Knowledge Base

Whether you're a teacher or a student, logging into Willow Learn is very easy. Simply go to app.willowlearn.com and then enter your school email address. Once that's done, you'll be taken to your usual school login system. For us, it's Google. You'll be asked to enter your password. And it's simple as that. You're now logged into Willow and ready to get started.

As a teacher, once you've logged into Willow, the first thing you'll see is a list of all of your classes. This should have already been set up by your network administrator, but you're also able to add a new class if necessary. Once you're ready to start configuring a class, simply select the class you want to configure and click it.

Once you've selected a class, it's time to give Willow some context on the lesson you're about to teach or the lesson you just taught. The first thing that Willow is going to ask is how much support do your students require? This can range anywhere from our minimal level of support where students will receive hints and questions only all the way through to a maximal level of support, when students aren't really ready for the task and Willow will eventually provide them with a complete solution. If you have students of differing abilities within your class, you can also turn on our individual support level, where you'll be able to set that on an individual student basis. For example, Jordan might require more support than Kelvin. Once you've done that, Willow will ask, what did you just teach about? You can provide as much or as little detail as you'd like here, and obviously the more detail you provide, the better job Willow will do at tailoring its content to your lesson. Today, I'm going to be teaching a history lesson on the daily experiences of Viking women. Once you've filled all of that in, we can click next and go to the next step.

Willow can produce even better responses if you upload some of the lesson resources that you use during your lesson. Willow supports a variety of different file types such as PDF, PowerPoint and Word documents. And by uploading these, we're able to give Willow even more context and even more of an ability to map its content towards what you just taught in class. Now this is optional, but the more documents you provide, the better job Willow will do. For my lesson, I'm going to upload a chapter from the textbook, which is a PDF document, my lesson plan, which is a Word document, and the presentation that I just showed to the students. Now that I've uploaded these, I can move on to the next step, safe in the knowledge that Willow has even more context now about my lesson.

Now that Willow has the context on our lesson, it's time to set up a task that the students will be able to carry out within Willow. We've provided a number of suggestions for tasks that we know work really well within Willow. I'm going to show you how to set up and launch the open use mode. The first thing to do is to select the task from the panel on the right. Once you click select, you'll see that the task title and prompt have appeared in the panel on the left. Now you can modify this task if you wish, but we know that the base prompt works really well. So I'm going to go ahead and click add task. Now that I've done that, you'll see it's my list of tasks below and I could if I wanted to add another task such as the quiz. I've now got two tasks in my task panel. However, students will not be able to access any of these tasks until I press the launch button. Now that I've pressed the launch button, students will be able to start interacting with Willow in this open use mode. Once I feel they've used it for long enough, I can press stop and the students will no longer be able to use Willow. And potentially I could launch another task or continue the open use after I've spoken to my students for a little bit longer.

Before you launch a task and allow students to access it, you might want to preview the task to see what it's going to be like. Willow makes that really easy. Simply select the task that you want to preview. We'll go through the quiz and then click the preview task button. Now you can experience that task as if you're a student. And you can go ahead and interact with Willow and see how your students will experience that task.

The task suggestions we've shown you so far are just that, suggestions. You can create your own tasks in any way you want. I'm going to show you now how to set up a quick custom task. So perhaps your students have been studying the Vikings, but they've also been studying the Romans. So in this custom task, let's have Willow present a scene from either the Roman Empire or the Viking times and ask the student which era the scene is from. Let's see how that works before we add the task and show it to our students. When setting up custom tasks, we definitely recommend you preview them before you let the students use them, because sometimes those prompts need a little bit of tweaking to get it how you want it. As you can see here, Willow is describing a scene regarding a long house. Since it's a long house, I'm going to assume this is from the Viking Empire, the Viking Age. And Willow's telling me that I'm correct.

