Are "book looks" a waste of time?
Book looks and work scrutinies are a staple in many schools. But can they actually tell us anything about teaching or learning?
I arrive at Schoolington Academy in the morning. I meet with the assistant and deputy head to discuss the themes of the visit. Some of the lessons we will drop into are science, and the leaders tell me that they are worried about science. The last book scrutiny showed that the books were messy and not well-kept, and there’s been a big drive on that recently. I say:
“Oh, that’s interesting, do you mean that the books look like this?” I take out my phone and show them a photo:
“Yes, exactly!” They say.
“Got it. And would you prefer the books to look like this?” I show them another photo:
“Much better, yes.”
“Cool, I understand. So I guess the problem here is that I think the first picture shows a significantly better book than the second one...”
Why do we do book looks?
I’m no stranger to conversations like the one above. For a long time, students’ exercise books were used as a principle lever of teacher accountability. Leaders would check the frequency and style of marking, and invariably tell teachers they weren’t doing enough, and they weren’t doing it properly. Thanks to investigations commissioned by the Department for Education and the Education Endowment Foundation, the number of teachers spending inordinate hours marking has dropped significantly over time. There is still work to be done, but we are heading in the right direction.
“marking…has become disproportionately valued by schools and has become unnecessarily burdensome for teachers. There are a number of reasons for this, including the impact of Government policy, what has been promoted by Ofsted, and decisions taken by school leaders and teachers.”
DfE review
The problem is that we aren’t very good at moving on from bad ideas. Marking in exercise books became popular as a proxy for teacher quality because it was obviously visible, easily enforced, and straightforwardly turned into a policy. It also had a certain surface validity: we know that feedback is good for learning, and marking is feedback. We know that teachers should care about their students, and marking shows we care. We know that teachers should review student work, and marking shows they did that. The case for marking appeared strong, so it took on a central role in teaching, learning and leading.
Of course, marking didn’t actually do all the things it was supposed to do, but as a profession we took the easy and simplistic route, writing policies and accountability strategies, and drastically increasing marking demands for no tangible gain.
Unfortunately, whilst the obsession over marking might be slowly waning, the underlying tendency to seek the easy route is not, and too many schools are still using superficial interpretations of student exercise books for teacher accountability.
The photos above make this point. The second book is neat and tidy. Things are underlined. It’s well structured, and makes sense. The first book, on the other hand, is a total mess. The underlining is wobbly, there are spelling mistakes, the handwriting is dreadful and the student has scribbled on the book to get the ink in their pen flowing. But, and this is the crucial point, the first student has actually done some work.
The second book is notes. It’s just notes. An entire page of written notes that were copied straight from the board, that by my most conservative estimate would have taken 8 to 10 minutes (maths in footnote).
The first book, on the other hand, has a title and short LO, followed by independent practice. Questions that the student has answered, and purple pen reflections on their answers. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, we should work with this student to improve their handwriting and spelling. But overall it’s substantially better, because it shows that the student has been thinking.
Are exercise books like mini revision guides?
Often, I receive some pushback on this, and people tell me that the books need to be neat and tidy for when students come back and use them as a reference or revision guide before exams. I think it’s important to challenge this theory:
Students rarely use their exercise books again. Most never go back to them. Ordinarily, students throw them away or bury them in a cupboard somewhere.
We probably don’t even want them using their exercise books again. Reading, highlighting and reviewing are notoriously ineffective revision strategies, and teachers should instead be giving students lots of retrieval practice.
Even if they used their books, and even if we wanted them to, it’s still an unjustifiably inefficient use of time: we can just print those very same notes and jump to independent practice and active cognitive engagement with those notes.
To me, books are used for students as a thinking tool. A way of concretising nascent thoughts through independent practice, and doing spaced retrieval over time. They aren’t revision guides and they aren’t textbooks.
How to do a book look
I do look in exercise books when I’m observing or doing a learning walk. But I try to think about the actual learning, rather than the surface details. I also try to use them not as definitive sources of information, but as one data point that can be triangulated with things I might see in the lesson and curriculum plans, alongside discussions with teachers and leaders.
