Using CENTURY as a whole class activity

CENTURY is an AI-powered online learning platform that personalises learning and provides teachers with actionable insights to support their teaching. Taryn Davison, c, leads training on how best to use the platform. Wanting to see how to better incorporate our data insights, she taught a CENTURY maths lesson weekly for half a term to a Year 4 class at St. John’s C of E Primary School, Abram. Part of Quest Academy Trust, St. John’s has been using CENTURY for the past six years. This blog series shares her findings.

The part of my job which I enjoy the most is the staff training of both new and current schools on CENTURY. I enjoy showing the platform to teachers and all the different things it can do for them. However, having never had access to CENTURY when I was teaching, there are some questions that I struggle with:

1. How many nuggets should I expect the students to complete?
2. Should I set work or let students work through their Recommended Path?
3. How do I use CENTURY in class to best support the students?

These are quite difficult questions to answer because there are so many ways in which you can use CENTURY, but in this article I’m going to give an insight into how I used CENTURY in the classroom as a whole class activity.

Lesson planning

Throughout my series of lessons, I used CENTURY as a whole class activity every lesson. This meant that once a week: 

• students completed class work on CENTURY.
• there was no marking for the teacher.
• students had a different sort of lesson, which they looked forward to. 

These were the lesson objectives that I covered and also the CENTURY nuggets that I set for the students to do:

It’s really easy to match CENTURY nuggets to your scheme of work because there is at least one nugget per curriculum objective. The questions within the nugget build in difficulty: easier questions, often assessing prior knowledge appear at the beginning, then questions on the skill or part of the skill being assessed; followed by worded questions and problem solving or reasoning. All students, therefore, should be able to attempt the nugget.

Takeaways:

Question 1: “How many nuggets should I expect the students to complete?” 

Answer: In 20 minutes, I expected my students to engage fully with one nugget. This included:

• Watching the entire video with headphones on (plus subtitles)
• Completing the ‘Your Turns’ (mini activities built into the nugget)
• Using manipulatives or relevant resources to aid with answering the questions
• Repeating the nugget if they scored under 70% (continuing with their Recommended Path if they finish)

Most students could focus on CENTURY for about 20 minutes in one go, and this is also a good opportunity to check the learning that has taken place and consider interventions. Anything less than 20 minutes and the students might not all fully completed the nugget.

Question 2: “Should I set work or let students work through their Recommended Path?”

The Recommended Path is where students can access diagnostics and nuggets. It is constantly adapting based on the needs of the individual student.

Answer: I always set a nugget and allowed students to continue on their Recommended Path as an extension.

If you are wanting data to inform the impact of your teaching, you need to set a specific nugget in order to gain some insight into class trends. Students should work through their Recommended Path if you want them to work on their own gaps in learning. 

Question 3: “How do I use CENTURY in class to best support the students?”

Answer: I used the data from the set nugget to inform my teaching, both in class and for future planning. Whilst the students were working on CENTURY I coordinated interventions to focus on small groups.

The Nuggets tab gave me the information I needed to target specific students who were struggling or to work with a specific group. I discouraged the students from asking for help whilst they were on CENTURY. They were expected to go back to the learning material if they were unsure how to answer a question, because I used that twenty minutes to work with specific groups of children. 

Tune in next week to hear how Taryn used CENTURY’s videos and slides as a teaching tool. Click here to book a demo of CENTURY.