1. A Teacher Tapp First 🥇
Thousands of you answered the first open-ended question on Teacher Tapp last week 🥳
To try out this swanky new feature, you were asked what first made you join Teacher Tapp.
The analysis team are working on the responses this week, Laura is swimming in about 90,000 words and the tech team are looking quite pleased with themselves – rightly so!
Overall, it was a success 🎆 Thank you to everyone who responded 🥰
Here’s a word cloud of the most common responses!!
What next?
Well, having the open-ended feature allows you to share your voice in a new way, strengthening the collective voice of teachers via Teacher Tapp 💪
Watch this space… 👀
SPREAD THE WORD
Lots of you came to Teacher Tapp by word of mouth or by seeing us on Twitter 🥰 All this positivity has got us hopeful of reaching our 10,000 Tappers a day mission 🚀
Share the Teacher Tapp love using this link https://onelink.to/teachertapp.
We know it’s not the prettiest of links but it’s one that works across Apple and Android devices 📱
2. Anchors ⚓️
In response to recent media discussions about potential strike action over teacher pay, we ran… a little experiment.
You may have seen the results on social media but for those of you who haven’t, we used ‘anchoring’.
‘Anchoring’ is a psychological technique in which you can change people’s perceptions by offering ‘contextual’ information.
How you talk about pay rises makes a difference to what people think is reasonable. We polled teachers on what rise they’d give to the profession. In one version, we added context (anchors) and in another just straight percentages.
It hugely affected responses…
With anchors, more teachers chose to align themselves with the nursing profession despite the rate of inflation being much higher.
All of which suggests that if you want to convince people a higher pay rise is needed, keep mentioning 11% inflation as context.
3. Trips
We received a number of requests from the community to find out more about trips.
So, we did!
Who enjoys going on school trips?
32% of KS2, PE and other subject teachers REALLY enjoy trips – all aboard the fun bus 🚌
On the whole, most of you say that you like trips (it reminds us of the famous question 🎂 or ☠️!) but as with everything in life, there is always one group who like it less than everyone else and in this case that group is…
🥁🥁🥁
English teachers! 5% of whom told us that they really don’t like school trips at all!
When you look at primary vs secondary teachers, there’s not much difference when it comes to levels of enjoyment but we found that there are significant differences between how many trips you’ve attended…
How many days in total will you have been out on school trips this year?
85% of primary teachers have had at least one trip, compared to only 51% of secondary teachers.
34% of you said that you’d been on five or more trips this year 😯
It got us wondering, who’s able to take that much time out of school to attend five or more trips?
Are the teachers who enjoy trips the ones who’ve been on the most?
Broadly, YES! (are you in charge of organising trips, we wonder 🤔)However, spare a thought for the 12% of trip haters (bottom of the chart) who’ve still ended up on over 6 trips each this last academic year 😏
4. Primary Genie 🧞♂️
Primary Tappers, the TT genie wanted to know which ONE primary assessment you would scrap if you could!!
The Y4 multiplication tables check had barely finished when you were asked this question, which didn’t stop 16% of you from choosing to scrap it over more established primary assessments.
Having said that, the Y6 SATs won this one by a fair margin.
Looking across all the assessments, heads are usually slightly more in favour of tests than their classroom-based colleagues.
BUT WAIT…
This trend is reversed when it comes to the EYFS baseline where 21% of headteachers want to see it scrapped, compared to 15% of classroom teachers.
Clearly lots more questions for us to dig into on this one 🚜
We wondered if your school use a phonics scheme that’s validated by the DfE.
41% of primary schools in the most affluent areas have changed to a scheme from the ‘validated’ list, whilst 57% of schools in the most deprived areas were already using one.
Despite being a non-statutory requirement, only 5% of you said that your school have no intentions of moving to a validated scheme.
It’ll be interesting to see how accountability measures stack up against schools that use a ‘validated’ scheme and those that don’t 👀
5. Tutor Groups
A Tapper wanted to know how tutor groups work in other schools.
63% of you see your tutor group at the start of the day which makes sense for registration…
Tutor time after lunch is more common in independent schools (21%) than in state-funded schools (11%)
Could this be because the school days are longer in independent schools?
What about afternoon registration? 🤔
21% said that you see your tutor group for 16-20 minutes a day, which was the most common response.
40% spend more than 21 minutes a day with your tutor group 😯 This came as quite a shock to some of us at HQ.
It might be worth us asking a follow-up question to find out what’s happening during that time.
If it was up to you would you get rid of tutor time? 👀
Another Tapper wanted to know how frequently subject departments meet.
34% of English, maths and science departments meet at least once a week. Is this because those departments tend to be bigger? Either way, that’s an impressive feat.
Arts including D&T, PE and other subjects are the least likely to have regular meetings than any other department.
Finally… we know you love the daily read, so here are the ones from last week
The most read tip from the past week was: When daily quiz regimes become lethal mutations of retrieval practice
And here are the rest for your reference:
- What’s stopping us teaching reading comprehension really well?
- How can the government’s target of 90% of pupils achieving the expected standards at Key Stage 2 be achieved?
- Embedding reading fluency in the KS3 English curriculum
- 10 Techniques for Retrieval Practice
- How I transitioned from Powerpoint-led lessons to drawing my lessons under a visualiser
- Practical strategies to support pupils with dyscalculia and maths difficulties in the primary classroom
- What makes great teaching? Beyond a list of strategies…
- In just 4 minutes of teaching…
- Post-It notes – A teacher’s best friend!