Let’s take the book below as an example:
In this one, I see a better attempt to ensure that the book is for “work” rather than “notes.” However, we are still in a bit of a halfway house where the gap-fill activities have a greater proportion of “copied things” to “answered things.” I can also see that some of it is left unfinished, and some is finished but not self assessed. These are all profitable routes of inquiry, and triangulated with what I see happening in the lesson might constitute useful pieces of feedback for the teacher.
The left-hand page of this book shows a student who has done independent practice and self assessed. I can compare the question numbers to the booklet the work came from, and judge whether or not the answers and self assessment are of a high quality. I can see immediately that there is little (if any) time wasted on copying notes from a board. The right-hand page looks less good. The practice hasn’t been finished, so I’d be interested to know how that had played out in the lesson. I might compare it to some other books and see where other students got up to, and if it was just this student who didn’t finish. The self assessment on this page is also of a much worse quality, and incorrect statements like “Dalton’s model is completely empty” are not reflected on. I’d be interested to explore that with the teacher, and unpick the way that they reviewed the independent practice (I suspect that they were running out of time and just put completed answers on the board, rather than going over them individually).
Exercise books are a useful source of data. But they need to be triangulated with other sources, and we need to have questions about learning, rather than presentation, at the forefront of our minds.
These books are also science books. A maths or English or DT or geography book might look different. Leaders should respect departmental autonomy, so we would need to talk to the subject experts about the decisions they’ve made and the type of work that they expect to see.
My point therefore is not “ignore books, they tell you nothing,” but that “book looks” or “book scrutinies” need to be more sophisticated than just checking for presentation, marking, or compliance with some other surface-level policy. Books can help us ask important questions about what is happening in lessons, which should then form part of a professional and subject-specific dialogue.
When executed with these variables in mind, book looks can be an extremely useful tool. When they are used as a blunt instrument for top-down accountability, they are, at best, a complete waste of time.
Carousel Teaching is designed to help you see past surface proxies and explore what really counts when it comes to Teaching, Learning and Leading. Read more here.
Footnotes:
Writing speeds: assessing writing speeds is complicated and estimates vary. For Key Stage 3 students, a speed of 12-15 words per minute is a good starting point, and I regularly test this in the classroom. I wait to see a block of text go up for students to copy, and start a timer. I quickly calculate the number of words and make an estimate of how long it will take, and using 15 words per minute seems to consistently work out as very close. In our case, the page has ~125 words. That means 125/15 = 8.3 minutes. That excludes the underlining, table construction, and slowdowns caused by writing unfamiliar words.
Whether copying notes from the board has any benefit: I am very confident that it does not. I am aware of research showing that writing notes has a cognitive benefit, but ordinarily those studies are about comparing “handwritten notes” to “typed notes.” My suspicion is that if we compared “handwritten notes” to “teacher provided notes and students did independent practice,” we would see radically different results.
Thank you for the post.
This has currently come up in our SLT meeting and I was the one pushing back and arguing that a book scrutiny is almost meaningless without triangulation from the lessons themselves.
I have a highly successful practitioner in my dept and he has almost no work in an exercise book as he uses whiteboards most of the time. Where he does have work in books he does not have learning objectives, no copied examples and little to no 'green pen feedback' evident. However, when ever I enter the room students are being taught well, challenged to think and to reflect on their mistakes. And equally important the outcomes of the students he teaches compare favourably to teachers with similar classes.
But the book scrutiny of his students would say he is failing for all the wrong reasons.
Though I can accept that a book could show learning to someone flicking through it, there is too many opportunities to game the system. I would go further than your article and say that in almost all cases a book look is pointless and only there for school leaders to have something to do in a meeting/review. It is almost like a security blanket.
Quite simply scrap the book look and get leaders to go into classes more.
Great post! I remember when book looks first became a thing. I also remember that initially the approach was more nuanced, more dept centric & yes even triangulated. Years later after spending 7 years away from the UK something changed - I returned to a standard exercise book format. Neatness ruled. Soul distroying.