Semantic Waves Legitimation Code Theory LCT | Computing At School CAS Conference for teachers

hi everyone it's William Lao here I'm a teacher of computing at Central Foundation boy school and what I thought I'd do today is I would represent um a

conference session that I ran at the Cass conference uh back in February March 2020 um and a lot of people have um been

asking about this session um on semantic waves and how this might be applicable to um Computing and actually a wide range of subjects so I thought I'd um

share this content with you um today so these are the two questions that we're going to try and answer today um

both pastorally and also academically so why do students find certain topics or concepts so difficult to understand what can we do about this

and we're going to look at that um in terms of subjects um there might be more of a SL on computer science as that's um and Computing as that's my subject

specialism but hopefully you can apply it to your subject as well I think it also has um a pastor Focus too

so essentially um we can look at this problem from a academic perspective to start with now you can imagine a student

standing on uh one side of a clip with high States reading on one side and by the end of the course on the

other side they're expect to perform high stakes writing and in the middle we have this Gap and that's essentially where the teaching

happens I feel as though at the school that I'm at uh cental Foundation we already do so much to try to help students make that Gap

and I'm sure this is these are things which um teachers do all the time as well and what I wanted to do is I wanted to summarize um all these great things

that we do and it I decided to put that into a diagram and it's a very busy diagram it's deliberately um quite busy um I've tried to encapsulate all the

best practice um that I see in classrooms um in order to make um teaching and and learning successful

but despite the fact that we do all of this incredible practice despite the fact that um we do um all different types of modeling what timeses of

assessment our behavior management retrieval practice and questioning even though we do all of this there are still some gaps for some

students there's a small minority that still can't access certain material despite our best efforts

and I wondered could semantic waves at the top here be a key missing piece of the puzzle so hopefully I'm going to present

to you a theory or perspective which you're all going to find useful I know many teachers and support staff already use semantic waves on a daily basis

although they might not call the semantic waves um however I think by highlighting um this Theory or um this facet of the

theory um it will make us more aware and how powerful that all of this actually is so where does this all come from then

so understand um semantic waves is semantic waves is actually part of a larger um Theory um called legitimation code Theory or LCT we're not going to go

into all the different codes we're going to focus mainly on semantics and um the the person behind um this theory

is uh Professor Carl maton and he came up with this cartisian plane and he says that um this semantic plane is relevant in a wide range of

disciplines not just in um computer science or any other academic subjects from education but also applies to engineering to sports Sports law dance

and music and I think I've witnessed this a lot um with all the um incredible work that pastoral um members of Staff

do as well so people like our our heads of year um and form shors um I think they also use this as well so the

semantic plane has two axes semantic gravity which describes how concrete or abstract something is so

um the more gravity you have the greater the semantic Gravity the more concrete the concept is

and whereas uh when we decrease the semantic gravity it becomes more abstract and then secondly we have

semantic density so how much meaning is packed into a concept or term so we have um concepts with low semantic density

they're quite simple whereas when we have Concepts which um have high semantic density they are a lot more

complexed condensed and um there's a lot more links um inter links between different topics so I would say that on

the left here you'd have everyday words or what you might call tier one words things which are simple um and uh easy to understand and explain to people

words like happiness or love you could explain that to um a seven-year-old or an eight-year-old that they're fairly simple

um I suppose happiness and love might actually appear more towards the top like this might something that's quite abstract to start with um and as move to

the right terms and Concepts have a lot more complexity and interconnections with other theories

um so on the right side of the plane we essentially have our our academic Zone where we're aiming for all of our students to get to um and that's kind of

like the Gap that we saw in the previous slide um and so what I thought we'd do is I thought we would look at some tier three words um with high levels of

complexity so they're going to be very um context um specific um because I teer free words and I didn't just want to look at Computing I want to look at

other subjects as well just to put the audience um a certain level of unease um so that they would see like what it would feel like to be thrown into this

and these are kind of like the concepts which uh we would need to look at so for example in uh geography this is like the the zone that we're talking about uh

that this Zone here that we're trying to get all of our students to get to by the end of our course of our T League school if we look at geography AQA GCC paper

one now here is a small selection of tier three key words taken from the 2018 gcsc exams now some of these terms are

abstract and high level um and general and then some of them are

more concrete and very um specific so um words like uh I don't know like hardwood agreements um a Cory is is

something that's physical and the Savanah and the tundra is something that's uh quite concrete that we we can show pictures of and it's quite easy to well you can

explain um whereas something like glaciation is nearer to the top um up

here um so the concepts which are which have a are a bit more abstract B more go at the top and the concepts which uh are a bit more specific and that we can

give definitive examples are and I think the ones that I gave with like Cory or U shape Valley would go um they're more concrete specific so they go at the bottom right um looking at um some other

subjects you can see how complex our job is so this is some from PE and these are just a small selection of terms that you have to learn for the

