I read on blogs and on twitter, that teachers should only teach knowledge and should not teach generic skills. I believe this is wrong and dangerous.  This blog looks at how to teach skills, and examines the arguments for and against skills teaching.

Procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge.

It is well established that long term memory is divided into two parts:

Declarative memory: ‘knowing what’ commonly called ‘knowledge’ For example
the battle of Hastings was in 1066.
The square of 5 is 25.

Procedural memory “knowing how” commonly called ‘skills’. How to ride a bike, play the piano, do a long jump, for teachers I would add how to read a difficult text.

Procedural and declarative memories are stored in different parts of the brain.

Procedures we need to teach our students might include:

• how to plan an essay,
• how to read a text to gain maximum understanding,
• how to approach a maths problem unlike one you have seen before
• how to justify an argument in a history essay for example by using historical facts
• How to critique a psychological experiment, and its findings

Teaching how to comprehend a text (an example of skills teaching)

The flow diagram shows a procedure you could explain to students, ask them to use, and to self-assess against.  You might adapt it: for example make a more detailed version for more able learners. In response to a comment below I would add that you might like to adapt this process to make it subject specific.

This procedure is not obvious to students. Some students are surprised to be told that you should not give up half way through a text when you begin to lose understanding, or that reading something more than once improves understanding.

Teaching the skill

How could you use this flow diagram with your students?  You explain the process, stressing what would happen if one of the steps was missed out. Your students use the process on a piece of text, this text explains new learning your students need anyway.  Then, following Reuven Feuerstein, I suggest you teach for transfer using class discussion on metacognition and bridging:

The teacher says:

‘We’ve just read a difficult text:
How did we do that? Why did we do it that way? What would have happened if we had missed out steps in the flow diagram? (Class discussion).

Where else could we use that process? Does it only work for this topic? (No!) Could you use the process for material on the internet? (Print it off, then you can). Could you use it for material in a library book? (photocopy the book, then you can). Could you use it for History? Maths?

I call the questions in bold Feurerstein’s ‘killer questions’.

Note you have taught some content that you had to teach anyway.  But by getting your students to read material using the given procedure you have simultaneously helped teach a skill. Students discuss their old reading habits and why this method is better. Maybe they improve the procedure. Maybe students use slightly different versions of the process.  They self assess against the process after each trial and set targets for next time. After sufficient repeated practice, preferably with feedback, the process becomes a habit, they don’t need the flow diagram any more.  You have taught the skill.  This is not a new teaching technique, its sometimes called scaffolded learning.

There is more detail on this here, including downloads for flow diagrams etc on other skills:

Teaching students skills

The best account is in chapter 21 in Evidence Based Teaching.

Does it work if you teach academic skills?

The best source of evidence for what works, and what doesn’t, is systematic reviews, or meta studies. See here https://geoffpetty.com/the-uses-and-abuses-of-evidence-in-education/

On my website you can download a summary of a review of high quality research on the teaching of study skills, thinking skills, and the like.  The main findings were:

• It is best to integrate or embed the teaching of academic skills with content learning, rather than teach a bolt-on unit on study skills, though both methods work. There is an average effect size of above 0.7 if skills are embedded, which shows that teaching skills is very effective. (A bolt-on study skills unit averages at about 0.45)

• It’s best to use tasks that are real, embedded, and subject specific.  E.g. Teach essay planning while they are writing a real essay for their course; or teach note taking by looking at the notes they have made in a real lesson.

• Students need repeated practice on real material that they have to learn anyway

• Students need to use the skills with a clear sense of purpose and to orchestrate their use.

• Students need to self monitor, self assess and self regulate their use of the skills.

• It’s greatly helps to teach even able students skills such as extracting key points; concept mapping; note making; summary writing. Strategies that stress the meaning and structure of information seem to have a very large effect on understanding.

• Meta-cognition is a notable feature of all the successful (high effect size) studies that the review finds.  Meta-cognition is students thinking about their learning, and self-regulating their own learning. For example, students reflecting about the way they read a piece of text, and so setting themselves goals for improvement, then evaluating how this went.

These findings directly contradict the idea that skills can’t be taught. Whether skills can be taught or not is of course an empirical question, and can only be answered by doing it, and seeing what happens in carefully arranged experiments in real classrooms. Over and over again, teachers have taught skills effectively, and although it took a little time to do this, their students got much better results.

(Yes, I know effect sizes are far from perfect measures, but this is a high average effect size for hundreds of studies, and effect sizes are the only way we have of comparing teaching methods and gauging their relative effectiveness. Any other way of gauging the effectiveness of teaching study skills, including your own guesses, will be less reliable.)

The controversy

Some cognitive scientists seem to be saying that skills cannot be taught, despite the strong empirical evidence to the contrary.  The argument goes something like this I think, but I have this wrong I expect. Its hard to express an argument you don’t agree with.

Procedures or skills such as riding a bike playing the piano and doing a long jump are stored in the procedural memory which is a subset of implicit memory.  This memory is unconscious, its a set of habits brought about by repeated use of the skill.  Someone with a skill finds it hard to verbalise or explain the skill, because it is automatic and unconscious.  We develop procedural skills though experience without really trying, we just get better at things the more we do them.  Therefore these skills don’t need teaching.

The trouble with this argument is that empirically it is clear that if you teach skills well, they can be learned well.

An example of this ‘don’t teach skills’ argument was drawn to my attention on twitter by @LeoToAquarius to a paper by Prof John Sweller Emeritus Professor of Education, in a ResearchEd talk he said that “our knowledge of human cognition,” tells us:

“We should be teaching domain subject specific knowledge, not generic skills”

“Generic skills are far more basic and far more important than domain-specific knowledge, but they do not need to be taught because we have evolved over countless generations to acquire them effortlessly and unconsciously simply by membership of a society’

“*It is a waste of students’ time placing these skills in a curriculum because we have evolved to acquire such skills easily, automatically, unconsciously and without tuition’”

See http://www.learnandteachanything.com/blog for a useful summary of his presentation

This begs the question what Prof Sweller means exactly by ‘generic skills’. But I worry that the impression given is that even study skills cannot be taught, which we know from classroom trials is not the case.
In his defence I think the term ‘generic skills’ was used in the 1960s and 1970s by those who believed that just getting students to use a skill will improve it. This doesn’t work well.

