learning – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

I wrote it on my hand

Just occasionally, a student will say something so extraordinary that I am stopped in my tracks. This week, it was when a child I have been working with in the run-up to her GCSE examinations told me that she had to resort to writing on her hand during a lesson.

I was hesitant to write this piece, for it means going over ground I have covered before; but in the spirit in which this blog was started, I remain committed to writing about what is on my mind at the time, and this week I am haunted by the fact that a student was unable to write down a question during her lesson.

More and more schools in the private sector have moved to a digital model, in which lessons are conducted using tablets or – most commonly – Chromebooks. I am deeply suspicious that this is a money-saving exercise, since schools can access the equipment at a considerable discount when buying in bulk, and anyone who has seen the average photocopying budget for a busy department will come to realise that the potential saving is considerable, once the initial investment is made. Printing booklets is expensive, and this fact seems to be outweighing the fact that they are effective learning tools.

The young people I work with are – as one might expect – reasonably tech savvy, but they are universally scathing about their school’s digital approach. Without exception, they report that the technology is clumsy, unreliable and not fit for purpose. They will even volunteer the fact that it is distracting and hampers learning by offering up temptations that would otherwise not be present. Students report a quite extraordinary litany of what they get up to on their laptops when they are meant to be on task during a lesson: at best, they may be doing homework for another subject; at worst, they will be playing games or accessing chat applications. All of them agree that they cannot discern what tangible positives the technology brings to their learning. Moreover, as I discussed at greater length back in January, they lack the skills and the maturity to manage their learning through digital platforms. Organising, managing and accessing large files and using screen-splitting to make this viable is genuinely beyond a significant number of students: frankly, it’s beyond a lot of adults.

So far, so predictable. The student I spoke to this week has been one of the many who have expressed frustration with her school’s digital approach and has found it difficult to access her notes and prior learning. There are constructions she has no recollection of ever been taught, which is not uncommon, but what is concerning is the fact that she cannot find a way to revisit her own notes on the topic. Had the school been using a well-organised printed booklet, this would have been effortless. Once again, the technology is working against her, which pretty much undermines everything that technology is meant to stand for; technology should be a facilitator and an enabler, not a barrier to learning.

I really struggle to comprehend why so many schools have switched to a digital model, despite the overwhelming evidence that handwriting is better for cognition. Handwriting engages a broader network of brain regions and motor skills compared to typing, potentially leading to better memory formation and learning. Typing is faster and more efficient when it comes to output, but it involves less active cognitive engagement and thus fewer opportunities for memory consolidation. Typing is fantastic for fast communication – it is not so for learning. Writing by hand forces the brain to engage in a more active, sensory-motor experience; the process activates the regions in the brain responsible for motor control, visual processing, and sensory input – a much broader range than is required for typing. Studies have shown that handwriting leads to more elaborate and widespread brain connectivity patterns than typing, suggesting that the act of writing by hand is thus more effective for encoding new information and forming memories. This is why, when I am learning something off by heart, I don’t do it (exclusively) on the computer.

But aside from all of this, let’s just think of the practicalities. I am a huge fan of technology and I do pretty much everything through it. I use a digital calendar, as I find it more effective and efficient than a traditional one. All my tutoring is online, so all the resources I use with students are presentable on screen. However, when I send them resources, these are almost always designed to be printed out and held in their hands. In addition, and here’s what is most relevant to my post today, I have a lined pad beside my laptop for notes. When a student asks me to send them something after the session, I jot that down on the notepad. When a student warns me that they will be able to make the next session, I jot that down on the notepad. It is simply more efficient and quicker to do this than to open a file and make a note in a corner of my digital resources. The notepad sits beside me at all times and I cross off each note as I implement it. The page beside me as I type has the following written down and crossed through (names have been changed):

Billy – noun table

Olivia – YouTube vid. on 10-markers

Niall – 2021 paper + Rome qus

This is exactly the kind of thing that a notepad is needed for – quick notes to self that will be implemented immediately and ticked off. There is no need for a permanent record, just a requirement for an immediate visual reminder to action something at the end of my run of sessions. None of this is rocket science, or so I thought.

Yesterday, when my student reported that she had some questions arising from her first lesson back in school, she admitted that she was struggling to remember them because she had not been able to write them down. Not only has her school moved so entirely over to Chromebooks that students appear not to have any kind of papers, notebooks or diaries to hand, but get this: her teacher seems aware of the fact that the Chromebooks are causing distraction during the lesson, so has banned students from accessing them during the lesson. This would be fine if the students were given an alternative route to note-taking, but that’s presumably against whole-school policy, so instead the students are left with nothing to write on. “So, I wrote it on my hand,” she said, “but then I couldn’t make it out and it got washed off later in the day.”

