An explanation of "when you get it, get up"

The aim for using “When you get it, get up” was to shift the locus of control in my Year 9 Project based learning classroom and to develop autonomy in my students so that they could decide when it was appropriate for them to begin a task. I would explain the process for stages of an enquiry or a project in three spirals. Firstly in a visual, diagrammatic form, then fill in the gaps or narrative for that particular stage and then finally model or suggest approaches. In doing so, together we encountered some of the entrenched attitudes to learning and “getting it”. On the first attempt, I explained the process to the students and upon showing them a diagrammatic representation of the structure of the lesson, one student got up, and was quickly followed by the rest of the class without any questions asked.

When we debriefed the lesson, more than half of the class admitted that they had not really got it, but had felt compelled to follow the first person as they did not want to be seen to need more support than others. Eventually we arrived at some fantastic criteria for what “getting it” means such as “When we can picture in our mind the path forward” and “When we have asked all of the questions we can think of”. Over a period of a month, I spent a lot of time writing down verbatim the questions that students asked and tallying data on their learning behaviours throughout the lessons, then shared these with the students. The impact of this approach was fantastic; students became more skilled at determining the level of support that they required. More able students became coaches in the classroom having been given the freedom to start stages of an enquiry at the earliest opportunity, they would then return to the rest of the class and assist others before moving onto the next stage. Students changed the way that they listened to instructions and as a result asked not just more but increasingly higher order questions. The success of the approach hinged on the fact that in every classroom (in my experience), students just want to get started, and this approach gave my class a mechanism to do that at the right time, once we had cleared the way for students to be comfortable with “not getting it” straight away.

Tmne10

View more presentations from Martin.