Dr Y Weinstein-Jones (@doctorwhy) is also a cognitive psychologist and she believes that skills can be taught as you can see from this very useful link that she tweeted:
http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/10/13-1
She like me made use of the Hattie, Biggs and Purdie reference below.

(1) Donker, A. S., de Boer, H., Kostons, D., Dignath-van Ewijk, C. C., & van der Werf, M. P. C. (2014). Effectiveness of learning strategy instruction on academic performance: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 11, 1–26.

(2) Hattie, J., Biggs, J., & Purdie, N. (1996). Effects of learning skills interventions on student learning: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 66, 99–136.

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First of all I’d like you to imagine you have been appointed Secretary of State for Education in the new European country of Rational-mania where government is unfailingly rational.   How would you proceed? (I will later compare this with policy in the UK where we see the near opposite.)

Your rational education policy

As Education chief you would seek out summaries of research on the factors that affect student achievement, looking for factors that affect achievement most.  Being rational you would realise that systematic summaries of research are more authoritative than any individual study and would turn to these for guidance. (See my blog the uses and abuses of evidence in education)

You would find that:

• what teachers do has a very big influence on student achievement.
• what leaders do has some influence but only if they affect what teachers do in classrooms.
• the type of school has very little influence on student achievement (perhaps surprising)
• the level of education of the teacher has next to no impact on their effectiveness.

http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

You would then conclude that your job as a policy wonk is to find some way of improving what teachers do.

You would look at summaries of research on what teachers do, looking for what has the biggest effect on achievement, and come across the work of Robert Marzano, John Hattie and others, including the central importance of formative assessment as described for example in the work of Dylan Wiliam.

References: Buy from Guardian books not Amazon as the Guardian pays taxes needed to pay teacher’s salaries

John Hattie: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Visible-Learning-John-Hattie/dp/0415476186

Dylan Wiliam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3HRvFsZHoo

Marzano: https://katiedevine.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/classroom-instruction-that-works_pdf.pdf

See also my book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evidence-Based-Teaching-Practical-Approach-Edition/dp/1408504529

You would ensure that teacher training was mainly focussed on these highly effective teaching approaches, methods, strategies and techniques. After all they work exceptionally well in pretty much every context yet are not widely used.

Then you would ask how policy could improve the teaching of existing teachers. You would find Helen Timperley’s summary of all high quality research on effective CPD, and discover that there is only one way to improve teaching to the point that student achievement is subsequently improved. This approach, which I call Supported Experiments, has a huge impact on student achievement if done well – in outline:

1. teachers identify the main problems and difficulties they have as teachers, and their students have as learners.

2. the teachers then study best practice in solving these problems

3. the teachers decide on one strategy or more to address these difficulties

4. each teacher uses a trial and error or action research approach, repeatedly trialling and improving this strategy.

5. teachers meet every month or so to discuss their attempts at using their chosen strategy, and to discuss how to improve their use of it. This improvement is discussed at the next meeting so the cycle repeats. (Teachers are learners too and need repeated practice, encouragement and support; who would have thought it!)

Timperley: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Educational_Practices/EdPractices_18.pdf

Supported Experiments: https://geoffpetty.com/for-team-leaders/supported-experiments/

When you study the education systems of the most successful countries as judged by international comparisons, Singapore, Finland, and so on, you would be pleased to discover that they in effect use Timperley’s simple model. You would also notice that they make little or no use of OFSTED style inspection systems, graded observations, SAT like assessments, or league tables. Timperley found no evidence internationally that accountability systems improved what teachers did and warned against them, so you would decide not to use these.

Okay, so much for Rational-mania’s education policy: how does the UK’s compare?

Andreas Schleicher of PISA: https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_schleicher_use_data_to_build_better_schools?language=en

The UK’s education policy.

Our education policies fall into a puzzling pattern, where the reformers root around with meticulous determination to excavate the factors with the least effect on student achievement, the more irrelevent to achievement the better, and then they spend billions on implementing these hopeless policies, whilst by comparison almost ignoring the teacher effect. Let’s look at a few examples, I can’t deal with them all, there are just too many, there are very few exceptions.

• The last few governments have put enormous emphasis on turning schools into academies. School type has very little effect on student achievement compared to the very large effect that ‘what teachers do’ can have on attainment (Hattie 2009). But academisation has been pursued with billions of funding over decades. (Some research shows that academies improved attainment a bit in the early years, but not by remotely the huge effect that changing teaching could have had).  Its not enough for policy to improve outcomes, it must improve outcomes MORE than alternative policies of the same cost.)  The respected statistics programme on Radio 4 found that academies do not raise acheivement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b074zy97

• To train as a teacher you must have a good degree 2:1 or better. There is no evidence that a better degree improves a teacher’s teaching. Now we have a teacher shortage.

• Government funding for post-16 student places has been conditional on pupils retaking GCSEs in English and maths if they don’t have a C grade. Retaking a year in school is one of the most ineffective educational strategies ever discovered. In international research it’s called ‘retention’ and its third from the bottom in Hattie’s list of well over 100 influences on achievement. It’s so disasterous it actually reduces attainiment. Retaking GCSEs isn’t the same as repeating a school year, but its close enough to ring alarm bells. In the past colleges decided that if GCSE had failed for a student, it would be best to try another strategy, and students studied ‘Functional Skills’, which integrated English and maths into vocational studies. Sensible, – but colleges are now bribed away from this strategy. http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

• The effect of a school building on learning is tiny compared to the effect of pedagogy. Tony Blair’s government spent tens of billions on building new schools and colleges and relatively ignored pedagogy. Okay we like nice new schools and don’t want asbestos in our buildings, but this policy could never improve achievement significantly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Schools_for_the_Future