Once you've launched a task and your students are participating in it, you can head over to the Task Insights panel to get a real-time report of how the task is going. This panel will show you information such as how long the students have been spending on the task, how many students are active, how many messages they've sent. Willow also provides you with a bullet point report of how the task is going within the class, giving you highlights such as Kelvin showing good understanding, Jamie's engaged, Jordan is actively participating, but often selects incorrect options. We have some common misconceptions that we maybe need to tackle. We're reassured that there are no inappropriate interactions, and we're told that this seems to be effective in maintaining participation. Moving down to the student breakdown section, we can see a little bit of a breakdown on what the individual students are doing. So what was their last message? How engaged are they? When did they send their last message? A little summary of how they've been doing, and also the marks they've got so far on this quiz. Now if I want to, I can also dig in further into one of these students. So if I want to see some individual insights just on Kelvin, I can click the Insights button here and Willow will generate me a bullet point report that only talks about Kelvin rather than the whole class. I can do that for any of my students, but equally I can go into the history section and actually look at what they've been doing, what messages they've been sending, and how they've been interacting with Willow. So there's a complete audit log here of every interaction that this student has done with Willow.

As well as viewing insights from the task that's running right now, Willow also stores insights from historical tasks. So you're able to go back and look at insights from tasks that you ran in the past. To do this, simply click the Select Task button, and then select the task that you'd like to see insights for.

Whilst the Tasks Insights section provides insights on just an individual task, Willow is also able to provide you with insights across all the tasks that you've run within your class. This is the Class Insights panel. Here you can see statistics around how often Willow is being used within your class, who is interacting with Willow the most, which topics they're finding most engaging, and then Willow will provide you an analysis of the strengths, areas needed support, and teaching recommendations for your class.

Now let's take a look at Willow from the student's perspective. The first thing the student will see when they log in is a question asking whether they're using Willow at school or at home. If they select at school, they'll see a list of the classes they are a member of. In this case, I'm just a member of the one class. So let's click into that class. Now first, it's important to note that because a session has not yet been started, the student is not yet able to actually participate in Willow. And this is to make sure that you as a teacher have control over when this tool is in use. The next thing you'll notice is that there is this key background information section, and this has been populated with some facts relevant to today's lesson. Since today's lesson is on the daily experiences of Viking women, we have some facts here about women in the Viking times. We also have our AI skills tips and tricks section. Now this section is constantly updating as the students interact with the AI system and is designed to give them tips and tricks to help them become a more effective user of AI as that becomes a more and more important skill in the workplace that students need to develop. Now let's see what happens if we actually go ahead and launch a task. So switching back for a moment to the teacher interface, I'm now going to launch my quiz task Once that's done, if I switch back to the student interface, I will see that Willow has now prompted me to start a new session and jump into the quiz. So once the student clicks the new session link, the quiz will begin and they can start interacting with Willow in this quiz format.

Willow has been carefully designed to keep students on topic. If a student starts to deviate from the topic of the lesson or ask off-topic questions, Willow will carefully redirect them back towards the correct topic of the lesson. And it won't engage in topics that are irrelevant to the lesson. If I start to ask Willow irrelevant questions like who won the football yesterday, Willow will not engage on this point and will redirect me back towards the focus of the lesson. So I'm afraid I don't have the latest football scores. Today we're focusing on the daily lives of Viking women.

One of the biggest potential detrimental effects of AI is that students become over-reliant on the system and are not able to think for themselves. We've designed Willow really carefully to make sure this doesn't happen. Willow will refuse to complete the students' work for them and instead provide them with a scaffolded approach to make sure they are actually learning. For example, if I ask Willow to write an essay on the lives of Viking women, Willow is going to refuse to actually write that essay for me. Instead, Willow is going to start to give me some suggestions of how I can do that myself and provide me some step-by-step help to actually do that, but it's not going to do my work for me.