So, there we have it. What a stunning victory for technology over common sense. You have a child left unable to access her notes, unable to write down a question for their teacher or tutor (the fact that she wanted to save a question for one-to-one time rather than interrupting the flow of the lesson should surely be applauded) and a piece of technology which undermines learning to such an extent that the teacher is forced to discontinue its use in lessons without a suitable replacement. Three cheers for our ability to make the world just a little bit more bonkers than it needs to be.

Hang in there, folks!

“Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.”

Peter Ustinov

This week, I have had a high volume of messages and phone calls from parents who are worried about their child’s progress. Witnessing your teenager navigate the pressures of impending exams can be a source of significant anxiety for parents and carers; balancing the desire to support them academically while managing your own concerns can be a delicate task, and never more so in this crucial period between Mock results and the final examinations, the proposed dates of which have just been announced. This year, both exam boards have elected to place all three of the Latin examinations prior to Half Term.

While all parents are anxious for their children to do well, the situation varies from client to client. Some have a child who is seemingly crippled by their own anxiety, struggling to study effectively because of the extreme pressure they put on themselves to succeed. Others report that their child is so laid back (or in denial) about the examination process that they’re doing little to nothing at all, blissfully convinced that the eleven weeks remaining between now and their first examination is an absolute eternity of time, during which they will – at some point – address what it is that they need to learn.

Parenting is like any relationship: it has a dynamic of its own and there are pressures from multiple angles. Every parent wants what’s best for their child and the anxiety stems from worrying whether we or they could be doing more. Yet parental anxiety can inadvertently influence a teenager’s stress levels and when parents exhibit high levels of concern, teens may internalise this stress, leading to increased pressure and potential performance issues. Recognising and managing our own anxiety is therefore crucial in fostering a calm and supportive atmosphere – but this is much easier said than done!

Children often mirror their parents’ emotional responses, so most psychologists advocate for modelling the kind of behaviour that you think your child would benefit from: demonstrating calmness and confidence can help your teen to adopt a similar mindset. This is not to say that you should not share your anxieties, indeed discussing your feelings openly, without projecting undue stress, can encourage your teen to share their concerns as well. Many parents I know find the car is a great place to encourage this kind of openness, because by necessity the discussion has to be had without eye contact; many people – especially teenagers – can find eye-contact really confronting when talking about difficult things, so opening up or encouraging your child to do so while your eyes are on the road can be useful. If you need to have a really difficult conversation, too difficult to be had while you’re driving, then doing so on a walk can have a similar effect: again, your gaze is facing forward and you’re walking side-by-side, which can dial down the intensity of what you’re saying and make it feel less threatening for both of you.

Many parents underestimate the amount of pressure that they are under while their child is preparing for exams, so it is important to focus on self-care when you can. Engaging in activities that reduce your own stress levels not only benefits you but also sets a positive example for your teen – remember, they learn from your role-modelling, so making time for yourself is not selfish: it is modelling for your child the best and healthiest way to handle their own stress, both now and in the future.

In terms of practical solutions when it comes to study, promoting efficient study techniques can reduce exam-related stress. Assist them in setting achievable goals for each study session to maintain motivation and a sense of accomplishment. Encourage evidence-informed methods such as summarising information, teaching you or someone else the material, or creating mind maps to enhance understanding and retention. Rather than reading and highlighting, encourage your child to read, set the book to one side and then try to summarise the information they have just read in their own words. This is by far the most effective aid to memory, as it forces the brain to reconstruct the information, which is essentially how memory works. Utilising past papers under timed conditions can build familiarity with exam formats and time management skills, so this is another essential tool in the process.

If you’re looking for detailed advice on how to go about studying effectively, I would highly recommend a book called The Psychology of Effective Studying by Dr. Paul Penn, who is a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London. I interviewed him for Teachers Talk Radio a few years ago, and he is an absolute goldmine of evidence-based, practical advice. I would recommend the book for adults (it is aimed at undergraduates), but Paul also has a YouTube channel, which makes much of his advice really accessible for younger people. If you’re finding it difficult to persuade your teenager to try more effective methods of study, then Paul’s channel could be a great place to direct them towards.

Routines and comfort zones

As I write this, I’m in absolute agony. I can barely move without yelping. Rolling over in bed has been a challenge and I am getting up out of my chair like a 70-year-old. There’s me thinking that I normally make myself work hard on my twice-weekly visits to the gym. Turns out that – for quite some time – I’ve just been playing at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been making progress. On several of the machines, I can now select a heavier option than I have been able to previously, and my strength has definitely continued to improve incrementally. But if I’m honest, that progress has been very, very slow and has quite possibly reached a plateau over the last few weeks.

