Why I love Tassomai’s scientific approach to English teaching!
Chantelle Nichols, Teacher of English and KS5 Coordinator at The Sutton Academy in St. Helens, talks to Tassomai about how she uses Tassomai to identify gaps in her students’ knowledge and engage students who prefer maths and science in their English studies…
Chantelle Nichols taught a Live Lesson on the characters in Macbeth, which you can view here! You can also watch Chantelle speaking at the PiXL English conference about edtech and retrieval practice in the video at the end of this article.
The students at The Sutton Academy, slightly to my surprise, love maths. My department is now on a mission to make English as well loved as maths, and Tassomai is a great tool to help get some of the more reluctant students on board!
We study Macbeth, Inspector Calls, Christmas Carol, the Power and Conflict poetry anthology – all of which have Tassomai courses for our year 10 and 11 students. Using technology in a subject like English doesn’t always seem like an obvious fit, but I’ve personally found that it’s great for supporting those students who are reluctant to revise or struggle with less ‘fact-based’ subjects.
As a lot of our students like maths and science, some of them find English more difficult because the answers aren’t right or wrong in quite the same way. Having a platform that can break a creative subject down into fact-based knowledge and support them in a way they understand is really useful.
Instant feedback helps students and teachers
Our students really appreciate having lots of feedback, especially instantly available feedback like they get in the app. As an English teacher, it can be hard to give them quick responses, as essays take a long time to mark and they don’t get the same sort of ‘yes or no’ answer as they do in more scientific subjects.
Obviously this is not the same for every school, but in my experience I have found that Tassomai particularly helps boys to get into the subject a bit more. Disengaged boys in English are a really big issue for some teachers – that’s not to say that it isn’t also the case for other students, I’ve just been surprised by the natural uptake with our males students.
There’s much more of a focus on cognition and building long-term memory through consistent retrieval practice these days and I think Tassomai’s consistent light-touch approach is brilliant for this. It’s really struck a chord with some of my students, especially those who are excelling in maths and are looking for binary answers that they can commit to memory. The structure of working in short, sharp bursts really suits certain kinds of learners and gives them something to run with in class once they’ve cemented their core knowledge in the app.
Tracking progress and misconceptions
My students like being able to track their own progress and I think the visual aspect of the app really helps with that. They can see at a glance how well they’re getting on, so it’s easier for them to self-correct and identify their problem areas.
This is also a brilliant tool for teachers, as we can quickly identify misconceptions on a student or class level and set up interventions to help. I base lessons around areas where I can see misconceptions forming in the Tassomai data and that’s really useful for my planning process.
I even use the data to inform my seating plan choices – whether that’s grouping students together who I can see haven’t fully grasped a topic so that I can go back over areas with them as a group, or seating higher and lower achieving students next to each other so that they can learn from each other. The Sutton Academy is moving away from sets for English so being able to use this data to structure my mixed ability classes is a real plus.
Integration in the school
Our school already had a robust set up with Tassomai for science so it was easy to integrate the English department into the platform as well. I would recommend this process to any school who already uses Tassomai for another subject, as we found it was much easier to hit the ground running when the students were already familiar with the app and knew it helped them with science revision.
Having multiple subjects on Tassomai also means that our rewards (and sanctions) setup is already established and students are aware of the incentives. Each week we award ‘Tassomai Champions’ for each class and year group based on different stats – sometimes it’s how quickly they hit their Daily Goal each day, sometimes it’s who has the highest accuracy etc. The best incentive should be passing their exams… but a chocolate bar as a reward never hurts to keep up momentum!
We do give out detentions for students who do not complete their allotted number of Daily Goals, but during this time they have access to a computer to catch up on their Tassomai work. The beauty of the app is that it’s so accessible to students and they can use it on their devices, so detentions aren’t too much of a problem.
Sharing ideas
Our department had some great CPD and setup training when we first started using Tassomai and since then we are always comparing notes on which methods work best. I recommend picking a day of the week when students know their Tassomai data will be reviewed and sticking to it. I like to open the register at the start of each class on my chosen day with my Tassomai dashboard beside it so that I can check whether a student has completed their Daily Goals as I tick them off.
Finding the gaps
If I were to go through all of my homework marking manually to try and identify gaps in my students’ knowledge, it would take me hours! Tassomai makes it much easier to spot these holes and act on them quickly. They ran a series of Live Lessons earlier this year, which were based around the topics students found most difficult. As part of this series, I taught a lesson on Macduff, which ended up being relevant to the question that came up in this year’s English literature paper. This sort of data is invaluable to teachers!
Tassomai gives my students a structure to follow and once they get to grips with the core facts about a text, like its characters, themes and plot, then we can move onto more procedural knowledge and writing skills. Building up students’ core textual knowledge is a great way to engage students, even those who think they aren’t interested in the subject.
Earlier this year, Chantelle Nichols taught a Live Lesson on the characters in Macbeth, which you can view here.
Further reading:
Watch Chantelle speaking at the PiXL English conference in London about edtech and retrieval practice in November 2022.