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Summary of the video: Keep your goals to yourself.

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Summary of the video: Keep your goals to yourself.

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Summary of progress in my classroom? By Chris Hildrew, with a touch of formative assessment by John Hattie

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The myth of progress

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

C. S. Lewis

We tend to believe that things are getting better, that mankind is on a journey to some perfect state in which irrationality will be banished. This belief shapes and distorts our thinking. Darwin's evolutionary theory of natural selection is often interpreted as meaning that random biological mutations, which are then inherited and selected as being most fit for the context in which a species finds itself, are working towards some ultimate goal. They aren't. If we accept Darwin's theory, we also have to accept that our existence is a matter of chance. We are something of a fluke.

Karl Popper, thought something similar was happening in the realm of ideas. He saw the growth of knowledge as being the result of a process closely resembling natural selection. He thought that "our knowledge consists, at every moment, of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by surviving so far in their struggle for existence; a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit".

But even a cursory glance at the history of ideas demonstrates that if this is true, it's a maddeningly slow process. In education alone many hypotheses which are unfit continue to lurch about our landscape. Maybe we can better understand the spread of ideas by considering Richard Dawkins' theory of memes and mimetic evolution. In The Selfish Gene, he explains that just as genes are driven to replicate themselves through the process of natural selection, memes - ideas, tunes, images - also replicate themselves in a similarly self-interested way. Through a process of cultural transmission, ideas spread themselves from person to person and from consciousness to consciousness regardless of whether they are good or bad ideas.

Obviously some memes are incredibly useful or beautiful - the ideas of central limit theorem, King Lear, growth mindsets, the electric light bulb, the idea of education itself - but others are not. It often seems that all an idea needs in order to be accepted is to be shouted loudly enough and often enough for it to become something we no longer question. When this happens memes enter the realm of conventional wisdom and become self-evidently true in the minds of many; their survival is assured. Or as John Maynard Keynes put it, "the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas".

Our implicit belief in progress hoodwinks us into accepting that results should always be improving and things can only get better. We only have to remember the second law of thermodynamics: everything moves inexorably towards entropy and chaos. (The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium increases because isolated systems always evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy.) Any temporary sense of progress is but a beguiling illusion, just another self-interested meme that replicates as it passes from mind to mind.

Back to progress. Is it actually possible for pupils' learning to improve in a short time or at a great rate and continue for an extended period?

I don't think it is. Of course we can have breakthroughs but these are rare. Sudden breakthroughs are usually the result of the steady accretion of understanding over time - the fact that they seem to happen quickly is misleading. For the most part, you have to make a choice between rapid and sustained and, this being the case, I'm going to plump for sustained. After all, progress that doesn't last isn't really progress, is it? This idea that progress can be rapid has led us into believing that meaningful progress can take place in individual lessons and that learning follows a neat, linear trajectory. Children move from knowing nothing to knowing a little, to knowing a lot in a smooth and easily navigable and safely predictable manner. This is self-evidently wrong as even a cursory examination of children's work over time makes clear. Progress is, if anything, halting, frustrating and surprising. Learning is better seen as integrative, transformative, and reconstitutive - the linear metaphor in terms of movement from A to B is unhelpful. The learner doesn't go anywhere but develops a different relationship with what they know.

Progress is just a metaphor. It doesn't really describe objective reality; it provides a comforting fiction to conceal the absurdity of our lives. We can't help using metaphors to describe learning because we have no idea what it actually looks like. Even though our metaphors are imprecise approximations, the metaphors we use matter. They permeate our thinking. Learning is often conceived as a staircase which pupils steadily ascend. The long shadow cast by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget has meant linear 'stage theories' have dominated the way we see the mysterious process of learning. As we know from our own messy journey through life, we often seem to step back or sideways as often as we step up. An alternative metaphor is offered by cognitive psychologist Robert Siegler, who has developed the theory that learning is like 'overlapping waves'. Piaget saw learning progressing in neat stages like a staircase: children would master level 1 before ascending to level 2, level 3 and so on. Instead, Siegler envisages learning as "a gradual ebbing and flowing of the frequencies of alternative ways of thinking, with new approaches being added and old ones being eliminated as well". He suggests that as we encounter new rules, strategies, theories, and ways of thinking these wash through our minds like waves, sometimes obliterating what was there before, sometimes pushing suddenly forward in great surges.

This might be a more useful way to frame our thinking about progress. Siegler's image of surging and receding waves helps to explain the seemingly random retreats and swells we experience as we grapple with new skills and tricky concepts. Rather than feeling ashamed about 'slipping back' into the old ways of thinking and acting we thought we had out- grown, such episodes are better viewed as part of the natural ebb and flow of learning. Slipping back is part of the liminal process of integrating new and troublesome concepts into our mental webs.

If you're interested in how we might attempt to measure something inherently unmeasurable, I'll be speaking at The Key's Life After Levels Conference on 19th May. See you there.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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The myth of progress - David Didau: The Learning Spy

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We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. C. S.

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After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone, but Derek Sivers says it’s better to keep goals secret. He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them.