This week, in place of the deep-tissue massage and advice-session I normally get from my physical therapist, we met at the gym and he coached me in my usual routines. Flipping heck. I truly had not realised just how much I was staying in my comfort zone and what a difference it would make to me, having someone to push me beyond it. While Greg is anything but a Sargeant Major type, it’s amazing what a great motivator it is to have someone beside you, telling you to add more weight, stretch a bit further, try a bit harder.

“What weights should we use for walking lunges?” he asked. “Um … 4s or 5s?” I said, hopefully, knowing full well that he would push me up to working with 6s. Off he jogged to the weight store and returned, brimming with mischief. “They didn’t have any 6s,” he said, nonchalantly. “Try with these 8s.”

Ignoring this transparent deceit and weighed down by an extra 16 kilos on top of my body weight of 47, I waggled my way through a series of walking lunges. Greg did the same beside me, holding more than double the weight and chatting all the time about his son and his daughter. I’ve taught both of them, of course, because, as an ex-teacher in the village comprehensive, it is a local by-law that I must have taught the children of every single community service-provider: the personal trainer, the Sainsbury’s delivery guy, the gardener, the builder, the roofer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. While Greg chatted, I puffed and panted and my glutei maximi made it more than apparent to me that there would be trouble ahead. Yesterday and today, that trouble became manifest.

Over the last 48 hours I have felt almost as bad as I did on the very first occasion I tried this new-fangled business of resistance training. Ouch. It’s been a serious wake up call, the sudden realisation that – while habits and routines are essential and the stuff of a (healthy) life – they carry with them the risk of complacency and comfort. Things have been way too easy at the gym recently, because I have let them be so. I cannot remember the last time that I experienced serious delayed-onset muscle soreness after a visit, and that’s something to work on from here.

This week, I also met a new client, one who is struggling when it comes to committing her work to memory. Whether it be the set text, noun endings or vocabulary, there is a serious amount of rote-learning required in the subject of Latin, and many students struggle with the sheer volume of what they need to commit to long-term memory. Supposedly, she has been doing all the right things and has made regular use of flashcards, but the fact that the process is not working is most likely because it’s been too comfortable.

So, I encouraged her to work proactively on selecting the cards that she is struggling with and focus on those. Flashcards are for the words you don’t know, not the ones you do. I also warned against the well-known risk attached to using the flashcards alone, rather than getting somebody else to test you – the temptation to turn the card over too quickly and allow yourself to recognise the answer rather than to hold off until you retrieve it can be great; indeed it can be something that students do unconsciously, without even realising it. Putting somebody else in charge of the cards is a great way to mitigate against this risk. “It should feel uncomfortable,” I preached. “If you’re finding the flashcards too easy, you’re doing it wrong.” Huh. Physician, heal thyself, I thought ruefully this morning, as my muscles caterwauled their protest against Monday’s new and unusual routines.

What has this taught me? Well, it’s been a bit of a jolt. It has reminded me that we are all susceptible to the almost inevitable tendency to settle into a comfort zone, to keep patting ourselves on the back for a job well done when in reality we’ve done very little. It has also reminded me that going it alone is inherently flawed. I really understand why people hire personal trainers on a long-term basis – not because any of the exercises that they are doing are particularly complex or dangerous or requiring an expert, but because it’s just too easy not to push yourself. Paying someone to motivate you can be hugely valuable, and this has given me pause for thought. While I’m not sure it’s necessary for me to hire someone to train with twice a week every week, I can totally see the value in an occasional booster session to question my habits, to shake up my routine and to remind me to push myself harder. That’s something that I shall be investing in from this point forward.

Delayed gratification

This week I have found myself having a very stern conversation with one of my cats. Her name is Piglet. Piglet by name, piglet by nature. The animal simply cannot help herself when it comes to food. If she had her way, she’d be the size of a house, hauling her enormous belly around like a competitor in the World’s Strongest Man. Fortunately – or unfortunately, as far as she is concerned – she has mean old me controlling her food intake.

So, Piglet and I had to have a very serious conversation about her life choices. This is a cat that was in line to receive some small pieces of chicken as a treat. See, I’m not always mean: I had even taken the pieces out of the fridge, to bring them up to room temperature. Piglet, however, elected that evening to wolf down the remaining supper of our other cat, who is currently being rather delicate about her food intake. The second cat is in the early stages of renal failure and so is on a specialist prescription diet. When my back was turned for a nano-second, I failed to register that Dolly had walked away from her food and so I turned around to find Piglet urgently inhaling the last scraps of Dolly’s prescription dinner.

