The centrality of teaching skills in improving able pupil education
Trevor Kerry & Carolle Kerry
TK Consultancy, Lincoln
Introduction
The government’s Excellence in Cities initiative (DfEE 2000) has thrown
into some degree of relief the need for teachers to re-think their approaches
to able pupils. However, we have drawn attention elsewhere (Kerry & Kerry
1997a) to the fact that little really effective guidance on many aspects of
teaching able pupils exists in government or official literature. That the
government itself accepts this as a fact is evidenced by the recent
advertisements in the Times Educational Supplement (2000) for teachers and
others to submit examples of successful materials and practice.
The situation is made worse by the charges of élitism often made against
those who attempt to educate the able more effectively (Manuel 1992). Our
approach to this issue is not to justify different and alternative practice for
able pupils compared to others, but to offer teachers a range of improved
teaching skills that can be used with all students to ‘raise their game’ too.
Concentrating on teaching skills as outlined here removes the problems we
have described elsewhere (Kerry and Kerry 1997b) of recommending
specific teaching methods or strategies which do not necessarily produce
consistent results. Experience as a Special Needs Co-ordinator, and more
general work over many years with children with minority problems or
learning difficulties, convinces us that the skills-based approach here both
works in practice and is based on sound theory. This is the view that we
promote when we work (as TK Consultancy) with groups of secondary and
primary teachers studying able pupil education, whether for the Excellence
in Cities initiative or more generally.
The theoretical context
We work within a context of ‘grounded theory’, and these theories relate to
two key issues: how teachers teach and how learners learn. It is important to
have some theoretical starting points based on sound research, since
otherwise the advice one gives is merely unsupported assertion.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
1. Teaching and the teacher
The theory that underpins our view of how teachers teach is summarised in
the outcomes of the former Teacher Education Project (1980) which are as
valid now as they were when they were first set down. The model is a skillsbased model:
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Practical teaching consists of skills
Skills can be isolated and identified
Skills can be broken down into component parts
Skills can be studied and taught
Skills can be learned
Skills can be reflected upon and refined
Skills can be evaluated and assessed.
It is important to note that this is a skills’ model not a competence model.
Competence models in teaching and education management are significantly
flawed.
The competence movement (which raises its head about once a decade and
is currently in the ascendancy) is seductively simplistic. It reduces
performance to a series of behavioural acts and then tries to set an objective
standard (sometimes referred to as a performance indicator) against which
an individual can be scored as achieving or not achieving competence. There
can be little doubt that this model has informed much of educational reform
recently, and underpins the way in which initial teacher training, headship
training, and school effectiveness are viewed.
While competencies are unsubtle and ‘absolute’ (i.e. you either have them or
you don’t) (Pring 1995), skills deal in reflexivity (Pollard and Tann 1987),
creativity (Leroux and McMillan 1993) and strategy (Gronn 1999: 62). A
skilled teacher is one who is self-aware, capable of learning during and from
behaviours not merely reproducing them, and creative/explorative (an artist
or scientist, not an artisan). Competence is to skill as painting by numbers is
to art.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
2. Learning and the learner
In the same way as we have a grounded theory of teaching, we rest our work
on a grounded theory for learning. This theory is fundamentally Vygotskyan:
it asserts that children learn in large measure, though not exclusively,
through social contact (with teachers, with peers and with relevant others),
and that learning is frequently incremental (i.e. it relies on the ‘zone of
proximal development’ as Vygotsky called it to ‘ladder’ a way towards
understanding). Vygotsky (1978) held that talk was not about the
transmission of facts, its significance was in the communication between the
developing pupil and others with more knowledge. Through this talk, the
pupil moves towards the development of intellect and the higher cognitive
processes. Talk (or communication) is thus central to the learning process –
but, of course, this is focused talk not the ‘chat’ of indiscipline.
For convenience we define the cognitive processes using a slightly adapted
form of Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), which is sound, well-known, and easily
applied. We give more detail below, but using this method we can talk
broadly about classroom activities as developing higher order or low order
thinking. Low order work typically deals with information provided, directly
or indirectly, by the teacher (data); higher order thinking asks youngsters to
deal with this data and to manipulate it in some way. To give a simple
example: low order work states that the battle of Hastings was fought in
1066, while higher order work seeks to explain why it was fought or to
deduce lessons from it.