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The psychology of your future self | Dan Gilbert

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If you're like me, you work long hours every day and are constantly busy. Why is it then that we often feel fully busy, but unproductive? Why is it that given the amount of work we are trying to produce, we find it so hard to devote time to the activities that are most important to our long-term happiness and wellbeing?

The term "big rocks" describes important undertakings that are easily crowded out by all of the other things we feel we need to get done during the day. Big rocks often include thinking strategically about our careers, making a long-term financial plan, protecting our health, making progress on a large project, learning a new skill, and other activities closely tied to our long-term goals and ambitions. When we face each of these objectives, we recognize their importance, but it is also clear to us how incredibly easy it is to put them off until another day when we're not as busy fighting fires and dealing with a constant flow of new to-dos.

As a social scientist, I spend my days trying to understand why people (myself included) often make decisions that aren't in line with their long-term goals. We want to lose weight but have another cookie anyway; we want to save money but decide to upgrade to the more expensive seats at a concert. My goal is to use research to understand our behavior, and find ways to help overcome some of our destructive natural tendencies-helping us to make better decisions and spend our time and energy in ways that help us lead more productive, healthy, and satisfying lives.

So, what are some of the common reasons why our short-term actions prevent us from taking care of the big rocks, and what can we do about this?

1. We Don't Use Our Productive Time Well

Most of us are most productive in the morning. (Some people are night owls, but most are most productive before lunchtime.) Unfortunately, many of us do not use this precious time wisely-for example, one of the first things we do when we arrive at work is check our email, Facebook, and other tasks that don't need our full attention and cognitive capacity.

Instead of immediately focusing on email, meetings, and other activities, we would be better off spending the morning doing productive work that requires a higher cognitive capacity (thinking, planning, calculating, for example), and delaying the tasks that don't require as much mental energy to the hours when our capacity is diminished.

2. We Prefer Activities That Help Us Feel That We Are "Done"

Unlike small, unimportant tasks, the challenge with big rocks is that our efforts aren't immediately rewarded with visible progress. Responding to 15 unimportant emails has a tangible output of 15 emails, and this can makes us feel like our morning was well spent.

What about thinking critically for an hour? These kinds of activities are often accompanied by no tangible output, which makes us feel as if we have made no progress.

The key to success here is to break down the big rocks into smaller milestones so that you can feel a sense of progress. Then mark your progress on each milestone in a visual, dashboard-like way, so you can see your progress and be encouraged by it.

Let's say you are planning your next large project and to get a sense of progress you break the overall task into: creating a shortlist of ideas, creating a pro/con grid for each idea, create a list of requirements and dependencies, etc.

We get a lot of pleasure from crossing finished tasks off the to-do list. Let's make it easier to get that wonderful feeling while working on the big rocks.

3. We Wait for Inspiration in Order to Work on Complex Tasks

Waiting for inspiration is a common excuse we give ourselves to avoid difficult tasks. In reality, the best step we can take is to simply make a plan and start. This is true even for creative fields.

George Gershwin famously said, "Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come."

Set aside time, jump in and get done what you can. When you look back at what you have accomplished, you'll be glad you did.

4. We Procrastinate

Structured procrastination is our ability to do nothing while feeling like we're doing something. This includes things like getting to " inbox zero," going into our to-do list and reordering things in the "right" order, and cleaning old files from our desktop. The problem with these tasks is that they give us the sense we're achieving something when in fact we're not.

If it's important to you to have a clean inbox and orderly files, or to finish any other task that enables structured procrastination-remember it's wasting more time than it saves. But, if you still feel the need to get these things done set them at the right priority and get to them only after you have made real progress on a big rock first.

5. We Don't Realize We're Choosing the Wrong Things

Sometimes, not working on the right things is not an active choice. We're not actively rejecting working on a big rock, but if we don't think about it, and don't experience immediate consequences, we just don't do it.

One of the challenges is that big rocks often don't find their ways to our calendar. Our calendars show us mostly meetings, and the time needed for big rocks is usually the empty space between meetings. When we see the empty time, we think that we have extra time and we add more meetings, when in fact we should be realizing the "empty time" is not empty at all: It is the most important time we have and it should be dedicated to our big rocks.

What we need to do is to be aware of these big rocks, and the importance of the empty time, and then make a daily commitment to the big rock we want to tackle during our "free time."

6. We Let the List Become Too Long

With a long, overwhelming list of to-do items, it becomes more tempting to tackle the small, easy things in order to make visible progress. This gives us a feeling of quick wins and an artificial sense of making progress.

There's nothing wrong with keeping a to-do list, but we need to make sure that the joy of erasing things from our to-do list is not shifting the way we spend our time. One way to shift our attention back to the big rocks is to break our big rocks down into a few sub-tasks that together serve a big rock: This way we get both the joy of erasing things from out to-do list and we make progress on the things we really care about.

In this short article, I have described the challenges we all face with our time and priorities, and I am leaving it up to you to figure out the way you are going to deal with the big rocks and not spend your time on the small tasks that matter less. At the same time no two cases are the same. When it comes to time management, simply being aware of our mistakes and fallacies is an important step in setting our priorities in the right way.

