Category: Teaching

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What is pedagogy?

I’ve just returned from a very interesting meeting at the GTCE on pedagogy, innovation, assessment and pupil participation. There was a really interesting mix of people there, with academics, union representatives, teachers, consultants and school leaders.

Something that became reasonably clear early on was that nobody seemed entirely clear what pedagogy really means. Some of the GTCE papers seemed to imply it meant:

  • Teaching and Learning, or
  • “What goes on in the classroom”

Interestingly, Dictionary.com defines it as:

ped·a·go·gy:  [ped-uh-goh-jee, -goj-ee]  Show IPA

1. the function or work of a teacher; teaching.
2. the art or science of teaching; education; instructional methods.

Not quite the same! In fact the interesting publication Professionalism and pedagogy, a GTCE commentary led by Professor Andrew Pollard of the Institute of Education, say that pedagogy is “the art, science, and craft of teaching”.

I think we can all agree that:

  • Teachers should cause learning.

However it seems to me that in order to do this effectively:

  • Teachers must constantly review and reflect on their practice,
  • teachers should collaborate and discuss their practice with other professionals, and students, and
  • teachers should be constantly creative, innovate, and have fun with their teaching.

For me, these things are at the heart of pedagogy, but there is far too much of an emphasis on just measuring learning with narrow statistical tools.

In the world of IT, programmers discovered that constant, immediate and richly detailed feedback on their work results in much better products than the old methods, where customers wrote a specification and then waited two years until something got delivered. (This is the idea behind agile development).

I think teaching should be the same. Professional collaboration would enhance teacher strengths instead of enforcing minimum competencies through tick-box inspections. It would foster innovation which would be motivating for teachers, and this would result in better learning for students.

Every teacher on Twitter knows how collaboration and discussion has enthused them. I now need to put my money where my mouth is and push this approach at my school. Watch this space…

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Prompting discussion about improvement

Effective teaching is the hot topic at the moment, and with such fantastic discussions such as those at purpose/ed and the interesting (although controversial) Measures Of Effective Teaching project from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, there’s a lot to come.

I’ve been asked to develop my own tool to encourage some really good discussion and collaboration between colleagues, prompting a good hard look at the ways we teach, and what is going on in our classrooms. This is for a pilot project with a teacher training organisation.

So what do you think is a good set of data to prompt that discussion? I need your help! My initial thoughts are:

  • How much students test scores have improved (from initial formative assessment to final summative test)
  • Student levels/grades compared to target grades (based on prior attainment)
  • Student enjoyment survey/ratings/opinions
  • Teacher enjoyment survey/ratings/opinions (including assessments of behaviour etc)
  • Small portfolio of linked work that class are particularly proud of
  • Student self-assessment of how much independent learning went on – how would they rate their ability to improve in this topic without further assistance?

I don’t think this is exhaustive, and I certainly don’t think you’d measure all of these for every topic. However, a selection of these different approaches would prompt some very interesting discussion, and feed back nicely into upgrading schemes of work and resources for the next time it is taught.

What do you think?

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Failure is not an option

Every school is passionate about getting their students to succeed, and some are more successful at encouraging, nurturing and supporting than others.

For me there seem to be two distinct approaches to this.

Option 1 is “We will not let you fail”. These teachers will put huge amount of time and resources to ensuring their kids do well. They’ll lay on extra classes, support, and encourage. Teachers will pour in hours of time, and buckets of effort to help their students succeed. Nerves may fray as they see students taking advantage, but through sheer dedication and professionalism they’ll make it work for the kids.

Option 2, however, is “We will not allow you to let yourself fail”. These teachers will have incredibly high expectations, and put in hours with the kids. They will encourage and nurture the students to develop a work ethic. They will model the hard work necessary to break through problems. They will work hard with students to help them diagnose their own problems and learn the tools to improve. Frustration may grow as they try ever more ways to get kids to see the light, but through sheer professionalism and determination they’ll teach the kids to work it out for themselves.

I would never condemn option 1, but I don’t know how sustainable it is. I think students genuinely appreciate both, and when they’re really down they’ll need some direct intervention to pick themselves up.

Let’s inspire our students to dream, and teach the tools to realise them.

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Jamie’s Dream School

I loved this TV programme. Jamie completely gets these kids. He knows just how they were turned off by their school experiences, how they have low self-esteem, and how they lack self-discipline. You could see that he really related to them, that it made him think deeply about his own school experiences.

I was relieved that, unlike Monday’s Panorama, he didn’t go over the top and cherry pick very rare examples of classroom violence and claim it was the normal everyday experience for British students. In fact, he just bluntly stated the facts, and then expressed a wish to do something for kids, as he wished someone had done for him.

These kids were fantastic people. They didn’t need, or appreciate, anyone lecturing them with what their problems were (as David Starkey discovered). Quite the opposite – they could recite their problems to each other, and were totally self-aware. What we heard were endless stories of lack of respect, lack of discipline for them leading to lack of self-discipline, and a terrible lack of aspiration, hope, and engagement.