Thus, in our work, learning is about intellectual activity at the higher
cognitive levels (not about acquiring yet more information). With BowringCarr and West-Burnham (1997: 65) we would resist the ‘reification of
knowledge’. Teaching is about a subtle and reflexive process that can tease
out those intellectual processes in others, and even encourage them to reflect
on their own learning through metacognition (Wallace and Adams 1993;
Chan 1999).
Defining teaching skills
Teachers need a range of skills with which to operate professionally. The
most obvious is that of class management. But this global skill can be
broken down into sub-sets of skills: how to maintain vigilance, the need to
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
keep eye contact, the use of body language, giving praise and so on. These
sub-skills can be demonstrated; in turn, trainee teachers can practise these
skills for themselves, and discover that some work better than others in their
specific circumstances. They can reflect on when and how to use them; they
can refine their usage to mould with their own preferred teaching style, the
school ethos, and the responses of the students. Anyone observing this
teacher at work will be able, more or less consciously, to appreciate and
assess the degree of skill being demonstrated. In a nutshell, then, this is how
the skill of class management works. Over the course of a professional
lifetime one can blend the ingredients, shift the emphasis (e.g. with
differently responding groups of pupils), become more astute (e.g. at issues
of timing), add sub-skills (e.g. voice control), and generally expand the skill
repertoire.
But in order to make improvements it is necessary for the teacher to
constantly review his or her skill level. There are two main ways in which
this can be done: either by having a colleague or mentor who observes your
performance and helps you articulate possible improvements, or by constant
self-analysis. One would hope that the first of these processes would happen,
perhaps on a paired basis of support between colleagues. In any event, we
would encourage the latter – the process of self-awareness while in the
classroom and reflection afterwards.
In the context of the education of more able pupils we tend to assume that
the fundamental class management skills of our teachers are in place, and we
therefore concentrate on teaching skills that are more specific to cognition.
In our view these are:
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Defining learning objectives
Setting effective classroom tasks
Differentiating work
Questioning effectively
Explaining effectively.
The remaining sections of this article are a Cook’s Tour through some of the
more basic issues associated with each of these skills.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
The skill of defining learning objectives
Newly qualified teachers tell us that, during their school experience periods
in college, they still had to write those lesson notes that began: aims and
objectives of the lesson. The trouble is that aims are long term and
philosophical, and objectives are immediate and tangible; so the two sit
unhappily together and are difficult (they say) to formulate. In formulating
learning objectives we suggest that aims and objectives are replaced by
intentions, and that these in turn are formulated as: ‘by the end of this lesson
(sequence, course, term, year etc.) I intend that my students will….’
The intentions themselves operate in five domains, thus:
KNOWLEDGE
UNDERSTANDING
SKILLS
ATTITUDES
SOCIAL/AFFECTIVE
Thus a set of objectives for a short sequence of history lessons, selecting
just one from each domain might read:
‘At the end of this series of lessons I intend that my pupils will…
 Know the basic facts about life in London during the second World War
 Understand what it was like to spend time in an air-raid shelter
 Be able to identify typical war time sounds from the commercial sound
tape: Britain at War
 Have formed a positive view of how a museum visit can bring a topic to
life
 Have co-operated in producing a role play in groups on the theme of
evacuation’.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Using this simple technique and the five domains, really effective learning
objectives can be formulated for any sequence of work over a longer or
shorter period of time. Of course there are factors that need to be taken into
account in composing these intentions. Typically, these would be the factors
shown in Table 1. But there is another set of issues that ought to be
consciously addressed as part of the process of formulating learning
objectives and curriculum planning generally, and that is the matter of
variety in learning and teaching methods employed. The five domains
strongly suggest that learning and teaching styles and techniques should be
blended closely to achieve the intentions identified. Just a few of the options
are listed below:
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Exposition/explaining
Questioning
Practical work
Experimental work
Problem-solving
Problem devising
Simulation
Role play
Formal debate
Self-study
ICT-based study
Written exercises
Peer critique
Self-marking by pupils
Project work
Mock tests/exams
Creative writing
Media-based work (e.g. using camera, sound recorder)
Drama
Interrogation of external ‘experts’.
Carefully formulated intentions set in a context of variety in learning and
teaching methods can help stimulate all pupils to learn more effectively and
keep the most able interested. However, intentions do not – of themselves –
guarantee outcomes. For this reason one has to put in place a number of pre-
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
requisites to make formulating good intentions work. These pre-requisites
are threefold:
 A climate of psychological security
 A climate that values intellectual activity
 A climate that encourages debate.
