Month: August 2013
Teachers do not have to engage students!
An example may help. What happens if we add something to try to engage a learner? It can very often distract from the actual, intended learning. Here is the example. I was being taught how to deliver a leadership programme. Richard the designer of the programme showed me a slide of a bug ship. He he written the following under the cartoon picture of the ship:
Richard explained that the idea of lead-a-ship came from his some who asked him if leadership was what a captain on a ship did. I found this quite engaging. When I left Richard and tried to put some materials together, powerpoint, to explain what we wanted participants in the programme to do I could not remember the purpose of the picture and the lead-a-ship thing. I certainly could remember the picture and the phrase, lead-a-ship and i also remembered that his son had been influential in the matter. But, the very engaging matters of son and the pun had distracted me from the learning. I did not know what the lead-a-ship thing was for.
That happens when we add a context or something that is in itself engaging to the learning that we want to happen. We remember the thing that was engaging rather than the learning that was intended.
the fuss and our time, as learning designers, becomes on searching for something that can engage the learner. We already know the learning that we want them to do. The engaging thing we find will not distract us, so we don’t see it as a distraction. But the learner does not know which bit to pay attention to. Does he attend to the image of the ship, or the son’s involvement or the pun on leadership?
We need to plan the learning materials so that they point out that which is to be learned as clearly as possible and do not try to make a distracting engagement thing so attention grabbing that it distorts the learner’s attention focus.
Our job is to focus attention not engage learners in distractions.
Hattie, on students asking questions in class
Connected to this point, I’m spending a lot of time researching the issue of student questions. And I can tell you that student questions are glaringly absent from classrooms. On the other hand, we know that teachers ask about 200 questions a day and that students already know the answers to 97 per cent of them. And most of the questions are about surface level knowledge, and require between three and seven words in response. On average, most students ask about one question a day at school.
How much teacher talk is too much?
One of the difficulties of so much teacher talk is that it demonstrates to students that teachers are the owners of subject content, and controllers of the pacing and sequencing of learning. It reduces the opportunities for students to impose their own prior achievement, understanding, sequencing, and questions.
From Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing
Impact on Learning (Hattie, 2012)
JOHN HATTIE’S EIGHT MIND FRAMES
MIND FRAME 1: Teachers/leaders believe that their fundamental task is to evaluate the effect of their teaching on students’ learning and achievement.
MIND FRAME 2: Teachers/leaders believe that success and failure in student learning are about what they, as teachers or leaders, did or did not do…We are change agents!
MIND FRAME 3: Teachers/leaders want to talk more about the learning than the teaching.
MIND FRAME 4: Teachers/leaders see assessment as feedback about their impact.
MIND FRAME 5: Teachers/leaders engage in dialogue not monologue.
MIND FRAME 6: Teachers/leaders enjoy the challenge and never retreat to “doing their best.”
MIND FRAME 7: Teachers/leaders believe that it is their role to develop positive relationships in classroom/staffrooms.
MIND FRAME 8: Teachers/leaders inform all about the language of learning.
Notes from a podcast by John Hattie. Aug 2013
What Hattie says, in my words…
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My thoughts, comments and some questions
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How difficult should it be? How do we measure the difficulty? I like it that we can up challenge without making the content itself more difficult.
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I like SOLO.
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Yeah. This is so true. In our rush to deep thinking we forget that we needs to know lots of stuff before the deep stuff can make proper sense. Paddle about in the shallows for a long time.
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Confirmation bias kicks in here. We like what we know and tend to reject that which conflicts.
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Agree strongly but how much of the method of the worked example do we need to show. Difference between showing how to solve a maths problem and how to write an essay.
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This is how our brains work. Working memory stuff rules our ability to learn.
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We can make students think without having to make everything hidden and a puzzle. Make them think when they know what to do.
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Seems a no brainer if we can sort out the nature of the worked examples and the features we need to demonstrate by using them.
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I can only agree. If we observe to help improve a teacher, and the teacher improves, why do we need to make an Ofsted style judgement?
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This is the hard bit. If we give them the answer will they become dependent on us and not think?
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Probably this is mostly true. I like to nail my colours to the mast!
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This is so true it is a real shame it needs to be said. Watching the teacher is like watching the magician. You will always be distracted and never work out how the trick is done.
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I do like this. Traditionalists don’t seem to like any form of group work. I do. Now I have a better idea of why.
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Wow. Never thought of it like that. But it is so, so true.
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Wow again.
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Yep. That’s just what I teach my teachers to do. Listen, properly, to the students and hear what they are learning.
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Well done, Mr Hattie. Great advice.