They were given amazing people to learn from, but none of them were teachers. What you saw were fairly unruly kids being engaged but not self-disciplined. It clearly showed how these celebrity teachers lacked the understanding of classroom management, planning, and psychology, but that they did their best with genuine enthusiasm, respect (in most cases), and fantastic resources.

Of course, the average teacher has more than one hour of lessons per week. They have one twentieth of the time to reflect on each lesson, adjust their plans for the next, and recoup their energy. They have more paperwork, more assessment, massively prescribed curriculums that ensure they rarely get to follow the students’ own interests, and far fewer resources to work with.

This programme clearly shows what heroes teachers are, day in, day out. Resilient professionals, caring and engaging, raising aspirations. When David Starkey got angry and disappointed he lashed out at students, blamed others, and expected someone else to fix it. As a real teacher you just can’t do that. You have to take it all, work tirelessly to raise standards, with every child, every day.

Jamie’s Dream School has inspired me to keep challenging and engaging my students, to keep reminding them how much potential they have, and to be disciplined with them so that they can learn to discipline themselves. It’s given me a stark reminder that belittling students achieves nothing, and that they will only respond well to people who believe in them.

I look forward to the rest of the series. Well done Jamie.

PS A mini quote from me, on this subject, was published in The Guardian on Tuesday 8th March.

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Are you a standards parasite?

Standards of achievement and behaviour in schools take constant and relentless effort to maintain. Every member of staff and every student has a duty to act in the way that improves the quality of the school.

Teachers in particular are responsible for setting and maintaining boundaries, modelling good relationships, and stretching students. Every teacher has good days and bad days, but today it occurred to me that every school has some particularly outstanding staff who are even more visible, even more relentless in applying, maintaining and raising standards.

If you look at the last few weeks at your school, I’m sure you can think of times where students behaved well without you having to put in much effort. Thinking back over my years of teaching, I know there were days when I took classes like this as a great reason to relax a bit, and let a few lapses go by without comment. Similarly there were students who may have not done some work where I just let them be.

However, it occurs to me that at those times I was being a standards parasite. I happily accepted the results of my colleagues’ hard work while eroding those same expectations. The recent discussion about Troops to Teachers seems to be very pertinent to this – there seems to be a suggestion that former troops are less likely to let agreed standards slip than the average teacher, which of course makes it easier to raise standards in challenging schools.

I have no doubt, as with any ‘magic fix’ in education, that this is not a panacea: that not all former troops can make the transition to great teachers, and indeed clearly there are many non-ex-military teachers who are outstanding practitioners in this area already.

However, anyone who is a high-standards exporter, anyone who is an aspiration-raiser, and anyone who can combine the magical complexity of teaching with a relentless drive to raise standards for all must surely be welcome in the classroom.

Do you raise standards, or are you a standards parasite? It’s something that has certainly provoked a lot of reflection about my own everyday classroom practice.

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It’s like a magic wand: Metaphor and analogy can improve learning

So here’s quite a bold claim from the wonderful article Humor, Analogy, and Metaphor: H.A.M. it up in Teaching:

…use of metaphors and other strategies can “increase retention by as much as 40%”.

Randy Garner’s wonderful article cites a number of papers that all show that use of humour, metaphor and analogy in the classroom can improve learning, increase retention, and give students a more positive view of the subject matter. I dealt with humour in my last post, but I think the other two are just as important.

What’s going on here? The educational psychology papers cited by Garner take a top-down approach, with some important caveats about using this method (including avoiding over-complexity, and being culturally sensitive). Excitingly (for me at least), there is similarly significant evidence in the bottom-up approach of neuroscience. There’s a wonderful quote from the Royal Society‘s fascinating Brainwaves 2 report on Neuroscience and Education:

When we sleep, walk, talk, observe, introspect, interact, attend, and learn, neurons fire. The brain has extraordinary adaptability, sometimes referred to as ‘neuroplasticity’. This is due to the process by which connections between neurons are strengthened when they are simultaneously activated; often summarised as, ‘neurons that fire together
wire together’

I believe this is also known as Hebbian Theory. Essentially by expressing a new idea in terms of existing mental scaffolding and well-understood vocabulary you associate the new concept with existing knowledge. By talking about the new idea and the old at the same time you get the neurons to ‘fire together’ which gets them to ‘wire together’. This provides a great starting point for the brain to construct its own understanding.

I certainly remember university lectures where the professor would begin with a vast tranche of new vocabulary and proceed to describe new ideas with these terms and concepts with which I was completely unfamiliar. Result? Total disengagement – i.e. I fell asleep.

I remember well being shouted at in the middle of a lecture theatre of 180 students for being ‘bloody rude’ and blearily remembering where I was and noticing the incomprehensible notes on the board, while simultaneously observing how I had dribbled on the lecture notes I had taken so far. I’m sure you’ve encountered students similarly engaged when they missed out the building blocks and cannot access the higher content.