It has long been recognised (Maslow 1970) that youngsters can learn best
(perhaps only learn at all) in a climate in which they feel secure. This
security includes such in-school factors as freedom from bullying or abuse
and external factors such as productive home-school relationships
(Alexander 1997). Thus schools have to scour their policies and their
procedures to ensure that the kind of infra-structure alluded to here is in
place before attempting to improve learning. That is one aspect of what is
commonly termed ‘school ethos’ (Day, Whitaker and Johnson 1990: 28).
Another is more specific: that everyone in the school values cerebration.
You don’t have to be a genius to have an enquiring mind and an interested
approach to life. What is more important is that all members of the school
community signal the value of education generally and of thinking
analytically in particular. One of the most impressive sights we have seen in
a primary school was of the caretaker conducting a lesson about the
problems he had to solve in his job, in which the children joined avidly with
questions and suggestions.
This leads to the third point: the importance to this overall ethos of debate,
by which we mean the readiness of everyone to engage and re-engage with
issues rather than assume that a solution that suited the past is necessarily the
solution for tomorrow. We need to try to encourage youngsters early in their
careers as thinkers to articulate their thoughts and thus to own them, to
reason rather than assert, and to refine rather than shout their points louder in
the manner of so many on the Jerry Springer show. We have challenge the
situation highlighted to us by another caretaker: ‘The art of conversation’s
dead’, he regretted. On this overall question of ethos, the best schools are the
ones that publicly celebrate success – in any field – and by anyone in the
school community.
We have laboured some of these issues because they apply as the
background to all the teaching skills discussed in this article. In the same
way, we cannot leave the topic without a glance at how such skills fit into
the realities of evaluation as represented by Ofsted inspection. Here the
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
guide has to be the Framework document (Ofsted 1995), though it is
indicative rather than explicit. Ofsted expects that ‘ there should be clear
evidence of programmes of study in the classroom work observed’ – and
while the emphasis here may be content-led, to formulate the learning
objectives for lessons and schemes will certainly help demonstrate the point.
Ofsted also looks for ‘continuity and progression’. Our view is that if
learning objectives are clearly formulated, and if they can be seen to be
translated into learning, clear evidence of continuity and progression will
follow inevitably. Ofsted claims to look for a ‘whole school approach’ to
learning with ‘learning outcomes monitored by senior staff’. The whole
school approach has been argued in the preceding paragraphs; and
effectively formulated objectives aid senior staff in the monitoring process
and their ability to provide tangible evidence of learning.
The skill of task setting
Well formulated learning objectives apply to lessons or schemes, but also to
individual activities within lessons – the commonest of which is the
classroom task. Youngsters are asked, for example, to work through a set of
problems in mathematics, to conduct an experiment in science, to write a
poem in English, to read a map in geography, to refine ball control skills in
PE. These are all ‘tasks’.
Tasks need to be carefully formulated and to have their specific learning
objectives identified. But tasks themselves have an ‘intellectual value’ – they
can reflect a low order of thinking demanded by the teacher, or give scope
for higher order thinking. A manual, repetitive task (such as colouring in
ready-drawn pictures on a worksheet) will normally be at a low level [unless
the intention is, say, to develop fine motor skills for very young children]. A
task such as composing a haiku will normally be at a higher order of
thinking. In repeated analysis of tasks in classroom over many years, we
have concluded that higher order tasks generally fall to the following
categories, which are also exemplified in Table 2:
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Imaginative tasks
Deductive tasks
Application tasks
Analytical tasks
Task requiring skills of synthesis
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
 Evaluative tasks.
Effective classroom tasks share some common characteristics. Each will
have a clear purpose - (a) learning objective(s) - in the mind of the teacher.
This (set of) purpose(s) will be shared with the learner so that both the task
and the criteria for successful completion of it are fully understood by all.
The task will be couched in language of a suitable form and level for the
group, e.g. in the light of their ability, age and prior knowledge – but always
with an eye to stretching the pupils. Effective tasks are interesting,
encouraging of pupil participation. The cognitive demand will be high. Good
tasks often form part of a coherent series, building knowledge,
understanding and skills over time. Any limitations relating to the task (such
as word limits or time allowed) will be clearly explained.