GCC paper p and our computer science um I didn't necessarily pick AQA or a specific example for any reason it was just that these were readily available someone

already made these um readily available as well so um these ones from computer science like um things like nonvolatile

or operating system application layer um what it's a a protocol that's quite abstract kind of um concept so that would belong somewhere close up here um

to the top right and you can begin to see how complex a teacher's job is but also how complex it is for a student because like a student studying just 10

gcsc would have to know 600 of these tier three words and that's not even including subjects like MFL where the majority of words they encounter r ti3 words because they're completely context

specific to that subject and they won't hear them anywhere El um so I thought like one activity

that um I gave people was to um get out an exam paper or a a specification be it from the the GCC specification or a

level specification and then actually highlight all the tier three words so your subject specific keywords that the students are highly and likely to

encounter um in their daily day-to-day life and which which will need explicit teaching and I'd recommend you spend like 10 or 15 minutes doing that now

these are readly available so if you you know just go on I GCC so if I say like it's already pre-loaded quite a lot this

is the the previous JT 76 this is the specification which is just ending right now um but I would probably print this out and go through here and you know the

tier three keywords there are already so you've got CPU forment architecture M MDR program

counter accumulator ALU Cu cach uh execute maybe I think fetch is probably not a Tierre word u but execute definitely and there's often this debate

of well what happens if this word like fetch means different things in different context so a student might be able to explain a dog fetching something but can they actually explain the

minutia of a fetching instructions from RAM and putting in the NPR for example and I'd recommend this is useful for all subjects because you begin to see from

um a novice's perspective how complex our subject is and how it might be quite challenging um to teach um and to learn

a certain subject soid just spend like 10 or 15 minutes do that you can pause the video um and do that if you wish um it's it's a very useful

exercise okay so once you've done that um what we should do next is we should

consider the the theory in a bit more detail and we need to look at some of the traps that might um occur when we are

teaching so what maton states is that there's a risk in some classrooms um that there is

um a lot of unpacking I simplifying going from the abstract um to the concrete examples

any repacking so we take a really abstract term um say for example uh I would say that the internet is fairly

abstract or say like four Loops or wild Loops or nested Loops are quite abstract and you give lots of examples and you unpack them you simplify and essentially

go from abstr abstract to concrete and that is what most good teachers do but he says that then what a lot of teachers or some teachers don't do is they don't

then repack the term and he terms these downward escalators so what he says that he encourage us to take the content that once we've um introduced what the

abstract term is and we've given lots of concrete examples so you you introduce concept of a while loop you go through lots of different examples of a while

loop um showing how you might have um well you would always have a condition at the top um and then you might have um a very basic W which ends after a

certain number of Loops or when a certain condition has met um you might have a w with a counter um you might also have a w with an if statement that when a certain um

condition is met something happens so those are all the very concrete examples that we should be doing so to make the abstract concrete but then what it says

is that we should then repack the content and generaliz and theorize afterwards so once we've given all these

examples of while Loops um or for Loops or given all these examples of say um secondary storage um devices or protocols we then need to generalize and

then need to say okay so when would we actually use these so when would you actually use a while loop as opposed to for Loop when would we actually use these

protocols and in doing so we create what he calls are um semantic waves so we take a concept we unpack it and make it

concete give lots of concrete examples and then we repack it as well um and by continuously going from

concrete um back to abstract from complex and simple and back um this is what it might look like um in a lesson

and he says that actually um in a lesson you would have several um semantic waves you wouldn't just have one you could have semantic waves um within a lesson several of them within a lesson you

would have semantic waves within a unit of work as well now he also says so this is what it might look like within a lesson so you go from heix reading this is hex's

writing the other side of the cliff that we're trying to get to and we're starting with these abstract terms that we have to somehow um help students

understand and so we dip straight into um concrete examples because when you've got something that's quite abstract like binary we need to give them lots of

examples of like ones and zeros um colors um sound and how they're represented so we go to concrete examples but then we repack then we give more concrete examples and repap and

eventually um we get to a stage where we're able to perform this high stakes writing which is essentially what an exam is and it doesn't really matter what subject you you're studying at

gccna level you're going to need to perform some high stakes um writing um and so he also identifies

some other traps so let's look at line a first of all so it says that line a shows what happens when a teacher never unpacks so in some classrooms they just stay at the abstracts all the time so

it's abstract it's General and complex without any examples um but hopefully even throughout this presentation you've heard me give examples of how we might

unpack the concept of using binary by using binary numbers by showing binary addition by coloring in pixels these are all concrete examples of of ways you