• All the highest performing educational systems give great emphasis on the professional independence of teachers and on their CPD. They ensure teachers have time to get together in meetings to discuss how learning can be improved, and policy makers see this as the main improvement mechanism. Non of these countries have inspection regiems, graded observation, national testing, or league tables, etc. They believe in trust rather than control. So our governments have for decades adopted with vigour the very strategies the most effective education systems abhor. Andreas Schleicher: https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_schleicher_use_data_to_build_better_schools?language=en

• ‘Assessment for Learning (AfL)’ was a policy intended to improve formative assessment. This looked as if it might at last buck the trend and improve teaching and achievement. However, in an astonishing denial and reversal of the research findings on formative assessment, the policy makers ensured this huge policy initiative did not focus on improving learning, but instead on measuring and recording it. This was in flagrant disregard of the advice of Black and Wiliam, whose research showed that measuring and recording learning had a tiny effect compared to actually improving the learning. https://www.tes.com/article.aspx?storycode=6261847

Why do policy makers unerringly seek out ineffective policies, and even when gifted with a great policy like AfL, deliberately change it to make it less effective?   Some would say that our policy makers are just stupid and ignorant. Tempting, but that can’t be it, they are reasonably intelligent and are educated, and if they were stupid they would alight on a good policy by accident sometimes. But this almost never happens. Policy is systematically disasterous. What is going on?

I will post my guess later, but in the meantime would be interested in yours.

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I’m a great fan of Professor Dylan Wiliam, and his  book on how to embed formative assessment into your teaching is a stunner. It has some brilliant teaching methods for you to try. Formative assessment has a gigantic effect on student learning and achievement, and benefits the weakest learners most, but as a profession we don’t do it well. Wiliam’s methods are usually easy to use, and require your students to work harder than you do, which should be our goal for this year!

The first chapter is a gem, making the case that the best way to improve our education system is to improve teaching. The evidence Wiliam quotes is overwhelming, and anyone interested in improving education should read it.

Contrary to popular opinion Wiliam shows there is strong evidence that education has improved very markedly over the past 50 years or so. Students do very much better now on objective tests such as IQ tests. 50 years ago, only the top 15% did as well as an average student does now on the same test! So standards have not slipped. Instead, expectations of parents, employers and governments, have risen faster than education has improved. I feel a letter to the Daily Mail coming on.

Black and Wiliam have dropped the term “Assessment for Learning”, though they invented it, because it has become corrupted by the Government’s Education Department purloining the term to describe summative practices that have nothing to do with formative assessment or with Black and Wiliams’ careful reading of research.

What follows are some strategies from the book, but the book has many more strategies and some vital insights, so do read it, and ask your library to get some copies. If we and our student teachers got formative assessment right, then students would learn about twice as much as from conventional teaching.  Try these powerful methods, talk about your experiences with colleagues, and adapt them until they work. You’ll need to use them about 5 times to discover whether they will work for you, and about 25 times to get them working 80% effectively. Happy experimenting!

Japanese catch up

Say you have 14 lessons to teach a topic or unit:

1. 12 lessons are used to teach the topic
2. At the end of the 12^th lesson you give students a short diagnostic test or quiz
3. The test/quiz papers are not marked by the teacher, who instead looks them over to discover what students find difficult
4. Lessons 13 and 14 are used for remedial activity on the difficulties noticed in ‘3’ above.

Using exemplar work to clarify success criteria and to improve work

1. A task is set, and students work alone to produce draft work.
2. The teacher collects papers, and secretly awards a provisional grade to each student. No comments are made on the work. The teacher chooses the three best pieces of work (exemplars) and photocopies these.
3. Students get their own work back, unmarked, along with copies of the three exemplars.
4. Students work in groups to use the exemplars to decide on assessment criteria for the task.
5. Students redraft their own work, and resubmit. (They are not allowed to simply copy the exemplars)

Peer assessment of draft creative work

1. Students are given a design brief and working alone generate 5 or 6 rough ideas
2. Students decide on their best idea
3. Students swap their draft ideas with those of another student, and secretly choose the best idea presented by the other student
4. Work is handed back to the owner, and discussion follows, especially if the choices are different.

Students write their own assessment questions

After a topic has been completed, students write assessment questions, along with some means of assessing their answers such as:

• assessment criteria,
• mark scheme
• etc

The students don’t do each other’s questions, but the teacher can grade each student’s questions and assessment guidance.

Peer assessment to improve answers without a model or criteria

1. Students work individually on a practice exam test or quiz
2. Students work in groups of 3 or 4 and share their unmarked papers
3. Students try to create the best composite answer from their individual papers
4. Groups share their answers with the rest of the class

C3B4M

While students are working in class they are asked to consult three peers before asking the teacher for help: ( ‘see three before me’ = C3B4M)

Traffic-light cups

Each student is given 3 cardboard cups: red, amber, and green. As the lesson progresses, each student shows the level of their understanding by displaying the appropriate coloured cup on top on the desk in front of them:

Red:                   I don’t understand what is going on

Amber:                   I sort of get it, but I am not confident

Green:                   I understand it well, and could explain it to others.

The teacher can say to a student displaying an amber cup ‘what don’t you understand?’, and then ask a student displaying a green cup to answer the student’s question.

When the teacher judges it necessary, because there are some amber or red cups being displayed, she says:

“Okay, red cups over here with me, those with an amber cup find a student with a green cup and ask them for help”

The anatomy of formative assessment

The diagram below  is a summary of aspects of Dylan Wiliam’s excellent book “Embedding Formative Assessment”. The diagram tries to show that the top two boxes engergise the process in the bottom three boxes.

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Most people reckon that grades motivate, creating healthy competition and something to aim for. But one of the surprises from educational research is that grading has a negative effect on at least half of students. By grading I mean any comparison with other students, marks out of ten, letter grades, merits and distinctions etc

The students most at risk are those in the top and bottom quarters; let’s see why.  Weaker students get a string of poor grades and their interest and motivation is reduced. So they work less hard, produce even poorer work, and a vicious cycle results.

Able students get a string of good grades and become complacent. They don’t bother to read your helpful comments, as they don’t see a need to improve. They may even reduce their effort – “a merit is good enough?”