When designing Willow, we felt an immense responsibility, not only to keep students safe, but also to flag potential safeguarding issues to a responsible adult. And that's exactly what we've done. So if a student was to report a safeguarding issue or a problem of that nature, we'll make sure a teacher or a responsible adult hears about that. For example, if I tell Willow, Tom is bullying me, Willow is going to give me a compassionate response, which we're about to see. I'm really sorry you're going through that. It's important to tell trusted at all. However, also on the back end, if we switch to the teacher interface, we'll actually be able to navigate to the risk monitoring tab where you can see that this high priority alert has been generated with a student reporting being bullied by Tom. If we click the view details tab, we're able to go and explore that entire conversation and see why Willow escalated this message to us.

This video explains when it's helpful to upload specific text to Willow and when you can rely on its existing knowledge. The key idea is understanding the difference between situations where Willow already has a strong general understanding and situations where you want it to work with absolute precision on the exact material that you're studying in class. So I'm going to show you this across two different examples. The first is an English literature lesson studying the Great Gatsby. So you can see here I've uploaded no text and no resources in this area. So you absolutely could provide more accuracy by doing so, but I'm going to show you that, you know, across an English lit class when generally you need pupils to be able to give verbatim quotes or perhaps just kind of short summaries, what you aren't often or ever really examining is their ability to give line precise quotes to how Willow will perform in that setting. So we're going to just do a plan and essay. I'm going to put a very simple title in, which is looking at the power. And then we're going to preview the task. And as you will know about Willow, I can't just get a quote or an answer without doing a lot of the thinking myself. So I'm going to try and be really specific in order to get Willow to help me. I want a quote that shows Daisy is reckless. Something hurt dangerous driving. So hopefully that's specific enough to get Willow to help me out. They'll keep out of my way. It takes two to make an accident. This comes after Daisy hit and run. She says this to Gatsby, saying how she expects others to take responsibility for their mistakes. So proving clearly across a highly popular and well-known novel, Great Gatsby, where we didn't need like a line reference. I wasn't saying can you tell me what happens on page 73, line 14, that Willow was able to provide the kind of level of detail that I was looking for. If I now go into a classics lesson, which is a different scenario where we really do want that deeper level of accuracy, we're going to look at a text like the Odyssey, which is obviously really long and complex with multiple translations, additions, line numbering systems, etc. So in a case like this, expecting Willow to automatically match the exact version your class is using is probably quite unrealistic. Okay. As well as that, knowing how long the text is, Willow can actually get quite confused in pulling across specific to a chapter. The right context, it will always talk about things that are happening within the Odyssey, but again, to prevent it from drifting in any way between different sections, locking it down to a clear bit of uploaded text would be really useful. So you can see how... If I do it without any text uploaded and go in and ask Willow about the book, 19 lines 508 to 5.30 approximately, what happens? Willow is likely to give a broadly relevant answer but not hyper accurate to the scene in question, which is the case. This is not the correct scene. So instead, what I will do is jump out, go back to the lesson context and upload the right context. I've got a PDF here that I can use, or I could use a Word doc either or suffice. Come through, I'll do the exact same thing again, and now say, okay, what happens in line 5.9 to 5.30 book 19, approximately. Here we go. So now we've got the correct scene. specific to the text in question so this is definitely what we'd recommend for subjects like classics where yeah accuracy is highly highly important or perhaps it might be in geography you're looking at a really well-known case study but you're working off a certain documentation which has specific you know facts and evidence within it and being actually aware that Willow isn't looking at that same document. It's got knowledge of that event, but it will have wider knowledge just like the internet does. So being as accurate as you can to make sure that if you want that level of accuracy, making sure that Willow is lockstep to your documentation and doing so by uploading the resource would be the way to go. i think my big takeaway is the vast majority of time willow's general understanding will be really sufficient it's amazing at as you can see going into gatsby or even the odyssey and knowing the stories and what's happening but where it really is testing that detailed level of hyper accuracy uh being as specific by uploading the relevant documents will really help willow make sure that uh yeah it's performing in line with what it is that you are expecting from that use case

