Net Gains

I have been at the School's North East Summit near Durham today. Schools Northeast is an organisation that has been brought together by Headteachers across the region to encourage collaborative development. What is most impressive is that it encourages the sharing of good practice across Local Authority borders. The conference was fantastic, and left me with several nuggets for developing my own philosophy and practice…

One of the speakers was James Nottingham. Many friends and colleagues have expressed their sentiments that James is an inspirational speaker, and successfully challenges you to look intimately at what, how and why you are implementing teaching and learning. I hadn't heard him speak and was delighted to attend his presentation. What's more – he didn't disappoint. The presentation was excellent and has left me with some serious reflecting to do – especially related to the building of mental constructs when moving from building vision to implementing systems, which will be the focus of a later post.

I want this post to relay a very simple idea for stimulating children's successful learning of the weekly spellings. The initial step is to give the children their spellings list the week before the test, and give them a few minutes to read them and to begin to internalise them. After they have had that initial exposure, give the class a pre test. Take it in and mark it.

For the children who get 7 – 10 (out of 10), give them some additional words to learn (added to the original list, not replacing it). For those who hit the middle, keep with the list given. Finally for the group who get 0 – 3, work with them during the week and give additional coaching.

At the end of the week, you give the children the actual test. However, the score and feedback is based on the net score not the total correct. You get the net score by subtracting the pre test score from the test score. In effect this gives you a progress mark. As a result, a child scoring 3 in the pre test and 6 in the actual test has made as much progress as the child who scored 7 and 10 respectively as their progress score is 3.

This relates back to some of the writing I have done earlier about rewards. This system immediately appealed to me because it rewards the effort put into the learning rather than just rewarding the outcome. If we wish to develop resilience in our learners we must enable them to feel a sense of achievement and pride.

James Nottingham clarified why this works based on some interesting research. I hope I'm not doing him a disservice and oversimplifying here, but one of the key things that we do as a society is to praise intelligences (you're a great footballer, good boy, brilliant reading) rather than the learning processes (you've put great effort into that, you tried really hard). The "net scoring" system for the spellings above allows you to praise the process, and develop the learning behaviours and skills in an honest and open way.

Would this work for your class? How could you adapt it to other situations where you give feedback to pupils? There are certain mental constructs that underpin this methodology. I will explore those in a further blog in the next few days. Your comments, as ever would be appreciated.