Psychology has established more subtle responses to grading. It tends to make students nervous and vulnerable, so they play safe and recoil from risks – the opposite of what we want, as students learn most by taking risks and working outside their comfort-zone.

Grading tends to make students adopt quick fixes, like copying or learning without understanding. It makes mistakes seem shameful, rather than opportunities to learn. It also teaches some students they ‘can’t do it’.

Ironically even if weak students overcome these tendencies and improve greatly, their classmates have improved about as much. So they are still at the bottom of the pile. Grades tend not to recognise improvement over time, so they make ability seem fixed rather than due to effort to learn. Minimum Target Grades may be an exception though, if the emphasis is on beating your personal best, not everybody else’s.

Use ‘medal and mission’ feedback instead of grading

The alternative to grading is to give “medal and mission feedback”. In order to learn at the maximum rate students need to know what they have done well (a medal) and what they need to improve (a mission). If learning is like rolling a rock up a slope, students need to know how far they have rolled their rock, and where to roll next.

But be careful: comparative comments like “excellent work” or “rather weak” have the same negative effect as grades. Students need to know how to improve, not how they compare.

Students also need to know which way is up – the goals for the task. The most powerful way to do this is to give students clear goals, assessment criteria, success criteria, and best of all, show them what good work looks like. Examples of good work can be peer explained, discussed in class, or they can study them and answer questions about them. “how did Javar present his data?”

And don’t forget students must act on the feedback! It helps to ask them to put targets from their last piece of work on the top of their next. See ‘Learning Loops’ in my ‘Teaching Today’ or ‘Evidence Based Teaching’.

Of course we do need to grade work sometimes as students need to know how well they’re doing. But how often? Once a term? Twice a term?

I have wittered on about this at conferences for decades. A few years ago somebody approached me and said he had introduced Medal and Mission feedback on an underperforming A-level philosophy course. He gave students no grades at all, just comments. He found the weaker students strived much more, and able students were more stretched. After two years he was struggling to find missions for his top students, their work was so good, so he got them reading undergraduate textbooks.

He was pleased and confident when they took their final exam. But his confidence turned to mush months later when he found a letter on his desk from the Examining Board and a ‘see me’ from the Head of Department. He opened it with trepidation – what had he done wrong? It was an invitation to an awards ceremony – two of his students were in the top five for the whole country.

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If you are a teacher or trainer in the Post-19 Further Education sector, you are worth in the order of £500,000 a year to the national economy, according to a recent government research paper. This is because your teaching improves the lifetime earnings of your students, and the profits of the businesses they work in.

“Measuring the Economic Impact of Further Education” a BIS research paper published in 2011 says that for every £1 invested in the Post-19 sector, there is a return of £25, and that each successful level 3 student is worth £94,000 to the economy, and a successful level 2 student £50,000. A successful apprentice is worth £136,000.

Post 19 FE makes an annual contribution to the economy of £75 billion at a cost of £3 billion, a net profit of £72 billion a year. This is half the cost of the National Health Service. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills who are responsible for the Post-Compulsory sector could hardly deny these figures. They come from one of their own reports.

So if a Post-19 teacher were a banker, what sort of bonus would she ask for? Well, how about 10% of her annual contribution to the economy, generously leaving 90% of it to society? That’s a bonus of £50,000. Per year of course. Bankers would laugh at her modesty, Barclays’ executives tried to give 25% of their recent payout to share holders, while keeping 75% of it for their bonuses.

What are you worth if you teach younger learners? Prof Dylan William, one of the great educationalists of his generation quotes research at Columbia University showing that if you prevent one dropout, the net benefit to society is $209,000, or £129,000. This breaks down to:

• $139,000 in extra taxes the individual would pay because the individual would be earning more money
• $40,500 in reduced health care costs
• $26,000 in reduced criminal justice costs largely because the individual would be less likely to be incarcerated.

Figures in the UK would be comparable, probably greater. This ignores the benefit to businesses, or to the individuals themselves of more interesting jobs, more control over their life, more earnings, and even a longer life.

So how much money is an entry-level teacher worth? These teachers routinely prevent students dropping out from the education system. Well suppose she saves just 10 dropouts a year, that’s £1.3m a year. Her 10% annual bonus would be £130,000.

With these sorts of figures, improving the achievement of students is very big business indeed. A recent US report on the long-term impacts of teachers tracked one million students from age 9 to adulthood. They concluded that replacing a teacher whose skills lay in the bottom 5% of all teachers, with one of average quality, would generate cumulative earnings gains for the students of about £860,000 per classroom. Suppose you are an Advanced Practitioner or teaching coach, and you manage to help 5 teachers improve in this way. That’s £4.3 million a year just in the gains of earnings of the students in these classes. Your 10% bonus? Well we’ve ignored the gains made by the businesses who will employ these students, so a 10% bonus would be very modest, at £400,000. Per year of course.

Now research reviews show that the very best way to improve student achievement is to improve the quality of teaching. This of course, is the aim of most good CPD. Teaching strategies have 3 to 4 times the effect on student achievement than any other factor according to both the world’s experts on this, Professors John Hattie and Robert Marzano. Factors such as finance, class size, management style, the quality system, and OFSTED have puny effects by comparison. It’s the exact nature of your teaching style and your teaching strategies that creates successes, or failures, (not your education, IQ or personality). Especially important is your ability to critically review your students’ learning, and adapt your teaching as a result.

So adapting and improving your teaching is probably one of the very best investments that a government could make. Where else are you going to get a £25 return for every pound invested? Where else could a tiny improvement in someone’s practice, that leads to one extra student passing, lead to a £50,000 gain?

I can hear senior managers and principals saying ‘what about us’? Well, the news isn’t good I’m afraid. It’s what teachers do in classrooms, workshops, and tutorials that has the biggest impact remember. Management quality comes quite a long way down Hattie’s list. Unless the manager’s main priority is excellent CPD and excellent teaching and learning. Then they deserve a share of everyone’s bonus.

