Following a conversation on twitter I was asked if I'd mind giving an example of what I do in the classroom (I did offer, it wasn't out of the blue). It's generally similar to what Adam Boxer appears to do and you can watch him in action here. Some aspects are similar because I took my cue from him, others are similar because of essentially convergent evolution.
All my lessons start with a few questions. This is partly because my current school requires us to start all lessons with a reading or a retrieval activity and partly because I need to know what the kids know before I start teaching them. I can't build on sand (Furst, 2019; Willingham, 2009). These questions (usually five, could be four, could be seven) will contain questions designed to look for prerequisite knowledge - the stuff you're trying to build on, the previous content that if the students do not know they will not be able to understand this lesson. Not all of the questions will necessarily cover prerequisite knowledge - sometimes a lesson only really needs one or two foundational nuggets - and sometimes it's good just to get the kids thinking around the content a bit.
While they're answering the questions (in silence) I'll circulate, looking at what they're doing, getting an idea of what they know as a group as well as any anomalies from individuals - anyone super stuck? Anyone flying? I'll usually take the register as well, although silently so as not to disturb their working. This (the questions, not the register) will normally take between 7 and 10 minutes and then we'll go through the answers.
Now, I wouldn't normally get students to write the questions down unless they can't answer them. My kids know this is the expectation if they're stuck - it means they can look back and see "oh, damn, I couldn't answer these questions" and it means I can see "oh, damn, they couldn't answer these questions". It also means they're not staring into space thinking about what's for lunch while the rest of the class works.
I do expect my students to answer in full sentences - wE aRe AlL TeAcHeRs Of LiTeRaCy - and I think it's good practise for them. It also means they know what they were on about when they look back.*
I, on the other hand, can't be bothered writing the full answers and so write in the answers under the questions. Also useful so the kids can see what the original question.
You'll notice I haven't written an answer for every question. When I say "go through the answers", most of this is done verbally. I will cold call students and get them to read their answers. If it's something that is complicated, multi-layered, or got wrong by lots of the students I will write it (see q3 and the breakdown of what do we actually mean by the word "aqueous"). Often, I won't bother writing it in full - I'll just give the key points they need to state to get the marks. I will have said aloud the full answer so it's not like they're missing out on detail. There is an expectation in my classroom that you listen to me. (Obviously if there was a reason students struggle to understand me speaking I will of course write more - I taught at a school with a unit for hearing impaired students and I probably wouldn't teach my class then like this)
The rest of my lesson involves a fair amount of explaining (supplemented with live diagrams), questioning, and then some independent work. And the layout is always the same.
By the end of the unit/topic/sequence, I will have something that looks like this:
It looks fairly complicated, but it gets built up over the lesson with lots of talk from me. It isn't something I could just give to another teacher and have them use. And it's not really something that gets reused so much. Almost all of the full sentences there will be built up with input from the students - I will give them the information, I will ask them something like "okay, what was this [thing]?" and they will tell me. It's useful for me to have them essentially explain it back to me because it lets me know how well they know it . Also the whole teachers of literacy thing. General rule in my classroom - if I write it, you should write it. That doesn't necessarily go for diagrams because they are there to supplement my explanations, not for students to remember the not particularly good drawing of a kangaroo/car/electrolysis cell.
At the risk of sounding unpleasantly cocky: I am the expert in the room. If students can get everything they need from a PowerPoint stuck on the board and clicked through, what is the point of me being there? Why have I bothered to get a PGCE and read loads of books and blogs and watched countless videos about teaching? But aside from the £9,000 certificate that says "Matt is a teacher"** we know lots about how learning happens (see what I did there?). No, we don't have definitive answers for everything, you're right that there is still an awful lot we don't know, but we have a rough idea of what works, and perhaps more importantly, what doesn't seem to work so well. We know that if there's the same information coming at us from two directions we tune one of them out (Ashman, 2021). So why do people still insist on reading off PowerPoints? Okay, so you only put bullet points and expand on it yourself, better, but we know the problems caused by split attention (Ashman, 2021). We know how effective dual coding can be (when done properly), so why would we not take advantage?
NB: When I plan resources for others, it's required that we use presentations so they look like this:
They will have the script in the presenter notes, that had I been the one teaching it, I would have used. I try to encourage my colleagues to use the interactive whiteboards as much as possible although, as is always the case in schools, they often don't work 🙃
*I've seen it argued that writing the question is less effort than thinking about the answer and some kids will preferentially do that and whilst I don't have a good counter, I have found that because I still expect their answers to be written in full sentences, whether the copied the question or not, I don't normally have kids just copying - copying the question and the full answer apparently seems like more effort than just answering the question. But this is just my classroom.
**It doesn't say that
Furst, Efrat Understanding Understanding, https://sites.google.com/view/efratfurst/understanding-understanding?authuser=0 [Accessed 16/04/2021]
Willingham, Daniel T. (2009). Why Don't Students Like School?, First Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Ashman, Greg (2021). The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction. London: Corwin