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An article that looks into 'priming', how memory works and whether retrieval should be completed at the start of the lesson

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

It's a simple premise: if you think memory is important to learning, then memory formation is, by this very argument, important as well. And memory formation comes before memory conditioning (e.g., retrieval practice). With the publication of a n euroscience paper on memory formation we now have convergence between cognitive science's research in how memory works [in education] with neuroscience's research in how memory works. Remembering knowledge over time and how to do something, after a gap of time, are very much vogue in education right now and rightly so. However, this article is about the publication of neuroscience research and what this neuroscience paper suggests about the way some in education will approach their lesson design as a consequence (a longer write up of these ideas can be found here).

Let's get some caveats out the way. The research in this paper is about cells in the brain and formation of memory through the expression of genes. It's not about the more social concept of mind, nor indeed does the paper suggest what teachers might do with this new knowledge of the brain. I'm not claiming that this paper proves anything about how we should teach, but I'm aware that it does bring criticality to the way that some think that memories are formed and need to be conditioned (especially within education) and so it is worth investigation. It's such a simple premise: do you think memory is important to learning? If the answer is yes, then memory formation is just as important as memory conditioning, but more importantly comes first in the time line. And, you might ask yourself, how long is that time line?
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So what does this neuroscience paper say? Well it said that the formation and recall of memory works a bit like a body reacting to a vaccine. The first jab makes the body receptive to it and gets it ready for the booster. When the booster arrives a surge of gene expression takes place, the strength of which controls the number of cells ready to be recalled in case they are required (e.g. if an infection shows up then the body is ready to react). So there are three parts of the process. The initial activation is the first step - this is where memory is formed for the first time. The next part of the priming process is at a genetic level - a reformulation of the cell architecture which is effectively 'readying architecture for gene expression'. Finally, a warm reactivation event in which expression of the arc gene happens across the reformulated architecture ready for future remembering. The reactivation event is the crucial event. We can speculate then, that when you teach you are laying down the first activation- a first pass of the schema* itself, but the gene expression at this point will be small. Indeed, over time, the effectiveness will wane as the potential memory cells have not had a second reactivation event (weak remembering (forgetting) is why teachers are using the conditioning approach of retrieval practice so much). When you do enter the reactivation window that is when you supercharge the memory cell formation. Further, should you need the schema to be ready for recall and to be produced on demand (e.g. an examination), you undertake a warm reactivation event yet again to prepare for the recall (retrieval) event itself. Instead of going straight into a full retrieval of memory cold, there should be a warm up process where you are getting the memory ready to access the schema in case it is required. Then you should ask for a full retrieval. It is very important to note the distinction between retrieval (accessing memory cells) and retrieval practice (conditioning a rote response to stimuli through the 'testing effect'). Our work here is focused on the strong formation of memory and subsequent strong remembering, not on conditioning a response.

*Note discussions around the concept of schema
3 Stage Process of Priming
Stage 1 - teaching and re-teaching of new/schema through an activation phase (followed by a delay of some days to allow the biological reformulation of architecture). Update: Phase 1 trials suggest that a 3-7 days gap following activation is the optimum time span.

Stage 2 - warm reactivation of the schema leading to revisiting the schema from Stage 1 (this triggers the expression of the arc gene needed for memory formation)

Stage 3 - remembering of schema associated to Stage 2 alongside teaching of new schema

How does this affect teaching then? Well, currently, there is a lot of focus on retrieval practice, a psychological conditioning process - retrieving knowledge repeatedly with the view to making the recall stronger through something called the testing effect. Yet this paper is suggesting that there is a big elephant in the room. Memory formation needs to happen first. And memory formation takes much longer than you think. If you go straight for a retrieval quiz then that's the equivalent of asking the schema to be recalled without having reformulated cells ready to express the arc genes. You are still in the activation phase. It's not necessarily strengthening the memory formation. Cold questions and retrieval quizzes at the start of the lesson and very soon after the first learning don't reflect what this neuroscience research says. What you should be doing is something else - controlling the priming event.

Controlling the priming event means knowing architecture has formed and is only available for a short window of time and that you can take advantage of this knowledge through a variety of pedagogies. Think about discussions and recaps of the topic - quite wide ranging discussions rather than small minutiae. Then, in the main part of the lesson, the small minutiae will more accurately be recalled and more importantly, the process of priming and the subsequent remembering (producing memory to face the challenge) will work more effectively. It is important to see the nuances here of some of the things we do in teaching. Retrieval at the start of a lesson of content that is not going to be used is reactivating the wrong (cells containing the) schema. In addition, that's a different process altogether - that's conditioning - (retrieval and retrieval practice are two different things). According to the science in this paper, you want to be ensuring that you actually work with the schema for which the cellular architecture was created as that will lead to expression of arc genes which are responsible for creating more memories. In some ways the paper informs us on the gaps between cognitive science and neuroscience.

The main gap is this - much of the work on what we do as teachers is once memory has been formed: reducing extraneous load, conditioning memory through revisiting and so forth. However, all of this practice is reliant on the idea that memory is formed in a one off event and that we begin the conditioning process immediately. What the science in this paper says is that is not how memory is formed. And this has implications for the way we as teachers approach learning. There is a period of time where memory is formed. It's not instantaneous and nor is it the time for conditioning. Instead, it's the time for supercharging memory formation. If memory is important to learning, then creating strong memories could, we speculate, lead to more efficient use of time by a teacher later on once memory has been formed. Less time spent conditioning memory would free up time for more learning of further knowldge to take place - but that's something for our research study to consider.

The future could be, one could speculate - not starting the lesson with the conditioning process of retrieval practice, but starting the lesson with warm reactivation of the schema and with a teacher awareness of who is not meeting this learning for the second time (e.g. absences, barriers to learning) and how long it has been since the activation phase. In particular, you should not start the lesson with retrieval of schema which won't be used in the lesson as this does not lead to expression of the arc gene necessary for memory formation. The lesson itself should contain both remembering and new learning together as the brain constructs the new knowledge (or skill) into gene expression and starts to get further architecture ready for the next warm reactivation event. When that happens, it will be ready to swing into action with both the original knowledge and the new knowledge constructed into a single schema. This stronger formation of memory will lead to better remembering and require less future retrieval practice (because we currently use conditioning to supplement weak memory formation). Retrieval should still form part of the lesson, but if incorporated into the main lesson following a warm reactivation event at the start of the lesson then it will be more effective. And lastly, remember, the schema used should be relevant to the lesson.

It is a potential change in the sequence of learning that we have come to see become quite mainstream. First, an activation event, then a gap of time to allow for reformulation of the cell architecture (Phase 1 trials suggest the optimum time for this gap to be 3-7 days), then either a warm reactivation event alone or warm reactivation and new knowledge together to start the architectural reformulation necessary for expression of the arc gene in the next warm reactivation event. In addition, less retrieval practice is necessary. This is because we currently use retrieval practice (interleaved or not) to condition a pupil into producing knowledge in response to a question - known as the testing effect. By making the original formation of memory stronger through the priming process (expression of the arc gene) remembering will be stronger. You are supercharging the formation of memory through creating more gene expression at cell level. We have worked up further thinking here on what the implications would be for interleaved retrieval pratice, Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, OFSTED inspections, NPQs and even SEND. All of these areas could be affected by this concept of supercharging memory formation.

There is lot of theorising there and I'm sure those with good knowledge of both science and education will be able to add more thoughts. This paper does not at any point inform us how to teach and it's important to emphasise that point. There is a major caveat also which is that taking science and turning it into educational practice has lots of limitations in terms of ecological validity. However, it is an interesting paper and it does suggest a different, and scientific rather than theoretical, model of how memory is formed and how a priming event could be better than retrieval for the start of a lesson.

We have launched a two phase project to investigate the concept of priming and enhancing the formation of memory using these ideas. The active part of this project will run from September 2021 to July 2022 and we have completed Phase 1. Our thanks to everyone who participated. We are now working on the tool kit for Phase 2. We recruited 40 schools who are currently participating in Phase 2 of this research. If you are interested in being part of this research (we still have space for further schools in Phase 2) or any other research projects then drop me an email at james.shea@beds.ac.uk or you can find me on Twitter at @englishspecial.

Dr James Shea, Principal Lecturer in Teacher Education
Copyright © 2021. James Shea. All rights reserved

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Cognitive Science v Neuroscience: retrieval at the start of a lesson or not?

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com It's a simple premise: if you think memory is important to learning, then memory formation is, by this very argument, important as well. And memory formation comes before memory conditioning (e.g., retrieval practice). With the publication of a neuroscience paper on memory formation we now have convergence between cognitive...

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How should we deal with students who are so keen to participate that they disturb the learning of others?

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How to use Mayer's 12 principles of multimedia (with examples)

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If you're creating a training video, PowerPoint presentation, or eLearning course, how do you ensure your final product will be an effective learning resource?

You don't want to spend hundreds of hours developing an eLearning only to find that your audience thinks it confusing and uninteresting.

To help us create the most effective multimedia learning experiences, Richard Mayer has developed a theory of 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning. Think of these principles as 'guidelines' as you develop your digital learning experiences - learning videos, eLearning courses, and instructor-led PowerPoint presentations.

As you begin building your next multimedia learning experience, we suggest printing out the 12 principles as a checklist. Keep the checklist next to your computer as a helpful reference to design and develop your learning experience.

Instead of flooding your audience with paragraphs of Arial text, why not use a little science theory to help you stay on track.

Let's start by defining some terms.

What is multimedia learning?

Multimedia learning can be defined as a form of computer-aided instruction that uses two modalities concurrently. This means learning through the combined use of visuals (through pictures, animations, text, and videos) and audio (through narrated voiceover).

Since the 1970's, the science has been well established that visual elements such as images are far more effective for learning compared to text alone. Fast forward to the modern digital age, and we all experience multimedia learning every single day - through YouTube videos, eLearning courses, PowerPoint decks, free online MOOCs. The list goes on and on.

Researcher Richard Mayer wrote a book called Multimedia Learning where he explains his research on how best to structure multimedia learning experiences to maximize learner comprehension. Today, we're going to cover the basics of his 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning.

1. The Coherence Principle

First up is the Coherence Principle, which states that humans learn best when extraneous, distracting material is not included.

Simply said, cut out the extras. Use only the information that the learner needs. And most often, that means simple text and simple visuals that relate directly to the learning topic. Remove all the fluff.
How to use the Coherence Principle:
You can use the Coherence Principle as you're planning your visual elements. Ask yourself, "Is this image 100% necessary to help with comprehension? Or could you find a better one? Does this message use simple enough language so the audience will understand? Maybe I could trim down a few words."

The Coherence Principle is also quite helpful when you're editing your training video or eLearning course. As you re-watch the experience, make sure to watch with a critical "Coherence Principle" eye. Determine how you can reduce, simplify, and clarify.

2. The Signaling Principle

Next up is the Signaling Principle, which essentially means that humans learn best when they are shown exactly what to pay attention to on the screen. If there is a ton of information on the screen, how is the learner supposed to know what is the most important part?
How to use the Signaling Principle:
As a learning developer, this is where you can utilize the signaling principle by thoughtfully using features such as highlighting important words and using animated arrows to point out significant information. Another way you can use the signaling principle is by having slides or scenes that separate learning sections. This is a quick and easy way to signal to the learner that we're moving on to the next topic.

3. The Redundancy Principle

Next up? The Redundancy Principle. This principle suggests that humans learn best with narration and graphics, as opposed to narration, graphics, and text. The theory here is that if you already have narration and graphics, then the text on top is just redundant information. And this can be overwhelming for a learner.
How to use the Redundancy Principle:
You can use this principle for videos or eLearning courses that have narrated audio. Try to only include graphics or text, but not both together. Or if they are together, make the text minimal.

Personally, from a learning perspective, I enjoy reading text on screen so I what I suggest whenever possible is to include closed captioning that can be optionally turned on and off. This can't be done in all cases, but I definitely suggest that whenever possible.

4. The Spatial Contiguity Principle

The Spatial Contiguity Principle is about the actual space in between your text and visuals on the screen, stating that humans learn best when relevant text and visuals are physically close together.
How to use the Spatial Contiguity Principle:
This one makes sense intuitively. You should keep all related text and graphics physically close together in your frame. This makes it much easier for learners to process the information, using less energy to decipher meaning. This principle is pretty straight forward. Make it easy for your audience to know where to look for information.

5. The Temporal Contiguity Principle

The Temporal Contiguity Principle states that humans learn best when corresponding words and visuals are presented together, instead of in consecutive order.
How to use the Temporal Contiguity Principle:
If you're introducing a new process, the animation (or visual) should be occurring at the same time as the voiceover audio. This is preferred to having the voiceover audio play first, and then watching a visual after. You can use this by making sure your voiceover audio is always timed well with your visuals or animations.

6. The Segmenting Principle

Next is the Segmenting Principle which states that humans learn best when information is presented in segments, rather than one long continuous stream. Mayer found that when learners can control the pace of their learning, they performed better on recall tests.
How to use the Segmenting Principle:
You can use this principle by providing learners with more control over their learning. This is done by adding next buttons or allowing the speed which a video plays.

This principle also suggests that learning is broken up into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Make sure that no one lesson, slide, or video has too much information packed in it.

7. The Pre-Training Principle

The Pre-training Principle states that humans learn more efficiently if they already know some of the basics. This often means understanding basic definitions, terms, or concepts before beginning the learning experience.