In my teaching I absolutely adore using analogy. I’ve been given quizzical looks by my students after describing particle theory and gases using the analogy of “a bunch of predictably mad 11-year olds who’ve been let out in to the playground”, or describing electronic drift and current in terms of slightly spaced-out festival goers wandering from stage to stage. It did seem to work though, and it certainly stuck.

Of course, these models, analogies and metaphors are starting points. It’s just as important to look at their shortcomings too, but if we begin our teaching of new topics using analogies then students have something to get their teeth into while they build up their mental map.

Incidentally, yes I know my title contains a simile and not a metaphor. Forgive a poor Physics/Maths teacher a minor transgression.

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Make ’em laugh to make ’em learn.

I’m continuing my lessons from Neuroscience theme again in this post. In the fascinating article Humour, analogy, and metaphor, Randy Garner explains that scientific studies have consistently shown that a little humour in the classroom actually increases interest in learning, strengthens information recall, and encourages longer and deeper retention of knowledge. According to one paper he cites:

“teachers who use strategies that promote the connection between humor and learning usually provide students with their best school experiences”

I bet many of you already have your corny jokes ready to roll. Some of my terrible Physics/maths favourites:

  • Gravity? Depressing subject! Gets you down…
  • Student: “Sir, what (sic) is the unit of Power?” – Sir: “Correct!”
  • Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip? To stay on the same side.
  • What happens if you cross a Physics teacher and a Geology teacher? They talk about Earthquarks
  • What happened to the criminal mathematician? He went to prism!
  • What’s the cheapest sub-atomic particle? Neturons! They have no charge..
  • How do you neutralise an enemy air base? Use an air acid!

What are your favourites? Let’s share and use! I’m suggesting the use of #teacherjokes on Twitter as a great way forward…

Some great contributions:

  • @doc_gnome: we’ll be looking at splitting long hydrocarbons into more useful substances; it’s going to be a cracking lesson.
  • @BeckyBoooo: did you hear about the mathematician with constipation? He had to work it out with a pencil.
  • @slkslkslk: The Red Room and The Tell Tale Heart are similar because in both the climax happens in a bedroom.
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The big learning style myth

The UK’s Royal Society released a brilliant summary of the key lessons for educators from modern neuroscience called Brainwaves 2.  This had some amazing findings, which I’ll return to in future blog posts, but I wanted to pick up on an article from The Psychologist it referred to: From Brain Scan to Lesson Plan by Prof. Paul Howard-Jones.

A fascinating statistic:

“Myth: 82 per cent considered teaching children in their preferred learning style could improve learning outcomes. This approach is commonly justified in terms of brain function, despite educational and scientific evidence demonstrating the learning-style approach is not helpful (Kratzig & Arbuthnott 2006).

Ever since I studied VAK learning styles during my teacher training I remember thinking that it was a load of bunkum that was based on such a tiny study and then cited so many times people assumed it was a concrete fact.

The number of teachers I meet today who insist on measuring their students’ learning style and trying to force certain types of activity on them is astonishing. I hear that teacher training courses still push this rubbish as fact. What will it take to get it out of circulation? This is harmful stuff! We should be giving every student a rich, varied diet of educational styles and allow them some choice in the way they consume their learning.

Are you one of the 82%, or do you know someone who is? I’d be interested to hear your comments and experiences.

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Help wanted – any statisticians out there?

We know that a great teacher can make a huge difference to a class, and the whole debate today focuses on the way to get more great teachers, and allowing them to make even more impact.

The thing is, data I’ve been looking at seems to suggest to me that the variation in any teacher’s quality is pretty huge compared to the variations between teachers. This would suggest that many teachers are capable of delivering some great lessons, but that most of them are inconsistent. If this is true, the focus could be much more about collaboration, about getting teachers to have more great lessons, and less on the blunt “good teacher/bad teacher” labels.

Trouble is, despite being an A-level maths teacher, I wouldn’t say my statistics is top-research-quality, and I wondered if there was someone out there who might help me?

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What happens when government looks at the long-term?

A few weeks ago I blogged that government needs to engage with long-term outcomes in education, similar to the long-term survival statistics that we see in the health sector. Thanks to @LeeDonaghy for pointing out a fascinating piece in the Guardian saying that they are now planning to do just that, by linking two government databases together and finding out the destinations of school-leavers.

It is brilliant that government is taking up this agenda, and should be welcomed. I can’t entirely understand why Christine Blower of the NUT said:

“I cannot see what relevance this information would be to government, except to use as yet another measure against which to judge schools”

Surely if the government are going to judge schools against something, then long-term outcomes are something that schools can be more proud of than raw exam results? Personally I’d love to see the extent to which schools are raising the aspirations of their students – i.e. do a comparison of parental education/jobs and students’. A great school may be in an incredibly deprived area, and still doing very well by their students who are going on to be in better-paid jobs, more highly qualified, with happier lives than their parents.

So, this measure is a great start, but to go further we need to see it taking account of parents and local area. I would also like to see some ‘soft’ statistics such as confidence, health and happiness. I know that these would be controversial, but I for one would love to see government and schools working together to raise aspirations and produce students who are happy, self-confident, fit and healthy.