“You could have had some chicken pieces this evening!” I admonished her. “As it is, you’ve made the choice to eat the prescription cat food, so now you’re not getting anything else.” She stared at me, unmoved and unimpressed, still cleaning her whiskers after the extra feed she had claimed for herself.

In reality, of course, the cat’s brain is not capable of understanding the point. She’s a very smart cat, but she has not yet mastered English, nor has she worked out that stealing the prescription cat food means missing out on her chicken treats. She is also – being a cat – not capable of making the fundamental decision of delayed gratification, something which human psychologists and the world in general like to cite as a crucial indicator of our future success as adults. Or is it?

I am quite a fan of The Studies Show, a podcast hosted by two science writers called Stuart Richie and Tom Chivers. In each episode, they debunk various stubborn myths that persist either as a result of poor science or as a result of the science being poorly reported or interpreted (or both). They investigate how science is at the mercy of human bias like any other subject, and explain things such as confounding, publication bias and collider bias (I am still struggling to grasp the last one in full). In one particular episode, they explore the experiment nicknamed “the marshmallow test”, which was hailed as a groundbreaking study into impulse control in very young children, with some quite extraordinary claims made about how the findings were linked to future success in several walks of life – in education, in financial stability, in relationships and in health.

In various tests, performed on a group of 4-year-olds in Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologists offered several hundred children a choice between either one or two sweet treats. The children were offered the choice of either taking one treat which they could have immediately, or if they waited for an unspecified amount of time, during which the psychologist left the room, they would then be allowed two treats. Times that the children were left to wait varied but could be up to 20 minutes. One point, made hilariously by Tom Chivers during the discussion, is to question whether some smart four-year-olds might already have a sound understanding of the value of their own time. “You know what, one marshmallow isn’t worth 20 minutes of my time, mate!” he imagines them saying. Stuart Richie then ponders whether marshmallows were a significantly bigger deal in the 1970s compared to now – what kid in the mid-2020s is going to wait 15 or 20 minutes just for one extra marshmallow?

The issues with the study are many, but the most dubious are the claims that were extrapolated from two follow-up questionnaires, which were responded to by only around 100 of the original 653 participants – meaning that more than 80% of the candidates were not included in the two follow-up studies, which looked at the children in later life. Chivers and Richie also raise the query that the original test was confounded by the fact that different children were given different coping strategies to assist with the waiting time – for example, some were encouraged to use distraction techniques, others to focus on the end reward. This is because the original purpose of the research at Stanford was to try to find out which of the coping strategies would help children most with delaying gratification – the idea of following them up to see which children became more successful in later life came some time afterwards, which may explain why Stanford lost touch with so many of the participants. However, it is the later follow-up studies that caused all the excitement, as they supposedly found a quite remarkably strong correlation between later success and the period of time that the younger children had managed to wait before receiving their reward. The claim – of course – turns out to be nonsense. The correlation only worked with children who had not been offered any coping strategies to help to delay the gratification, which somewhat begs the question why the primary author of the study believed so strongly in the teaching of delayed gratification as a life-strategy. Far more importantly, however, the correlation all but disappeared in replication studies, when controls were introduced for socio-economic background and previous academic success, both of which are far more obvious likely predictors of future academic attainment and overall success.

Chivers and Richie link the wild extrapolations taken from this particular study to similar attempts to introduce the concept of “growth mindset” in schools, another topic of academic research that they take a sledgehammer to in a previous episode. I remember this particular fad very well, as at the time in my school we had one particular Senior Manager who had read Carol Dweck’s book The Psychology of Success and was a shiny, happy acolyte for the concept that the tiniest shift in rhetoric – basically, praising kids for working hard rather than for their smarts – would somehow revolutionise their success in the classroom. It may not surprise you to know that it didn’t, and that the studies in this area have since been shown to prove nothing of the sort.

This is not to say that delaying gratification is not an important skill. It is, of course, an important part of growing up and becoming a successful adult that one learns to some extent to place tasks in an order of importance and/or urgency, rather than focusing entirely on what you would most like to do in the moment. Studying for an exam, preparing for a competition or an interview, exercising and eating the right things for the benefit of your longterm health are all simple goals shared by many which require this skill. In my experience, children acquire the ability to delay their gratification at different rates and while some teenagers have fully mastered the process others are still grappling with their motivation and find it really hard to set aside the things that they enjoy the most to focus on something important but less interesting. One of the greatest things that schools can do is thus to focus on assisting children in their ability to concentrate, as a lack of attention in class remains by far the biggest barrier to academic success for many of our most vulnerable students.