And this makes intuitive sense. If a learner starts an eLearning course knowing about the topic, they can easily become overwhelmed once complex visuals and definitions start being thrown their way. A bit of pre-training before starting the course really would have helped.
How to use the Pre-Training Principle:
You can use this principle by creating an introductory "guide" or "cheat sheet" for learners to use throughout the course. Or you can create an entire lesson up front dedicated to understanding the basics, before the learner moves into the actual course.

8. The Modality Principle

The Modality Principle states that humans learn best from visuals and spoken words than from visuals and printed words. This doesn't mean that you should never use text on screen, it simply means that if there are visuals and too much text, learners will be overwhelmed.
How to use the Modality Principle:
Try to limit the amount of text you use on screen overall. Rely more on visuals, unless you need to define key terms, list steps, or provide directions.

9. The Multimedia Principle

The Multimedia Principle states that humans learn best from words and pictures than just words alone. This principle is sort of the foundation of all Mayer's principles, that images and words are more effective than words alone.
How to use the Multimedia Principle:
You can use this principle by being very thoughtful about the images you select. Remember that these images need to enhance or clarify the information.

10. The Personalization Principle

The Personalization Principle says that humans learn best from a more informal, conversational voice than an overly formal voice. Having a more casual voice actually improves the learning experience.
How to use the Personalization Principle:
You can use this by keeping your language simple and casual. Try to avoid overly professional sounding text, or long, complex words. It also helps to use the first person (you, I, we, our). This is where it helps to consider your audience demographics and try to match the tone of your voiceover to enhance personalization.

11. The Voice Principle

The Voice Principle states that humans learn best from a human voice than a computer voice. While Siri and Alexa are getting pretty close, there is no substitution for a human voice. It's important to note that the studies are still rather preliminary for the Voice Principle. But even so, it makes sense to use a human for your voiceover.
How to use the Voice Principle:
You can use this principle by recording your own professional narration, or hiring a professional to create an audio voiceover. Make sure your audio is high quality by using a professional microphone and mastering in audio editing software.

12. The Image Principle

The Image Principle states that humans do not necessarily learn better from a talking head video. Talking head videos are incredibly common in eLearning courses and MOOCs. The research on this one is also still in its early phases, so take this principle with a grain of salt.

The thinking here is that if there is important information to be learned, relevant visuals on the screen will be more effective than showing a talking head of an instructor.
How to use the Image Principle:
Instead of having a talking head of the instructor, use relevant animations and visuals that help reinforce the audio voiceover. Note that talking heads can provide some value for the instructor by building credibility and trust. This is especially useful to establish at the beginning of your learning experience. Just try to limit your use of talking heads as your video or course dives deeper into the learning content.

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How to Use Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning [Examples Included] - Water Bear Learning

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If you're creating a training video, PowerPoint presentation, or eLearning course, how do you ensure your final product will be an effective learning resource? You don't want to spend hundreds of hours developing an eLearning only to find that your audience thinks it confusing and uninteresting.

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A concise article that provides a useful refresher on how best to use questioning of and for learning

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Skilful questioning: The beating heart of good pedagogy

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Questions are an integral part of classroom life and essential to every teacher's pedagogical repertoire. Questioning serves many purposes: it engages students in the learning process and provides opportunities for students to ask questions themselves. It challenges levels of thinking and informs whether students are ready to progress with their learning.

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Different approaches into the ways to build core life skills into your curriculum to help prepare pupils for the next stages of their lives.

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There's no one definition or list, though it's often associated with skills that help people to manage and live a better quality of life. According to the web service SkillsYouNeed, important life skills may include:

The life skills you teach will depend on the age of your pupils - for example, job-related skills might be more relevant to Key Stage (KS) 4 than KS3 pupils.

Hold one-off extra-curricular days throughout the year

These 'focus days' can involve workshops, presentations or lessons on specific life skills.

You may want to:

Use form tutors to deliver these as they have stronger relationships with pupils

Divide staff into specialist areas of delivery

Bring in external experts - to keep this cost-effective, have external speakers or agencies deliver sessions to entire year groups.

Highworth Grammar School in Kent runs extra-curricular days where pupils focus on topics such as careers, enterprise and study techniques.

If you choose to run these yourself, Barclays LifeSkills has free lesson plans and presentation slides that you can adapt for your school. Topics range from problem solving to adaptability and money skills.

Factors to consider

Make core life skills part of your school culture, like at Warminster School, to help pupils and staff see these days as a key element of the curriculum (rather than a bolt-on to core lessons)

Address any concerns about how focus days might affect timetabling and workloads to make sure your staff are fully on board

Review the relevance and quality of each focus day so that it provides value and purpose

Plan these days carefully so that they don't always fall on the same day of the week and don't disrupt the same subjects

Book external agencies or speakers well in advance if you're using them

Plan discrete lessons

You can offer these to all pupils or to specific groups.

To make these lessons most effective:

Develop a number of mini-courses for each skill - this will enable your pupils to engage with a core life skill over a longer period of time than is possible with one-off focus days

Ask a teacher with particular expertise to lead each course - for example, you could ask 1 teacher to lead a series of 6 sessions on financial management to 1 form group. That teacher could then repeat this series for other form groups over the course of the year

Patcham High School in Brighton and Hove teaches life skills as a compulsory subject. The school has a team of teachers responsible for areas such as enterprise and economy, career development, philosophy and ethics, and healthy lifestyles.

Factors to consider

Make sure staff and pupils know why each course is relevant and the value it will bring

You'll likely need a dedicated team of teachers to run discrete lessons, so you'll need to organise staffing and timetabling carefully

Use tutor time

This can help you efficiently use your school's timetable and help pupils see core life skills as part of your school culture.

Factors to consider

You might need to set up a dedicated team of staff to do this so you have a 'specialist' in each core life skill. You'd then need to rotate this team of 'specialists' within tutor time, as form tutors might not have the subject knowledge to deliver core life skills

You'll need to make tutorial sessions longer to teach core life skills effectively. This might involve increasing tutor time once a week and clawing back time by reducing all other periods. You could rotate the longer tutor period day to spread out the impact on subjects

Marriotts School in Stevenage has dedicated tutor sessions that cover character education, cultural capital and careers. Each half-term the school arranges a whole week of tutor activities around these themes.

Embed life skills in existing subjects

You could work core life skills into subjects like personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education and citizenship. The lessons would emphasise skills and ideas beyond course specifications and exams.

You may want to:

Conduct an audit of your curriculum to see where you're already teaching life skills in existing subjects. You'll then be able to find opportunities to fill any gaps

Combine this approach with one of the other three described above to make it most effective

The Hazeley Academy in Milton Keynes covers 3 core themes (health and wellbeing, relationships, and living in the wider world) in PSHE as part of its Life Skills programme.

Measure the impact of teaching core life skills

Think carefully about what impact you want core life skills to have, regardless of whether they're easily measurable.

Identify what type of assessment you want to conduct - this could be:

Ongoing formative assessment of how pupils' skills are developing

A summation of what skills they've gained the end of KS4

In the short term:

See what teachers and pupils think of your chosen method to teach core life skills

Use their feedback to help you make changes and refine how your school teaches these skills

In the medium term, teaching life skills might lead to behaviour changes in pupils

You could measure its impact on pupil behaviour by using a s elf-assessment questionnaire or teacher observation, for example:

Checking whether pupils use mindfulness exercises after sessions on wellbeing

Asking pupils which study skills they use regularly after sessions on this particular skill

You could also use pupil questionnaires and surveys to check how they enjoy the content they're learning.

In the long term, look for impact on pupils' employment prospects and study choices

Core life skills may also have a direct or indirect impact on your pupils' attainment in other subjects. For example, financial management and enterprise skills can have an impact on attainment in maths. You could therefore:

Look at exam results when identifying the long-term impact

Seek feedback from employers and/or further education colleges to see whether teaching core life skills has had an impact on pupils' readiness for employment or further education

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Approaches to teaching core life skills (secondary)

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There's no one definition or list, though it's often associated with skills that help people to manage and live a better quality of life. According to the web service SkillsYouNeed, important life skills may include: The life skills you teach will depend on the age of your pupils - for example, job-related skills might be more relevant to Key Stage (KS) 4 than KS3 pupils.

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Introducing Long Term Memory and Working Memory:

o Key features
o How do they interact during learning to build (and use) the memory base.
o Guidelines to aligning teaching and learning strategies with learning stages

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Introducing long-term memory and working memory: o Key features and limitations o How do they interact during learning to build (and then use) the knowledge base. o Guidelines to aligning teaching and learning strategies with the learning stages.

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Mike Shomaker - our NPQH cohort found this interesting ...

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As schools and colleges return to full-on remote learning, I've been asked multiple times to provide suggestions to support teachers in this endeavour and to provide CPD inputs for teachers in various contexts. Of course I don't have students of my own but I have delivered a lot of online training and gleaned a lot from engaging with people sharing ideas so, for what it is worth, here are my thoughts about what is essential and how to blend live delivery with offline learning.

First of all, here is a link to the previous posts focused on tech solutions for checking students' writing - this contains links to numerous platforms and suggestions from teachers using them.

As ever much of this lies in the detail of the context you're in: the age of students, the subject content, student access to technology, their capacity for independent work, the functionality of the core platform. However, as far as a general set of guidance goes, I think there are six areas to think about in every context.

The table below outlines the key ideas for each section of the flow diagram. The formatting works best on a full screen, not a phone. View or download this pdf for a different format.:

Plan the Curriculum
What am I teaching?
Big picture: weeks
Small steps: lessons

Make sure that you and students know what is expected over the span of a few weeks:
What am I supposed to know? Give them an overview of the key knowledge content for the unit as a whole.
What am I supposed to have done? Give an idea of the range of tasks that should be completed by a certain date a few weeks in future - or keep a rolling list that they can use to check off against.
This will support teacher and student to check for completion, gaps, next steps and to gauge the intensity needed in any lessons or tasks.

Plan the Inputs.
Live presentation
Recorded presentation
External source

Explaining new content will be a major factor and is likely to best done by combining live and recorded video with written guidance, depending on your context and the level of live engagement you can secure.
Live presentation via zoom or equivalent: great if most students will access - allows for integrated CFEU*, nicely dynamic.
Pre-recorded presentation: allows flexible deployment and access for students; requires CFEU to be planned more deliberately
External sources via e.g. via Oak National, BBC Bitesize etc : excellent in terms of workload, quality, variety. Need to check content alignment with curriculum and plan CFEU alongside.
Paper-based. Relies on students' capacity to read and follow guidance without support - but offers lots of flexibility. CFEU becomes more complex, the more material is provided at once.

If you get a good blend, you do not need to do all your lessons live. However, it's not going to be as good for students if you hardly ever make direct contact with them. The weakest students will drift. Find the right balance.

* Check for Engagement and Understanding (CFEU)
Live session Questioning
Chat questions
Quizzing

This is the key to the success of the whole enterprise.
It's vital to check that all students are engaging: e.g. attending live sessions if/when this is essential; engaging with the system as a whole - following instructions, accessing messages, accessing resources, able to ask questions
Ideas:
At key points, use a simple form (e.g. googleform) with questions every student must answer to show they are present, have accessed materials, received the message.
Use shared documents where students simply write their name to show they are present or reached the end of a set of instructions.

It's vital to check for understanding - just as in a normal classroom - so that students know what to do in response to the instructional/video inputs. Don't just assume.
If live, sample students by cold calling (choosing who responds) to make sure students understand instructions, followed the content of any presentation, made sense of key concepts, ideas, procedures, vocabulary.

Use cold calling with students in live sessions - sample the class by name and ask them to respond . Go even further than you would in normal lessons: Jenny, tell me what I've asked you do before next lesson; Mo, what was your answer to the question at the end of that video segment. They may be answering verbally or via the chat.
Use chat function or live documents, digital whiteboards and notepads to solicit responses so that students show their understanding - not just saying 'yes I understand' and definitely not assuming that silence/no response means they are ok. Remember: you cannot tell if students have understood unless they tell you what they have understood. A screen full of silent faces or an empty chat stream, tells you nothing: ask them.

If you do not do many live sessions - relying mainly on pre-recorded inputs and paper based resources - set up at least some live stock-taking sessions on camera or via shared documents at key points in a series of lessons to run these checking processes. Use questions on forms so all students can demonstrate their understanding prior to devoting time to extended tasks.
Follow up on students who are missing/ not responding.

The more you embed the expectation and routine that you will check that work is being done, that videos are watched, that everyone should listen and respond in live sessions, the more that inclusive accountability reinforces students' habits: ie they know you will notice; they can't just opt out unseen.

Plan Student Tasks
Writing activities. Questions
Reading, research
Short-cycle: Live?
Long-cycle: Independent/offline

Ideally, this will form the bulk of students' time. After listening to video inputs or reading the set material, they will have tasks to complete. The length of tasks will determine how much feedback you can give dynamically. There are obviously hundreds of options here but a varied diet for students will help keep them motivated and engaged:
Short response tasks: questions and answers to be completed during a lesson or using online question platforms (e.g. in maths)
Short written tasks: to be completed during a lesson - perhaps using shared documents to facilitate dynamic teacher feedback as in the post featured above.
Longer question sets: to be completed offline - either self-checked, returned to teacher or discussed in next live lesson. Give them plenty to do! Shed loads of practice.
Longer written assignments: structured assignments perhaps via booklets/workbooks that may take several hours - for offline completion and submission for feedback. This can still involve using shared documents so teachers can track progress as students work independently.