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That is our job. Engagement comes with the success that comes after effort because of the confidence.
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Needs a lot more thought and planning to be able to do this in class. But it might just be the key we have been waiting for to unlock the Dylan Wiliam power of feedback to learners.
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Click and listen to the original podcast.
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So what more is it?
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Oh, I feel gulty again. I did give lots of feedback. But who heard it? Only me?
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We have to teach them this as well. So they have to practise receiving and acting on feedback. So we need to allocate time during lessons for this to happen.
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I get why this would be. I can ask questions as a learner of another learner.
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Is this a sop to some poor processes or is it a life line to those who still hold onto learning styles et al?
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As above
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Need to think more about what this means in a classroom and in planning.
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Yeah. I got into all sorts of hassle at my school when I was a HoD for giving regular and frequent tests. I knew I was right.
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Practice tests and distributed practice. Work for all subjects.
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As we said above
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Probably an untapped power in challenging schools.
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Yep. One of the first things I see in poorly performing schools. Kids who laugh at other kids who make mistakes and teachers who do not correct them sharply enough.
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I doubt we could agree what progress is in terms that are useful for teachers in planning and assessing.
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Buy the book. I will. No you cannot borrow my copy – it will be an ebook anyway for me.
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My daughter beat me at wrestling – progressive or traditional teaching?
I really should stop spending so much time on twitter. It gives me nightmares. The one last night was a wrestling match against my daughter, who, in the dream, beat me because my hips were hurting. The incongruity of her beating me matches the tension I felt while listening to a podcast by my favourite, challenging educational researcher, John Hattie. He was talking at a conference about some of the issues he would unpick in more detail in his new publication, Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, which is due out in September /October 2013.
Direct Instruction – Errors?
Just read the blog of @headguruteacher, who write about his response to the Seven Myths of Education book by @daisychristo ‘The Guru’ says what many folk probably think after reading the book. The description of the teaching process as it is currently in the UK is a bit too polarising. As ‘The Guru’ says most poor teaching is exemplified by those teachers who use a strongly didactic approach. They fail to capture the interest of students and poor behaviour results. Also, I would add, that some of the proponents of the knowledge based approach, which is not Direct Instruction as described by John Hattie – more later on this, are quite inexperienced teachers and they are less able, often, to manage the learning behaviour of a class than more experienced colleagues. They don’t yet have the wealth of knowledge; they have not yet practised the art of behaviour management enough to be fluent in it. That will also apply to some experienced teachers who have not practised well enough to develop the skills to manage behaviour for learning. There will also be some SLTs who have not recognised or are not able or not willing to manage behaviour in their school so that their teachers are able to teach. It is complex stuff, with many facets.
But back to Daisy and her book. For me the science that matters is that of working memory. It is the best theory we have about how we learn. It is also quite simple. There is a finite limit to how many new things we can think about at one time. We can increase the complexity of that which we are able to think about if some of those things are in long term memory. That’s a bit brief but it does define how we learn and whatever we think about Guy Claxton and building learning power or any other system they MUST comply with working memory theory (WMT).
The implications of WMT are that we must teach knowledge, and lots of it to our students so that they can learn more complex things and that must practise to an appropriate degree of mastery so that they are fluent in the process needed to ensure future learning is based on knowledge in long term memory. A critical book to read is by Daniel Willingham, ‘Why Students don’t Like School‘. This really explains the process of knowledge acquisition fully and well. It is an easy book to read and makes so much sense. If I were still a head teacher i would buy this book for all my staff!
But… This is the bit that annoys me. Just because the initial knowledge process is dependent on WMT and other learning is driven by WMT it does not mean that all future learning is didactic teaching. After the knowledge is inside a student’s head the process of practice and exploration can be by the activity based stuff we all know works. Once students know what they need to know we can secure and deepen their understanding by engaging them in challenging work. That includes group work and probably all other activities that teachers have used for a long time.
The caveat is don’t teach the initial knowledge part in any way other than by didactic means. Didactic could be by reading and learning, or it could be by the teacher telling. What matters is that however we do the initial knowledge acquisition phase it is as uncluttered as possible. We can’t allow students to be distracted by any frippery – that’s not a word I often use – as the frippery takes up some of the student’s working memory and may stop the knowledge from being learned.
Please stop using the term Direct Instruction. It is not the same as traditional teaching, or didactic, or anything else. DI is a very specific teaching system that is allied to computer aided instruction. Look it up on Wikipedia before you use it as a term. Or read this article by Englemann.
As I read Hattie he does not claim that anything other than DI is high up on the list of good ways to teach. DI uses WMT but a lot more in addition. Willingham does not use DI but bases his work around WMT.