Teaching on Purpose #3
Putting decision making at the heart of teaching
Teaching on purpose is a bitesize dive into teacher decision making. When we watch a teacher in action, what we see is the observable technique. This might be a routine for gaining attention, a modelling strategy or any one of the many questioning tools that teachers have at their disposal. But what prompts teachers to use a certain technique over the many other options they reject in the moment?
I think the answer is purpose. By ‘purpose’ I mean the thing the teacher is trying to achieve, but crucially, in the context of that very moment. What this means is that even when the broad purpose a teacher is driven by in one situation appears to be the same as in another situation, the technique they choose might look very different.
Each week, this substack digs into the nuances of how teachers choose, adapt or reject techniques driven by situational purpose.
At Chiltern Learning Trust, we have six core purposes that capture everything teachers do:
Securing, maintaining and regaining attention
Communicating meaning
Driving student thinking
Providing, scaffolding and consolidating practice
Utilising memory
Checking for understanding
Each week, I interview one of our teachers on the ‘Teaching on purpose’ podcast about a technique they commonly use to serve one of our six core purposes and I write about it here…
This week’s purpose: Securing, maintaining and regaining attention
This week’s technique: SLANT
SLANT (Lemov, 2009) stands for Sit up, Listen, Answer questions, Nod and Track the speaker. Teachers use it as a means of securing and maintaining student attention, either on them or on another student who happens to be speaking.
This week, I spoke to Ian Stonnell, Assistant Headteacher at Denbigh High School about how he uses this technique.
When might SLANT be used in a routine way?
When students first come into the class they are getting settled while the register is being taken, getting equipment out and beginning to get on with the Do Now activity. At this point, students might be going through their start of lesson routine at different speeds and with differing levels of attention to the task at hand. This is when SLANT might be useful to bring everyone to a common understanding of what is expected at that moment in terms of attention.
To signal that the expectation has shifted to all students attending to the teacher, who is ready to start teaching, the teacher might say ‘3,2,1 SLANT’ and in between each number, might scan the room to show students that they are actively expecting to see everyone beginning to attend to them.
This execution of SLANT suits the situation because it is well matched to the purpose. The teacher wants to bring the whole class attention onto them from a point where attention is on different things – some students attending to the Do Now already, others trying to dig their pen out from the bottom of their bag, others taking a little longer to get their books open. The ‘3,2,1 SLANT’ call for attention acknowledges that students might need a little time to finish what they are doing, place their focus on the teacher and then show they are visually ready to attend.
When might the technique be adapted?
We all have those classes that take longer to settle than others. We’ve also all had classes who have experienced high mobility. Or, classes with those students who don’t always respond immediately to our attention calling routines. A teacher might be concerned that certain students aren’t as likely to ‘Sit up’ immediately because their attention wasn’t on the teacher at the point of them saying ‘SLANT’ but they might also be concerned that calling out those students, especially early on in the lesson might not be the right thing to do either because it could set a negative mood that could easily derail the rest of the lesson.
In these instances, narrating the positive in between each number during the countdown, both reinforces what is expected and sets a positive tone that allows those more reluctant students to choose the expected behaviour. For example,
‘3… I can see the whole back row looking this way, thank you. 2… I can see the middle row now also, thank you Jack, you’re sitting up as well, so are others on the front row now… and 1… thank you those three people who are now on me… and SLANT… I have the back row in its entirety, waiting for two in the middle, I have the front row, thank you… great, I have everyone.’
This wouldn’t be necessary with every class and it may not always be necessary with any particular class but when teachers sense that attention might be a harder won prize than usual, narrating the positive is one way of adapting the technique to meet that context.
When might the technique not be needed?
Calling attention back from group work or at the start of the lesson when students are getting themselves into a classroom mindset following lunch time lends itself well to SLANT because it is an over communication of an attention expectation.
What if students are working silently and diligently on an example exam question and the teacher has spotted a common misconception as they circulate?
In this case, returning to the front of the room and issuing a simple instruction like ‘pens down, eyes on me, thank you’ might suffice. If students are already in an attentive state, as with this example, the teacher is simply shifting the focus of their attention and so a full reset (like using SLANT) might be unnecessary.
SLANT is a valuable technique and when used at the right time, for the right reason, it can be super powerful. But like all techniques, it isn’t a silver bullet because teaching isn’t a routine system. As teachers, we need to be sensitive to context and ready to adapt or reject any technique if it isn’t what’s needed at that moment.
If you enjoyed reading and want to hear the podcast episode linked to this post, you can find it on this link:
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