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6 Reasons You Keep Making Decisions That Work Against You

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If you're like me, you work long hours every day and are constantly busy. Why is it then that we often feel fully busy, but unproductive? Why is it that given the amount of work we are trying to produce, we find it so hard to devote time to the activities that are most important to our long-term happiness and wellbeing?

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If we look at the school system of today, we tempt to teach the pupils in levels or as you call it in Dutch; learning goals. We teach them by dividing certain levels of learning goals or as developmental psychologist Jean Piaget says: “ Children should master level 1 before ascending to level 2, level 3 and so on. But is this a way to motivate pupils? And will the pupils show any sign of progression? Or will they get stuck at a certain level. As David Didau says; “ Progress should be both rapid and sustained. It should happen really quickly and should last for a really long time.” This is technically correct, but practically incorrect as Didau says;” Progress that doesn’t last, isn’t really progress”. That’s why we should use substained as our head subject. Children should move from knowing nothing to knowing a little, to knowing a lot in a smooth and easily navigable and safely predictable manner.

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This is a response to the April #blogsync topic.
Progress in a lesson - knowledge
Many bloggers have written persuasively about how difficult it is to see progress over the course of a single lesson, and how it is a ridiculous demand for senior leaders to make when observing a single lesson that in order for it to be outstanding "progress is at least good for different groups and is exemplary for some." I agree, but there are clear instances where I can see progress in a single lesson in my classroom, and these seem to be around the acquisition of knowledge. A student can come in to my classroom not knowing how to use colons and semi-colons to construct a complex list, and they can leave knowing it. Students can come in not knowing the difference in camera movement between a pan and a crab or a crane and a tilt, and leave not only knowing it but having filmed using them. They can come in to the classroom not knowing who the "Havisham" in Duffy's poem is, and they can leave wanting to read more of Great Expectations. This learning can happen by discovery in a carefully planned inductive activity, it can happen by direct instruction, it can take the whole lesson or five minutes. I can check it in a mini-plenary, via whiteboards, thumbs up, traffic light cards, a homework, or if I'm feeling particularly Ofqual a twenty-question in-silence written test.

Knowledge matters. It is of critical importance that children leave my lessons knowing more than they did when they came in. Imparting knowledge is part of my core responsibility but, it seems to me, is the simplest bit of this most challenging job.
Progress over time - skills
More difficult to quantify, and with much less "stickability", is the development of skills. This is a long game. As Tom Sherrington memorably put it, "it takes the time it takes". You can develop skills through direct instruction, but this is more about modelling, trial and error, repetition, and what David Didau calls " deliberate practice ". In other words, the students themselves have to develop and strengthen the intellectual muscles used in that particular skill. The ability to construct an evidenced and persuasive argument is something that develops slowly, over time. I rehearse it in writing, applying the skill to Shakespeare or school uniform, smoking or Seneca; I repeat it in spoken debate with feminism, Marxism, media theory on in-role character defences. I will use the process to intervene, refining and developing the skill in written feedback or spoken interactions, and I will plan peer assessments so the students can benefit from each other's expertise.

Progress in skills is rarely linear. Students will often produce a stunning assessment, then slip back in the next one. Slowly, incrementally, they get there. How do I know? Because I am a subject specialist - I know what I am talking about. I know what an evidenced and persuasive argument looks like, I know what a well-edited cross-cut film sequence looks like. I know the difference between a "sophisticated" piece of writing and one which is "assured".

The hard thing with assessing skills is, that unlike with knowledge, there are so many ways to get them right, so many degrees of success. There are infinite shades of grey in each of my examples above, and in each case I have to apply my judgment. Sometimes, my judgment will not agree with AQA's or OCR's or Ofqual's, in which case I will protest and make representations and appeal but, ultimately, refocus my attention on the students. I still know what a sophisticated piece of writing is, but it is essential for my students' success that I also know what AQA think a sophisticated piece of writing is and that they get the benefit of both definitions.
Progress that really matters - development
The progress that matters to me most in my classroom, however, is not subject specific. One of the real privileges of teaching 11-18 is seeing students arrive as children and leave as adults. The influence that teachers can have over young people in this phase is a humbling and heavy responsibility. Schools should help to shape tomorrow's adults with compassion, empathy, a sense of responsibility, an understanding of the world around them, and the confidence to make their own minds up. I strive to provide students with the skills to express those qualities in the best ways they can. Often, I won't see this progress in my classroom. But, sometimes, a few years later, an ex-student will pop back to school, or I'll see them in the street, or a shop, or on holiday, or they'll contact me on Twitter, or, as has happened five times so far in my career, they apply for a teaching job at my school. Then I'll see it. I'll see what well-adjusted, astute and confident adults they turned out to be. I'll remember them at 14, and know that I played my small part in that astonishing metamorphosis of growing-up. And there is no prouder moment for a teacher than that.

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Progress in my classroom? How it is made and how I know it.

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This is a response to the April #blogsync topic. Progress in a lesson - knowledge Many bloggers have written persuasively about how difficult it is to see progress over the course of a single lesson, and how it is a ridiculous demand for senior leaders to make when observing a single lesson that in order...

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Myth of progress by Djoy