A cover lesson in Willow is really easy and is a really helpful way of using Willow when you're not going to be in the classroom, but you need some subject expert guidance to help your pupils because you know the person covering you isn't going to be able to provide that perhaps. So at the beginning we do the exact same thing as normal. This is a lesson around the regeneration of the Dockland areas. I've uploaded my case study. I've set my support level. So just doing the same thing as you normally would do for kind of in-class work. When we set in cover lesson, we highly recommend setting it as homework. This means that pupils can run the task at their own pace and can move through the task without you needing to be there clicking launch activity, nor needing the substitute teachers to log into your account to do so. So at home will always be the easiest way to do it. I'm going to set two tasks, the role play, so property developer, local resident... As always, we'll check that the task is operating in the way that I believe it is and want it to do. Perfect. For this task, I would like there to be a minimum that people spend on it over five minutes, but the most that I want them to do on this is 20 minutes. I'm going to click Add Willow Task, and it is now set down here. The second thing that I'm going to do is go in and set a... plan an essay, to what extent was the regeneration a success? And again, I'm going to set a minimum duration at five minutes and the maximum duration this time much longer. And I'm going to add the task here. I'm going to make sure that my due date is the day after. So my cover lesson is on Thursday. So I'll set my due date for Friday to make sure it's still live when they run it. And then I'm going to set assigned homework. Now this is a really important bit, making sure that whilst the tasks are queued up and loaded, and I'll show you in a second what that looks like for pupils, but there's really clear expectations and instructions for both the teacher covering you, but also your pupils. So something along the lines of, we've preloaded the homework task, I need you to get the pupils to log into their Willow account, to click at home and to view both the homework activities. What my expectations are of them is to, at the end of the lesson, hand in an essay plan, handwritten, left on my desk, or it might be that, you know, for homework, they're going to go home and write the essay, something like that. And what they're able to do is use the two tasks that you've set in Willow to help guide them through that challenge. So the first task is a role play. They can interview... people from that scenario and gather some evidence. The second is they can use plan my essay as a way to support them as they write their essay plan. So essentially being really clear for pupils and teachers what the task is, what the expectations are as you normally would do. I'm then going to just log out and log in into my pupil account. So again, those clear instructions saying it's at home, it's going to be in here as my homework. These are my tasks. There is a really important thing that you need to make sure the subject teacher explains, which is once they're through each task, so once they've done their five minutes minimum click through to next task, they won't be able to go back to the original task. So just highlighting that as well. So yeah, should be pretty straightforward from there. You can set as many tasks as you want. Again, it really is around setting clear instructions and expectations for the teacher and the pupils so they know where are they doing their work, what are they using Willow Task 4 in the lesson that I laid out. It was kind of the supplementary evidence finding and then there to support them as they write their plan but being really clear that pupils are expected to hand in a piece of work. on paper at the end of your lesson and then as I said just making sure that the substitute teacher remembers to tell them make sure to view the task in their homework section as well as once you click through the task you won't be able to go backwards

video is showing you how to both set homework tasks, but also cancel them or edit them. So be sure to click at home. I'm in a chemistry lesson here and I basically want to set them a quiz where they can do multiple choices, spot the mistakes and odd one out. I want them to have a minimum duration of 20 minutes at home and actually I'm going to leave the maximum duration blank because there is no maximum duration. I'm going to preview the task and check that I'm happy with what it's going to do. Perfect. Coming down here, I've got no task there and I can go add Willow task. The homework is due in on Tuesday, the 24th, and that's all I want them to do. I don't need to load any additional tasks after because all I want them doing is the quiz and I click assign homework. If, however, I changed my mind or wanted to make an edit to that homework task, all I need to do is go to previous assignments here. and I can now see the task that I've just set, due in on the 24th. I could go Edit and it's back here, which I can now click into and make edits around. Or if I wanted to, once the homework had been set, saving edits, I could simply go back to previous assignments and cancel the homework entirely. there was then an easy button to restore it if I wanted to come back. So that should be really clear. The main takeaway is your task management and previous assignments is the place where you'll find those previously set homeworks.