If student work is largely paper based/hand-written - then expectations about submission via photo upload or in-person hand-in much later in the term must be clear.

Open-ended projects could run in parallel to the online lesson flow. ( Universal Project Guide KS2/3)

Assess and Evaluate
Review student questions
Review student writing
Check for problems and omissions

There is a balance to strike along various dimensions:
- Checking all the work versus checking a sample
- Teacher checking versus students checking their own
- Checking live during the task completion or checking later after a completion date.

The more live and dynamic you can make it, the less you get a build-up of work students create without being evaluated. The shorter the pieces of writing, the easier it is to generate a loop of feedback and redrafting for all students. If you are monitoring on the go via shared documents, or focusing on self-assessment tools, you can minimise the reliance on handing in work for teacher assessment. It could even be all done in this way, on-the-go.

It's important to validate student work completion without falling into the trap of promising to check everything they do - which isn't sensible or sustainable. At the same time, if they feel their work is never checked, it is demotivating and quality and engagement will drop.

Identify key tasks or question sets that you will focus on for checking: This could be the weekly knowledge check; the extended writing task; specified workbook pages.

Provide Feedback
Whole-class feedback
Comments: live/recorded; written
Selected individuals

As far as possible, keep feedback to the things that are easiest to give to everyone:
Whole class feedback in live lessons or via feedback notes issued to all students
Self-checking quizzes - so students see the correct answers and their errors without teacher marking
Comments generated during the lessons or via shared documents where the teacher can manage their workload, leaving written or voice-note comments in the time they have available.

Try to blend setting some students off to work independently while focusing on small groups or individuals to give feedback. This can be done live: eg call six students to be cameras-on in a live session to discuss their work while others are set an offline task as the live session continues. Or, it could be in lesson slots devoted to individual feedback - eg by appointment on zoom - whilst other students are working independently offline.

Even if it is minimal, there must be some feedback. Students can't be asked to go off and do a ton of questions or assignment work - if that is never going to be checked in any way.

Use the information from assessment and feedback sessions to stock-take on the long-term curriculum coverage as weeks go by, to adjust the content in terms of pace and coverage for the lessons that week.

I recorded a short video for the recent Chiltern TSA CPD event, talking through the same diagram

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Remote Learning: Live or offline, cover the basic elements.

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As schools and colleges return to full-on remote learning, I've been asked multiple times to provide suggestions to support teachers in this endeavour and to provide CPD inputs for teachers in various contexts. Of course I don't have students of my own but I have delivered a lot of online training and gleaned a lot...

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Activate your Chartered College of Teaching Membership now!

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Webinar: Dialogic Teaching Revisited - More important now than ever? • Chartered College of Teaching

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Professor Robin Alexander presents on his work around Dialogic Teaching

Back in 2001, Professor Robin Alexander of Cambridge University coined the term 'dialogic teaching' for his approach to enhancing children's engagement and learning through high-quality classroom talk, which he then developed and refined by working with teachers in London, Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. In 2014-17, its successful large-scale trial by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), in Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds, provided conclusive evidence that dialogic teaching significantly improves pupil learning outcomes across the curriculum. To date, it is one of only 17 out of the 190 EEF trials to have achieved such positive results.

Robin Alexander has now published A Dialogic Teaching Companion (Routledge 2020) , which builds on this work, reviews the latest evidence about the vital relationship between talking, thinking, learning and teaching, and provides a revised and expanded version of his dialogic teaching framework.

In this webinar recording, Robin Alexander was joined by Dame Alison Peacock, Chief Executive of the Chartered College, to discuss these issues and the added challenge of sustaining high-quality talk in the context of Covid-19, in a presentation entitled Dialogic Teaching Revisited - more important now than ever?

Why, at this time, is high quality classroom talk so important for children and society?

What are its essential ingredients?

What's new about the latest version of dialogic teaching?

What does the Education Endowment Foundation evidence show?

What is it about dialogic teaching that makes the difference?

How might schools build dialogic teaching into their development planning?

About Professor Robin Alexander

Professor Robin Alexander's long career began with teaching in schools. Since then he has held senior posts in universities in Britain and overseas, worked with thousands of trainee and serving teachers and school leaders, researched and published extensively on many aspects of education, advised several governments, directed national enquiries like the Cambridge Primary Review, and received international awards for his work.

Shared links, files and suggested reading:

From the event

A Dialogic Teaching Companion (2020) - Professor Robin Alexander

Publisher's information - Routledge

More on questions and questioning, including examples of different kinds of questions, and indeed more on the other key moves like extending, discussing and deliberation/argumentation (see Chapter 7)

There are links to video examples and to transcripts of lesson extracts (see Appendix 2)

CPD options, with practical suggestions for professional and school development (see Chapter 8)

More about 'ingredient X', or what it is about dialogic teaching, in light of the research evidence, that makes a difference (see Chapter 6)

Articles from Impact on Dialogic Teaching:

The Education Endowment Foundation Dialogic Teaching Project

Oracy All-Party Parliamentary Group

Robin Alexander's website

Interested in content on this theme?

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Webinar: Dialogic Teaching Revisited - More important now than ever? * Chartered College of Teaching

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Back in 2001, Professor Robin Alexander of Cambridge University coined the term 'dialogic teaching' for his approach to enhancing children's engagement and learning through high-quality classroom talk, which he then developed and refined by working with teachers in London, Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.

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A recent EEF evaluation has concluded that the dialogic approach has a positive impact on pupil outcomes.

So here are the 7 habits of highly effective teachers…

The 7 strategies below have been designed to turn the theory behind dialogic teaching into practical steps that teachers can take.

Uninterrupted teacher exposition

Well-structured pair and group talk

Good use of wait time

Use ‘no hands up’ more often

Use ‘hands up’ for voting

Not repeating what pupils say

Going into the woods

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Hello! This is an interesting opportunity for those new to research ...  apply by 8th May 2021

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Hello! This is an interesting opportunity for those new to research ...  apply by 8th May 2021

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Interested in developing your expertise in using evidence to inform your practice?

The Certificate in Evidence-Informed Practice is perfect for teachers and leaders wishing to develop their understanding of evidence-informed practice and gain recognition for their expertise.

Successful completion awards participants with a certificate in evidence-informed practice and credits towards Chartered Status.

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Interested in developing your expertise in using evidence to inform your practice? The Certificate in Evidence-Informed Practice is perfect for teachers and leaders wishing to develop their understanding of evidence-informed practice and gain recognition for their expertise. Successful completion awards participants with a certificate in evidence-informed practice and credits towards Chartered Status.

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EEF Blog: How to use reading as a starting point for learning this year

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EEF Blog: How to use reading as a starting point for learning this year

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EEF Blog: How to use reading as a starting point for learning this year
On part-time secondment to the EEF as our Literacy specialist, Caroline Bilton is also the English Lead, Pupil Premium Lead and Assistant Headteacher at Cragside Church of England Primary School, a large primary in south-east Northumberland. Here she writes about how Cragside school are putting reading at the heart of their approach to teaching and learning this year...
So, here we are... At the end of a very long half-term defined by the challenges and incredible achievements of the children and adults in our schools. Many of the challenges have been unrelenting and draining. And yet, the achievements have been all the more significant in the context of Covid-19.

At Cragside CofE Primary, the achievements started with early decisions about where to focus teaching and learning at the beginning of such an important term.

Despite all the challenges, high-quality teaching has been the driving ambition with rich reading at its heart.

The decision was easy. As a school with a love of reading at its heart, we chose a book to capture the imagination of every child. A shared reading opportunity which would allow us to reconnect as a community. Additionally, it would prove an aid in integrating formative assessment, so that we could carefully understand the children's individual needs on their return to school.

With the help of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), we chose Here We Are - Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers. It is a beautiful book which unpacks the magic and wonder of the world through the eyes of a child.

Reading a book with such rich opportunities for discussion was a vital step in supporting the children's language and communication. Our very earliest observations had confirmed that a focus on talk was essential to support work across the curriculum.

Jeffers' book offered many opportunities to scaffold and model reading comprehension strategies too. The recently updated Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1 guidance report exemplifies this process.

One of the areas of focus for the guidance is to support teachers to understand their role in developing inferencing skills through high-quality discussions between adults and children (as highlighted in Box 1 from the report, below). Ultimately, the aim is to support children to make and discuss inferences independently when they read, along with talk with their peers, so that they can develop a rich mental model of the text at hand.

High-quality book talk, which was prioritised in every class, also helped to re-build high levels of motivation and engagement to read for pleasure and to take on the challenge of reading a rich, complex text full of ambitious vocabulary, imagery and more - just like Jeffers' Here We Are.

The Cragside Reading Challenge reward system was supercharged to ensure that book gifting was carefully used by class teachers to reward small steps in the return to regular home reading.

Alongside the focus on reading, we also identified the need to work on spelling and handwriting. Lockdown had meant very little writing for some children. Lots of tasks had been completed electronically, with lots of time having been spent with a phone or games console.

We knew handwriting and spelling practice could also provide quick wins in terms of building clear and accessible goals for children to take great pride in achieving. The focus of handwriting practice was on the process rather than product (as highlighted in Box 5 from the report, below). Careful assessment of any inefficient letter formation was used to support greater fluency and efficiency.

With more fluent transcription skills, we recognised that the children could devote more of their working memory to the content of their writing. Of course, they could also then enjoy writing their own Notes from Planet Earth to accompany Jeffers' book.

Hard work, determination and careful planning have ensured a successful return to school for the children and families at Cragside. Despite all the challenges, high quality teaching has been the driving ambition with rich reading at its heart.

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EEF Blog: How to use reading as a starting point for learning this year | News

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On part-time secondment to the EEF as our Literacy specialist, Caroline Bilton is also the English Lead, Pupil Premium Lead and Assistant Headteacher at Cragside Church of England Primary School, a large primary in south-east Northumberland. Here she writes about how Cragside school are putting reading at the heart of their approach to teaching and learning this year...

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What I’m learning from reading Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s ‘The Writing Revolution’: Part 1 — More writing isn’t better writing

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What I’m learning from reading Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s ‘The Writing Revolution’: Part 1 — More writing isn’t better writing

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This morning my copy of ' The Writing Revolution' by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler arrived at my work. I've had my curiosity peaked about this book for some time. Doug Lemov has mentioned it before as being a key text in teaching writing (and it is clear that this book, perhaps not coincidentally, shares a number of key characteristics in its' organisation and presentation with his seminal Teach Like a Champion). Jo Facer referenced it in her work, Simplicity Rules, where she discusses the increasingly well-known 'Because, But, So' activity. There's a great article about the 'origin story' of this book and the people involved in it in this 2012 article from The Atlantic. It also plays into one of the things I've sensed about my own teaching for a long time is that one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher was that, while I could identify and show students what good History work looked like, I found it really hard to explain to students the precise, granular steps that they needed to undertake to write better.

So, I've had a chance today to start looking at this book, and already I feel pretty certain that this book may be one of the most important things I'm going to read as a History teacher. Even just from the introduction and first chapter, there is so much that I've picked up already. One of the things that's really good is that, while it is a 'generic pedagogy' book, there are lots of History examples which helps make it easier to think about how I'd apply this to my own classroom. As a result of all this, I thought I'd blog about this on a semi-regular basis to give me a record of key learning points and to help me ruminate on how I'm going to implement this when going back into the classroom.

What I'm going to do in this first blog is focus on some bits from the Introduction to the book as well as Chapter 1 and provide a bit of a commentary on what Hochman and Wexler say as it pertains to me as a history teacher and the students I teach. In particular, a big theme of this section is that often we require students to do more writing when they come up to Secondary School, but that this does not lead to better writing on the part of the student and, therefore, is arguably inhibiting the achievement of students especially at the lower end of the attainment scale.

The first key point they make in the introduction is that we need to teach students to write good sentences before we teach them to write good paragraphs. This sounds obvious, but I don't think I've ever done this. I don't think I've ever really sat and got students properly to focus on writing one good history sentence, and then provided feedback on this. I think this is because, first of all, the idea has never really occurred to me and perhaps has seemed a bit simple, a bit primary school-ish, and secondly because students do so much writing in History, that I've generally focused more on the writing of longer pieces. What I tend to do is throw out a few writing frames or sentence starters but I think for me it's always been a bit of a 'nod' to inclusion rather than really doing it properly because fundamentally I didn't really know how to do it properly and a writing frame was better than nothing!

This is clearly a mistake, as the authors go on to suggest. They state that too often, we don't actually teach writing, but instead we show students good examples of writing in our subject and try to get the students to mimic it. In essence we assume the students will pick it up 'by osmosis' (their phrase). This is absolutely the case for me. I will often show students an example 16-mark answer of a top-grade standard and say to them - 'now you need to try and replicate this for a different question of the same style'. But of course, for many students, especially those who are lower attaining, this is too difficult, even with an example provided. This is quite often because they don't know how to articulate a good sentence let alone a proper long answer. In addition they often don't know enough either.

This links back to a broader suspicion about my own teaching - that while I could improve the student by giving them access to more content over the course of their school career, I wasn't doing enough to help those lower-attaining students actually figure out how to use that knowledge to produce pieces of writing that looked more like the pieces that higher-attaining students could already produce.