might teach binary um so color by pixel uh other things that you might do um you might actually use like um binary game

so there um a binary um G online so if you just Google binary to den game that would be another concrete example of how you might use it but in

in some classrooms they might just stay abstract General and complex without any examples and I suppose we've all been there when we've observed a lesson and you're going in there as a novice you

might be observing another um teacher teach you another subject and you're sat there with the students no one really understands what's going

on because the teacher hasn't given any complex any um concrete examples so they've talked about glaciation how it might be this process but they actually

haven't shown you what a glassier is or what a U-shaped valley is um or what a rash muton is and by giving you these examples and showing pictures videos

looking at case studies we're giving concrete examples um and that is how we get our our downward escalated but then

hopefully a semantic wave back up um he says that actually lying B you could um also have a risk where you just do lots of concrete examples but you

don't link back to the general theory so for example you just do lots of binary to denary conversion or you just do lots of quadratic equations in maps or you

just do lots of um I don't know um petal paragraphs um in English or you come up with like hundreds of simil

um whilst discussing simes but then you you never actually um go back um into the abstract say well why do we actually

use a simile um why do we actually need to um use binary numbers or when will we even use like binary addition so all of

these things that we learn we have to then generalize and then go back up um to the abstract say well the reason why we use this the reason what is the

effect of using a simile here what is the effect of um or why do we computers actually use binary we answer those poed

questions and we help the students understand these topics and essentially we help close the gap now as I said earlier I think this applies pastorally

too and I know this is a bit of a segue but um you know you probably um realized by now that I don't really get how much both in terms of my classroom and my

house particularly during lockdown but even in general but sometimes I like stick my head out of the out of my classroom and I hear these like

incredible conversations um from our directors of learning our heads of year and the Pastoral team like our inclusion team um or even like at detention you

hear a teacher explaining something so you might hear um a teacher essentially you might hear someone say that you know tell a student that you did something inappropriate or you were

rude and the student might have a really puzzled look and they might say no I wasn't rude or I wasn't inappropriate so essentially then the teacher or the the head of year will then give a specific

example so they're going into the concrete then and say well you know you were talking over miss or you talking over sir and that is rude so they've given the example or you push someone into the classroom and that's

inappropriate so when you take a term and for some students they don't actually understand what that means we said oh well you rude and to them they were they didn't think they're rude or they didn't think what they did was

inappropriate but actually when you give the example it's then really hard to um to deny that you're like oh yeah I guess uh me talking while sir is talking whilst Miss is talking is a bit rude

isn't it or if I push if someone pushed me into the classroom I suppose I think that was inappropriate wasn't it so then you know the teacher might turn back to the student and say well do you think

that that was appropriate or or inappropriate or do you do you see how that might be considered rude and essentially what they've done is they've told the student they were rud or inappropriate they've given the example

and then they've brought it back to the abstract and said you know it obviously was a bit rude and you should um and you you're trying to get them to generalize

already so I think these semantic waves um which I think the best practitioners are already using are indeed really powerful and it makes things easier for

students to understand um and I think the understanding whether it's something that's pastoral Behavioral or

in terms of subject content by using these semantic waves we are able to um I

suppose help students understand what is going on so let's have a look now at uh what this might look like in classro I

tried to plot a few of the techniques which I think I've seen in hundreds of classrooms hundreds of lessons sorry um and how we might combine these to ensure

CN using semantic waves at the moment I think we're still by abstract all and uh I probably need to give some concrete examples of how we um use these semantic waves

so I think uh one way that we might take something that's uh quite uh abstract and make it more concrete is by using a

simile so you might say to maybe your seven students or Primary students but the CPU is like a brain now you don't actually want them to remember that as

their definition but it helps make it um a bit more concrete you know you can say well it does all the processing like the

brain um and then likewise um you might give an analogy so um one thing that I talk about is a firewall and I actually

use the analogy of um osmosis in biology so those of you remember osmosis at GCC biology you have this semi-permeable membrane which only lets um certain

things in and out then you have this with guard cells or stomata implants as well which only let um certain things in or out and that is kind of like a firewall isn't it um or you could say is

like a security guard or a bouncer um who only lets certain things in or out so using analogies and the students like oh so that's what firewall is it's someone who only lets certain things or

certain people in and out and it's trying to detect malicious things as well you might use a metaphor or you might use a pneumonic there there are

loads of neonics and uh Adrian tff actually has a whole um book of poems that she uses and I think I mentioned

that um later on as well um as a way of making um abstract terms a bit more concrete um so there might be

pneumonics um to um remember um certain layers or certain protocols um and we can use those as well I think metaphors

um are really useful and this is across like all subjects now I'm not just talking Computing but hopefully you see where I'm going with that other things

