All you can see is inclined heads. 

You could hear a pin drop through the gentle scratching of pens on paper. 

The sound of success?

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The whole class is engrossed in the challenging questions you have set. You walk around and everyone is ploughing through the work. Great. 

After this, you go through the answers and pupils mark their work and report their scores. These range from 50 to 80 per cent, which makes you wonder what they got wrong. Hmm. 

No time to check now, it’ll have to wait until you next look through their books.

Success and shortcomings

Aggressive monitoring, a technique outlined in Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, creates conditions where you can sample independent performance and provide live feedback to students on their successes and shortcomings.

Before teaching your lesson, prepare an exemplar piece of work that represents the epitome of what pupils could achieve.

Best practice here is to work with another colleague, initially separately, and then get together to “spar” ideas about what the exemplar should look like and where the most likely misconceptions or errors may occur; such as spotting unit conversions which need to be made before a calculation. 

This is a really valuable process as it forces you to consider the sequencing of ideas in the lesson more carefully and which little difficulties you should include during guided practice.

Next, your exemplar work needs to be converted into a format that enables you to track independent performance. This may be spacing the lines out on an extended piece of writing or just a copy of the completed past exam questions for you to be able to annotate with ticks or dots. Ticks represent individual successes, dots show errors. 

More advanced forms may have individual students in a table with each bit of knowledge or skill trackable. For me, this is overkill.

In practice

In the classroom, once you are satisfied with pupil performance, you introduce the extended task to be aggressively monitored; the work is completed in silence. 

This is particularly important as you need to spend your time engaging with student work and not challenging misbehaviour.

Hold off checking student work for a minute or so to begin with and ensure all are focused - I like to stand, menacingly, by the behaviour board for this. Do not immediately go to help anyone.

Circulate during the task and provide feedback to individuals using ticks or dots. If a pupil receives a dot they can try to work out what has gone wrong. 

There is no need to actually speak to pupils during the feedback (maybe this is where the “aggressive” bit comes from?) as this will slow you down. Add the ticks and crosses you give out to your monitoring form.

The key question at this stage is whether the work is pitched appropriately and are students, generally, being successful? A likely teacher instinct is to initially go to the pupils who you know will struggle the most. 

However, you must fight this urge and let them struggle. To begin to answer this question you need to visit the faster-working, and often higher-attaining, students first as they will have generated the most data for you.

If they are getting most of the work done well but maybe with an occasional error then you’re on to a winner. If it’s all going wrong for the top students then you need to bring everyone back for re-teaching and more practice.

Next visit the lower-attaining, or slower-working, pupils to check that they are able to access the work successfully. Continue your meander around the room providing feedback and gaining data on your students until the phase of the lesson is over.

Going the whole hog on this means planning out your full route around all pupils; again, for me, this is overkill.

A phase of aggressive monitoring yields many students who have feedback on their work and a data sample of the successes and struggles of your pupils within the context of the task; this can then influence your approach to the next phase of learning or help determine the nature of future intervention. 

It’s also really lovely and quiet while they work which makes the process even more precious.

Ian Taylor is a science associate lead practitioner at Trinity Academy Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire. He tweets @MrTSci409