There are some teachers who talk too much without causing their pupils to think hard enough that they learn anything. What’s the solution?
1) Swiftly limit the teacher’s poor-quality talk to 5 minutes and suggest that students get on with their own work for the rest of the time?
2) Train that teacher to slowly improve their understanding of effective explanations, questions and instructions so that they can gradually improve the quality of learning?
Both solutions are actually very well-meaning. The first is short-termist, and suggests that the answer is to mimic a more effective teacher with their more efficient explanations and instructions. The focus is on significantly reducing the poor-quality input and presenting the students with tasks which, it is hoped, will get them thinking harder.
I can entirely understand why some teachers are asked to do this. It may well lead to a slight improvement in outcomes as some students will engage with the task and behaviour may improve a little as there is less need for them to challenge their self-discipline to the limit by listening to someone ‘drone on’. However, the problem in this scenario is that we’ve simply made the teaching ‘less bad’. There is barely any time for quality explanations, for direct instruction, for challenging misconceptions. This might, however, be an appropriate interim ‘quick win’ solution for a teacher who is very inexperienced or really struggling, of course. It’s probably that, after this approach is taken, the classroom will look better to the casual observer.
The second solution is much harder and probably won’t result in such quick wins. It requires a gradual build up of the subject matter being taught, the most effective pedagogies and the common misconceptions and challenges. It requires an increase in the subtle sensitivities of the classroom – an ability to rapidly adapt and refine the teacher talk ‘on the hoof’ in response to verbal, physical and emotional responses from all 30 children. It requires the engineering of situations which allow the teacher to ‘read’ the classroom. This is subtle, complex and challenging. On the journey to becoming this practitioner it is, I would argue, more likely that there will be bad behaviour at times. For the inexperienced or struggling teacher who is ‘on the brink’ then this might not, therefore, be immediately practical.
Which should we be going for? Clearly, it depends. One is a quick win with a little improvement, while the other is a much longer term process which will result in much greater quality. Both have their place, but we seem to have got to a place where approach one gets bandied around as gospel.
The education system seems to be rife with these quick wins. One of the reasons is that teachers have barely any time to improve their own practice beyond the first year or two of their careers. Another is that we have become enthralled to the idea that we can see a good lesson and that teachers should be encouraged to mimic the behaviours that we like to see. As one of the Trust’s advisers, Professor Robert Coe, has recently pointed out, this idea is simply not supported by any evidence.
We’ve seen Assessment for Learning repackaged as ‘write up learning objectives, three-part lessons and write extensive comments in books’. We’ve seen one day courses on ‘how to deliver outstanding lessons’. We see subtle and important arguments about the most efficient and effective methods of teaching being reduced to ‘group work always bad’ or ‘group work always good’. All of these are shallow solutions. Teaching even one child is a subtle, complex and deeply skilled task. Teaching thirty children is disproportionately harder.
It would be deeply hypocritical if I said the solution was to abandon quick wins, of course, as though this would in itself be a quick win! In a time-starved profession where reducing behaviour problems and increasing seemingly-positive observed behaviours are paramount, there is clearly room for a few quick wins. However, unless we make room for teachers to engage in professional learning that is sustained, challenging, collaborative and which engages deeply, reflectively and critically with high quality evidence, we will never make any substantial improvements to national levels of achievement. Too many quick wins will, ultimately, lead us to lose the game.
So, let’s do something better. My charity, the Teacher Development Trust, believes that professional learning should be prioritised in schools and yet we recognise that this is extraordinarily hard to do with so many other pressures on our schools. We don’t believe in simply preaching about this, we’re actively trying to help. If you believe in better then you should get your school to join our National Teacher Enquiry Network – a partnership of schools who are working to climb this mountain together. You can also sign up for our half-termly newsletter where we try and share advice and success stories.
Around 1 billion was spent on curriculum on line. That is about 50,000 for every hour in the national curriculum from 5-16 in every subject. Imagine we had something similar to Wikipedia but focussed on providing all the content knowledge and understanding for every lesson and supplemented with a range of explanations from people identified as getting the best results from the weakest students. Content liberally licensed to encourage copying and remix. Aim to provide information at an appropriate level for any learner. This would be a resource not a replacement for teachers. Something for teacher to draw upon if assessment shows students simply aren’t “getting it”. An obvious need would be training for teachers in using this global resource in their learning. I say global because like Wikipedia it would be freely available to anyone in any country.
Now it is easy to dismiss this on several grounds – it isn’t perfect, but the question is not about perfection it is about improvement? What about cost? Its true that in the current climate the government isn’t going to blow a billion on a new COL initiative, especially when it is so easy to see how poor the original was in terms of value for money. But collectively Wikipedia demonstrates what a few million per year can achieve and how collective grass roots effort can have far more impact than large commercial sales operations (Encyclopaedia Britannica). It requires a proof of concept to start with and a scalable infrastructure. There are many grants that could support this but it needs coordinating by an organisation like TDT. It requires a start by designing a web based infrastructure that is scalable and filled with high quality support for a specific curriculum area that can be shown to be successful and can then provide the motivation for teachers to collectively maintain and improve the resource. The current system where each teacher produces their own lesson plans and SOW or at the other extreme buys them from an education publisher is antiquated when we consider what web 2.0 has done for sharing resources and expertise in other fields.
It’s an interesting idea, Ian. The big issue would be how you use such a system with some form of quality assurance. It sounds to me like a WikiTeach would be an ideal job for a new College of Teaching? There is also the MESH project: http://www.meshguides.org/
No one seems too upset at the idea of using Lemov’s “tips and tricks”, getting people to observe them in practice, and having teachers use them in classrooms. Do you think this is an example of a “quick win” or does Lemov get a reprieve?
It entirely depends how people use them. If people are given the chance to develop these classroom strategies with an understanding of the underlying theory, and if they are evaluated on the actual outcomes, rather than a tick-box approach of whether they are using them observably, then Lemov’s approaches could be helpful. I’m not convinced that you can simply memorise the Lemov toolbox and then ‘teach like a champion’, however.
Time is essential, teachers should have less contact time & more professional development. This is expensive, but in the longer term it might be cheaper than the alternative. As someone who trains teachers to be able to talk more effectively I welcome more being done in this area, it can make a lot of difference but it does take practice and needs to be adapted to suit individuals. A lot of good teacher practice is about suitability of that teacher to certain practice, just because ‘A’ does it well, does not mean it will suit ‘B’.