we might do is uh we might uh tell a story or we might go into detail on atmology as well and uh I'm GNA give you

an example of a story right now because I suppose this this session could be as long or short as as needs to be so let me uh just do a quick seg it's kind of

like an unplanned one but it's something which I also spoke about um at the uh at the Cass conference it was another session um that I did so I'm going to

pull this up now and I'm going to tell you a story story and this is a story that I tell um all my students um and it

should kind of help you um see how stories and etimology is is really really powerful

so I suppose we'll start at like September 2015 and September 2015 is a time when my teaching philosophy changed

significantly had this new head teacher and he introduced several new policies and one of the these maybe completely rethink my role as a Computing teacher

and he stated that every teacher is a teacher of language and he said um so this her teacher was Ole knight uh he wrote a book called also called um creating

outstanding classrooms whole school approach and um when he said that every teacher is a teacher of language he also said that Mastery of a subject requires

Mastery of the language use in our subject and I was always searching for a way to make content more memorable and so here's a story I'm going to share you that's shared my students and I hope you

share with your students as well it's a story about cash memory and our students at gccna level need to know that cach memory um is CPU

memory or it's part of CPU which stores frequently and recently used data and um it improves access speed um when compared to accessing data from Main

memory and to remember this uh I'm going to tell you the story about cash so the word cash actually was first used by

French Canadian fur Trappers in the late 18th century see them here and these tra these uh Trappers that was their actual name they travel from their home to

their hunting ground and they'd cover hundreds of miles I think in some reports they say thousands of miles by canoe but definitely hundreds of miles by canoe and because they travel so far

on these hunts um and you I suppose you kind of see these uh Trappers in uh the film of the Revenant as well don't you um but clearly like returning home to

access Provisions would take too long so they would make these hiding places near to their trapping sites to store their provisions and uh this is what they

would look like um and what they would store in these um hiding places they'd store things like tools weapons food and animal Furs or

pelts that they'd already processed and these hiding places where they hid all these things um close to their Hunting site was actually called a cash and the reason why it's called a

cash is because the French verb cache means to hide so in the same way that a fur Trapper's cash was formed to enable

has to access to frequently Ed Provisions um so too is a CPU cache and uh I use this story every time I teach cash memory and hopefully it makes the

term cash more memorable um and so I think that this story also required a bit of research so I was digging deeper behind the atmology and

the root of these words and I encourage you to do that and you might find that when you dig a bit deeper you'll find

that um there's atmology in a lot of um other um words as well um such as uh

binary um iteration computer bus and polymorphism um and if you want to know a bit more about them perhaps I'll drop

those in the comments below um the video but yeah all of those words binary iteration computer bu poly they all have um a certain atmology and

a certain story behind them I always tell these stories because I think it makes them uh a bit more memorable

so let's go back now to uh work with these semantic waves and examples of how we might um help with saman way so I've given you

an example of stories and atmology you could documentary I think it's actually really useful to show documentaries um you might show them a bit of alphao or you might show them the T talk on uh

filter bubbles or on how algorithms have changed the world and that like algorithms themselves are really um abstract but when you make them concrete

so when you do um sorting algorithms with playing cards or um when you show a video of what an algorithm looks like as it sorts the dat

um that makes it more concrete I think also video tutorials so video tutorials are very simple um and also very concrete so particular for programming or when you're doing a certain skill in

Photoshop you might demo it but you might as well record it as well and then when students get stuck they just go back to the video and on my YouTube channel there are literally thousands of

um YouTube videos um with tutorials um so they're they very concrete as soon as just follow those along so that would be making

something more concrete you might do concrete examples case studies and practical that's like the bread and butter of uh of science

teachers isn't it so when when you actually start introducing case studies though it begins to be a bit more complex doesn't it because you start you

start looking at a case study an in-depth case study such as Cambridge analytica um um or you might look at migration patterns in Brazil in

geography for example and already there's a lot of complexity and interconnections there um so not only is it complex and concrete but also uh yes

so it's complex and concrete um and doing you know things like practical programming that would definitely be um in in there as

well uh so there's also this of I we you so um you would start off with worked example something that the

teacher does that's the I and then the wi which is the joint construction so that's uh something that you do together with the student so you might code together

or in pairs or with the teacher and then eventually you're heading to independent practice so essentially you're moving them from simple to complex and going from Works example joint constru to

independent practice you're essentially getting them over to um like this is the kind of where we want all our students to be

isn't it and I'm going to give you an example of IU now because I think that's what I did when I did my um conference session so it wasn't just like all chat

um we did actually have a look at this and try to plan our own lessons with IU um this is all in a Google Drive I'll give you the link at the end of the