The authors make the point that, essentially, as Secondary School teachers (and I think this might be especially true in History) we give students writing tasks above the competency that they've developed in primary school. We get them to start writing big chunks of knowledge right away. I have definitely done this. In both of my last two schools, a conclusion I had drawn when I arrived was that students had under-achieved in the subject consistently for a while because they had simply not done enough writing. The solution, therefore, was to do more writing. If they did more writing it would probably contain more knowledge and therefore get more marks. While this is perhaps true, especially for higher-attaining students, at no point was I really thinking about how to do better writing, and fundamentally this is because I wasn't really sure how I might go about doing that beyond showing them what better writing looks like (e.g., my own).

Another key problem that has held my teaching back is a lack of knowledge about writing and grammar. While reading this book I am constantly having to check the glossary for key terminology. Key words I noted down that I needed to check included (some of these come from Chapter 1 as well as the Intro):

Appositives

Transitions

Sub-ordinating conjunctions

Kernel sentences

Subject and predicate

Command sentences

Run-on sentences

We've done a lot of work in teaching recently on the development of 'knowledge-rich' curricula - yet I would guess that for most of us, our knowledge of the terminology used to describe the organisation of the language we write in every day is pretty poor (certainly mine is). It's clear to me that one reason why I can't help students to do better History-writing is that I've lacked the vocabulary to explain the key features of better History-writing.

I also don't know very much at all about how students are taught to write in primary school. Are teachers using this language in primary literacy lessons? Are secondary English teachers using this? Do students know these terms better than I do? I also know, however, that I can't rely on them to do this for me. One of the other points made is that students will find it hard, especially in the early stages, to transfer knowledge of writing in one discipline over to another discipline, unless we are all using the same vocabulary and terminology.

As I read I'm getting a bit of a crash course in these terms, and what's great is that it's already giving me ideas for better tasks that I can use with students. I am moving towards more of the two-page lessons and have set these for remote learning where I've made the resources already. Instead of straightforward comprehension questions, I can set them tasks where they need to turn fragments into sentences, or create questions from having read a set of material, or to combine two separate sentences into one big one, or do a because, but, so at the end. The other bonus is that this is not just a pure literacy task. This will help them to learn the History as well as to write better, as they point out in their 3rd of 6 key principles for better writing ( 'When Embedded in the Content of the Curriculum, Writing Instruction is a Powerful Teaching Tool').

To provide some examples, let's take the following bit of text from a lesson I'm in the process of developing on Migration to Britain before 1066 for Year 7, as part of our thematic study of Migration through Time to open up the curriculum with. The text is largely nicked from the Pearson Monarchs, Monks and Migrants with a bit from the 'Our Migration Story' website (which is excellent) and let's not get into whether there were any such thing as Anglo-Saxons for now!

At the moment, all I'm asking students to do with this information is to consider 'what did the Anglo-Saxons do to help create England' and to think about whether the Anglo-Saxons were 'settlers' or 'invaders'. But by using the TWR strategies I could do a lot more - for example:
Activity 1 - Fragments or Sentences
Identify whether the following are fragments (F) or sentences (S)

new tribes began

anglo-saxons came from europe

augustine came to england in

texts like beowulf have had an effect on english literature

For Fragments - turn them into proper sentences correctly punctuated.

For Sentences - correctly punctuate them and (extension) make them better!
The key here is to take away all the punctuation so as not to give away the answers too readily. Activity 2 - Questions TASK - Write three questions about the information above. One of the questions should be in the form of a command and use a term like 'explain', 'describe' or 'justify'.
Another example of a task in this vein could be...
Write a question to go with the following answer (a la Jeopardy).
So here a question might be 'When did the Pope send Augustine to England?' or 'When did Augustine come to England to develop Christianity?' A question like 'When did England become Christian?' might not be precise enough in this context and helps to expose a possible knowledge issue.
Activity 3 - Sentence combining
Take the sentences below, and turn them into one sentence.

The Anglo-Saxons came to England in approximately 450AD.

The Anglo-Saxons originally came from places like Germany and Holland.

The Anglo-Saxons replaced Celtic gods with their own pagan gods.

This activity helps students to create more knowledgeable sentences, using constructions like appositives in their writing. So in this case, the above could be turned into 'The Anglo-Saxons, who came to England in approximately 450 AD from places like Germany and Holland, replaced Celtic gods with their own pagan ones.' It's easy here to imagine how the challenge could be increased or decreased I think. Activity 4 - Because, but, so
This is the classic Hochman activity that I think has had the widest popular penetration into the teacher toolkit. The point of this is to help students think about information in different ways and to write accordingly. So, with the above text, you could easily do the following

TASK- Complete the following sentences:

The Anglo-Saxons migrated to England, because...[e.g. the land in England was seen as valuable and easy to get hold of after the Romans left]

The Anglo-Saxons migrated to England, but...[e.g. they did not manage to take over areas on the fringes of the British Isles like Cornwall, Wales and Scotland]

The Anglo-Saxons migrated to England, so...[e.g. the religious beliefs of the population were gradually changed over time].

Again you could upscale this by using a greater variety of words that mean the same as because, but, or so. Also what I really like about this is the way the activity is as challenging as the content you teach - this could easily be applied to an A-level lesson as it could be to a Key Stage 2 History lesson. The task itself also escalates in difficulty - as the authors point out, using the 'but' conjunction requires more sophisticated knowledge than the 'because' conjunction as it requires you to contrast two different bits of knowledge related to the topic.

The other benefit of these tasks is that it should facilitate better feedback from me. It won't provide too much to read and I can quickly pick up whether or not student knowledge of the topic is developing as I'd like, as well as, of course, their writing ability. One of the problems I have at the moment is setting too much writing and then drowning in it, so to speak, so therefore not being able to give effective feedback due to time constraints. A 'less is more' approach will hopefully work for the students, as well as for me.

Looking ahead, I need to think about and read more about how to effectively step up the challenge through one unit to start with, and then across a series of units, while reinforcing prior techniques learned - in a way that is appropriate to developing good historical writing. I also need to think about how to get a baseline of their writing before getting started to give me some pointers as to things to work on. There are suggestions in the book and I will come back to this in another post. One idea based on something in the book might be something simple like - 'Write me a paragraph about the Tudors' or some other topic that they have all likely encountered at primary school (World War 2 as another obvious example here). I'll also need my senior leaders to see that smaller amounts of writing does not necessarily mean that the work is less challenging. I think this is another way in which we can think 'more = better' and it's patently not the case.

So, to cut a long story short, I'm definitely sold on this book. I'm going to keep reading and hopefully tap out some more blogs about how my thinking is evolving (literally, I've only read the introduction and chapter 1 so far) and the impact it's going to have on the materials I'm preparing for our grand return to school in September - COVID permitting.

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What I'm learning from reading Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler's 'The Writing Revolution': Part...

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This morning my copy of ' The Writing Revolution' by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler arrived at my work. I've had my curiosity peaked about this book for some time.

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saysmiss - Kat Howard  Leadership | Curriculum | Workload  

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saysmiss - Kat Howard  Leadership | Curriculum | Workload  

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Zest for Learning... into the rainforest of teaching

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Tom Rees - Local chap, leader and now with Ambition Institute

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Tom Rees - Local chap, leader and now with Ambition Institute

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Last year, I wrote this post which shared how we had developed some analytics tools and data dashboards across Northampton Primary Multi Academy Trust. This was part of ongoing work in our trust to get better at using data we already have to describe, predict and ultimately intervene in the way we operate.

Since this post, we've had a lot of interest in how we've been developing analytics tools in the trust and so this is the first in a series of three blogs which I'll interview the brains behind the analytics, self-confessed data geek, Matt Woodruff.

Matt is the founder and 'Chief Data Scientist' at Coscole Ltd. (now a part of Groupcall Ltd.) and I've been working with him for the last 3 years on this project within our trust.

One of the things I've learned from Matt is the power of predictive analytics. I believe that too much time is spent looking at pupil data as a rear view mirror in schools. This is often driven by a need to 'know your data' for accountability purposes rather than to help you think about what data can tell us about the future. If we think about the publication lag of documents like ASP (previously RaiseOnline), it's crazy to suggest leaders should wait until November to find out about what happened in the past to a group of children who have already left the school. I think there's more we could do to analyse the information we have about future cohorts of Year 6 to help adapt and tailor their provision whilst we still have time.

An example of how Matt's brain works is our exchange over the title for this blog. I went for, 'Matt and Tom's Excellent (Analytics) Adventure' whilst Matt suggested the catchy 'A 'Small Data' Predictive Experiment using Machine Learning - Can MAT pupil level data generate reliable predictions for outcomes or identify pupils 'at risk'?'.
Matt & Tom's Analytics Adventure...
In this first interview, we go back about 3 years to a point in time where we were fumbling around in the dark for answers to a life without levels.
Me: Matt - when we first sat down with you, we had a ideas session where we outlined our vision of trying to bring together many pieces of pupil data in one place. What were your initial thoughts when you looked at the sea of post it notes which represented the many different pieces of data we wanted to bring together?
Matt: This is taking me back some time! It was at this stage that Coscole was finishing its direct commission with another MAT where we had spent three years building an approach to personalised learning, and in aggregating and visualising data. During this time I'd worked with multiple stakeholders from head office staff and directors of education, with data managers and school leaders as well as some pilot projects with teachers, students and parents. What was refreshing about beginning to work with NPAT is that you had, even back then, a good understanding of where there was challenge, and therefore where the opportunity was to improve: you were not setting out to boil the ocean; to have analytics be all things to all people.

I think like the mantra that 'Exams are necessary, but not sufficient' you imparted a view to me that said 'Teacher Assessment is necessary but not sufficient' in relation to understanding the whole profile of the pupil. You had already engaged with cognitive ability testing and understanding pupil attitudes to self and school, and were bringing in external assessment as standardised scores to provide a more rounded profile.

Of course it is natural at that stage you are inclined to pull your hair out - a growing MAT, albeit with a single MIS provider, with a growing need to make more effective use of data and to put it at the finger tips in an easily digestible manner to those that need it most - when your data comes from different providers, in different forms, at different times.

The 'sea of post-it' notes therefore represented the fact that as a Trust you had already embarked on the journey of understanding that there was a challenge in making effective use of data and saw the opportunity in the potential impact to improving outcomes if you could do it right. More than this - you'd moved down the road in determining exactly what you thought it important to capture, but also some things that you may have been doing by rote up until that point that you reassessed and decided it was not as important as you once thought it might be.
Me: There was a lot of planning and work that went on behind the scenes before we ever got close to inputting data. Aligning the MIS databases for across the trust was a big job and we spent a lot of time cleaning up our data as a trust which was an important but time consuming stage. Is this a normal part of the process with all schools you work with?
Matt: Getting to effective analytics is a journey. Everyone knows the adage 'Garbage in Garbage out', and it becomes particularly true when you compound the issue by aggregating 'garbage' across schools. Once again though this is not about boiling the ocean. Do you have to align everything across an MIS? Absolutely not. Should you seek alignment over time, in the things that really matter? Absolutely yes. You can do this in a way that does not undermine the context of different schools - thats vital. It is also not about a doctrine of 'top down'. In my mind it's about identifying good practice around data, and making sure all schools understand the importance of that. Good practices with data lead to much less wasted time further down the chain, and not only wasted time but the impact of not really being sure about your data providence. The typical reaction to seeing numbers, metrics, percentages is that we believe them. In too few cases are the underpinning assumptions challenged - "how was this data derived", "what moderation is in place across schools to ensure that an apple in one is an apple in another".

Yes, technically, the MIS databases were aligned in so much as NPAT standardised on naming conventions for Aspects. Yes we put in place data extraction technology and we warehouse that data and layer education modelling on top (the calculations that do your %GLD, Combined Y1/2 Phonics etc). That's business as usual really. The fun starts again with the people and process elements. As soon as you visualise data in a more effective way, and don't forget we're not inventing new data here - we are just taking data you already have available - you instantly see gaps. You instantly notice things that aren't right. And when I say 'you' I mean from CEO down. That can be a scary place for some because we lift up all the rocks. I think that's great, because this is absolutely not about blame for a legacy of data whose quality can be improved, it's about finally having access to the tools to quickly spot variations and to scaffold the people and the processes to ensure data is reliable.

There is no one I have worked with that has not done something different in their schools after joining and visualising data, and that's a great thing.
Me: We had several U-turns and changes throughout the process as we switched our position on the types of assessment data and teacher assessment descriptors. How were you able to manage these changing demands from a technical perspective?
Matt: You'd started with fairly granular objectives in teacher assessment if I remember rightly: levels and sub-levels, or steps and stages, or milestones and smaller objectives. The change specifically did not provide too much of a technical challenge around how we got the data, but I think we found it a particularly challenging time to understand the way in which you wanted to visualise it - how leaders and staff would need to see that in the most digestible form. We use both a flexible visualisation approach with the Trust with Microsoft Power BI, as well as our own Apps built for Office 365. PowerBI is naturally easier and quicker for us to adapt than the code in our Apps, but by the same stretch our Apps can provide a more effective interface at times for staff.

