The reality of teaching with LbQ

I have been working at Learning by Questions for 7 months now, and during that time I've met many teachers and school leaders and talked to them about the benefits of LbQ in the classroom. The primary benefit of LbQ is increased progress for pupils. This is because they are answering questions which challenge and extend their knowledge and targetted feedback when they get questions wrong. Because the feedback is instant, misconceptions are addressed straight away which is particularly important in maths where having the wrong concept (for instance you add both the numerators and denominators when adding fractions) can stall further progress and lead to frustration for the learner and extra work for the teacher undoing habits which have become ingrained. The benefits for teachers are very real as well, with hours and hours of marking per week saved and planning streamlined because finding the correct question set or sets takes minutes rather than hours.

During my time at LbQ I have seen a number of very talented classroom practitioners using LbQ. It is a real priviledge to see how a teacher can weave an LbQ question set into their teaching and then use the insights which the live feedback gives them to adapt their next teaching intervention. Like all experts (chefs, pilots, musicians, plasterers) they always make this look easy. But in reality they only make it look effortless because of the thousands of hours practice they have had.

This week I was invited into a primary school to teach a lesson using LbQ. The school had been using LbQ for smaller intervention groups, but the teacher wanted to see what it could look like in a whole class setting. So on Friday morning I found myself in a class of 34 year 6 pupils (yes big class!!) not sat to the side as usual, but right at the front, in the driving-seat as it were. The teacher was at the side, ready to grab the wheel from me if the whole endeavour was headed for a ditch without the brakes being applied, but for the moment at least, I was in charge. Me. A secondary English teacher many moons ago, and never marked down as being a natural mathematician, in fact it was always my weakest subject at school. I talked to the teacher and we decided to do a Topic review for Fractions, as the group had been working on these lately. We got the question set running without any issue and I hovered nervously at the front as the first blobs of green and red (then yellow) appeared on the results matrix. In terms of my thought processes and emotions, this was all far more real than observing somebody else, I felt connected to the results as they came in, and peered cautiously out over the class who were engrossed in the task.

Given I was there to showcase the power of LbQ, I had to deliver on that promise; so I was almost relieved when one of the questions became a deeper and deeper shade or orange and almost turned to red. (If you've not seen an LbQ results matrix, it marks questions correct first time green, correct after x attempts orange, and not correct yet: red). The teacher can see at a glance at top of the question the colour and the nearer to red it is, the more challenging the class are finding it. It looks like this:

Once I saw the red on the question I was able to preview the question on the screen and look at some of the pupils' responses. I worked out that two things were going wrong with this question, firstly that students were not finding a common denominator before doing the calculation and as the result was an improper fraction they were not converting that to a mixed number fraction. So I hit the pause button, and 1 second later the inevitable groan went up as the pupils realised they were stopped in their tracks. The fact so many were disappointed to be temporarily halted from their task is testament to how engaged they were but with all eyes on me I was able to use the inking tools to get them to solve, as a group, the first part of the problem (the common denominator part) and then send it to all devices where they could work on the second part (improper fraction into mixed number). Once this intevention was done, I could unpause the task and the pupils resumed where they left off.

The difference between seeing something and doing it for yourself may not seem that great, but having successfully negotiated that intervention (feeling a lot more nervous than I perhaps sounded), I can state there is a huge difference. I had experienced the flow of a lesson with LbQ, the way a misconception can be flagged to the teacher on the matrix and how they can take action to correct the learning and move forward. And if I, a non-primary specialist can do it, then any primary teacher can do it, and do it much better than I could. The key point is that LbQ does what it needs to, no more and no less. Before I had understood this, now I felt it.

Later in the session, I was working one to one with pupils as they were completing the reasoning and problem solving questions. Because I was totally engrossed in the task, I'd forgotted I was there to showcase LbQ instead I was focused, 100%, on helping the pupils get to the end of the tricky final questions. At this point I saw the power of the feedback. I have talked about this in meetings many times, but this time I felt it. I was working through a problem with a pupil and we had arrived jointly at what we thought was the correct answer. He typed it in, and it was wrong. Both of us laughed nervously, we were both convinced we had it right, but the computer (well iPad) said no!! But wer then had feedback and clues which we could use to refine our answer. As is the case with many multi-step problems, we had missed a step out. Suddently the finish line was closer than we thought, we tweaked the answer, submitted and got it right. The power of that feedback, written by teacher experts in maths, cannot ever be underestimated. For the pupil it is like having the teacher right there helping them solve the problem, for the teacher it is like having a whole group of expert teachers right behind you, helping you make the very most of your lesson.

The lesson lasted about an hour, and in that time the pupils answered 1071 questions between them. I knew, they knew and the teacher knew that significant progress had been made in that lesson. They had all got more secure with their knowledge of fractions. If this has been a paper task and each question had taken just 5 seconds to mark, the marking from this lesson would have taken 90 minutes to mark. And the pupils who thought you added both the top and bottom number would have only found out they were wrong on Monday morning. 72 hours too late to do anything about it.

I left the school and went to my next meeting, and the class moved onto their next task.