part 6 – Past Work Analysis).
• ✅ Discover the simple tweaks to your questioning that subtly encourage your learners to be more reflective, more engaged with their learning, and more metacognitively aware, without even realising it (Part 7 – Metacognitive Questioning Part 1).
• ✅ Twenty-five oven-ready questions you can pick up, put in your question bank, and use in your lessons to get your learners thinking metacognitively, no planning required (Part 8 – Metacognitive Questioning Part 2).

‘To truly empower learners, we as teachers have to relinquish some of our control.’

• ✅ A fundamental psychological concept so powerful that once you truly understand it, you’ll never look at learner independence the same way (Part 1 – The Locus of Control).
• ✅ Over a dozen examples of classroom tools you can make, create or maybe even already have, that empower learners to take control of their learning and become more independent (Part 2 – Creating a Tool-Rich Classroom).
• ✅ An approach to scaffolding that magically removes the teacher (and the TA) from the equation yet still produces outstanding results (Part 3 – What is self-scaffolding?).
• ✅ Why reigning in your feedback and giving learners a greater role in working out what they need to do to improve can actually make your life easier at the same time as it empowers the children you teach (Part 5 – Learners Setting Targets).
• ✅ An open-ended activity that puts the ball in the learner’s court, helping satisfy the fundamental need for autonomy every human being possesses (Part 7 – Options and Choices).

‘Beliefs influence thoughts. Thoughts influence actions. Actions are what we see from learners in our lessons. All three are open to change.’

• ✅ Why thinking about the surface of a mouse’s brain is a remarkable way to unlock the supreme potential for learning that sits inside every human being (Part 1 – How would you describe your brain?).
• ✅ Hands down the simplest approach to understanding how a learner’s mindset influences their thoughts, the decisions they make, and how they act in your classroom (Part 2 – Growth Mindsets vs Fixed Mindsets).
• ✅ Why unlocking the secrets of goal-orientation shines a powerful light on how your learners think about learning, and what this means for how they make sense of the tasks you plan for them (Part 4 – Mastery vs Performance).
• ✅ The #1 starting point for getting learners to change how they talk about independence, and why shifting their language is the first step to shifting their behaviour (Part 5 – The Language of Independence).
• ✅ Six ways any teacher can change how learners look at learning and potentially generate extraordinary shifts in the effort, enjoyment and engagement they show in your lessons (Part 7 – Reframing Learner Thinking).

‘Personalisation comes from how the teacher adapts the learning based on their knowledge of learners’ needs. That’s why the teacher is always the most important resource in the room.’

• ✅ Stop differentiation feeling like a tangled knot of complexity and start seeing it as an uncomplicated thread of simplicity that runs through all aspects of great teaching and planning (Part 1 – Rethinking Differentiation).
• ✅ Unlock a way of thinking about differentiation that removes almost all the pain from planning, and which helps you recognise examples of personalisation in your own teaching you never even knew were there (Part 2 – Subdividing Differentiation).
• ✅ Experience a formidable tool for differentiating practical activities that many teachers go their whole career not knowing about, and which you can start using almost as soon as you’ve discovered it (Part 4 – Differentiating Activities).
• ✅ How to pose three questions to any learner in any lesson that will take them from low-level thinking to high-level thinking in a matter of seconds – no planning required (Part 5 – Differentiating Questioning).
• ✅ Five failsafe strategies for scaffolding listening that help learners who are struggling with their literacy, or their English language acquisition, to immediately feel more confident, more independent, and more in control of their learning (Part 8 – Differentiating Words and Writing).

‘How you ask a question is often as important as what the question is asking.’

• ✅ Why changing the rules of the questioning game is a miracle teaching tool that can instantly take learners from unresponsive to super-engaged (Part 1 – Differentiated Questioning).
• ✅ A way of coming up with questions that means you can personalise the level of challenge for any learner, in any lesson, in the moment, with the minimum of effort (Part 2 – Structuring Tools).
• ✅ One way to do whole-class questioning that automatically annihilates social awkwardness and means every learner in the room knows precisely what you want them to do (Part 4 – Whole-Class Questioning).
• ✅ How ten minutes work can lead to twenty-five years of benefits by allowing you to create a question that becomes a hugely influential fulcrum in your lessons, and remains relevant for at least a quarter of a century after you’ve planned it (Part 7 – Hinge Questioning).
• ✅ Exactly what to do if you want to leverage an approach to questioning that has retained its extraordinary power for over 2400 years, predating Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and even the birth of the Roman Empire (Part 8 – Socratic Questioning).

‘Challenge means something different for all learners. Yet what remains the same is the sense that we are helping learners to push back the boundary of what they can do, whatever their starting point may be.’

• ✅ The single most effective way to think about differentiation in practical terms, what this means for supporting your less-able learners, and how you can use it to help them experience success in your classroom (Part 1 – Subdividing Differentiation).
• ✅ Why understanding the key relationship at the heart of human memory is crucial to effective personalisation, and why this is even more vital when it comes to supporting the less-able learners your teach (Part 2 – Scaffolding Learning).
• ✅ How you can use a decades-old graphic organiser to up the pace of your less-able learners’ new word acquisition, helping them to expand their vocabulary more easily, more quickly, and more effectively (Part 3 – The Frayer Model).
• ✅ The secret behind applying not one, not two, but three powerful taxonomies, each of which can help you effortlessly discover the right level of challenge for every learner you teach, no matter their current ability level (Parts 5, 6 and 7).
• ✅ Exactly what you need to do to use the students who are already sat working in your classroom as a tool that has the potential to radically transform the in-lesson experience of your less-able learners (Part 8 – Peer Tutoring).

‘Modelling is inherent to human learning from the moment a child is born. At all stages of education it is a powerful tool the teacher can call on. One that invokes the essence of our nature.’

• ✅ Discover how one visionary psychologist unlocked the power of social learning, providing generations of teachers with the four things necessary to ensure modelling works in any situation (Part 1 – Practical Modelling).
• ✅ Why a goldfish bowl could provide you with your next great modelling opportunity – and what kind of impact this could have on your learners (Part 2 – Peer Modelling).
• ✅ Five lesser-known strategies that are frequently overlooked by teachers who get bogged down in the ‘traditional’ ways of doing peer-assessment, but which you can use to dial up increased motivation and stronger engagement in your lessons (Part 3 – Peer-Modelling Through Peer-Assessment).
• ✅ An approach to the modelling of writing that brings to the surface the secret rules and methods nearly every learner struggles with at some point during their school career (Part 5 – Genre Modelling).
• ✅ A technique for modelling definitions that is so influential it has been discussed by some of the greatest philosophers of the last 400 years, yet which is so simple to use we can call on it in any lesson, with any group of learners, at almost any time (Part 7 – Ostensive Definitions).