The biggest issue though is both from a technical and a data perspective. We lose consistency, and history. For me a major incentive for a mature approach to data and analytics is having access to this history so we can build trend analysis and forecasting. Every time we decide to do something different it makes that more difficult. In this case with NPAT those decisions and changes were actually dealt with fairly early on and we've collectively been consistent since.
Me : After a year or so of being to analyse pupil information, we then started the conversation around how we could use technology to start to predict future attainment. You introduced me to the concept of Machine Learning. Can you explain (to a non-data specialist) how Machine Learning works?
Matt: There is a lot of hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) right now. Three years ago everything was Big Data, in much the same way. In many respects there is absolutely nothing new about ML, its been an active research area since the 1950's and arguably in different forms well before that. Today, ML is a subset of the domain of AI and deals with the ability of computers to learn from data. It is technology that is now prevalent in just about every other aspect of our lives - from blocking spam in emails, to recommending products on Amazon, films on Netflix, and of course most recently in developing self-driving cars.

ML is itself subdivided into:

ways that we set out specific parameters for the computer and where we know what we are looking for (supervised learning),

where we want the computer to look at unstructured data and classify it itself (unsupervised learning), or

where we set up a computer to learn through its own exploration - most famously used with Google's AlphaGo team beating the world champion (reinforcement learning).

These developments have brought ML more recently into the mainstream. Tools are widely available to utilise ML models both with open source approaches, with Microsoft, or in combination. In fact, Microsoft have recently announced the fact that they are integrating ML/AI approaches with PowerBI, which is really exciting. EdTech companies like CenturyTech integrate ML in their adaptive learning routines.

In these ways, the technology already exists to make what we do in education faster, better, and deliver more impact. We spend 95% of our time looking backwards - what has just happened - whether that is last year or the last 'data drop'. This is 'descriptive analytics' - we are simply describing the things that have happened. Other industries have already moved into 'predictive analytics' - using data to predict what is likely to happen in the future. Where we can get to beyond that is with 'prescriptive analytics' - if we know what is likely to happen in the future what should we be doing now either to mitigate risk or extend opportunity? The potential for a learning system that provides effective and efficient decision support for the human in an education context is vast.

This isn't about ML being able to take peoples jobs; that in five years we'll have robot teachers. This is about us leveraging what computers do far better than us, in order that we focus our human intelligence on the things that the machines will never be able to do (there is some ongoing debate on when the singularity might occur, but I think that's beyond this blog...).
Me: There came a point where I asked you if you thought you would be able to predict our SATs results last year and you went off and did something clever on your laptop and came back with some results. What did you do?
Yes, we got to that point where we knew that we had good consistent data, and conceivably enough to do something meaningful from a predictive point of view. We tend to like lots of data for reliability, and when you boil it down a Year 6 cohort is not a lot of kids, even over 7 schools. However, we were at the point 18 months in where we had one years of historical data on the same basis as the current Y6 cohort. The same 'schema' if you like, of the things that we thought might matter in predicting outcomes.

Truth be told this was new to me. We'd been active in development at Coscole around the AI stack being released by Microsoft and also at that time had been engaged in another predictive proof of concept with Microsoft and one of the largest MATs around Progress 8. Looping back to my mantra of not boiling the ocean, I thought why not try something - it'll either work or not work. If it works, that'd be pretty cool. If it doesn't work, we'd be interested in why not.

The easy bit was actually the 'data wrangling'. This is normally the bit of any data scientists life that consumes 60-80% of their time - finding data, cleaning data, putting it in a form that can actually be consumed by something and then do something useful... The joy for me is that we've done most of that: we have all your data warehoused, clean, ready to go.

I set out then to run a very simple experiment. This type of work is not new, lots of providers do it with their own data and I'm sure in more advanced ways, FFT, Rising Stars, CenturyTech etc - but for me it was a validation of others results and I was personally interested in the correlations with the MAT data. The question I was interested in was "Can we use school owned, in year data, from different data sources, for reliable prediction?" . If so, the follow up would be more important - "How should this impact current data collection practices to save time for staff, and to highlight interventions early?". I also had an academic interest in a methods comparison study in the context of my PhD.

The experiment was a straightforward linear regression model trained on your prior year Year 6 MAT data including a selection of pupil characteristics and principally their standardised scores in Reading and Maths. I completed this in both Python as an open source approach as well as in Microsoft AzureML. I then used this model to run against your (then) current Year 6 cohort to predict their Reading and Maths test outcomes.

The results were interesting - in one way or the other I'd described earlier. Or both - pretty cool.
In Part 2, I'll be asking Matt to explain how accurate his predictions were when we opened the envelopes* on results day in July 2018 and what the implications of this are for adopting predictive analytics for outcomes or identifying those at risk in the future.
*We didn't really open any envelopes on results day. It was a downloadable csv. at the much more civil time of 8am this year rather than waiting till midnight.

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Last year, I wrote this post which shared how we had developed some analytics tools and data dashboards across Northampton Primary Multi Academy Trust. This was part of ongoing work in our trust to get better at using data we already have to describe, predict and ultimately intervene in the way we operate.

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Government guidance 2016

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Developing your curriculum design skills. 

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Developing your curriculum design skills. 

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One of the biggest changes in education in the last few years has been a shift of focus from pedagogy to curriculum. As a new teacher, it is increasingly important to understand the principles behind meaningful curriculum design, both for your own development and to empower you to take part in the conversation at a whole-school level.

If we take seriously the idea that 'the curriculum defines the purposes of a school and the journey a school wants its pupils to take' (Young et al., 2014) then every decision we make in school is a curricular decision. However, for the purposes of this article, I am considering the academic curriculum - the subjects taught - rather than the extended curriculum. Curriculum design requires you to read, think and question more than any other aspect of teaching. It is both the everything and the everyday. Here, I outline seven useful categories of curriculum design to guide your thinking.

Categories of curriculum design

1 Purpose

Ralph Tyler's book Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction offers a useful set of questions for curriculum design, and his first is: 'What educational purposes should a school seek to attain?' (Tyler, 1949). A school curriculum must be designed with this question in mind, and also respond to the question, 'What is the distinct purpose of each particular subject?'

I propose that there are four main schools of thought about the purpose of a school curriculum: to prepare pupils for the workplace, to build character, to further social justice and to teach knowledge for its own intrinsic value (Turner, 2016). Getting to grips with your view on each of these and their relative importance is essential, as they impact on curriculum decisions at a whole-school level and at the level of each individual subject.

For example, my research and work in the field of curriculum and assessment has persuaded me that the primary purpose of a school curriculum is to teach knowledge for its own intrinsic value (and that doing this will result in the other purposes being achieved). Consequently, when designing an English curriculum, I prioritised the study of canonical English literature, whereas a curriculum designer focusing on preparing pupils for the workplace might devote more time to writing linked to careers.

Whilst many schools would argue that they try to create a balance, the demands on time mean that schools are forced to prioritise, and it makes sense to do this in a purposeful way.

2 Principles

The next step is to ascertain what your curriculum principles are; these are the foundations on which your curriculum will stand. Take the following principles: a curriculum must provide access to the best of what has been thought and said; a curriculum must be centred around the premise that 'learning [...] is defined as a change in long-term memory' (Kirschner et al., 2006); a curriculum must reflect both the substantive and disciplinary knowledge of the subject (the precise knowledge content that needs to be learnt and the way in which that knowledge is organised, discussed and used by the subject community).

These principles create questions that every teacher must then ask themselves, such as: What does the 'best of what has been thought and said' look like in my subject? How have I sequenced my curriculum to ensure that pupils will build schemata (mental models) of knowledge? What is the disciplinary and substantive knowledge in my subject, what is the appropriate balance between these two in the curriculum and how does this unfold in the way I teach?

Through these types of questions, we begin to make precise and deliberate choices about the curriculum.

3 Expectations

A curriculum must take care to fill gaps and build bridges for pupils, whilst continuing to aim to a higher ideal for all.

The 'all' is important here, as there is a danger of lowering expectations and curriculum demand for pupils with lower prior attainment, which often includes a larger proportion of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Recent research on attainment grouping suggests that two of the seven reasons as to why students in lower sets and streams have poorer outcomes are that 'teacher expectations are lower for lower sets' and that these students 'are offered an impoverished curriculum and qualifications' (Taylor et al., 2017).

Therefore, a key part of curriculum design is determining where the curriculum is heading: what does a pupil need to know and how do they need to apply this to achieve the status of a 'scholar' in your subject?

4 Big ideas

Once you have determined the heights that you want your pupils to reach, you have to consider how you will help them to get there, and this requires clarity about the building blocks of knowledge. If we think of the curriculum as 'content structured as narrative over time', which does two jobs: 'making the next stage possible (a proximal function)' and also 'doing an enduring job (an ultimate function) which might come into its own later' (Counsell, 2018), we begin to get a sense of why we must think about the curriculum as a whole. This requires you to consider the overall structure of your subject.

A useful exercise is to try to identify the overarching ideas and concepts of your subject. The most important action here is to look at the distinct features of your subject and begin to understand its narrative. Rhetoric is an important part of the English curriculum, dipping into both the substantive and disciplinary strands of the curriculum, and might therefore be considered a useful big idea or curricular title; within this, you might want to explore threshold concepts such as understanding that language is manipulated to gain power and that rhetoric comes from an ancient tradition that uses three appeals: pathos, ethos and logos. This is an example of how using a framework can help you begin to grasp the narrative of your subject, and therefore develop a coherent curriculum.

5 Content

Choosing content requires us to make precise decisions that reflect the specific demands of our subjects. In particular, it is useful to make content selections based on how we develop schemata of knowledge, but it is our subject disciplines that ultimately determine what the expert schema of a subject specialist (teacher) might look like and the types of content that help build these schemata in the mind of a novice (pupil).

This tricky content choice is often more difficult in a subject where knowledge builds cumulatively rather than hierarchically. In subjects such as maths, which have a clear hierarchical structure, there is often less debate about content as there are core components of knowledge that you must know in order to be able to progress within the subject; it would be hard to argue for a maths curriculum that didn't include algebra or place value. In English, which is more cumulative, there is more of an argument about which content is essential. Even in areas where there is much agreement, such as the study of Shakespeare, choosing between his plays is more open to question - why King Lear rather than Hamlet? However, having a clear set of curriculum principles means that you have useful boundaries for content choices.

6 Sequencing

We select content because it is important, so we clearly want pupils to remember this knowledge! The way in which we structure material over time is integral to helping pupils reach security and fluency but is again dependent on the subject. More hierarchical subjects, such as languages, maths and the sciences, require taking each piece of component knowledge and determining what knowledge is required to access it and which concepts it builds towards. However, even more typically cumulative subjects have aspects that are hierarchical: in art we can see that grasping pointillism would require a knowledge of impressionism; in primary geography, a knowledge of the rivers of Britain requires knowing the geography of Britain, such as the fact that Britain is a country that is made up of counties.

Alongside this, we must factor in research that indicates that pupils learn by transferring information from working to long-term memory and that using spaced practice, interleaving of material and opportunities for retrieval all support this learning (Deans for Impact, 2015). Clearly this has implications for the way we would want to structure the curriculum.

7 Review

Finally, one of the most important aspects of curriculum design is to remember that it is a process that requires review. It is through measured and deliberate conversations within a subject community that we stand the best chance of creating a stimulating, imaginative, rigorous and enriching curriculum.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

What is your view on the purpose and principles of a school curriculum? Getting to grips with this will help you to make purposeful decisions.

What does a student need to know to achieve the status of a 'scholar' in your subject? Support your students' learning whilst also aiming high for all.

Remember that curriculum design is a process that requires review - talk to colleagues within your school and subject community.

References

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Developing your curriculum design skills

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One of the biggest changes in education in the last few years has been a shift of focus from pedagogy to curriculum. As a new teacher, it is increasingly important to understand the principles behind meaningful curriculum design, both for your own development and to empower you to take part in the conversation at a [...]

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Curriculum studies has been in decline for some years in the UK. As an early career teacher in the 1990s, I was able to choose from a range of university Master's-level programmes with a specialist focus on the curriculum. By 2019, only one university (the UCL Institute of Education) offers a dedicated curriculum studies Master's degree. It is therefore heartening to see that the curriculum is back on the educational agenda across UK jurisdictions. This is in some respects due to new policy trajectories - in Scotland, Northern Ireland and, more recently, Wales - that actively construct teachers as professional curriculum-makers. This has led over time to increasingly nuanced discussion about curriculum by teachers and other educational professionals in those countries. In the past year, England has raised the status of the curriculum in professional discourse, as Ofsted has shifted its focus to the curriculum through, for example, its intent, implementation, impact initiative.

While this is encouraging, there is still considerable work to do. This article offers an overview of and contribution to this debate, by surfacing some of the concepts that are needed to develop a more sophisticated approach to developing the curriculum in our schools.

What is a curriculum?

Curriculum is a contested and often misunderstood concept. At a simple level, the curriculum simply means a course of study. The word is derived from the Latin word meaning 'racecourse' or 'race', and has come to mean a general course, conveying the notion of going somewhere in a predefined direction.

However, such a conception of curriculum is obviously insufficient for understanding the complex processes of schooling in today's society. A more sophisticated definition is required, and there have been many attempts to provide one. For example, Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence states that the curriculum is 'the totality of all that is planned for children and young people throughout their education' (Scottish Government, 2008, p. 13).