video it'll also be below so you'll have access to the slides and also sample lessons with IU um so uh what we've got

here then is uh I suppose is this yeah so we've got a do now so this is the start of every lesson we have a do now which is going to be probably five

questions a quick five five um five questions or five gaps um which test prior knowledge so the start and then what I would do is I would introduce

them to how you might represent numbers in different ways so 92 uh four 11 um a tally so like five

and then 100 so writing those in words before introducing um binary you see that here so this would be the actual lesson

now so this is the example that I would do put 0 1 01 in here I don't have edit access I've logged into the wrong account but you can download this you can download all

the resources by just file download so I put 0 one01 and a second there's a one blet four well actually we would start

with um just a den example wouldn't we and say that actually your it's multiplication so you've got 08 so you got zero one four so it's a four 02 and

one one so 4 plus one which is five and then we do this one together and then we' go to independent practice and once again this red one is the I this one would be the Wii and then

they've got plenty of practice on their own so that's like the I wi U and then this is the the binary game that I spoke about so this is another way of uh them

getting concrete examples and plenty of practice there I believe this is like a remake of The Cisco vinary game isn't it okay so another one is logic gates

the lesson plan might be in here as well iude the lesson yeah so have a look at the lesson planning during time but you'll see that I've got to do now in

here let start every lesson and we've got binary Edition overflow and this is a completely different topic now so because I'm trying to inter leave um

lots of content so um I'm going to add in other topics to Ure that students on encountering that forgetting curve or improving on that forgetting curve so

we're looking at uh SQL on here and then also I've interleaved something to do with um CPU um factors

that affect CPU performance that cause clock being cache and then syntax errors as well that's like a great do now five questions across five completely different topics so we're really going to stretch students and get them to

think across a wide range of topics um I have all host to do now as well I think I I can share those in the link um

we gots of those somewhere okay so this is an example of IU so Advanced logic exercise so we would have already done logic this isn't like the first thing that we do in logic

we would have told them what an and gate is an orgate is and an not gate and this is like the last lesson in um logic I

suppose um and so we're com Gates now and we're introducing the so this is the one that we do together sorry this is the one that I do on the board this is the one that we do together and then there's lots of independent practice

these are way more complex than anything they'd see at GCSE and maybe even a level and by the time they finish that lesson uh I asked him you know did you find that difficult and like it was

fairly tricky I was like look you found that tricky and you still got like mostly answerers right then you'll at least to know that this is actually taken from like uh first year

Electronics engineering um lecture so um and the link is there and they're really encouraged by that if they can do this problem they can do any GCC problem and

I give this to my year 10 and 11 then because we've done lots of abstract examples we're just looking at uh Gates right um we then need to go uh concrete

so I've then said you know an example might be a water pump being designed um that only pumps water when the main switch a is on and there's water present in the system sensor b draw the logic

diagram so they've then got like a real life scenario to apply that to and then more concrete examples that's the I this is the wi and this is the you and then

they eventually this is more practice for them more ined practice and then we go more abstract so then I've given them an essay about Mo's law um and linking

the fact that Mo's law is increasing well the number of transistors on a chip doubling um every year and asking them like what are the implications of that like what is the

impact that on stakeholders technology ethics and environment and I would get to plan it here and then to write the essay there so we plan it as a wi I think it's a joint again and then we

would do it all together actually then it would be independent so that is how I would use IU um in terms

of um to create a semantic W okay um other things so reading tracing annotating and commenting U so

this is for programming as so by reading code tracing it um and commenting your code um you're essentially um going more abstract because you're say well why did

I use a for Loop instead of a wild why did I decide to use this algorithm here um you might ask them different typ of question so you might ask a defined

question eventually explain and evaluate and this is now going back up so now we're generalizing and going back upwards into the abstract so to complete

the semantic wave eventually we get to evaluate the use of binary or the use of hexad deal um or evaluate the effect of

glaciation on the landscape in Wales for example or evaluate um the the ethics behind genetic

engineering in biology um you would then give inter questions and we saw that in the do now earlier so you would try to inter leave as many not as many topics as possible

but that mors law question ask them to inter leave things like facts affecting CPU with binary and logic gates cheaper

logic gates for example um yeah so inter leaving content is

quite key terms of um what the cognitive science is in helping students um learn eventually then you would get them

to hypothesize so what would happen for example to The Internet of Things um as it as it um grows um what would happen

if you um didn't have protocols or didn't have um layers what would happen if you just had solid state drives and no magnetic drive so we're we're talking

now we're like right at the top end so GCC grade n or AAR really getting people to hypothesize and then getting them to write an eight mark question they should be able to essentially write an eight

mark question on any topic um in the in the spec on any of those tier three keyw um and like maton goes on to