Us teachers are often made to feel we are charity cases begging for bread from the tables of the real workers. But we create more value in our lifetimes than most entrepreneurs could dream of.  FE has endured swinging cuts for decades and these are likely to continue. Governments, of all persuasions are killing the goose that lays the golden egg. We are not

Homework question: Success rates in FE went from 59% in 2000/01 to 72% in 2003/04. At roughly 4 million learners a year, estimate the economic value of this improvement. You will need to use other figures from this article. Please mark your own work.

I’m joking about the bonuses of course, but the rest of the analysis, figures and all, are deadly serious, and economic orthodoxy. This raises two questions:

1. Good CPD has a gigantic impact on success rates, and so on our colleges’ finances, the economy more generally, on the life chances of our students, and the job satisfaction of teachers. Is it sensible for CPD to be optional?

2. The government has decided that teaching qualifications in faith schools and in FE should be voluntary. What? Some teaching strategies nearly double student attainment – but new teachers don’t need to hear about this? This is done in the name of deregulation and voluntarism, but look what these did to the banks. What next? Shall we deregulate what side of the road we drive on? Does your brain surgeon, really need to be qualified?

We need teacher training qualifications that are more demanding, not less, focused on what really makes the difference for students, and the economy: teaching methodology. Qualifications should require teachers to be able to use those few high performance teaching methods that double the rate of student learning.

FE has been characterised as the Cinderella sector, I believe The Establishment in politics the media and elsewhere barely know it exists. Frank Coffield tells an anecdote of Boris Johnson thinking FE used to be called Secondary Modern Schools. Its time we shouted our own praises as no-one else will.  We are the goose that lays the golden egg and its time we got our fair share of funding.

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This is a very under-researched question but we are beginning to get some answers. What makes brilliant teachers brilliant is not who they are, but what they do in the classroom, and some of the techniques they use anyone could adopt.

Doug Lemov works in America, and he went to some of the very best achieving schools in the worst areas of social and economic deprivation. Then he asked these schools if he could watch their very best teachers, and camped out in their classrooms. He found these exceptional teachers often used similar strategies, which were key to their success, but often under the radar of most educational research.

One such teacher achieved the top mathematics results in his county, but 80% of his kids claim free school meals, almost all were from minority ethnic backgrounds, and 90% counted as poor. Yet his students achieved a 100% pass rate, surpassing the results of others from privileged areas.

Lemov studied about 50 such teachers, and found that they used a great deal of Whole Class Interactive Teaching (See ‘Teaching Today’ or ‘Evidence Based Teaching’) with very high expectations and very high participation rates. They were strict but caring, and saw these qualities as two sides of the same coin, “tough love”.

Lets look at a strategy used my most of Lemov’s 50 teachers, ‘No Opt Out’. It deals with students who, in response to a verbal question from you, says – ‘I don’t know’.

No Opt-Out

Here is a bit of dialogue showing the strategy being used to teach students how to calculate percentages. The teacher has already explained and demonstrated the process, and is now getting the class to calculate 7% of 320, with her guiding and writing on the board:

Teacher: What’s the first thing we do with this one? William?

William: Don’t know

Teacher: Carl?

Carl: We need to divide 320 by 100.

Teacher: Good, why?

Carl: Because dividing by 100 gets us 1 percent.

Teacher: So what’s this first thing we do William?

William: Divide by 100

Teacher: Yes. And why?

William: To get 1%.

So the teacher goes back to the student who “failed”, to get him to try again, and to succeed. This will only work of course if the teacher almost always goes back each time to any student who doesn’t succeed with a question. Then students will expect this return, and so prepare their answer. They will listen very carefully to the other students getting the answer correct, and to their justification of why that is done, knowing that they will have to explain this themselves in a moment.

You will need to use this method with some skill if you are to avoid two problems: students repeating an answer they don’t understand, and students getting wrong answers. Let’s see a teacher using No Opt Out while dealing with both these problems. It is a weak Level 2 catering course.

Teacher: Why do we store food in a refrigerator? Harry?

Harry: To keep it cool.

Teacher: Yes, and why do we want it to cool?

Harry: Tastes better.

Teacher: Well, partly. Who can help Harry?

Alex: Germs don’t like it cold.

Teacher: What is the advantage of that? Susan?

Susan: Stops food poisoning.

Teacher: Why?

Susan: Because the bugs don’t grow in the cold.

….(remember it was Harry who gave the initial unsatisfactory answer)….

Teacher: Germs don’t grow in the cold. Okay Harry, so why do we use fridges?

Harry: To keep food cold so we don’t get food poisoning.

Teacher: And how does the cold stop food poisoning?

Harry: Because it stops the germs growing. The cold does.

Teacher: Excellent.

Teachers often don’t ask enough of these “why?” questions but without them students will not understand, and so will quickly forget.

Some supplementary questions that help these dialogues are:

Who agrees with that answer?

Who disagrees?

This No Opt Out strategy has other advantages:

• Weak students end up succeeding, this fixes their misunderstandings, but also raises their self belief as learners
• There is a hidden message that success depends on doing the right thing, listening, and attending. The method demonstrates that everyone can succeed if they try. Lemov points out that “Get it wrong; then get it right” is the fundamental process in learning, and this strategy makes that happen.

“No Opt Out” embeds high expectations and could be used at any academic level and in any subject. But don’t expect any new strategy you experiment with to work straight away. You will need to get used to it, and so will your students. You could use it just in sections of your lesson, first warning your students. You might need to explain why you are using the method, and how it works. Try it on a reasonably good class first.

As with any new method, ask your students how they feel about it afterwards, and whether it would help their learning if you did it slightly differently. But don’t give up on it if they tell you they don’t like it because it makes them work harder!

There is a lot of talk about ‘high expectations’, less talk about how it can be achieved in the classroom. There is a lot of talk about ensuring all students succeed, and again less about how this can be done. Studying excellent teachers is beginning to show us how, but we need to do this so much more.

Click here for a pdf with more detail and do get Lemov’s book now in second edition.

Are you prepared to help?

I have never tried this method myself and don’t work in ordinary classrooms now, so would somebody mind trying this method out for me? If you can try it long enough to see whether it works, or not, I would be very interested to hear from you: my contact details are on my website www.geoffpetty.com or you could leave a commment after this blog. Perhaps you could even video your lesson to show us how it works in practice!? Then I could put the video on my website.

