Progress is something that teachers talk about a lot.

The problem is that progress can look different for different teachers and different learners.

Here are some thoughts I have had on progress over 30 years of teaching secondary students maths and computer science.

Helping students to progress with the skills they already have

Students come to lessons with a variety of skills already. I like to recognise these skills and work to improve them. I do this by presenting work at different levels to them throughout a lesson and seeing how far they get.

The ice cream cone lesson

Some years ago I taught a lesson where students had to design and make a cone shape to hold ice cream. At the end of the lesson they all got to eat the ice cream, which was in a container in a freezer in the school kitchen. That motivated them to do their best as it was a very hot day.

Some students already knew how the net of a cone should look and began designing it taking into account the volume of ice cream they wanted to put into it. They then cut it out and assembled it, showing their calculations clearly for the maximum volume of ice cream it could hold.

An extension task was provided where I asked the students who were able to do so to work out the volume of a hemisphere of ice cream that could be placed on top of the rounded end of the cone. A couple of the more able students were able to do this.

Some students found it hard to get going on the task. They spent a lot of time looking at animations of nets of cones and figuring out how they could be folded up into a cone. Then they spent a bit more time on working out how to change between litres of ice cream to cubic centimetres of ice cream.

At the end of the lesson students had done what they could and were all rewarded with ice cream served in a bowl. That was much cleaner and didn’t require me staying after the lesson to clean the tables. Students can be messy.

The students could all see that they had made progress developing their skills of geometry, numerical reasoning and recording their work.

Teaching new skills focusing on resilience and accuracy

In a lesson where students are being taught new skills on a topic which they haven’t come across before, I like to share with them what I think success will look like.

I think that Financial maths is an important part of life.

In England, there are too many students leaving school without an understanding of how finance works. When I left school around 45 years ago, I had very little idea of how finance worked. I followed the examples of my parents and friends and opened a bank account and occasionally saved when I could.

Later on when I was able to buy a house I was introduced suddenly to the world of mortgages and loans.

I wish that I had known about these things before I was confronted by them.

I have been fortunate to work with students on financial maths lessons. These use maths skills as well so its’s great to be delivering that as well. With maths comes accuracy skills so we spent some time talking about why it’s important to be accurate when checking calculations.

Now we have those fantastic graphical calculators which allow you to put in the amount of the loan, the interest rate, the number of years the loan is for and then you press the enter button to get the repayments that you need to make over that period of time so that the loan is fully repaid at the end of the term.

Students were always fascinated by the amount of extra money paid in interest so we looked further at different interest rates offered by different banks.

Maths isn’t always a subject that engages students, but coupled with the idea of savings and finance, it can be used to develop student resilience. Students can also see the need for accuracy in their calculations.

I was interested to see how student resilience improved. Support from peers was important, if one student got lost another would often step in and help them make progress with using the calculator to improve their resilience.

That was great to see as a teacher.

Helping students to progress with their life skills

Helping students to develop key knowledge and skills of how the world works is important to me. They can demonstrate that they know these skills in debates and applying their skills to solve a problem.

I like to encourage students to ask questions about what they are learning as they go along and to find answers to these online.

I encourage students to explain their points of view to others, and to actively listen to what is said to them before responding. Students can then build on a response by diving deeper into the topic they are discussing.

There is a very interesting part of computer science called ethics. I have taught this topic for several years now and the discussions some students have about ethics are fascinating at times.

As we all live in a world dominated by technology, I think that it’s really important that students are aware of how technology works and the ethics behind that.

That helps them to make decisions about how to stay safe online, how to deal with their money online and how to deal with fake news.

It’s great to see them progressing and building these skills.

Developing progress in independent learning

Most students expect a teacher to stand in front of a class and teach something. That makes sense.

I used to sometimes do things differently.

In computer science students were required to learn about databases. Databases are large collections of data which can be used by anyone who knows how to talk to the database. Database languages can be complex but students aged 11 to 16 usually learn a language called Structured Query Language (SQL).

So I used to set homework on this topic before I taught the topic. The homework would be to watch a you tube video on databases and SQL. The video would always be a short one lasting no more than 10 minutes. I would ask students to write notes about what they learned from the video.

The next lesson I would talk about SQL and look out for those students who looked confused.

If they were confused it was usually because they hadn’t done the homework.

I hoped that this would help them become better independent learners as they would soon figure out that if they had watched the video and taken notes, they would have got more out of the lesson.

Testing students’ knowledge in the classroom with deep questions or a quick test

I think I would find it hard to measure progress without some sort of test. The difficulty is making sure that tests are not too frequent, set at the right level and that they give the student a sense of achievement.

So following a lesson on looking at computer hardware, I got the students to design a test on this topic.

Each student wrote a possible question and an answer to that question on the back of a card. The cards were then muddled and in groups students discussed the question and its answer and put the cards that had good questions and answers on them in a pile. Other cards that they thought didn’t have good questions and answers on them were put in a different pile.

At the end of the lesson I had a whole pile of cards in the good questions pile to base my test on.

Students took full ownership of the test and loved the fact that they had helped design it. Most actually looked forward to and enjoyed taking the test a week later.

Measuring and assessing progress

I’ve found that students work better when they have a supportive environment, when they see value in their work and when they work towards a set goal. Progress happens when they take small steps towards resilience, reasoning and independent learning.

Along the way students can grow in their life skills, their ability to use technology to understand the world better and learn to ask better questions which help them learn well.

A lot of what happens in a classroom is because of the lived experience of the teacher. Sometimes it’s important to step back and let students lead their own learning, making progress as individuals at their own pace, whilst being aware that setting limits on student’s progress can lead to students not making the progress that they could make.

What types of progress do you think are important to help students develop as individuals?