suggest that the highest level of academic writing at University when he looked at the highest scoring assignment they also had semantic waves in them so

each paragraph would have um would present a theory have some concrete examples and then relate back to the overarching theory and these semantic

waves would appear throughout the essay you'd see the semantic waves within paragraphs and within the essay and he he therefore encourages us to teach our students about semantic waves is to say

to students look right now I'm going to go concrete and then we're going to abstract and the reason why we're doing these semantic waves and how we might use them in our extended writing and

essentially the end goal is for students to be comfortable to move anywhere within a subject um and remember the zone that we looked at at the beginning

of the video on this right hand side here um that's where we we need them to be at and it's impossible to precisely predict what's going to come up on an

exam but what we definitely know is that if students can move from from abstract to concrete throughout an extended 48 or 20 Mark like high tariff question you

know that's not going to be easy but with plenty of practice and experience of semantic waves in the classroom they should be able to bridge that Gap and go from like high six reading to high six

writing and write and perform at the highest level um other examples I've put in unplugged here so in the session people came up with their own um in the

conference session people came up with their own strategy as well I asked well you know like what else do you do in the classroom and people talked about unplugged say yeah of course when you do a card sort for sorting algorithms or I

actually have a whole booklet of computing Outdoors so things you can do Computing Outdoors on a field trip or for

homework um those are um concrete um and then storyboards like you might uh they're quite simple ways of representing things in say it and IM

media you might storyboard something before you actually make something or like visualization diagrams in IM media for example and poetry I may mentioned

Adrian tough has a couple of books out um which sh link Computing with poetry there's also learning games um I'm not the kind of teacher to you know put

students on like a a learning game or like code academy or whatever every single lesson but sometimes uh I will use um learning games and logic games because I think

they're actually useful I've given that IU example the lesson plan is in the folder so I've talked about that already oh yeah so what I did was um I

asked people to add to that previous slide and we did a think pet share um tackling the most difficult words in the spec so what we actually looked at was

like I I would advise you to go back to this slide and your tier keywords you made easy earlier and think about what

technique you would use to teach each of those tier three keywords but how would you teach um binary how would you teach cach how would you teach the fetch

decode and execute cycle how would you teach wireless networks which strategies would you use in here to do that and over the year or

over a unit I would imagine you probably all of these um for for each unit to get a complete

picture um what we did next then is um I asked um us to put into um this table

um like where these different things belonged so another lens was looking at like different types of knowledge

so I said these tier three key words like which of these are process driven because what I suggested was that anything that is process driven so

things like um doing uh binary conversions or programming you essentially have to use

iwu for that you you do it they do it and then they sorry they do it um you know in pairs or in a grp people with you and

then um that they have to do it independently so IU is absolutely key for um process driven things so in

French you might have like conjugating er verbs or like know the past participle of verbs

that is classic IE U um this red section here so I would argue that anything that is um process driven so what people call

they might call skills or procedural knowledge I would use IU um and then what we um might consider more content

driven like declarative knowledge or just knowledge I suppose um I think that takes different techniques you can't really do IU for

declarative knowledge um that's not going to really work so for declarative knowledge I think it would be things like using similes analogy metaphors

pneumonics um showing a documentary um Define explain evaluate giving lots of concrete examples case

studies um whereas on the process driven I might put in things like um practicals um video tutorials yeah so I would have really

think about not only how you to teach each of those tier three key words and each of those Concepts but what techniques are effective for process

driven um things in the spec and what techniques are useful for Content driven um so things which are more more knowledge based declarative knowledge

based so hopefully um we've talked about how now um we essentially need to get our Learners from high six reading to high six

writing and actually the the answer to how do we bridge that Gap the semantic Gap maybe Carl maton offers the answers

in these uh semantic waves um and I highly encourage you to have a look at his other works on um legitimation code

Theory I'm still going through that um myself to be honest um and yeah I think we covered this already

um further reading for semantic waves this this video here um I obviously I've got a link to all these slides um so you could just click on the link there's the

blog here by Digi teer I think he's based in South Africa um and then there's this journal article

by by Matt on as well that dig gu let me just go to that website because remember reading it and that's what really got me onto semantic waves in the first place

and I think it happened that quite a few people were looking this at this at the same time I think like Professor Paul K was also looking at this but um yeah

this teacher Dorian love who is actually on Twitter I follow him on Twitter has been um writing about this since like 29th of March uh 2018 so he's been looking at this for like two or four

years um and he looked at together so this is what got me first started and then what really made me think more deeply about um Computing this was probably the starting point for me

that's a great blog to dip into I would say um other further reading for teaching and learning I've got all these

titles here teach Like A Champion is for me it's such a it's such an iconic text for to like run a classroom some people don't like