Geoff Petty 2011

Further Reading

Doug Lemov (2010) ‘Teach Like a Champion’. Jossey-Bass

Geoff Petty (2009) ‘Teaching Today’ 5^th Ed. Oxford University Press – see chapter 24 on Whole class Interactive Teaching

Geoff Petty (2009) ‘Evidence Based Teaching’ 2^nd Ed. Oxford University Press – See chapter 9 on Whole Class Interactive Teaching, and chapter 15 on dialogue, questioning, and the self correcting classroom.

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Students helping in pairs: ‘study buddies’

Imagine you teach on a business studies course, and you have found that Jake is having trouble with percentages. You find another student Bracha who is good at percentages, preferably not a close friend of Jake. You talk to Bracha and ask if she would help Jake with percentages. You emphasise the difference between being helped and copying! Students get this, you don’t need to explain much.

You explain this to Jake, and Jake and Bracha meet outside class time to resolve Jake’s difficulties. Jake knows that Bracha will report back to you how things are going: e.g. the effort that Jake is putting in, and progress made etc. You might formalise this agreement with ground-rules and an explicit process. Or you might leave it informal and fluid.

Research shows that Bracha will get at least as much learning out of this as Jake, and that both students will enjoy it.

Students helping each other in groups: Learning Teams.

Learning teams are groups of about six students who offer each other mutual support. They last about two months to a year, and are carefully monitored by the teacher.

You explain at the outset, that in the real world people do not work in isolation, but in teams. And good teams communicate well, discover issues and difficulties, help each other with good grace, and team members feel absolutely happy to ask for whatever help they need. Students make take time to achieve this, but it is worth the effort.

Teams take collective responsibility for each other’s learning, they share mobile phone numbers, land-line numbers, e-mails, addresses, maybe even a Facebook page.

Teams will meet during course time to begin with, perhaps while tutors are seeing students one-to-one, but then meet outside of class time. Some adult teams meet up in pubs outside class time.

Teams meet with an agenda. They take it in turns to be the chair and secretary and to keep minutes. They agree ground-rules, and negotiate action plans, and support for each other.

“Okay what are people finding most difficult?….. Who needs help with Mr Jay’s latest assignment?’

The minutes are then presented to the tutor or class teacher in charge. The effectiveness of learning teams is monitored by the teams themselves, and by the teacher.

If a student does badly with an assignment or test, you can turn to the team who are partly responsible for this poor performance and say: ‘Did you know of Tim’s difficulty? …..What did you do about it? ……Why didn’t he get all the help he needed?’

If you would like to use this method, download the handout which gives a more detailed account, or search for “Learning Teams Geoff Petty”

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Many teachers interpret ‘feedback’ or ‘formative assessment’ to mean commenting on students work, and annotating it with ticks, crosses, and comments and so on. Some think this includes grades or marks.

But the guru on formative assessment and feedback, Dylan Wiliam, interprets the terms differently. For him the purpose of feedback is not just to comment on progress to date, but to fix the errors and omissions in students’ understanding, and to help students identify exactly what a good piece of work looks like.

Dylan points out that feedback is an engineer’s term. A thermostat tells your boiler that the temperature is 5° too low (this is like a comment or a grade) then this information turns the boiler on (this is the fix). Without the fix, there is no benefit from the feedback.

A misconception teachers often have is that it is they who must provide feedback and formative assessment. But students can do a pretty good job for themselves and each other, saving you some trouble, as well as teaching students about how to assess, and the nature of good work.

Done well, feedback can have a huge impact on students’ learning. Let’s look at an example of good practice: the Snowball teaching method.

Snowball

One use of snowball is to get students to evaluate an imperfect piece of work. I will imagine you have just explained to your students how to use commas. But this approach could be used to teach them how to write a good marketing plan, care plan, or experimental design. You could also use this approach to teach students how to rearrange algebraic expressions, indeed pretty much any intellectual skill.

Having explained how to use commas you will want to give them feedback on their understanding before they start to use the skill. You give them a few paragraphs of punctuated text, but it contains errors and omissions in the use of commas. Students are then told the following sequence in advance, and challenged to find all the errors and omissions in the example given them, and to be able to explain these.

1. Students work alone to detect the faults in the text.
2. Students pair up to discuss the improper use of commas that they have found, and to combine and improve their ideas.
3. Pairs combine into fours, and again ideas are discussed and improved. Together they create the best, reasoned critique of the punctuation they can.
4. Now you get one idea from each group of four in turn. You choose a member of the group to give one problem with the punctuation, and perhaps another to explain why this is a problem and what the solution is. You don’t comment on their thinking at this stage except to clarify it.
5. For each point made by a group you ask the class if they agree or not, and why. There is class discussion. You record the class’s conclusions on the board, whether these are right or wrong, and without evaluating them.
6. You repeat 4 and 5 above with the other groups, until all the comments on the use of commas have been collected.
7. You now comment on the class’s thinking for the first time, and correct errors and omissions in this.

Why does this teaching method work so well? When people learn they make links between neurons (brain cells). The new learning (red in the diagram below), is connected to prior learning (black in the diagram). This new learning encodes the student’s version of what you have explained. It is called the student’s ‘construct’ for how to use commas.

This construct will have errors and omissions in it, because it was not made by you, but by the student. If you are not convinced, at the end of one of your lessons, ask your students to write down what they have just learned on a piece of paper. Collect these in – and read them. You will be astounded at how your perfect explanations have been garbled and corrupted! And of the vital need for formative assessment.

The best way to fix these errors and omissions is to engage the learners in active learning on a challenging task with feedback. This requires the student to form an understanding, then checks and corrects this understanding, and so improves it. Snowball does this pretty well, as each student will go round the quality learning cycle a number of times: probably when working alone, certainly in pairs when there is a disagreement, again in fours, and yet again during class discussion. The construct is improved at each stage.

You also get excellent feedback on their understanding. This enables you to re-teach the points which students have not understood.