In the meantime, Piglet remains at the mercy of her desires and will no doubt continue to make a lunge for every tasty morsel she can find in her path. I have often said that one of the joys of keeping a cat is that they teach you how to live your life and speaking as someone who doesn’t always remember to reward myself just for the hell of it, Piglet serves as a feline reminder that sometimes making a dive for the thing you crave the most is to be recommended.

Piglet, who can only delay her gratification while sleeping

France is bacon and other misconceptions

When I was young, my father said to me: “Knowledge is power, France is bacon.” For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, “Knowledge is power, France is bacon,” they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say “Knowledge is power” and I’d finish the quote, “France is bacon” and they wouldn’t look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did “Knowledge is power, France is bacon” mean, and got a full 10 minute explanation of the “knowledge is power” bit but nothing on “France is bacon.” When I prompted further explanation by saying “France is bacon?” in a questioning tone, I just got a “yes”. At 12 I didn’t have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I would never understand. It wasn’t until years later I saw it written down, “Knowledge is power,” Francis Bacon, that the penny dropped.

Anonymous post on Reddit, 2011.

The ease with which such misconceptions can arise is something that all teachers should be aware of. Most likely, you can remember some of your own from childhood. For me, most memorably, it was the phrase “rich as Croesus”, which my mother used to use regularly. As a kid, unsurprisingly, I’d never heard of the ancient Greek king of legendary wealth, so I heard “rich as creases.” For years I wondered what being rich had to do with having creases, or why creases were considered to be the same thing as being rich. I just put it down to one of those weird things that grown-ups say.

It is important to remember that much of what adults say is inherently puzzling to young children. Before we berate them for a lack of intellectual curiosity (why on earth didn’t I just ask … ?), it is important to remind ourselves that pretty much everything that adults say or do can seem puzzling on some level to very young children. It is not, therefore, surprising when they shrug and accept a saying or something that they are told is a truism that makes little obvious sense: nothing makes obvious sense when you’re small.

Further to that, the account of the child who heard “France is bacon” illustrates the anxiety that most children have that they have at best missed something obvious or at worst that they are inherently stupid. You can feel the child’s unease as they anxiously test the waters with the various ways in which they attempt to have the saying explained to them. Even the teacher completely misses the opportunity to correct the misconception, as they clearly did not realise where the misconception lay. This illustrates the tendency that we have as teachers to assume that we already understand what it is that a child needs explaining to them: in this case, the teacher assumed that the child was puzzled as to the underlying message of the saying – in what sense can knowledge bring power? What the teacher actually needed to do was to quiz the child on why they were asking about it – what was puzzling them about the quotation? Had the teacher done so, the misconception would have been identified and rectified.

One of the things that I love about tutoring is the opportunity that the one-to-one setting brings to uncover such misconceptions or gaps in a child’s knowledge. This is partly because of the time and focused attention that it affords, but it is also because of the opportunity that you are offering a child to ask all of those “stupid” questions that they’ve been bottling up for years. Nothing brings me greater joy than a tutee who develops the confidence to interrupt me and demand an explanation for something, or to ask me a question that I did not realise that they needed to ask. That’s when the relationship between the tutor and their student has really developed, when a child gains the confidence to demand the most out of their sessions.

Just recently, I was reminded how careful we need to be when assuming what a child knows. I showed my tutee the translation of a Latin poem by Catullus, which contains the metaphor “my purse is full of cobwebs”. Now I went in with the assumption that the child might need encouragement to grasp the metaphor, as many children do not find these as easy as you might assume. During the discussion, however, I discovered that she did not in fact know what “a purse” was. There was no chance of her understanding the metaphor until that was rectified! It had not previously occurred to me that this might be a word that a 16-year-old might not know: but if your family have always used the word “wallet”, or your parents carry their change in their jeans, or – as is becoming increasingly the norm – they don’t really carry cash at all, then maybe it is simply not a word you have come across. We should never, ever assume.

Misconceptions that arise from mishearings such as “France is bacon” or “rich as creases” also illustrate the essential importance of dual coding. A couple of years ago, I realised that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of trying to explore where this misconception had come from, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words, and he had been understandably confused ever since. Yet had the teacher simply written the words “to” and “for” on the board as well as saying them out loud, this misconception would have been avoided. So many people confuse dual coding with the idea of simply putting a nice picture on their handouts, or the ridiculous belief that illustrations are essential for basic vocabulary learning. Not a bit of it. Dual coding is the process of combining words with visual stimulus. It is used to help the brain to grasp a concept without misconceptions: using a visual representation of what you are explaining in written words, or writing down what you are explaining verbally.

