The Classify Education Newsletter #3

Author

Andrew Wilkinson
June 01, 2024

Welcome to the third edition of The Classify Education Newsletter. It’s been a busy month with lots of exciting things happening

What we cover

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Classify updates

  • Development on The Classify platform has slowed and is continuing to be a challenge.

  • Platform has all modules built out but getting all of the modules to speak to each other is proving more difficult than initially thought.

  • The Learning Curve School Leadership Podcast continues and we have released two episodes over the last month which you can find here. Episode #3 was with TES International Schools Principal of the year Joanna Povall and episode #4 with Head of History Emily Folorunsho.

  • New blog post: Explanations A Model to Support Student Understanding is live now - find it here.

Leadership reflection

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We all live within our own imagined world, but we operate within the real world.

Matthew Evans (2021)

Reflection: I was recently lucky enough to speak with Nick Hart, the Principal of Horizon British School in Dubai, and he introduced me to the concept of the imagined school - originally written about by Matt Evans.

The basic premise of the imagined school is that, as leaders in a complex environment, it is incredibly difficult to get a true understanding of the lived reality that teachers, students & parents experience.

For example, We may well have given a certain message to staff but how is that message understood and acted upon? Chances are, not every member of staff will have interpreted the message the same way and thus we start to get a divergence between the imagined school and lived reality.

Schools are complex adaptive systems and as such have many, many variables. Leaders are also competing against the reality presented by staff, who understandably, may want to show the best of their work rather than the day in and day out reality.

All of this means that leaders are making evaluations and judgements based on an imagined school vs the real one. The wider these two schools become the more opportunity there may be for poor leadership to thrive as decisions are being made based on an incorrect reality.

I’d highly recommend reading Matt Evan’s original blog here and Nick Hart’s excellent follow up blog here.

The data drop

I came across this really interesting data sample from FTT Education Data Lab in the UK who work with over 6000 primary schools.

The chart shows a significant drop in absence rate during the SATs week in Year 6 last week vs the previous 3 weeks.

Naturally, the assumed rationale for the data is that attendance has improved because of the SATs assessments.

Most schools in the UAE have now entered an assessment window and this data made me wonder if there has been a spike in UAE attendances. Qualitatively & anecdotally, attendance has been up in my school this week and assessments have most definitely been a cause of this.

Teaching & learning tip

Frayer Models

Frayer models are an excellent and flexible tool to support and check students understanding of a concept.

The components of Frayer models are quite simple: definition, characteristics, examples & non-examples. By students exploring these components we can explore what a concept is and isn’t whilst developing a frame of reference for students to use.

Frayer models can be differentiated in many ways: challenging students to give more robust definitions & characteristics or getting students to identify more complex examples. Alternatively, students could be given partially completed frayer models.

Frayer models would be excellent as a retrieval practice task either as homework, exit or entry tickets, giving students the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of concepts. The amount of examples or clarity of the definition/characteristics would give a good insight to students short-term understanding.

Five things we enjoyed this month

Learn more about Classify

I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Classify Education Newsletter and you found some value in it. Please share with your colleagues and keep your eyes peeled for more from Classify over the next month. If you have any feedback for us about the newsletter, please get in touch by replying to this email.

Myself & the development team are working hard on the Classify platform at the moment but if you would like to find out more about how we can support your school schedule a call now👇