Such definitions are helpful in that they broaden thinking about the curriculum and what it comprises. However, this sort of broad definition can also be confusing, as the term 'curriculum' comes to mean different things to different people. For these reasons, it is necessary to be clear about the various facets that make up the curriculum, and the ways in which these link together and interact in practice. The following terminology will all be familiar, but reflecting on it again may help to make sense of the complexity that is the curriculum.

Curriculum - an umbrella term denoting the totality of the learning experience of children and young people in school. Considering the curriculum would thus include the questions of what, how and why listed below, as well as assessment.

Curriculum purposes - statements of what the curriculum is intended to achieve. These include narrowly defined outcomes or objectives, and more broadly defined aims or goals. This is the 'why' of the curriculum, and is often (but not always) made explicit in official documents.

Curriculum framework - the documents that outline the structure of the curriculum and its purposes. This also usually includes the content to be taught - the 'what' of the curriculum.

Curriculum provision - the systems and structures established in schools to organise teaching - for example, timetabling. This is the 'how' of the curriculum.

Pedagogy (often termed 'instruction' in the literature, especially in American writing) - usually referring to the teaching strategies and learning activities planned to achieve the aims and fulfil the planned framework. This is also the 'how' of the curriculum.

Assessment - the methods used to judge the extent of students' learning (e.g. tests, homework, observation). Assessment judgments might be used formatively (to provide feedback to learners to inform future learning), summatively (to provide a grade) or evaluatively (to judge whether teaching has been effective).

The relationship between these elements is complex and can be problematic. I provide several examples to illustrate this point:

The particular curriculum-planning model that is outlined in the framework can exert a major influence on pedagogy. For instance, a framework that emphasises content to be learned might encourage teacher-centred approaches to teaching, whereas a model based on processes and skills may encourage activities that are student-centred.

The organisation of provision exerts an effect on pedagogy. For example, methods such as cooperative learning can be difficult if the school day is divided into small teaching blocks, as is the case in most secondary schools.

A heavy emphasis on assessment can encourage narrow 'teach to the test' approaches -so-called washback.

Curriculum planning is fundamentally a political process. In other words, it involves questions of value and is subject to disagreement. Different people have different views about what should be taught (or indeed omitted - the null curriculum). An important question is 'whose curriculum?': who is it for and who chooses? Some believe that content should be chosen to meet children's needs and/or interests. Others suggest that there are bodies of knowledge that have intrinsic value or help us access society's conversation, and which should be taught to all children. For example, social realists such as Young and Muller (2010) believe that children will be disadvantaged if they are not taught knowledge from the academic disciplines (which are recognised bodies of knowledge developed over generations by scholars using rigorous methods).

These complex debates are often reduced to spurious categories: traditional vs. progressive curricula; knowledge vs. skills; subjects vs. interdisciplinary approaches; teacher as sage-on-the-stage vs. teacher as guide-on-the-side, etc. It is far more fruitful to consider these dichotomies in a more nuanced way, for example:

Knowledge vs. skills is better seen as balance between different types of knowledge that are all essential for a meaningful education: propositional knowledge (knowing that), procedural knowledge (knowing how) and epistemic knowledge (knowledge structures and approaches to inquiry - such as scientific methods - that characterise different disciplines).

An accomplished teacher will both teach directly and facilitate learning, depending on the purposes of the learning being undertaken.

This in turn raises further questions about the choice and organisation of curriculum content. Should the curriculum be structured around subjects (the prevailing secondary model in the UK) or themes, a primary school approach? Should school knowledge focus more on 'learning that' or 'learning how'? Should there be a core curriculum for all young people, or should there be choice? What about relevance to real life? Or is the school curriculum a sabre-tooth curriculum (Peddiwell, 1939), which rarely changes and drifts out of date as society evolves?

The curriculum operates (or is made) in different ways at different levels:

supra - transnational ideas about education

macro - national-level policy intentions

meso - policy guidance (ES, LEA)

micro - school-level curricular practices

nano - classroom interactions.

(Thijs and van den Akker, 2009)

Curriculum-making across these levels (or layers of activity) may not be coherent, and there may be good reasons for this (for example, to account for differences in school contexts). Curriculum policy is sometimes referred to as the prescribed curriculum. This is the written curriculum, embodied in a school's documents, curriculum guides and programme of studies booklets. It is the 'official' curriculum. Written curricula are essential, but they do not always reflect what is taught. At the level of practice, the terms described curriculum, enacted curriculum and received curriculum are sometimes used. The first two terms comprise the taught curriculum - what teachers say they teach and what they are actually observed to teach. The received curriculum is the 'bottom line' curriculum - in other words, what the students actually learn. It is the most important curriculum of all; but it is also the one that is most difficult to quantify, and the one over which we have the least control. The described, enacted and received curricula can be very different to the prescribed curriculum, as teachers actively adapt official policy to meet local circumstances, and as learners assimilate and understand what is being taught in very different ways. As can be seen, curriculum is an inexact art form rather than a precise science. (See Thijs and van den Akker, 2009, for a more detailed discussion of this topic.)

A final point to consider concerns what is known as the hidden curriculum. Virtually everything that happens in schools that is not subject to reflection and intention can be seen as part of the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum of any institution is made up of:

the non-academic learning promoted by schools, through the attitudes, values and culture promoted by the school (e.g. enforcement of rules)

the physical environment of the school (e.g. a shabby building may be perceived to permit vandalism)

the social environment of the school (e.g. a culture of bullying or bad behaviour amongst students)

the unconscious and unintended teaching that occurs in the classroom (e.g. the teacher who subconsciously but overtly gives preferential treatment to girls or boys may encourage the development of certain behaviours and attitudes amongst both male and female students).

With the above in mind, I offer an alternative definition of curriculum: the multi-layered social practices, including infrastructure, pedagogy and assessment, through which education is structured, enacted and evaluated. This requires attention to:

curriculum for what, by whom... and for whom?

appropriate selection of knowledge/content and teaching methodologies that are fit for purpose

the importance of context - what works in one school may not work in another

teachers as (professional) curriculum-makers - no curriculum development without teacher development (Stenhouse, 1975); teachers' professional agency (Priestley et al., 2015) is a vital part of this

the role of system dynamics as barriers and drivers to curriculum-making

the perspectives and experiences of traditionally marginalised groups.

Three curriculum-planning models

There are a number of distinct approaches - or, more accurately, starting points - to curriculum-planning. It is necessary to be clear on which model is being used to ensure coherence and conceptual clarity. Kelly (1999) offers three archetypal curriculum-planning models and suggests that each model is inextricably linked with both underlying purposes and conceptions of knowledge, as well as with pedagogy. Kelly's models are:

Curriculum as content and education as transmission. In this approach, the starting point is the content to be taught, often neglecting questions of purpose, and frequently conflating knowledge (an end of education) with subjects (one of various means available for accessing knowledge).

Curriculum as product and education as instrumental. In this approach, education is defined as assessable statements, such as learning outcomes, often specified in great detail across multiple linear levels. This approach has been associated with bureaucracy, over-assessment and instrumental 'tick-box' approaches to curriculum development (e.g. Priestley and Minty, 2013).

Curriculum as process and education as development. In this approach, planning will start with consideration of purposes and values, and content and methods are selected to be fit for purpose. Process approaches can be complex and demanding on schools and teachers.

It is necessary to stress (again) that these models represent starting points for curriculum-planning, rather than mutually exclusive categories; for example, supporters of the process model would not argue that content is unnecessary or unimportant, simply that the selection of content is a secondary consideration, to be debated once the broad principles of the curriculum have been established.

Conclusions

The above discussion suggests that the school curriculum is complex, involving considerations of how policy translates into practice and considerable variation in how this happens from school to school. The process of planning and implementing a curriculum is therefore difficult and uncertain. A successful curriculum must pay attention to underlying purposes of education. How, for example, does it ensure that young people are socialised into society, while avoiding indoctrination and developing individual capacity for active citizenship? How does it make sure that young people develop skills for work without becoming too focused on narrow training? How does it cover essential content, given that this changes as society changes, without becoming overcrowded? How can it remain relevant in a pluralist society where there are competing demands for different content and differing views as to what is important? Where do decisions about content lie? With the teacher? The politician? Parents? Or students? How does it set the scene for learning that is active and teaching that is inspirational?

This article is based on a longer piece by the author, originally published here: https://mrpriestley.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/curriculum-concepts-and-approaches

References

Kelly AV (1999) The Curriculum: Theory and Practice (4th ed). London: Sage.

Peddiwell AJ (1939) The saber-tooth curriculum. Available at: http://www.hci.sg/admin/uwa/MEd7_8678/THE_SABER-TOOTH_CURRICULUM.pdf (accessed 20 March 2019).

Priestley M, Biesta GJJ and Robinson S (2015) Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Priestley M and Minty S (2013) Curriculum for excellence: 'A brilliant idea, but...' Scottish Educational Review 45: 39-52.

Scottish Government (2008). Building the Curriculum 3: A Framework for Learning and Teaching. Edinburgh: Scottish Government.

Stenhouse L (1975) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann.

Thijs A and van den Akker J (2009) Curriculum in development. Enschede: Stichting Leerplan Ontwikkeling (SLO).

Young M and Muller J (2010) Three educational scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge. European Journal of Education 45: 11-27.

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Curriculum studies has been in decline for some years in the UK. As an early career teacher in the 1990s, I was able to choose from a range of university Master's-level programmes with a specialist focus on the curriculum.

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The scourge of curriculum: genericism’s destructive power.

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The scourge of curriculum: genericism’s destructive power.

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It is not difficult to find problems in contemporary education. Many of the problems are acute and obvious and, quite understandably, therefore attract a great deal of attention. In this blog post, I want to draw your attention to a destructive force in education that is far more subtle in its workings, but which, I would argue, is undermining what we are trying to achieve in our classrooms. That threat, I shall argue here, is generic thinking.

The first stage in generic thought is not that different from what one finds in some branches of philosophy. It involves looking at a complex world, and then trying to find the things which each part of that world has in common. By looking for what is common or similar, we are able to make generalisations more easily: the very basis of human communication depends to a considerable extent on our ability to make meaningful generalisations that others will understand.

What is lost in the process of generalisation is difference. A generalisation casts aside the things which two or more things do not have in common. In many cases this is helpful. Differences create noise. Differences create contradictions. Differences are inconvenient. It is often just easier to ignore difference.

But it is worth dwelling for a moment on what difference creates. It is differences between you and me which make us individuals. You could make generalisations about the two of us: we both have a heart, a brain, blood cells, and so on. It would not be difficult to construct a series of statements which treat us as essentially the same thing. Yet no two people, despite all their similarities, are alike. And, in fact, it is what makes us different from one another that makes the world an interesting place. To generalise, however necessary this sometimes may be for communication, is to cast aside that richness and complexity.

Yet, as I have frequently argued, generic thought is endemic in education. Take initial teacher education. In training new teachers, we have distilled what is common to all teachers, regardless of subject or age range taught, and from this constructed a set of generic statements that we call the 'Teachers' Standards'. These standards necessarily cast aside differences between different types of teachers and, because we tend to place more value on what we assess, the differences between different types of teachers get ignored. This is how generic criteria destroy: they find the things which are held in common, and they turn these things into the totality of what it means to be or do something.

The same is true with curriculum. It certainly is possible to think in generic terms about the things we teach. History, science, geography, literature, mathematics: these all involve 'analysis', 'critical thinking', 'explanation' and so on. It certainly is possible to construct statements that hold true across all subjects. It certainly is possible to pull out threads of similarity and congruence. At the level of philosophy of curriculum, these might well be worthwhile speculations. The problem, however, is that curriculum is never created just, or even primarily, for the purposes of philosophy. A curriculum is created to be enacted in practice. And here, again, we see genericism's destructive force.

This destruction happens at a number of levels. In some of its more perverse forms, it treats academic disciplines as alike, each being a carrier for the set of generic ideas that can be distilled from all. Generic curriculum thinking does, however, also operate within disciplines. We assume, for example, that there is a generic 'scientific method', and that as long as we have learnt what is common across all the sciences, we have learnt what is the case in all the sciences. This destroys the significant differences between how astronomers, geologists and biophysicists (to pick just three) go about producing knowledge of reality. We assume, similarly, that there is a generic thing called 'historical thinking' which can be learnt in a generalisable form, something which rather overlooks the fact that there are peculiar differences between how (say) historians of 7th-century Northumbrian politics and 20th-century Spanish economics think about the past.

Lest my argument here be misconstrued, I am not suggesting that you cannot generalise. Clearly there are things that astronomers, geologists and biophysicists have in common, and so too are there things common to the study of early-medieval politics and modern economics. I am not disputing that it is possible to generalise. Rather, I am arguing that a great deal is lost in the process of generalisation and that we risk losing that complexity and richness if our curriculum (and assessment) models do not account for this.

A common response at this point is to argue "let them learn what is generic, and then this can be applied to specifics later on". I think we should be very cautious about this argument. It assumes, first, that the generic thing remains meaningful when it gets taken out of context. To return to my human analogy, we cannot take a heart, a brain and some blood cells out of a person, and then later "apply" these by asking those things to drive a car when mixed back together. When we generalise, we attenuate the things we keep by removing them from the context in which they hold power.