The key to the effectiveness of tasks and their intellectual demand is often
signalled by the verbs that drive them. Thus, higher order tasks will feature
verbs such as:
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Compare
Contrast
Discuss
Provide evidence for
Solve
Invent
Imagine
Explain
Discover
Debate
Assess.
The effectiveness of tasks is enhanced when teachers share the intentions
(i.e. the learning objectives) of the task with the pupils, and keep careful
records of individual and group performance. Recording plays six major
roles in the intellectual life of the classroom:
 It supports continuity (e.g. between lessons, teachers, classes and
schools)
 It support progression by identifying progress made by the pupils
 It provides feedback to enable the curriculum and teaching to be
reviewed and strengthened
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
 It supports future planning, therefore
 It underpins improvement in pupils’ learning through feedback
 It is part of the continuous loop that forms the teaching learning cycle.
Tasks, of course, have a context in lessons; and for many those lessons take
place in contexts where not all pupils are equally able. To further the skill of
task setting, therefore, the teacher needs the additional skill of being able to
differentiate work effectively.
The skill of differentiation
Differentiation is the process whereby the levels of tasks set to pupils in
class or for homework are matched to the known levels of performance and
potential of the individual pupils involved in the learning.
It is particularly important in the context of the more able that the needs of
this group, or of specific individuals within it, are met through good
differentiation practice. Our research on this topic (Kerry and Kerry 1997a)
was depressing in that it revealed that there was little insightful guidance
from official sources such as Ofsted; and that in practice most differentiation
in classrooms was by outcome. We, therefore, decided to collect examples
of practice by teachers; and then we compiled these examples into a
checklist (see Table 3) through which we explored their use by further
groups of teachers. What emerged from this study was that teachers use
differentiation very sensitively, and take careful account of the
circumstances and the individuals that form the context of it. They also
identified for us a number of ways in which differentiation can increase
cognitive demand for the more able, of which the following represent a
cross-section:
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To encourage pupils to ask their own questions
To engage pupils in their own research
To create a desire to learn
To extend the pupil through individual work
To increase confidence and self-reliance
To set challenges and push back boundaries
To increase both knowledge and understanding
To minimise boredom and use time better
To promote interest and engagement
To give pupils an opportunity to use more advanced/technical language.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Ofsted, and others who study the process of teaching and learning, expect
work to be differentiated. The skilled teacher will be able to do two key
things to demonstrate this skill: first, to use a variety of differentiation
techniques in a manner that is sensitive and planned; and second, to be able
to articulate how and why these techniques have been selected.
The skill of effective questioning
The teachers’ skills of task setting and differentiation relate as often as not to
the written or skills-based tasks that pupils undertake in classrooms, but all
the same principles apply when teachers use the spoken word to stimulate
pupils to think. This is most obvious in the skill of asking questions.
Teachers ask more than a million questions, on average, in a professional
life-time, and some (such as modern linguists) considerably more. It is worth
ensuring that the skill is well honed.
First, it is necessary to ask a question of ourselves: Why ask questions?
Questions are essentially designed to get the respondents to think in order to
formulate a response. In practice, however, questions come in different
kinds, some more prone to higher order answers than others. Thus closed
questions (where the teacher has pre-determined a single right answer) are
less thought-inducing than open questions that allow youngsters to
speculate. Likewise, questions can be formulated to attract mainly low order
thinking or mainly higher order thinking:
 Revision questions and those requiring only the re-presentation of known
material (simple comprehension) attract low order answers; while
questions that ask students to deduce, hypothesise, analyse, apply,
synthesise, evaluate, compare, contrast or imagine attract higher order
responses.
So in our sessions about questioning, we encourage teachers to think about
the kinds of questions that they ask (not because every question can or
should be higher order, but because – by increasing the proportion of higher
order to low order questions the chances of stimulating students to think
productively are improved). We emphasise the need for teacher to take a
conscious stance about:
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
 Preparing lessons in a problem solving context
 Preparing the key questions that underlie the lesson
 Encouraging response by using appropriate language and content, and by
prompting and giving clues (rather than answers)
 Learning how to time questions, and to pause between them
 Understanding how to distribute questions effectively around the class
 Appreciating how to drive up the cognitive demand of the lesson through
sequences of questions.
Those new to thinking analytically about their question techniques in the
classroom find the basic advice contained in Table 4 helpful. Kerry (1998)
contains an extended version of this section with many worked examples
and further discussion.