it like some people think it's like a bit oppressive but you know like actually have having like spoken to Doug in the past and when you see all his

videos it is all about like his whole movement is about like social mobility and being able to um essentially teach Knowledge and Skills um in the most

efficient way and learning from like the best teachers around the world it's full of video clips as well I teach Like A Champion 3.0 is like in the process of being written Dylan William is is

obviously very influential and from his work on formative assessment and the black box as he says um bringing words to Life by Beck so this was a really

important book and because it teaches you more about atmology and how actually learning more about language and how

students acquire language um is key to success in in any subject so I hope there are people watching this who are not computer science teachers and who not been completely put off by the bit

of computing theory that presented that angman and con's theory of instruction it's a really difficult read but it's essentially lots of examples and

thoughts um on uh direct instruction uh I laugh about it because it's so difficult to digest but it's something I do p out of um o KN and David Benson but creating outstanding classrooms that is

essentially what got me first started um on my journey into um looking at um effective classroom um being more effective in the classroom and

eventually writing my book teaching Computing in secondary schools which is you know research based it's based on like the latest cognitive science um and

yeah I think if if you're into that then how we learn is a great primer for that as well um I have on my blog um a list of other books which you probably want

to uh check out uh so on my blog there's this post um what every teach training program should each to about a year ago

and at the end you can see that I've got this diagram and also the books that I would recommend can I MEAP that work so we can see them nice and big yeah hidden

lies of Learners another classic my GR nuttle in New Zealand um where he did an ethnographic study record um conversations in the classroom and

he's the one who really um pioneered um the concept about how students essentially need to encounter um a topic three times in three different ways to

actually um understand it so for that to go to longterm memory and uh we don't know why that is and we think that maybe it's to do with Evolution so maybe it's

to do with the fact that um the brain is deliberately designed designed to filter out irrelevant information but by the time we've encountered it a third time in a

different way then it goes to longterm memory that neural pathway is is solid for most of us and maybe that's something to um semantic waves has to

play there as well like by presenting a concept in abstract concrete back to abstract um that's three different ways already isn't it an ethic of Excellence

is brilliant in terms of projects and how you get students to think about dra redrafting make it stick it's kind of like a more in-depth and uh and why students down like school both of these

um are you know solid books for cognitive science um if you just want an intro then I suppose read how we learn if you find that interesting than these two books a

bit heavier but better um the motivation breakthrough um I started reading that I think it's really good it talks about um students with special educational needs

um students who might not be able to access education and maybe even this concept that um Behavior or poor behavior is communication so all behavior is communication someone's

asking up in your classroom well maybe they're just trying to communicate something and trying to understand what that is the end of average I think is really important because it teaches us

that there's no average town There's no um what works for the average um works for no one actually so we need to like make everything like quite um bespoke

and think about the individual Learners um and the individual context some people just say that's nonsense actually context is relevant well you know having taught for like 15 years 14 15 years in

like five different schools um I didn't tell you the context is important what works in one school is not necessarily going to work exactly the same in other school why we sleep uh probably the most

important book I've ever read I believe B at that um start with why you see that even in this presentation start why quite important clever lands is fascinating book by Le in Korean about

different education systems around the world Sarah Jane Blake more fascinating Research into um how the teenage brain works Legacy is more a book on culture

um Steve Peter's book on my management is about I suppose like how we manage our emotions and maybe even like thinking fast and slow that that kind of

thing the art of learning I love because it's like a more of an anecdotal way into learning and um the way that Josh

weights can learn in certain ways and yeah I think the way he articulates the learning process both in chess and martial arts I think there is some transferability there people say there's

no transferability um in like business books or in learning books but I actually think that it's just a good read if you are involved in training other teachers so if you're a head of

department or you're a mentor get better faster is an amazing program when I was an assistant head we basically ran the whole teaching learning on uh get better

faster and dougl Mo's teach Like A Champion 2.0 as well I'm shocked at that oh yeah it's up here teach Like A Champion 2.0 it's here yeah so we basically ran the whole program these

two then that really hard to digest book byman and is in there as well anything else worth checking out the Vlog uh I mean this oh I probably want to go back

to this so yeah there's so much could talk about um I've written about most of this but like modeling so this morning

actually um had someone uh message me uh on Twitter asking um about modeling and I'd say that like I we use is bread and butter in terms of modeling we need to

um scaffold we need to use a visualizer or classroom management software to do that when you're showing things um a

dual coding um so by having pictures next to um text and having lots of concrete examples mix

examples so examples of different qualities like a bad example a middle Mark band and a top Mark band that is

quite important um and I think it is um the guy who did that Roy um Sadler Roy did this great work on like mixed

examples um and how we need to use MI examples these large functional wall displays um you'll see I've got loads of those on my website here um so if you go

to uh learning.com uh go on to resources and actually just go straight to freebies so I do sell physical resources

but I'm not really here to push that main thing I want to show you is that most of my resources I give away for free so all the physical resources are there just in case you don't have access to a printer or you like to have paper

copies uh you can get this from here or from Amazon but actually all of them I give away for free so that Computing Outdoors but with' like unplugged