This video explains how much lesson context we recommend giving Willow before starting a task. Our core advice is to treat this just like lesson planning. Spend a few minutes telling Willow exactly how you wanted to behave. The clearer your instructions, the less chance of any drift. For example, if we go into this primary class, I'm going to show you two different use cases. One is where I provide a really thorough lesson plan. I'm going to say, you know, this is what we're doing. We're writing a formal persuasive speech. Who to? This is the purpose of the lesson. This is how I want them to organize their writing. So it's four clear sections with an intro and conclusion and two content paragraphs. What we are building on from previous lessons and the key literary skills that they'll be asked to use. Now, this is thorough, but I imagine not dissimilar to the kind of sort of medium term plans that you might have or just general lesson plans. You can, of course, upload any additional resources here. And if I run this lesson and go through, write a speech to council, RJ for more parks. what we'll see is if we ask things like what structure should I use or what tone should I use, we're going to get things absolutely lockstep to the initial lesson plan and instructions, which seems really obvious. Not now to counteract all of that, what I want to show is Willow's strength. So even with minimal setup, Willow can still perform really well because it's aligned to the curriculum or the exam board you've selected. So if I were to now run the same task without those detailed instructions, Willow will still suggest a really sensible interpretation of that. So here we can now just go, you know, write a speech to the council, persuade them to build a new park. And going through from that, running the task and doing the exact same thing, what we'll actually see is because Willow understands what a year four, five, six English teacher pulling on the national curriculum would want. If I say what structure should I use or what tone, we're going to get really similar answers about an opening intro paragraph one to ending focus using the box up plan because it's very familiar with that from the curriculum. That being said, of course, if you wanted pupils to write three paragraphs without specifying that, Willow wouldn't know. Similarly on the tone, though, we're going to see a really good inference of what tone pupils likely to need to write in polite, respectful, enthusiastic, sensible, logical. So the same kind of things. However, what's clear is Willow can't infer it's not going to mind read. So, yeah, without giving real specificity, Willow will just... suggest what it thinks is the most useful interpretation of your plan, which in this instance was absolutely fine. Now, I just wanted to quickly end by showing where perhaps this wouldn't work as well without that kind of accuracy of lesson context. If I was running a geography lesson where I was saying we're going to be revising rivers and providing no more context in that, Knowing that this is tied to the EDUCAS exam board, Rivers comes up in a whole host of different settings and context. And so what Willow will naturally do with only that context is basically pull from every available area in the curriculum where Rivers naturally comes up, which makes logical sense. So if I said map the topic, what we're going to see is... all of these different areas. But actually in my geography lesson right now, that's not particularly useful because all we've actually been doing is studying this section, which is erosion, transport and deposition. So clearly without giving that additional context, I'm not getting the lesson that I expect. So what I do is make sure that we provide river processes is what we just covered. Now time to revise only cover these topics. So just being really clear with Willow with how you want it to perform and behave will ultimately give you a much better experience. So now we can see revision mode and if I go and map that topic, we will get only erosion transportation deposition. And you can see we're looking at river processes only. So the big takeaway really is Willow is really strong by default. It knows what you're teaching and it knows what generally should be taught using the curriculums or the exam boards. but it will always be strongest when you're precise. If your lesson has specific goals, make sure to tell it. If your goal is broader, Willow can handle that too. Ultimately, the clearer you set up, the sharper the support, but you can be rest assured that actually Willow generally has an exceptional knowledge of the types of things that you would want to be running. So if you really are pressed for time, minimal context is required.

