When I started to use a visualiser, I was surprised by some of the feedback from students where they saw it as a helpful tool. One was the fact that I was no longer ‘in the way’ when modelling on the board (it probably doesn’t help that I’m not always great at standing still during delivery); the second was that students felt that my explanations were clearer, as I took more time.
It is true that sitting to model and write does make me slow down a little, mostly as it has made me more aware of how I am delivering the explanations whilst I model. The summary of effective direct instruction from Barack Rosenshine (2012) was really influential here, as it made it reconsider the importance of making modelling matter.
To start with, this was as simple as me narrating my thought process (taking the effort to slow down and pause as appropriate) and annotating this thought process as I go. This meant that students had the scaffold of this thought process when they either continued the piece I started or started anew with a different focus. This was a big shift from the rushed models I’d previously completed on the whiteboard, as being conscious of the limited space meant that I was often restricted to a single paragraph, with limited annotations.
Over time, I also started to replace more of my pre-prepared models with a live version, using the visualiser. For example, when feeding back after looking at students’ work, I now tend to write model to show students how to get past the misconceptions I identified by modelling those mistakes and the correcting of them. Again, modelling the thought process has been important here as I’ve had students reflect by asking which questions I asked myself whilst writing that they didn’t ask themselves, before they redraft their original piece. What I’m aiming to develop is the idea that they shouldn’t ‘just write’ (as is the temptation in exams where time is limited and the required knowledge is substantial); instead, I want to embed the process of ‘write > reflect > repeat’.
As well as modelling the process for written answers (which has proved more successful than the various acronyms I’ve used for analytical paragraphs before), I’ve also used the visualiser to model planning of tasks/writing and the annotation of texts. I believe that this has supported students’ cognitive load because (as one student mentioned) I’m not ‘getting in the way’ of the explanation/modelling. Students can look and the board and listen to my narration; they don’t need to be distracted by my physical presence.
Now I am more confident with using the visualiser, I now find that I use it without planning to, which has made it particularly useful when it comes to addressing misconceptions or sharing successes ‘in the moment’ as well as live marking a piece to model effective peer/self assessment.
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