What's In and What's Out?

During my lessons this week, the importance of stopping part way through the lesson to focus on misunderstandings (especially in Maths where several pupils are finding a particular method/question tricky) or redirect the learning/task was confirmed for me- so 'portable plenaries' are definitely IN!

As for the use of success criteria to move learning forward;  well, a large question mark hovers over this concept in my humble opinion. In theory the idea of breaking down the learning outcome into small steps; or the idea of SC as ingredients sounds very useful and logical. I am not questioning the fact that they can involve pupils in their learning by making expectations more explicit; or that they could be useful for teachers in terms of assessing pupils' progress, but I do have some unresolved areas of uncertainty about the best way to harness their potential.  Firstly, I find that the language (for various reasons) in which they are written is sometimes inaccessible to the pupils.  Secondly, it doesn't sit comfortably with me when the differentiated work set for pupils limits them to a certain SC 'rank' regardless of whether they were in fact capable of achieving more in that particular instance.