is one of our most popular modes. We often describe it as giving every pupil a teaching assistant sat on the corner of their desk ready to help the pupil whenever they really need support. To give you a quick overview of how it works, we'll always begin by asking pupils what you need help with, what areas are you unsure about. Pupils can then ask any question directly related to their lesson. This is a biology class that I've set up where they were looking at the kidneys. The other pupil says, I need help understanding the nephrons. Willow will provide that level of support, giving that explanation. I'm still confused. And as you know, with Willow, we'll move down a scaffolded process, providing more and more support to the pupil, but of course never relinquishing answers or enabling the pupil to outsource a shortcut their thinking. Additionally, if pupils are working on worksheets or a question sheet and have access to it on their devices, they're able to drop that in and say help with this question. Again, as we know with Willow, it's not simply going to provide the answer. Yes, we've already looked at the nephrons, but when it comes to the alveolus or the villus, it's going to ask questions back and bring out that Socratic questioning to really unlock the question. people's current understanding to then guide them towards the answer in a way that actually ensures that that real thinking is taking place. Open use ultimately is a really flexible mode It's directly dealing with the big challenge that we know teachers face around capacity in the classroom, having 30 pupils that potentially all might have a question at the same time, a different question and how do you get and respond to those whilst dealing with pupils that really need more significant support from you as the teacher. So what OpenU should do is give that first port of call. where pupils can come to you to ask that initial level of question and in most cases find that their learning becomes unblocked from there again for a new up in the classroom to do the things that you need best. We also have had some fantastic feedback from teachers around using open use in cover lessons so where the task may be something being done outside of Willow, so whether that's a worksheet or planning an essay, writing a debate, summary, doc, whatever it might be what you can do if you know that the teacher covering your lesson is a substitute teacher without necessarily your subject expertise, you can give pupils access to Willow during their class. So again, they can come to Willow to help unblock their subject-specific content, enabling the substitute teacher to manage behaviour and the more kind of pupil engagement side of things, freeing them up to hopefully have a more successful cover lesson. So, So really excited to see how you get on with OpenUsers. We said it's a really popular mode and it really is about providing pupils with that one-to-one support. If what you're looking for is support with a specific worksheet, I would advise you at this moment to click onto support with a worksheet mode and I can very quickly talk you through that mode instead. at a high level they are very similar support with the worksheet will just directly reference whichever worksheet you've uploaded and run through the same sort of scaffolded protected struggle support that you're looking for

So this mode is to look at support worksheet, which is very similar to open use. However, in this specific mode, you actually upload the worksheet pupils are working on. So Willow has direct access. As you can see... This is the worksheet which I've uploaded, which is predominantly text-based, but please note there are some images in here. As you can see, Willow can only understand text currently doesn't have diagram spatial information or images. That being said, for the vast majority of worksheets that predominantly text-based, Willow can be really effective and I'm gonna show you that. If however you are doing a specific worksheet, looking at graphs and functions or areas of shapes, things of that nature, I would very much suggest not to using Willow currently for that level of sports because it won't get you particularly far. So make sure to upload the question booklet. Now that can take a few minutes, depending on the length of it. Please just bear with it. If it happens to take maybe more than five minutes, give the screen a refresh and try again. But predominantly should be a few minutes or less. I'm going to save my lesson context. I'm going to come through to worksheet support and preview task so that we can see how it operates. Going back to the booklet, if I said I need help on 1A. so we can see willow knows what the question is for part one think about what the word itself tells you give me the answer so we're getting that level of scaffolded support again how you would respond so now let's deal with question two question two need help this was as a reminder the image the diagram that willow can't see Willow will be able to tell however that it's there we go is about a diagram it's about the lung model it's going to explain to pupils they can't see the diagram so if they want support they can explain it but it still can help with 2i 2b 2c and so on so still pretty effective way to provide that support to pupils on a worksheet like this but as I said please do bear in mind that if it is 90% images and diagrams on your worksheet, Willow won't be particularly helpful in that setting.