Dillon (1988) is right to draw attention, too, to the fact that pupils can, and
should, ask questions, and to further point out that dealing with pupils’
questions demands teacher skills. He suggests that teachers must listen more
closely to what pupils say, not only hear the question but decide whether
there may be any other hidden motive in asking it, be sensitive to any
controversial opinion it may contain, and decide whether the question is
based on understanding or misunderstanding. He suggests that there are
three underlying factors that skilful teachers will have addressed:
 Physical issues: such as the layout of the room so as to encourage
participation
 Psychological issues: making students feel secure to express opinion
 Cognitive issues: the establishment of the ethos that the classroom is
about sharing intellectual processes.
But if teachers ask a lot of questions, and it is thus imperative to get them
right, then it even more imperative to improve on skills in the last of our five
areas dealt with here – the area of explaining.
The skill of explaining effectively
Since the popular law of two thirds declares that teachers talk for two thirds
of all lesson time, and since explaining makes up a significant proportion of
that talk, then it is critical that, as teachers, we pause to consider this skill
from time to time and to check our own practice. Explaining involves giving
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
understanding to another person and has three elements: an explainer,
something to be explained, and one or more explainees. Explanations are
delivered through a series of linked statements – keys that unlock the doors
of understanding. From these basically very simple premises one can build
skills that make explanations more effective in practice.
The spoken prose that forms the substance of classroom explanation can be
enhanced using techniques that everyone can master with just a little
practice. Table 5 sets out some of these techniques. These techniques take a
little practice to do well, and the teacher needs to be conscious of them as
he/she proceeds through the explanation. A good way to practise this is to
tape-record some of your explanations and play them back, using the items
in the Table as tools for analysis.
It is important to point out that there are other explaining skills than those
shown in Table 5. A good explainer will take account of the audience’s prior
knowledge; audio-visual aids can be used to enhance the quality of the
explanation and provide examples and reinforcement; explanations need to
be seen as part of the school’s whole policy for language; explanations can
be given by students, and they may appear in written form. Between them,
questioning and explaining make up about 60-80% of what happens in most
classrooms, so proficiency should be a watch-word.
Pedagogy as a key to able pupil learning and teaching
When we conduct training sessions on teaching skills the position we adopt
is that they improve the learning and teaching of all pupils and thus have a
benefit for everyone, in addition to any effect they may have in helping able
pupils learn better. Schools usually react very positively to the message,
because most people in the business of teaching realise that honing these
skills is at the heart of what they do. There is just one reaction that we find
hard to accept, however, and that is the reaction of the head (usually) who, at
the end of a long and hard-worked day involving a lot of demanding practice
by staff and rigorous activity, sums up by saying:
‘I’m sure that was a very useful session, but of course we didn’t learn
anything we didn’t know already’.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
This statement leads us to form our own polite and silent question: In that
case, why isn’t it happening in every classroom in this school, day in and
day out, throughout the school year? We would prefer to see an honest reappraisal of teaching on a regular and systematic basis against Ofsted and
other criteria as described, for example, by Aris, Davies and Johnson (1998).
We would prefer to see this kind of initiative in the hands of teachers rather
than the government (Campbell 1998), and we feel that the attitude of the
head teacher cited above plays into the hands of those who impose central
control.
Teachers have faced a long period of siege by political authority. Lawrence
(1999: 91) argues that teachers may be more ‘tender-minded’ (i.e. sensitive
to criticism) than other professionals, but also that ‘teachers’ self-esteem is
at risk from without’ through pressures from government and society. We
suggest that the best way of restoring this is to gain confidence through
secure professional performance – which means effective teaching skills.
What we are arguing for here for the teaching profession is the adoption of
what Fullan and Hargreaves (1992) call the ‘total teacher’. They assert that
‘total teachers are most likely to emerge, develop and prosper in total
schools, in schools which value, develop and support the judgement and
expertise of all their teachers in the common question for improvement’ –
and one might add: for the totality of their pupils.
[For those who wish to pursue these issues further, the five teaching skills
described here appear in two small volumes in the Hodder and Stoughton
Effective Teaching Skills series (Kerry 1998, 1999).]
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Table 1: Some factors to be taken into account when formulating learning
objectives
The Curriculum:
the knowledge/content factors
Special issues:
(e.g. is it exam work?)