I would add here, further, that I am not sure this is a good way of learning something. My understanding of models of how we learn is that we find it easier to start with specific examples and then to abstract from these, rather than to start with the abstract and then apply this down. It is why I am very sceptical about starting a school history curriculum with a set of lessons on "what is history?" or "how to analyse sources", and then asking for these generic ideas about history to be applied onto the periods pupils study. Rather, I would argue, the generic needs to emerge from the specific: it is much easier and more meaningful to have a conversation about "what is history?" after pupils have spent a long time studying history. I am sure that the temptation of the generic is an example of the curse of the expert: a group of history graduates sitting down to write a curriculum will immediately know what the abstractions they are producing mean because they have a hundred specific examples in their heads. Novices do not have these, rendering the abstract less meaningful.

There is clearly a spectrum. At some point in curriculum design, we have to say "we are going to generalise here". The point of my argument is not to avoid generalisation: rather, it is to peg back what I would argue has become an excessively generic way of thinking about curriculum (and teacher education, and so on). I am not sure there is some rational basis on which to decide where to draw the line, but I am convinced that we have gone far too far in one direction. My acid test, I suppose, would be to ask "would a rational outsider look at this curriculum and from it recognise diversity within that practice". From my reading of current statements about 'standards for teaching', 'critical thinking', the 'scientific method', or 'historical thinking', I am not at all sure that the beautiful differences obscured by these generalisations shine through.

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The scourge of curriculum: genericism's destructive power

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It is not difficult to find problems in contemporary education. Many of the problems are acute and obvious and, quite understandably, therefore attract a great deal of attention. In this blog post, I want to draw your attention to a destructive force in education that is far more subtle in its workings, but which, I...

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Decoupling formative and summative assessment

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Decoupling formative and summative assessment

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The following post is my seminar notes from a session I ran with Christine Counsell on why 'summative' and 'formative' assessment need to be decoupled, particularly in terms of not principally using summative marking criteria to inform teaching. I am particularly grateful to the history teaching community (particularly the so-called 'History Pizza Assessment Group' in Cambridge) and Daisy Christodoulou for helping me clear up my thinking on this matter.
The current prevailing model in formative assessment is to give pupils a task (an essay, an exam question, a piece of music to play) and then to judge their competence at that task using a series of levels, often based on either task-specific or generic descriptions of competence. Having ascertained how well a pupil performed on that task, we then identify what was absent from the performance: what should have been done that was not, or what could have been done better? The feedback we offer to pupils is then based on this analysis of deficit. Feedback is then framed in terms of 'reaching the next level': comments appear to take the form "in order to do this task better you needed to..." Let's call this model of feedback 'coaching'.

And, in some ways, this is fine. It is a particularly effective form of feedback when the person you are coaching already has the wider domain of knowledge and skills they need in order to make sense of the meaning of feedback.

The 'coaching' model of feedback is however less useful when the person you are teaching does not know enough to make sense of the feedback. To the contrary, the feedback you offer might actually be more confusing than helpful.

In order to help a pupil in this situation, you need to identify where the gaps are in the knowledge base of the pupil: your assessment is less one of "how well was the task performed?" but rather one of "what are the possible causes of this task being performed poorly?"

But herein lies the problem. The knowledge of your pupils cannot directly be seen: it can be inferred only from their performance in a task. But, paradoxically, the task you want the pupils to perform well in (the essay, the exam, the piece of music) might not be the most suitable task you need for identifying the causes of failure in that task. This means that (a) feedback you give on the performance ('coaching') might not be understood by the pupil and (b) you are not diagnosing what it is you need to teach or re-teach in order to fill the gap in the pupil's knowledge base.

By way of example, a doctor might see that a marathon runner has collapsed half way through a marathon. But simply noticing the failure does not explain why the runner has failed. It would certainly be pointless at this stage to begin giving feedback to the runner on how to run better. Instead, the doctor is likely to carry out some tests: lung capacity, blood-sugar levels, tests for an infection, and so on. These tests don't look anything like the final performance. What the doctor gets the runner to do (e.g. modifying diet before the run) also does not immediately look like the final performance. But this is precisely the kind of help the runner needs to do better next time.

So what might a diagnostic approach, rather than a coaching approach, to formative assessment look like? In short, it might involve the following process:

what are the common causes of weak performance in the subject I am teaching?

what tests can diagnose those causes most accurately?

All of this might be helpful when working with a class who are close to completing the final performance - e.g. a class of Year 11 pupils with a looming exam. But what about younger children? It would be even more pointless to start coaching younger children on exam performance: their knowledge base is even smaller, and therefore they are likely to be even more confused by the feedback. It is here that we need our curriculum to help us out. A curriculum sets out what pupils ought to know and, although a curriculum is not written simply to prepare children for tests, it nevertheless is the case that pupils who have learnt the curriculum well should be able to perform well in tests based on that curriculum. For younger children, the crucial question then is simply

have the children learnt what is on the curriculum?

Here again the tools you need have to be fit for purpose. Some tools are good at determining whether factual knowledge has been learnt. Some tools are good at spotting misconceptions. Some tools are good at seeing whether knowledge of one thing has been sufficiently well connected to knowledge of another.

So what are the key take-away messages here?

First, there is something to be gained by coaching pupils on performance in a task, but this is most likely to be useful when they already have a good knowledge of what is being learnt. Feedback given that is based on assessment criteria therefore has a place, but its place is limited, and it can be counter-productive.

Secondly, diagnostic formative assessment is instead a matter of identifying what the causes of poor performance are, and then testing to see which of those causes is responsible for poor performance. These kinds of assessment will not necessarily look like the final performance: indeed, they might well look very different.

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Decoupling summative and formative assessment

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The following post is my seminar notes from a session I ran with Christine Counsell on why 'summative' and 'formative' assessment need to be decoupled, particularly in terms of not principally using summative marking criteria to inform teaching. I am particularly grateful to the history teaching community (particularly the so-called 'History Pizza Assessment Group' in...

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Curriculum is all about power. Decisions about what knowledge to teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What we choose to teach confers or denies power. To say that pupils should learn 'the best that has been thought and said' is never adequate. Start the conversation, and questions abound: 'Whose knowledge?'; 'Who decides on "best"?'.

Such questions reflect concern about whether schooling reproduces inequalities or interrupts them. Such questions matter. But reducing knowledge to voice will not get us far either. The contentious questions - Which works of literature? Which historical stories? Which art? - cannot be resolved by some optimal blend of diversity, some nirvana of neutrality, as though distribution across the sources of knowledge or types of knower will settle things. No matter how redemptive of former injustice, no holy grail of content selection will be reached.

Nor does adding in preparation for the 21st century help. How can we decide what is relevant to the ever-shifting 'now'? Worse, relevance quickly merges with perceptions of relevance and, before we know it, content is chosen for being engaging or deemed 'relevant' by the pupil. Then we have completely lost our moorings. At that point, we lose touch with the duty of including the next generation in a shared language of abstract concepts, in common tools for precise thought, in the possibility of objective knowledge underlying them and in the possibility of citizens appraising it. These things serve the rationalised sensibility on which participation in a democratic society depends.

Appeal to knowledge and skills is no corrective either. These terms invoke such diverse assumptions that discussions end up at cross purposes. And to suggest that knowledge is less important than skills is to ignore the way in which our knowledge changes us, including our curiosity and capacity for new knowledge.

As educators, we need something more coherent concerning the character of knowledge - its structure, its origin, its status as a set of truth claims (such as their revisability) and the relationship of teachers and pupils to that knowledge. How, how far and when can teachers or pupils participate in challenging or reaching those truth claims? In which subjects and under what circumstances must they just accept them (for now) as givens?

How can a senior school leader tackle these questions? School leaders need practical solutions; few have time to swallow philosophical tomes. Yet to shy away from big ideas is always a false saving. And intellectual resources exist that are rigorous, accessible and useful.

First, we have longstanding traditions of practice and debate within subject communities concerning ways of teaching the structure, status and origin of knowledge. Second, a relatively recent research programme arising from the sociology of knowledge advances the idea of 'powerful knowledge'. In this article, I will reflect briefly on just one theme emerging from the first, which is further illuminated by the second, namely the curricular distinction between substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

Substantive and disciplinary knowledge

Substantive knowledge is the content that teachers teach as established fact - whether common convention, concept or warranted account of reality. You might want pupils to know of crotchets, percentages, the Treaty of Waitangi, Debussy or prokaryotic cells. In calling this 'substantive', we are treating the material presented as givens.

Disciplinary knowledge, by contrast, is a curricular term for what pupils learn about how that knowledge was established, its degree of certainty and how it continues to be revised by scholars, artists or professional practice. It is that part of the subject where pupils understand each discipline as a tradition of enquiry with its own distinctive pursuit of truth. For each subject is just that: a product and an account of an ongoing truth quest, whether through empirical testing in science, argumentation in philosophy/history, logic in mathematics or beauty in the arts. It describes that part of the curriculum where pupils learn about the conditions under which valid claims can be made, and associated conventions such as what constitutes evidence or argument in that subject.

In those subjects where content choices are potentially infinite and selections must be made, it is through due attention to the disciplinary dimension that pupils know that what I teach is not all that there is. In those subjects where truth is sought through argumentation, pupils learn that even the selection and juxtaposition of two facts in a narrative amount to an interpretation, and that interpretation can be conducted responsibly or irresponsibly, but never definitively. A successful history, geography, RE or literature curriculum, in which the disciplinary was visible, will leave pupils absolutely clear that even the curriculum itself, as they received it, was one such selection, and must not be confused with the whole domain.

This substantive-disciplinary distinction works to differing extents and in very different ways across subjects. The disciplinary dimension is barely relevant, for example, in school-level modern languages. Moreover, how it gains expression in a school curriculum varies widely. In history, pupils encounter historical scholarship in order to learn how historians participate in a social process of claim and counter-claim. But they can't read scholarship without being drawn into the argument themselves. The date of the Treaty of Versailles is a given. Many events before and after the Treaty of Versailles are givens. But attributions of cause, consequence or significance to the Treaty of Versailles are not givens. The humblest of Year 7 history essays is elementary training in argumentation and produces legitimately different conclusions. Moreover, teacher-led, subject-specific research traditions have explored multiple ways of doing this well by blending secure substantive with rich disciplinary knowledge so as to refine pupils' appreciation and practice of historical argument (Foster, 2013).

Is it the same in science? Not quite. The substantive and disciplinary distinction definitely holds. Pupils study scientific methods, understand degrees of certainty, conduct investigations. But in terms of pupils' relationship to those processes and conclusions, there are differences. At school level, conclusions are not normally 'up for grabs' by pupils in quite the way they are in philosophy, literature or history, where argumentation itself is the method. In other words, each school subject stands in a slightly different temporal relationship to its real-world cognate of scholarly and professional knowledge production.

Therefore, when schools talk about pupils 'being' artists, historians or scientists, they are rarely talking about the same thing across subjects. In some subjects, we see frequent knowledge production processes (composing and creating; arguing and judging). In others, even those full of practising and doing within subject skills, the balance tilts towards knowledge reproduction, with less open-ended interpretation (a reason to avoid conflating 'disciplinary' with 'skills'). This doesn't mean that disciplinary knowledge is less important where less is 'up for grabs'. It may just mean that pupils (for now) are learning more about how others have established truth claims. Even for a textbook or teacher to state, 'Scholars are unsure whether trade in seventh-century Arabia...' is to show disciplinary attentiveness by modelling responsible claims.

All this matters in whole-school leadership. 'Substantive' and 'disciplinary' are illuminating categories not only for understanding curriculum but also for grasping the implications of curriculum for teaching and assessment. Regarding teaching, they help senior leaders to interpret teaching activities in the light of an object. Before one can apply research into the efficacy of (say) pair/group discussion, one needs to establish what is being taught. Failure to do this has caused untold problems. A world of difference exists between a paired discussion designed to practise a facet of open argument derived from a particular discipline and a paired discussion designed for learning substantive content. In one, the dialogue teaches a disciplinary process; in the other, the rationale is constructivist pedagogy. They cannot be appraised in the same way. Regarding assessment, an understanding of substantive and disciplinary would have seen senior leaders questioning the use of level descriptions for formative assessment years earlier than actually happened. Each subject has its own pattern and interplay between learning substantive content and engaging with its origins or processes. The practice of treating progress as mini-versions of level descriptions and GCSE mark schemes has dangerously distorted subject structures and journeys.

The expression 'knowledge-rich' curriculum is normally associated only with substantive knowledge. This is understandable given that we're emerging from an era in which mastering content was sidelined, even demonised, and given the attention now paid to research on the relationship between academic content knowledge and reading, on the vocabulary gap between advantaged and disadvantaged and on the role of knowledge in making subsequent learning possible (Willingham, 2017). But we cannot neglect the disciplinary dimension. This is achievable even in the primary phase. Our Year 4 pupils' questions show that they are fascinated by Mendeleev's cleverness in making the periodic table open and revisable, by van Leeuwenhoek's worries about the Royal Society taking his microscope seriously, by the questions that geographers ask about borders and boundaries.

Powerful knowledge

The categories 'substantive' and 'disciplinary' are merely one cross-section of useful curriculum analysis but they are foundational. Their significance is further illuminated by a body of research within the sociology of knowledge that tackles education's knowledge question within a progressive agenda for social justice (Rata, 2016) (Young, 2008). Associated with the concept of 'powerful knowledge', these theorists challenge the view that academic knowledge necessarily perpetuates disadvantage by remaining the preserve of the powerful forces that created it. Drawing on Durkheim, they argue that knowledge developed by academics in intellectual communities becomes independent of those socio-historical origins through its abstract and generalising tendencies. Because this specialised knowledge is not acquired or produced informally in everyday experience, entitlement to it through curriculum is vital (Young and Muller, 2016).