There are no written comments or grades during Snowball, but there is plenty of feedback …. Vitally, this goes on to produce plenty of fixing! The feedback in Snowballing has not just corrected students’ work, it has corrected their understanding. And your teaching!

Snowballing will not be enough by itself to teach the use of commas, students will now need individual practice at punctuating text, or creating marketing plans etc. But they will find this practice very much easier if they have snowballed first, and less practice will be needed to establish the skill. This practice could be snowballed as well, or instead. Snowball has lots of uses!

So feedback or formative assessment does not require the teacher to do all the work, or to provide lots of comments and marks. Its main aim is to get students to understand what they are trying to do, what they do well, and what they don’t, and to fix misunderstandings.

Some common misunderstandings regarding feedback

Feedback has most effect when it creates ‘cognitive conflict’ meaning that that student is puzzled they got it wrong, and starts to work out why, Hattie (2003). Disagreements during the snowball discussions create these cognitive conflicts, which are usually resolved by the students, or later by the teacher. So snowballing, used well, can have more effect than you marking student work.  You will of course need to mark student work sometimes in order to get feedback on their performance, but feedback to students is often best done through discussion.

References

Hattie, J. (2003) Why is it so difficult to enhance self-concept in the classroom: the power of feedback in the self-concept – achievement relationship. Conference paper available free on-line by searching for the title.

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Summary: Daisy Christodoulou’s book ‘Seven Myths about Education’ has created a stir, not least in the blogosphere, where her ideas seem almost to have become a new orthodoxy. She believes we should not teach skills, but only knowledge (facts). She is wrong, and ironically it is her own weak critical thinking skills that have caused her to make this error.

I look at the evidence that skills are very teachable, and ironically, greatly help students learn facts.

I enjoyed reading this book, and agree with some of its arguments as I will explain later, but the key message that Daisy Christodoulou makes – that it is not possible to teach skills – is very wrong and very easily disproved. The misconception is also dangerous as it leads teachers into bad practice.  (There are quotes below showing that she really is arguing not to teach skills.)

How do we know that it is possible to teach skills? Christodoulou refers mainly to books on cognitive psychology which are often largely based on lab research. But this is not the best source of information on which teaching methods work best, and which don’t. The most authoritative source of information on this is meta-studies, or systematic research reviews on experiments in real classrooms with real students and real teachers. There is an excellent research review on the teaching of skills such as learning to learn and study skills etc. It is by Hattie, Biggs, and Purdie and there is a summary of it on my website.

The main findings of Hattie’s review are that if the teaching of skills is integrated into the teaching of facts, there is a very marked improvement in students’ understanding of those facts, and they learn the skill too.

It might seem surprising that learning a skill would improve understanding of facts, but if students have to think hard about the facts they’ve been taught, as skills require, they will learn these facts better.

Hattie Biggs and Purdie’s review was based on about 50 attempts to improve students’ learning-to-learn or study skills. In the nature of systematic reviews, only the best evidence was used. In each case there was a control group who were not taught the skills so that comparisons could be made between not teaching skills, and teaching them. Those who were taught skills did very much better in assessments of the understanding of the content taught. (So teaching skills helps students learn facts better, it does not impede the learning of facts as Christodoulou believes)

It’s important to realise that the effect of integrating the learning of skills into the teaching of content can be very large. Prof John Hattie, whom Christodoulou quotes with considerable approval in her book, finds in his own review that the effect size of integrating the teaching of study skills into content teaching is 0 .77. (Effect sizes measure the effect of a teaching strategy or other factor on student attainment, an effect size of 0.4 is moderate, 0.6 is high according to Hattie’s Visible Learning (2009). So Skills teaching is not only possible, it has a high effect.

The effect size of ‘Direct Instruction’ which Christodoulou advocates and found quite revelatory, is 0.59 according to Hattie’s Visible Learning, which Christodoulou mentions with approval. In the same book the average effect size for teaching study skills (integrated in or taught separately) is also 0.59. But according to Christodoulou direct instruction is a revelation, and teaching study skills is impossible. (Direct Instruction is a specific a sequence of teaching methods designed to teach a topic, which crucially includes student activity, but student activity is missing from her description.)

By the way, if skills are taught conventionally at a separate time to the teaching of the content, then the effect size is much less at about 0 .45. This is not so good, but still of moderate effectiveness.

It is not only study skills teaching that works well. See Abrami (2008) on critical thinking which finds that done the right way (see below) you can get a very high effect size. See Hattie (2009) for a list of meta studies on other skills.

You can download my summary of Hattie Biggs and Purdy’s review here https://geoffpetty.com/for-teachers/skills/. Here is a useful finding from it:

Teach Study skills in context: the relational approach. (Mean Effect size 0.77)

This is the best approach. It is to integrate study skills teaching into the subject teaching using subject specific material and tasks.  For example the subject teacher teaches essay planning, by setting a task of doing an essay that is actually required for the course. The subject teacher breaks down the skill of essay writing, and explains how to research, plan and write essays, gives students time to practice these skills in class, and ensures students get feedback on how well they have done on each sub-skill. This does not need much extra time. See chapter 21 in ‘Evidence Based Teaching’ for an account of ‘double decker lessons’ which teach skills and content at the same time but leaves most time for teaching content.

Skills are best learned alongside content. This argument is given directly in a quote Christodoulou takes from ‘Why don’t students like school’ by Dan Willingham. But Christodoulou appears not to notice this quote contradicts her own argument. The quote appears on page 77 of her book, the last sentence of the quote  reads:

“The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking”

Abrami et al (2008) finds in his meta-analysis that if teachers teach critical thinking skills is sessions dotted through the course, and students are then set tasks that get students to apply these same skills to course content, then students learn the skills very well indeed (effect size over 0.9). It also helps if students collaborate in groups or pairs, and are given clear objectives for thinking critically.

Christodoulou criticises people who believe that we only need to teach skills, and then swings to the other extreme saying that we only need to teach knowledge (facts). We need to teach both. God, or evolution seems to think we need both too: we have a special place in the brain to store facts (declarative memory), and another place to store skills, (procedural memory). Whoever else agrees with Daisy, God does not. (Hence the title for this blog)

If we don’t teach students skills such as essay writing, reading for understanding, testing your own recall before a test, note making, exam techniques etc., then students will be left to learn them unguided. This is discovery learning, which Christodoulou greatly disapproves of too!