Children will always form misconceptions and that fact is nothing to be feared. It does, however, mean that teachers must be particularly alert to them and the methods that are most likely going to help to resolve them, or to prevent them from forming in the first place.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Responsive Tutoring

One of the most powerful tools for promoting student progress is what’s called assessment for learning (AfL). When I was first teaching and the phrase was all the rage, you wouldn’t have passed an interview without mentioning it. While the acryonym AfL is less often used these days, it still underpins modern teaching.

The thinkers credited with the founding principles behind the use of AfL in the classroom are on record as saying they wish they’d called it something else. Rather than “assessment for learning”, they wish they’d called it “responsive teaching” and I can see why. In many ways, AfL is about neither assessment nor learning – at least, not in isolation. AfL, or rather responsive teaching, is about what a teacher does differently in response to where their students are in terms of their understanding.

While summative assessments (such as a GCSE examination) focus on evaluating final outcomes, AfL is embedded in day-to-day teaching in order to gauge students’ progress, clarify misunderstandings and – most crucially – to guide further learning. Effective use in the classroom presents a unique set of challenges for teachers, especially when working with larger groups. The process is infinitely easier in a one-to-one setting, where the dynamic between the tutor and the tutee shapes the entire process.

Responsive teaching is meant to be a continuous loop, the gathering and interpretation of evidence used to shape a teacher’s instructional decisions. AfL can also be used to help students to recognise their own current level of understanding and set goals to improve. It is meant to be an ongoing, dynamic process and requires teachers to have a nuanced understanding of each student’s needs, strengths, and areas for improvement. To be effective, AfL requires not just frequent feedback but feedback that is individualised and actionable. In a one-on-one setting, a tutor can more naturally meet these requirements, while in a classroom with multiple students, the process becomes complex, requiring considerable skill and resourcefulness from the teacher.

When implementing AfL in the classroom, teachers encounter several challenges that are unique to managing large groups. In a classroom of 30 students, teachers must balance AfL with the demands of covering the curriculum, managing behaviour and addressing a multitude of diverse learning needs. The time constraints are significant. For each student, providing specific feedback and tailoring instructional adjustments is an ideal that is often close to impossible to achieve in practice. In any single lesson, a teacher may only have a minute or two to focus on each student. This time is rarely enough for comprehensive feedback, making it challenging to provide meaningful guidance on areas for improvement.

In larger classrooms, teachers have to rely on quick, general assessments, such as asking questions to the class or using hand-raising methods, but these approaches can miss individual nuances and only provide superficial insights into each student’s understanding. Real-time feedback is essential for the process to work, but logistical challenges mean that teachers sometimes delay feedback until they can examine students’ work. This delay can diminish the impact of the feedback and may hinder a student’s immediate progress. It also places a significant workload burden on the teacher: even schools who have understood and embraced the principles behind whole-class feedback are still placing a considerable assessment burden on the classroom teacher in terms of work that must be completed outside the classroom.

In any classroom, some students may actively participate and show enthusiasm, while others remain quiet or withdrawn. Unless a school has fully embraced and embedded the principles of “no excuses”, teachers will struggle to gauge the understanding of all students. Ensuring equal participation is challenging, and without specific engagement from each student, teachers may only get a partial view of the overall class understanding. Implementing AfL strategies requires significant time and energy, which teachers often need to dedicate to managing classroom behaviour. Students can become disengaged, especially if they don’t immediately understand a lesson or find it challenging. The need for behaviour management can take time away from delivering AfL, reducing the effectiveness of feedback and lesson adaptation.

By contrast, one-to-one tutoring provides an environment where AfL shapes and defines the entire process. In a one-on-one setting, the tutor’s focus is exclusively on a single student and this individual attention means the tutor can tailor questions, feedback, and guidance specifically for that student. Any misconceptions or gaps in knowledge are immediately identified and addressed, without the need for complex assessment. For example, a tutor might notice hesitation in a student’s response and immediately reframe the question to clarify understanding. This kind of personalised, immediate and dynamic intervention is impossible in a classroom.

In tutoring, feedback is instant. If a student misunderstands a concept, the tutor can pause and offer corrective feedback on the spot. There is no need to wait, no need to press ahead with the curriculum. This timely response to a student’s needs helps to solidify learning and build confidence, making AfL truly effective. Tutoring allows for a flexibility in pacing which simply cannot happen in the classroom. A tutor can spend as much time as necessary on a particular concept, adjusting the level of challenge to ensure that a student remains engaged. For example, if a student masters a topic quickly, the tutor can introduce more complex material. Conversely, if a student is struggling, the tutor can slow down, review foundational concepts, or use alternative explanations.

