 Hello, my name is Ross McGill. I have been a school teacher for 25 years, senior leader for about last decade. About 10 years ago I started tweeting and blogging as teacher toolkit and it has become one of the most popular sites in the UK and probably around the world. Why is effective classroom differentiation important? Simply because kids can get lost. We have the real challenge in any classroom across the world. Different settings is key context, things like that, but when you're working with low income families, disadvantaged kids, you want to bridge the attainment gap. That's a difficult challenge with funding caps, but for the general teacher on the classroom 4 with 30 kids in front of him, it's a real challenge for all staff. First form would be having a secure overview in terms of not just the student data but the social, mental, emotional health, triangulating all those different sources. Speaking with kids and parents out of class as well as in the classroom. That would be my number one. Number two, lesson planning. Although there are lots of myths about lesson plans on templates, paper, things like that have been kind of quashed. I approach planning from a cognitive point of view rather than what you do and look at the why. That tends to help reduce teacher workload rather than looking at it as a one off. Lesson episode, look at it as a scheme of work over a series of lessons perhaps for 10 or 12 weeks. Tip number three would be questioning. Now there's lots of different techniques for questioning. The key thing I would emphasise is plan a key question for groups of students. You can't ask 30 kids different questions. You can't meet all the needs. But if you have planned questions, dare I say top, middle or bottom or think of the types of questions you would ask. One example is called a Fermi question which is a statistical question which begins with how many. So how many balloons could you fit in this room? How long is this video? And then straight away you encourage a creative process and you get the kids thinking it gives you a bit of feedback, a bit of time to go on to the next episode in the class. Tip number four is look after yourself. After 25 years of teaching, I think of all the disasters I had in the classroom for whatever reason having a late night or not looking after myself. It sounds silly but eight hours of sleep, bottle of water on your desk and a banana or something every single day makes a big difference to your health, especially if you're working 45 to 60 hours every week. Tip number five, stickability. There's lots of research looking at how we learn as students, making it a stick. I look at stickability on my five minute lesson plan. Simply ask yourself two questions when you're 30 kids in your class. What do you want the kids to take away from your lesson and what's the key thing you want to bring back? If you can answer that in one word, that's essentially what you should focus your entire lesson on. That's what stickability is. That should hopefully improve your effectiveness in the classroom.