Computing is in here um so lots of ways of teaching Computing unplugged and Outdoors um you can do it in teams or

you can do it individually uh that's a great set of missions and debriefings uh in there uh but yeah large functional wall display so these things I have in my

classroom and they're like they take up half the classroom say like literally a whole wall is this and then these little icons are cut out and use them to demonstrate how like things are loaded

from like Ram from secondary storage into RAM and then into virtual memory uh literally physically move them into virtual memory when Ram is full so I use

those as like working wall display um and yeah there's like whole load of stuff computer science coloring but

uh I mean these A3 classroom displays I'd say A3 or A2 is minimum in any classroom if you're going to use A3 displays in a classroom you're going to have to print them three or four times because you're going to have to

replicate the same display four times around the room so everyone can see it so the anatomy of data packet uh this one actually we use and

we cut out and send it around the room classes these are made by Peter Kemp I believe and he made them available cre I encourage us all to make things available create Commons because like

that way we all just get better a lot faster to borrow um Paul vck s's um ter this is another one of P accounts I

think this one's possibly mine here programing construct like sequence selection iteration so I'm trying to use dual coding there throughout uh what else is there to talk

about uh Behavior assessment kind of like in my book retrieval practice Yeah retrieval practice is key if you're not doing like a do now like quickfire five

do Nows like five questions at the beginning of every lesson then I would recommend you do that because that's one way to get students to inter leave and um practice like space practice um using

online platforms like Quizlet um some people use educate for other subjects sakica I love Quizlet I've written my own sets on there and the great thing about Quizlet this is like complete separate I didn't really talk about this

in my conference but I thought whilst I'm here I'm not just go for everything right that I do um as a teacher so I have my class here and say for example my GC computer science

class I can go in here and look at this year 10 FB 2021 set and I can go to progress we subscribe to this I can't remember how much it is a year but it's

cheap it's like 30 to 100 pounds a year and for that I can see when students have taken a test and what their score is I actually don't care about the score

um because the testing program the way it works is the platform is that for the questions that they get wrong um they get those questions more often and the questions that they get right they get

those less often so it's pure like inter leaving spacing forgetting curve all of that built in and the questions I wrote myself um but you can just I suppose you

can get hold of my sets anyway so in here uh I can see that adim 21740 got 5 but I'm actually not that bothered about it um I don't really care what he got in

the test it's more that he's actually doing the test at a certain time um and eventually I'm telling them to aim for 90% because that allows for some typos

and spelling errors and if they can get 90 or 100% on these tests then effectively um they're going to get a grade seven or above in their exam pretty much guaranteed I don't know

anyone who's got like 90 100% on these test frequently and then got less than that so I combine them all into this master set Hey where's the master set did I not put them maybe I haven't put

it up yet because they're like my year 10 class where my year 11 class here so they have the master says 369 terms starts

off with I get them on learn well actually I didn't tell to take test first and then they go on to learn and they asks them a question and then it gives feedback on it it's brilliant I

mean the free version works just as well it's just you can't tell when they've taken a test so you actually have to physically make sure they're doing it but during remote lockdown and for

homework we can't do that test are great pictures in there um I think I wrote most of these questions myself or I adapted them based on someone else's actually someone on Facebook wrote them

then I adapted them um yeah anything else let's just go back yeah it's turning into like one long tutorial I hope I press record imagine if I go here and it's not recording

thank goodness it's recording knowledge so yeah different types of knowledge um different type if the the the Holy Grail

or the end point is independent practice and everything leads to that essentially if your students can do things independently then you've won right not

like that's like a bit finite isn't it but eventually they do anything independently you say okay yeah they've learned it they can do it independently okay so uh in terms of me

then you can follow me on Twitter moud learning you're obviously on this YouTube video anyway with mow test my website mow learning uh there are physical um resource that you can buy

all fre pretty much all free as well um there as well and then you can email me if you've got any questions about this uh and then lastly the slides and

resources uh are available here uh bit.do

slas2020 WL I hope that's been useful and a decent introduction into semantic waves particularly for uh Computing teachers

um but also um for um you know anyone from other subjects as well um

yeah I leave it there and um I think that is all any questions feel free to contact me here or pop them

in the YouTube comments uh or on Twitter I'm fairly active on on social media and I hope you have a lovely day and that

this was useful to you all all right bye