One-to-one tutoring fosters a relationship where the student may feel more comfortable expressing misunderstandings or asking questions. I actively praise my students for interrupting me and asking questions, although I am careful to highlight for them that this is the right environement in which to do so; it is important to me that I support classroom teachers by clarifying to students that they cannot – nor should they – demand this level of individual attention and feedback in the mainstream classroom.

Reading their minds?

Classroom teachers are expected to be psychics. According to the Teachers’ Standards, which are many and complex, every classroom teacher must not only understand how children think and learn but must know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively; they must have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn and how best to overcome these; they must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, those of high ability, those with English as an additional language and those with disabilities; they must be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support all of these different young people … and all of this must happen while there are 30 of these diverse learners in the same room.

Much of what is demanded of the average classroom teacher is impossible. I say this not to be a doom-monger or to preach the acceptance of mediocrity – far from it. Throughout my career I strived to be the best teacher I could possibly be. Yet in reality, we cannot be all things to all men and we cannot possibly fathom the inner workings of every single one of the minds that are sat in front of us.

I have written numerous times on the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring but this week something hit me that had not occurred to me before. While I have always been aware that one-to-one sessions give me an insight into the misconceptions each child may have and thus the ability to address those, it has not previously dawned on me that tutoring a large number of students in the way that I do has given me a broader insight into how children think and learn in a way that I could not have experienced as a classroom teacher. Working one-to-one means that I get to listen to how my students think and reason in real time.

It is often said by modern cognitive scientists that education has placed too much focus on the diversity of learners in the past. While every parent likes to think that their child has a unique set of needs that can only be met in a unique way, the reality is that there is far more that unites young learners than divides them. We now know a great deal about how memory works and how best to support students with the learning process: this is not to say that some will not find it harder than others and require more time and effort than others, but broadly speaking the approaches that work for those with special educational needs in fact work well for the mainstream classroom as a whole. If you tailor your classroom towards providing the best learning support for your neediest learners, everyone benefits as a whole.

Working one-to-one with the huge number of students that I do has furnished me with a real insight into how students tackle the process of translating and what the common pitfalls are when they are doing so. It has also provided some perhaps surprising insights into which constructions that children tend to be able to translate on instinct, without a full grasp of understanding. This information is actually gold dust and links to what I blogged about last week – the necessity of designing a curriculum around the learners sat in front of you and in relation to the time you have available as well as the end goal when it comes to examinations. I have realised in the last year or two that there are some complex constructions which many classroom teachers tend to focus too much time on, to the detriment of the basics, when in fact many students could translate those constructions without difficulty so long as they had a grasp of their verb and noun forms and their vocabulary.

Working one-to-one has given me more of an insight into what doesn’t need to be taught as well as what does. While most of my students have gaping holes in their basic knowledge, many of them have spent an unnecessary amount of time being taught things that they do not need to understand in detail. Sometimes, a construction has been so over-taught that a child has been left in complete confusion; their natural grasp of it, one which they would in all likelihood have stumbled upon if given the right basic tools and a decent dose of confidence, has been lost forever.

I am still pondering what to do with these insights as it occurs to me that they could quite honestly be of enormous use to any classroom teacher who is willing to listen. For now, my understanding of how children go about acquiring the skills that they need to do well in Latin is ever-increasing and remains endlessly fascinating to me.

The best use of curriculum time

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

Theophrastus.

On Wednesday, I had my regular fortnightly meeting with the new teacher who has taken over the teaching of Latin in the school where I used to work. This teacher is an ECT (in her first year of teaching) and while she will of course have a professional, in-house mentor to oversee her development within the school, the Head was conscious of and rightly concerned about the fact that she will have no subject expert in the building to offer her support. That’s where I come in. This week, I found my young protégé in a bit of a flap about one particular part of the language curriculum and since reflecting on our time together I realise that I was less helpful than I could have been. Rather than letting our conversation continue when it comes to the grammar at a granular level, what I needed to do was to get her to reflect on which aspects of the curriculum actually require the most time spent on them. Next time I see her, I shall do so.

One of the most frustrating things about leaving teaching is at last having the time to see and understand how one could completely re-write the curriculum to reflect more accurately the way that the exam papers are written. What those outside the profession will find difficult to understand is that it is left in the hands of often new and experienced teachers to design an entire curriculum to prepare for an exam they did not write. No real guidance is shared by the exam boards (and on the odd occasion when some guidance is offered, it is usually either unrealistic or unworkable in some or most settings). What we really need is for exam-setters to work alongside schools to build an appropriate curriculum, but that’s never going to happen.