This is a really popular task with primary school teachers who are looking for Willow to provide support in the planning mode for any extended writing task. You can see here I've put a little bit of context. Pupils are writing a letter to a pilot in World War I, I'm thinking of their bravery. I've just copied that because I'm going to need that again in a second. Of course, as is always the case, the more context you put in here if you want to provide a box plan or a a medium-term plan or some sort of objectives or more detail around what exactly you want your pupils to achieve and accomplish in this writing task, this is the place to do so. I'm going to show you how Willow will respond in the majority of cases where you keep it pretty light and you allow Willow to just do what it would do by default. So I'm going to move forward to the Lesson context and I'm going to click on our extended writing planning. you can see this is for key stage two extended writing looking across the genres so a narrative descriptive persuasive exploratory or even discussion or balanced argument type of writing the task box here i'm just going to paste what i put before again more detail here if there are specific things you want them to touch on this will be the place to tell willow and i'm going to preview the task So what this mode will do is primarily three different features of planning. Before we get to that, it's going to sort of just check that people understand the task. What is this letter really doing? What's the main purpose? To express gratitude and acknowledge their efforts. Again, you could probably have been thinking a little bit more about a year five vocabulary there, but that will do. Then going to get asked a second follow-up question about the audience and what we want our reader to feel. So I could just put it proud. And once Willow is confident that pupils understand the gist of the task at hand, there are kind of three main modes that Willow will work through in their planning. The first is around their ideas, helping them generate... the different things that you might want to talk about the second is a vocabulary within there it will break down into two main modes one is topic specific vocabulary and the second is helping them uh upgrade their writing by getting them to have a go at sharing some of their ideas and then we'll pick apart some of those uh sort of words that are used within that context and help upgrade from that position onwards. And then the third is looking at the structure of their writing. So if I say generate ideas, imagine you're writing to the pilot, what was one thing you could say thanks for, something they did, something they gave up, what comes to mind, that they risked their lives, that they protected friends and family and sacrifice their livelihoods to do so that we all remember them and see their bravery as aspirational. So once Willow feels like there's enough there to help generate their thoughts and that we've got some good ideas, you can see a little summary here. We might then go into the vocab mode where Willow is really going to try and guide them towards that topic specific uh vocabulary uh could say uh planes there we go we've got a more precise word for the planes they view they were made of wood and fabric think about a word that sounds old-fashioned so i don't know what it is as always we're going to get scaffolded support but at the end of this vocab section it's going to have pulled apart five really useful at least five so there we go we've got biplanes uh topic specific words that they can go away and use within their writing task. Can you think of another word? People. Tyler, not sure. There we go. So we've got really specific word choices that are going to help inform and add real colour to their writing task.

This video is about the support level. The support level is how Willow interacts, how quickly and how readily that will get involved providing the kind of scaffolding support that a pupil might expect, whether that's sentence starters, a way in, model answers, a prompt, a check, etc. The vast majority of pupils would operate at medium, which is really maintaining productive struggle but providing the kind of teacher-level guidance and responses that will keep the pupil moving forward when they do become stuck. You've got minimum, which is for pupils that are particularly confident in the given topic. Willow will operate much more as a thinking partner here. It will really push the pupil to go deep, to really try and do the majority of the solving themselves with very minimal levels of scaffolding. And at the other end, we've got maximum, so this is for pupils who are less confident in a given area. It will provide scaffolding more readily, and when it does, it will do more in terms of modelling, chunking, or giving a clear next step or way in. Really important to note two things. The first is you can set this wherever you want to, but Willow will always operate dynamically, so it will adjust according to the interactions it's having with the pupil. The other thing to be clear about is this is different to the attainment expectation. There's a separate video on that that I would suggest you take a look at shortly. Attainment is really how deep do we expect, or does Willow expect, pupils to go on a given subject or topic. If you want to lower that expectation for students working below, you can do that, where Willow will prioritise achievable success over the completeness of a given curriculum or topic. Vice versa, you've got higher, which will take students above and beyond. Again, we suggest the vast majority of pupils work on track, which is in line with the curriculum or exam board expectations. You can see I've set up a class here with three pupils. Joe, who I'm going to set at medium. Lower, who is going to be at max support because I need max scaffolding for this pupil. And Higher, where I set at minimum because I want the fewest, or the least amount of scaffolded support provided. I'm going to keep all of them at the attainment level on track. Again, to be really clear, support level — you can have pupils at minimum and maximum within the same top set or bottom set. It's got nothing to do with the attainment expectation. It's merely about how you want Willow to interact in terms of the support we provide. Saving lesson context. And I've actually already set up an open use class here, so I'm going to jump into that and show you three different examples. This is my pupil who needs maximum support. So if I ask Willow, how exactly does Fitzgerald make Daisy powerful through what techniques? So I'm getting a good level of scaffolding, coming back with a variety of different ways in and things for me to think about, and then saying which of these feel most useful? Is there a particular scene or character you're specifically focusing on? So you can see it's provided a good amount of knowledge back to the pupil to help them keep moving and have a really clear way in to this problem. At the other end, this is my minimum support. I ask that question of Willow, and what we'll expect to see is far less given away. You're thinking about methods, which is exactly right. Before I point you anywhere specific, what do you already recognise where power is made visible? A scene, an image, or a character action? So really throwing that question back to the pupil and providing very little in the way of practical support initially. And our medium, our middle pupil, we will get something in between. Let me give you a way in, then you can develop this yourself. So we've got that first example, symbolic settings, but again clearly coming back to the pupil to do the vast majority of the thinking. Hopefully that is clear. The next video that I suggest you take a look at is the attainment level.

