Boost Student Outcomes through Targeted Teaching

3 mins read
Rupert Denton

When I was teaching one of the most frustrating aspects of planning for a class was ensuring I was targeting each lesson effectively, ensuring all students were able to grasp the content and express understanding despite the level they were at.

Checks for learning at the end of preceding classes would help, but they were undermined by the time-pressures to move along whether or not all students had grasped the lesson’s objective.

Diagnostic assessments at the beginning of classes were also useful but I found they could be time-consuming, get in the way of the bulk of content needing to be covered, and often yielded incomplete data that was not really specific enough.

These obstacles were often echoed by my colleagues and peers at other schools who were frustrated by the difficulty of properly targeting their teaching.

A 2015 report by Nesta and the National Foundation For Educational Research (NFER) highlighted the positive impact of flipped teaching, allowing teachers to gain a better understanding of students’ preferences. One teacher noted, ‘It helped us to identify those pupils that are responsible and independent in their learning and are most determined to succeed. When you take away the person at the front and say ‘It’s over to you’, some pupils at that age can respond to that… It’s given me a really good insight into who’s doing the work and who’s really keen.’

So the benefits of targeted teaching are clear but so are the difficulties faced by beleaguered teachers already trying to do a million things at once. This is where I see ClickView’s Interactive Videos playing a really constructive role in boosting teachers’ ability to gather meaningful data prior to class, enabling them to plan effectively and target their teaching more precisely.

Using ClickView Interactives to Target your Teaching

ClickView’s new interactive features allow teachers to add a layer of interactivity to any video on ClickView. These interactive features range from multiple choice questions to short answer questions.

“Teachers can gather meaningful data prior to class, enabling them to plan effectively and target their teaching more precisely.”

In turn, the interactives automatically calculate and deliver rigorous and multifaceted data that will enable teachers to understand how each member of their classroom is going both individually and in relation to the rest of the class. The data will also allow teachers to gain broader insights into whether there are significant gaps in learning across the class. Importantly, if these interactive videos are completed prior to the lesson teachers will be able to gain all of these analytics before even entering the classroom thereby enabling them to plan proactively and target their teaching.

ClickView Interactive Video Analytics
Measurable results of video viewing and concept comprehension

One area that I think will yield really interesting results when using ClickView Interactive Videos are flipped classrooms. Flipped classes are classrooms where lessons are delivered through video prior to class allowing class time to be better utilised for problem based learning, collaboration and critical thinking. ClickView believes in the transformative potential of flipped teaching and is working hard to support and foster flipped learning across the United Kingdom.

Flipped Interactive Lesson
Flip your classroom and add built-in questions to your own videos

“ClickView believes in the transformative potential of flipped teaching and is working hard to support and foster flipped learning across the United Kingdom.”

ClickView’s interactive features will enable flipped teachers to create tailored questions to formatively assess their students who have viewed each lesson prior to the class. This will give the teacher a far deeper understanding of how well students have understood each lesson’s content and, in turn, tailor their lessons for the actual, rather than guessed, needs of each student in their classroom.

I genuinely believe in the power of ClickView’s interactive tools to enable teachers to target their teaching to meet the needs of each student in their classroom and, in turn, boost student engagement and outcomes.