As we talked, my instincts were telling me that this teacher was becoming unnecessarily bogged down by her worries about a particular construction and was planning to spend a huge amount of time on it. I need to make sure that she does not do this. The reason? Well, I have just reviewed the 8 separate past and specimen papers that we have from the exam she is entering her students for, and this particular construction appears either once or twice in each language paper. Around half of the time, its appearance is supported by comprehension questions, which guide the candidate towards the correct interpretation. The rest of the time, the examples used are almost exclusively ones which most students would be able to translate on instinct, even if they had never been taught the existence of this particular construction. Compare that to another kind of construction, which most teachers skim over very briefly, but which in fact appears multiple times in every single exam paper. Which would you focus on? Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how few teachers go through this thought-process when designing their curriculum and planning their lesson time.

Having made the switch from the classroom to private tutoring, I am in contact with dozens of students from multiple different types of schools. Something I have come to realise is that almost all teachers over-teach the aspects of the curriculum that they believe to be difficult. It is not that their beliefs are incorrect, but what they get wrong is the amount of curriculum time that they dedicate to these concepts as a result of their relative complexity. It’s a common assumption in education that one must spend more time on something because it is difficult. In fact, this must be weighed up against three crucial realities: firstly, the nature, knowledge and curriculum history of the students that we have in front of us; secondly, the amount of time that we actually have with them; thirdly – and perhaps most crucially – the relative weighting that this difficult concept carries when it comes to final outcomes. This requires an understanding of how much, how often and with how much depth that difficult concept is tested, as well as how many marks that testing carries. Once you start trying to balance this equation, it can lead to some surprising conclusions, which might not seem obvious to anyone but the most experienced in curriculum design.

If a concept or construction is so difficult that its full understanding will require multiple hours of curriculum time, yet that very construction is only likely to add up to three marks on one paper, which converts to 1.5% of the student’s overall score … is that concept actually worth teaching at all? It’s something to think about, at least. Perhaps one could teach it in a very condensed form, teach some broad strategies that work in the majority of cases and leave it at that. Certainly, what one should not do, is spend hours and hours of precious curriculum time trying to bring students to the point of full understanding whilst neglecting other concepts which we might consider simpler but appear multiple times on the paper and are thus integral to success. It simply isn’t the sensible approach, given the huge constraints that all schools face when it comes to curriculum time.

The tendency for teachers to labour what’s difficult is something which I share openly with my tutees. I am very careful not to criticise or undermine the school’s curriculum, but I simply explain that it is natural for teachers to spend lots of time on the things that they know are difficult as they are setting the bar high for their students. Children of the age that I work with are perfectly capable of understanding that this might be a noble and understandable approach, but is perhaps not the best strategy to help them if they are struggling with the basics. Even the most able students, who are aiming at the highest grades, can still be reassured by the knowledge that the most challenging aspects of the curriculum are of less importance than perhaps they thought they were; it actually frees them up to grapple with them, once they have been released from the anxiety that their full understanding of this concept is absolutely essential for success. Knowing that you’re working on something that might gain you an extra mark or two is very freeing, and it enables the students who are aiming high to make sensible decisions about how to spend their own time, which is often very stretched.

In Latin, it is not only the language paper that requires this frankness of approach and a realistic analysis of where one’s time should be directed. I have written before about the extent to which teachers over-teach the stylistic analysis of literature texts, when the overwhelming majority of marks are gained in the exam through students simply knowing the text off by heart. I emphasise this over and again to the students I am working with, many of whom come to me because they are scoring very low marks in this aspect of the examination. Students can score at least 80% by simply knowing the text like the back of their hand, so this should be the overwhelming focus of the lesson: despite this, I have so far come across only one school where I would say this is happening – where the focus is on drilling and making it clear to students that they must be learning the text in detail. I shall not name the school, but one thing I will say is that it is a very high-achieving school, where the Latin department produces results of almost exclusively 8s and 9s in the GCSE every single year: this goes to show that the school is not avoiding the trickiest concepts – there is no way a student could score a Grade 9 without getting a decent score in the style questions – but it shows that they understand how to balance their curriculum and focus their efforts on what gains students the biggest advantage. The emphasis must be on knowledge, with the complex skills being supplementary to that. The final clincher, which again I share with my students, is that the high-level questions become infinitely easier and more doable once you know the text. Thus, a student who has already gained a solid knowledge of the text that is in front of them has a much better chance of being able to understand and apply the ideas he/she is being taught to gain those elusive extra marks.