This video is about attainment expectation. If you're interested in understanding the support level, there’s a separate video that looks at how Willow supports different pupils — and its readiness and willingness to offer scaffolds and weigh in. This video is about attainment. The majority of pupils, we suggest, should work On Track. This is for pupils working in line with age-related expectations — whether that’s passing their GCSE or working in line with the national curriculum. Success will take them all the way up to mastering everything in their curriculum or their specification, adapting dynamically to how the pupil responds in order to work out whether they’re, for example, a Grade 6 pupil or a Grade 8–9 pupil. Higher is for your very top set pupils — those you really want to stretch and take above and beyond their curriculum goals. Lower is for students working significantly below age expectations. This would typically be for pupils in lower sets who need: Acceptance and prioritisation of achievable success Clear progress from their starting point Progress over completeness or full mastery of a topic What I’m going to do now is show you how this impacts the type of support and interaction pupils will have with Willow. We’ll look at two different pupils: Joe — operating at Higher A pupil I’ve named “Lower” — operating at Lower Again, we would strongly suggest that the vast majority of pupils operate On Track, but I want to show you the difference between these two modes. If I come through, I’ve set up a revision mode supporting pupils one-to-one on revision of The Great Gatsby. In revision mode, Willow will always ask pupils whether they want to dive straight in or start with an overview of the topic. I’m going to say: Overview. We then get the key things that a pupil set at Lower should really understand about The Great Gatsby. This was specific to the theme of power, as that’s how I set it as a teacher. Notice: The language The simplicity of the points The clear ordering of three main ideas A key takeaway The big takeaway is something like: Power is about who controls the story and who gets hurt. Now compare that to an overview in a Higher lesson. We’re now discussing: Social and class power Gendered power Narrative power We’re asking questions such as: Is this perspective trustworthy as a retrospective telling? Who is given power over meaning? Even when discussing money and class, the Higher mode refers to: Economic power The invisible hierarchy of East Egg versus West Egg Tom’s casual cruelty as a product of security Whereas in Lower, it might simply say: Tom has old money and uses it to control others Gatsby has new money It’s really about the depth and exploration of content that Willow moves into with pupils. If I go back and say, “Tell me about the context in society” at Lower, the response is: High level Very manageable Not going too deep If I ask the same question in Higher: Consumerism exploding Jazz Age hedonism Significantly more detail More complex explanations Hopefully that gives a clear guide into where and when you should be changing the attainment level. As I said, the majority of pupils will operate On Track. And if you’re interested in understanding the impact that support level can have, please do check out that separate video as well.