The students:
(age, range of ability)
Relationship of this lesson
to previous work/future
work
Physical context:
box classroom, laboratory
type of furniture
Students’ previous learning
experiences as whole class,
in groups or as individuals
Length of time available
Class-based factors: e.g.
gender mix, overall level of discipline etc.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Table 2: Examples of higher order classroom tasks
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Imaginative tasks:
‘Write a short story on the theme: Terror’
Deductive tasks:
‘Using the information provided in the Pack, and
any other evidence you can find in books or on CD, explain what you
think is the meaning of this short story and who the “real” villain is’
Application tasks:
‘Given what you know about electrical circuits,
explain how you would wire up this sequence in order to control each of
the components individually’
Analytical tasks:
‘Explain why the most common ploys that
supermarkets use to display goods actually work in practice’
Task requiring skills of synthesis: ‘Given what you have learned in your
mathematics lessons about how to display data, find some effective ways
in which to display your findings from the heating and cooling
experiment we have just carried out’
Evaluative tasks:
‘Compare and contrast the approaches to love and
relationships in the poetry of Hardy with those of Shakespeare.
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Table 3: Ten methods of differentiation reported by teachers
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Production of additional/ more demanding resources
Target setting for individual pupils
Asking more open-ended questions
Use of role play
Deployment of support staff to promote individuals’ learning
Use of graduated worksheets
Setting an extended project
Use of a variety of recording methods (written answers, graphs, video
production etc.)
9. Problem solving
10.Use of open-ended tasks
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Table 4: Some basic advice on teaching question-based lessons
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Establish the ground-rules from the outset (i.e. not to shout, not to talk
over others, not to interrupt etc.)
Create an appropriate learning ethos (i.e. a ‘cool learn’ ethos, where
thinking, ideas and contribution are all valued)
Keep the pupils curious (teachers have a lot to learn from TV soaps on
this score!)
Make investigation central to the learning in your classroom (even show
that teachers have learn also)
Make the pupils own the problem (learning is not just the teacher setting
tasks about he/she is expert, but about really wanting to know the
answers and sometimes failing to find any)
Encourage the intuitive leap (scientists call them hypotheses, most of us
call them guesses – but it’s OK to guess and be wrong)
Value everyone’s contribution (avoid the obvious pitfalls of ‘favourites’,
unconscious gender bias or domination by the vociferous)
Monitor the learning in progress (make sure some of the questions
provide you with feedback about emerging levels of understanding)
Raise the cognitive stakes (by sequencing questions appropriately).
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Table 5: Some key skills for explainers
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Think of an attention-grabbing introduction: Avoid the ‘today we are going to’
syndrome, think of a way that will engage the audience
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Define new technical terms and difficult language: the explanation won’t make sense
unless everyone understands what you are saying
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Link the explanation to real experience: understanding is always heightened when
something being described ‘rings true’ in the real world
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Use plenty of examples: these can be positive and negative – ‘It works like this….it
does not work like this…’
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Break up long explanations into segments punctuated by tasks or other activities:
students may lose the thread during over-long wordy lessons, and these punctuation
periods can be used to build on your spoken examples
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Use connectives in your own speech to enhance continuity and meaning: in
conversation we automatically use words and phrases like ‘and’, ‘but’,
‘consequently’, ‘however’, ‘by contrast’; they are just as important during classroom
explanations because they sustain the logical links between key elements of the
explanation
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Use repetition, emphasis and other ploys of language and delivery: repetition lends
weight to a phrase, a pause may help to focus attention, and inserting a phrase like
‘now here is a particularly important bit’ gathers the audience’s concentration
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Gain feedback: check from time to time (perhaps through asking some questions) that
everyone is following the line of thought you are putting across
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Control the pace: given that your feedback is positive you might be able to proceed
quicker, at other times you will need to recap or go slower
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Keep things interesting: a sine qua non of every lesson
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
References
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© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry
Biographies
Trevor Kerry is Professor in Education at the College of Teachers and Visiting Professor
in the International Educational Leadership Centre in the University of Lincolnshire and
Humberside.
Carolle Kerry is a social scientist with experience as a school governor, vice chair of
governors and clerk to a governing body. She holds the Fellowship of the College of
Teachers in school governorship and the education of minority groups of pupils.
Together they run TK Consultancy providing in-service education for teachers and they
can be reached on e-mail: TKConsultancy@eggconnect.net
© 2011 Carolle & Trevor Kerry