It seems odd that an English teacher would be against teaching students how to write essays, but it just goes to show how you can be misled if you’re not careful when choosing what to read. I reckon you should read cognitive psychology, look at research into what teaching methods work best, and at research into what the best teachers do. Where you find common ground, then give that approach a try. This is ‘corroboration’ or ‘triangulation’ – a critical thinking skill.

How this book might mislead teachers

The glaring omission, in what is admittedly a short book, is how should we teach the facts that Christodoulou (and I) so greatly approves of. She seems to like ‘Direct Instruction’. Like many in the UK I call ‘Direct Instruction’ ‘Whole Class Interactive Teaching’, the evidence for it is overwhelming as she says, (and there is a lot about it in my Evidence Based Teaching).

I worry some teachers will interpret her book to mean that they should stand at the front and spout facts. This clearly won’t work. She does write on page 101 that “the most effective way of remembering something is to think about it” and quotes Dan Willingham again, saying ‘memory is the residue of thought’.

But how are we to make students think about facts? Only by asking them questions that go well beyond simple recall. So teachers must ask students to take the facts they have explained and then analyse, problem-solve, and evaluate for example. But then students are using skills.

What I agree with

I stress that there was a lot in this book I enjoyed: for example the focus on the importance of fact learning, the critiques of Oftsed’s advice on good practice which are shocking and I hope will improve not least because of the attention she has given it. I was also interested and agreed with much of her criticism that the National Curriculum being far too skills based though she might go too far here.

I passionately agree that initial teacher training should be evidence based. I liked the stress on classroom practice, and especially agree that teachers should consider carefully what students are made to think about by their lessons.

I agree that teaching facts is vital. I agree that as our factual knowledge increases we become more expert. I agree that skills are useless without facts. I agree that learning at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy is at least as important as learning at the top. I agree that much skills learning is done badly. But non of these proves that skills do not exist, or that you can’t teach skills well.

Doesn’t hold up does it? We need to teach facts and skills, or only the most privileged will learn skills.

Does Christodoulou really say don’t teach skills?

I have received some comments on twitter, and in response to this blog, worrying that I might have misread Daisy’s book.  Here are a few quotes from her book that make it clear she only approves of learning knowledge, or facts:

On page 71 first paragraph, Christodoulou  sets out the position that she criticizes, that ‘we should teach transferable skills’:

“Teach pupils the how, not the what. Teach them how to solve problems, how to analyse, how to think critically, how to evaluate. Teach them how to apply these important skills to whatever content they might encounter, now and later in life. Above all teach them how to learn, because if you teach pupils how to learn, then it does not matter how fast knowledge changes.”

 Teaching ‘how to learn’ includes teaching study skills such as checking your recall of important facts.  I set out in Chapter 21 of Evidence Based Teaching how to teach other skills such as analysis, evaluation etc. However, rather than teaching skills the way Christodoulou describes and criticises, I advocate teaching skills the way the evidence points – embedding the teaching of skills into the teaching of knowledge. Then the learning of both skills and knowledge benefits.

She makes it clear later in the same chapter that she does not think we should teach these skills, (which includes learning to learn skills), but instead should teach knowledge only. On Page 80, in the last paragraph she writes:

“It is wrong to conceive of knowledge and skill as polar opposites. However, I then often see people conclude from this that we should teach both skills and knowledge. This is not the case. What Simon shows us is that it isn’t really possible to teach skills in this abstract fashion. We achieve skilled performance through committing knowledge to long-term memory and practising using it. Once we’ve recognised that the distinction between knowledge and skills is a false dichotomy, the practical conclusion we should draw is this: if pupils commit knowledge to memory and practice retrieving it from memory, that will cause skilled performance.”

Crucially, on Page 81 in the first paragraph she writes:

“If you think that your teaching time should be completely devoted to teaching skills, or if you think that it should be divided in some kind of proportion between teaching knowledge and teaching skills, the time that is given over to teaching skills is devoted to practice that won’t actually improve skills.”

I take this to mean don’t teach study skills or essay writing skills, or how to evaluate, just teach knowledge or facts.  This is clearly wrong. It would also be boring.

What I think has happened here is that Christodoulou’s is using her book to fight an ideological war. She takes a ‘traditional’, or ‘neo-traditional’ view of education, and her book attacks the progressive view. She is right to criticise many approaches advocated by the ‘progressive’ movement, including the attempt to teach skills without content, the evidence is dead against this.  But she throws the  skills teaching “baby” out with the wooly-minded progressive “bathwater”.  There is a way to teach skills that is very effective.

Questions for my critics.

Here are a few questions for Daisy Christodoulou and those who are persuaded by her:

If we can’t learn skills:

1. Why has the brain special places to store skills (procedural memory), if all we need is knowledge (declarative memory) ?

2. Why have rigourous experiments in real classrooms with control groups repeatedly found that teaching skills can raise students’ performance markedly? See for example Abrami (2008) on teaching critical thinking.

3. Are you really saying that we can’t teach students to read for understanding by underlining key points in a text and then summarising in a mind map, or with key points? Are you really saying we can’t teach students to write essays, or to practice their recall of important facts? Or are you saying that if you teach this, it doesn’t work?

4. If you say you don’t approve of discovery learning, why do you, by implication, condemn students to learning skills by this method?

References

Abrami, P. C. (2008) “Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: a Stage 1 meta-analysis.” Review of Educational Research 78: 1102 -1134

Christodoulou, D.(2014) Seven Myths about Education. London: Routledge ……First published by the Curriculum Centre (2013)

Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London: Routledge

Hattie Biggs and Purdie (1996) “Effects of Learning Skills Interventions on Student Learning: A Meta Analysis.” Review of Educational Research Summer 1996 Vol. 66, No 2, pp 99-136

Petty, G. (2009) ‘Evidence Based Teaching’ 2nd Ed. Oxford: OUP

https://geoffpetty.com/for-teachers/skills/

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