Not only does this knowledge offer the language of abstract concepts, but these precise concepts also become tools with which to imagine change. They enable humans to theorise possibility and think the un-thought (Wheelahan, 2010). To achieve this, a curriculum must enact processes of 'epistemic ascent' (Winch, 2013), by which concepts already understood by students are brought into new relations of abstraction and generality, giving the student yet more power to challenge, rethink and create. McPhail illustrates this with music (McPhail, 2014). He explains how without epistemic understanding, pupils are restricted to subjective experience of music. Discussing the complex relationships between music's subjective and objective dimensions, McPhail shows how teachers can integrate students' ownership of music's affective power with access to knowledge fundamental to the conversations of the discipline.

While collaborating in building a trust-wide, knowledge-rich curriculum, we have found it useful to reflect on this body of work, not only regarding the power inherent in the abstractions of substantive knowledge, but also regarding each subject's disciplinary dimension. Powerful knowledge theorists emphasise that specialised knowledge is emergent, provisional and revisable through continuing social processes such as scholarly research and critique. For pupils to learn how knowledge is formed and changed distinguishes a knowledge-rich curriculum grounded in 'powerful knowledge' from one merely ossifying a canon. In a stark prediction of three futures, Young and Muller (2016) contrast a Future 1 in which knowledge is fixed and tied to the social context that produced it, and a Future 3 whose radical potential harnesses the fertile, generative qualities of knowledge to give all citizens access to intellectual tools for rational change.

This article scratches the surface of debates that school and system leaders cannot ignore. Given its implications for democracy, curriculum is a serious business. We must engage with its provenance and properties.

References

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Curriculum is all about power. Decisions about what knowledge to teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What we choose to teach confers or denies power. To say that pupils should learn 'the best that has been thought and said' is never adequate.

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What are the aims of a knowledge rich curriculum?

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What are the aims of a knowledge rich curriculum?

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Andy Buck summarises some of his key thinking around Educational Leadership

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...but relevant for us all! The pastoral team at Michaela have summarised some important points about building relationships and managing behaviour.

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Tackling disadvantage - Teach First report

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Tackling disadvantage - Teach First report

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HoC Briefing paper from Jan 2020 on funding allocations and the way the budget is used

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How can teacher resilience be protected and promoted?

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how can teacher resilience be protected and promoted

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This simple one page guide is a useful reminder

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A welcome to the BWT Research Hub by Andy Buck from Leadership Matters #honk

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EEF Blog: The danger of oversimplifying the traditional vs progressive debate
In this blog, Robbie Coleman - a secondary school English teacher and a Senior Associate at the EEF - looks at the age-old 'trads v progs' educational debate, and finds valuable nuance in the research of Barak Rosenshine.
Barak Rosenshine's 1997 article, The Case for Explicit, Teacher-led, Cognitive Strategy Instruction, is only eight pages long, but it is an excellent companion to the long-standing educational debate around 'progressive' and 'traditional' approaches to teaching. If you read one thing about education before the new year, I would recommend it.

For a start, the paper underlines that this question is not new, providing a snapshot into a version of the argument that took place in the US at the end of the 20 th century. Rosenshine bemoans the (then) fashionable idea of "learning by discovery" and the belief that skills are "better caught than taught" (Rosenshine, 1997: 5).

But Rosenshine is not a tribalist, and the paper helped me understand the debate between traditional and progressive ideas in a much more nuanced way than I previously had. He splits the question of whether to prioritise the teaching of knowledge or skills from the question of whether lessons should predominantly be teacher- or pupil- led. He focuses primarily on reading comprehension and surveys a range of studies conducted between the 1970s and 1990s, to recommend that the explicit instruction of reading comprehension strategies is a good idea.

For me, his paper illustrates the danger of oversimplifying the traditional vs. progressive debate. The distinctions between knowledge and skills, teacher-led and pupil-led approaches are real, but placing them together on a single dimension appears to me to be unhelpful.

For example, imagine three classes are studying poetry of the First World War:

In Class A, before beginning to read John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, the teacher shares definitions of several sophisticated words in the poem ("scarce", "quarrel") that she anticipates will be new to the class, and gives them some key contextual information about the author and the war.

In Class B, students are placed in groups, each of which is given a different poem. The teacher asks students to read and discuss their poem, before preparing a presentation for the rest of the class on the key ideas they feel it contains.

Before Class C read Rupert Brooke's The Soldier,the teacher explains that it is very likely that the poem will appear confusing in the first read through. She then sets out one strategy to help, involving question prompts. After reading through the poem, the teacher writes, "Who? What? Where? When?" in the margin of the page and, speaking aloud, models the process of answering the questions.

There is a clear difference between Class A and Class B. The former emphasises a range of facts (contextual information and vocabulary) that the teacher believes will help the students understand and engage with the poem. The latter is pupil-led; the teacher will circulate the room and provide support, but more responsibility is placed on students to interpret the poems for themselves, and groups are a given choice about how to present their findings to the class.
Figure 1. Traditional vs. progressive teaching: beyond a binary split
Both Class A and Class C appear to be teacher-led. In Class A the teacher provides information relevant to the poems. In Class C, however, the content being taught is a strategy that the teacher believes will help her students to improve their comprehension. It is this type of explicit instruction that Rosenshine advocates in his paper, having reviewed 56 studies testing the impact of explicitly teaching thinking strategies.

Explicitly teaching skills does not mean that one must eschew teaching facts. Rosenshine's paper does not denigrate the approach taken in Class A; indeed, in his other work, Rosenshine advocates the "daily practice of vocabulary" ( Rosenshine, 2012: 13) and highlights the findings of cognitive psychologists who argue for the explicit instruction of both "the concepts and skills that students are required to learn" ( Clark, Kirschner and Sweller, 2012: 6).

Instead, the paper demonstrates the value of a more precise set of distinctions between traditional and progressive teaching than I had previously encountered. Crucially, it is not the case that fans of explicit-instruction necessarily believe that facts are the only things that can be explicitly taught.

In addition, it provides several ideas that I will try to incorporate into my teaching next year. Rosenshine provides a useful typology of prompts and strategies, as well as advice on modelling these approaches for students.

In a future post, I'll look at progress in the fields of cognitive and meta-cognitive strategy instruction since 1997. I'll also dig a bit deeper into the link between directly teaching skills and promoting independence. For example, might there be a role for the Class B approach at a different point in a teaching sequence, after students have attained a particular level of knowledge and skill?

PS: Another reading suggestion... If you haven't already, read Barak Rosenshine's outstanding 2012 paper Principles of Instruction, which provides an overview of findings from cognitive psychology and observational studies of highly-effective teachers, distilling an enormous amount of research into 10 pieces of practical advice.

* A version of t his blog was first published by the Chartered College of Teaching

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EEF Blog: The danger of oversimplifying the traditional vs progressive debate | News

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In this blog, Robbie Coleman - a secondary school English teacher and a Senior Associate at the EEF - looks at the age-old 'trads v progs' educational debate, and finds valuable nuance in the research of Barak Rosenshine.

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As part of our commitment to getting better through sharing expertise and drawing on the best available evidence, we have put together free, downloadable journals filled with the best conversations in education. We call these journals, 'The Expert Edits'.

We're delighted to release the latest in the series & our fourth Expert Edit: Intentional Curriculum Design.

Curated by our experts, the Edits are a collection of the latest thinking around teaching and school leadership. Each expert shares a selection of the latest and best-informed content from a range of different authors, providing an analysis of their ideas and some reflective prompts so that you can apply them in your own setting.

They include questions like:

How can we create a world-class education system?

What is leadership success dependent on?

What makes a great curriculum?

How to implement school improvement?

What defines system leadership?

Easy to download and digest, we hope The Expert Edits will pique your interest, inform your practice and help you to keep getting better.

You can download all four here:
The Expert Edit: Intentional Curriculum Design by Chloe Wardle The Expert Edit: Leadership Knowledge by Tom Rees The Expert Edit: School Improvement by Marie Hamer The Expert Edit: System Improvement by Sir David Carter
About us

Ambition Institute is a new graduate school for teachers, school leaders and system leaders.

We're on a mission to help educators serving children from disadvantaged backgrounds to keep getting better.

You can find out more about our full programme offer here.

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The Expert Edits: The best conversations in education

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As part of our commitment to getting better through sharing expertise and drawing on the best available evidence, we have put together free, downloadable journals filled with the best conversations in education. We call these journals, 'The Expert Edits'. We're delighted to release the latest in the series & our fourth Expert Edit: Intentional Curriculum Design.

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The Pupil Premium is one of the most important tools we have to address the stubborn link between family income and education outcomes. Used purposefully, it can help tackle some of the barriers that stand in the way of eligible pupils' progress.

But getting the most out of your Pupil Premium requires careful consideration and planning. Our guide - and its accompanying resources - are designed to support you to plan, implement, monitor, and sustain an effective strategy.

They align with the for creating a Pupil Premium strategy as well as its ​''. This means you can be confident that your approach fulfils the expectations of the Pupil Premium strategy document.

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How to plan, implement, monitor, and sustain an effective Pupil Premium strategy

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The guide is split into two sections, each with a distinct purpose. The first section explores how we can support teachers to deliver the most effective and empowering online learning while schools are closed.

The second considers the challenges and opportunities teacher educators face when planning professional development for teachers in the current climate, as well as considering what foundations we could lay now for the years that come.
SECTION 1: HOW CAN WE SUPPORT TEACHERS TO PROMOTE STUDENT LEARNING NOW?

1.1 Identifying action steps to refine online teaching - Josh Goodrich

1.2 Helping teachers to explain ideas clearly - Clare Couves

1.3 Designing work packs and preparing online learning - Susie Fraser

1.4 Collectively designing effective online learning - Rachel Sewell

1.5 Guiding teachers in online learning - Andy Jones & Greg Hughes

1.6 Finding ways to help families and staff remain connected - Jo Riley

SECTION 2: HOW CAN WE SUPPORT TEACHERS TO KEEP IMPROVING?

2.1 Continuing to develop teachers' professional knowledge - Debbie Light

2.2 Designing a professional development programme for all staff - Louise Hall & Catherine Clark

2.3 Continuing to train trainee teachers - Keren Davis

2.4 Supporting trainee teachers who are still teaching - Kathryn Frost

2.5 Interviewing prospective teachers remotely - Chris Mitchinson

These extracts, insights and experiences have been shared by the participants on our Teacher Education Fellows programme. They represent specific challenges in their contexts, and draw on the programme's learnings and resources to develop solutions. We hope it serves as a useful resource for other educators across the sector during this difficult time.

Teacher Education Fellows is a two-year programme to help experienced teacher educators develop informed and intentional approaches to the most important components of teacher education.

If you're interested in improving your practice, benefitting from the network and joining the best conversations in education, speak to our team about becoming a 2020 Fellow.

For more information about Ambition Institute and our full programme suite, click here.

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The guide is split into two sections, each with a distinct purpose. The first section explores how we can support teachers to deliver the most effective and empowering online learning while schools are closed.

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Putting Evidence to Work - A School’s Guide to Implementation

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Putting Evidence to Work - A School’s Guide to Implementation

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What does the research say about designing video lessons?

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What does the research say about designing video lessons?

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Education technology is really powerful. The problem is that it is just as easy to use that power badly as to use it well.

You can see this with video lessons - clearly video allows you to do all kinds of cool things, but how many of these cool things will help students to learn better?

The best guide I have come across is the work of Richard Mayer, in particular The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. It is truly exhaustive - it details hundreds of studies, establishes a couple of dozen principles, and makes it clear where the research is limited or in flux, and where the boundary of each principle lies. In chapter 3 of my book Teachers vs Tech I write about quite a few of Mayer's principles. I also say that given just how complex this research is, it's unrealistic to expect teachers to be solely responsible for designing lessons that accord with it. And if I thought that before Covid-19, I think it even more now. Right now, the focus is rightly on getting content out there, even if the format and design are not perfect. Still, here are a few more or less effortful research-backed tips for designing video lessons.

You can always just share slides
Mayer's 'image principle' (ch 14 of the Cambridge Handbook) is that adding an image of the instructor to a lesson doesn't improve learning. Basically this is because the image of the speaker is usually not relevant to the content you are trying to teach, so it can function as a distraction.

More recent eye-tracking studies show that when a talking head speaks to a set of slides, the learners spend more time looking at the talking head than at the content on the slides - even when the talking head is referring to the content on the slides.

A number of famous online resources don't feature the speaker's image at all, just the lesson content and the speaker's voice. Look at Khan Academy, for example, or Hegarty Maths - they feature the teacher's voice talking you through a worked example that appears in stages on a slide.

Hang on a minute, you might say, what about the classroom? Students deal with a human presence there all the time. That's true, but it is offset by the fact that in a physical classroom, it is much easier to follow a teacher's gaze and gesture - and of course for the teacher to monitor the students' gazes. The way in which different technologies allow you to follow the teacher's gaze is another important area of study.

Go for a plain background
Still, it is worth pointing out that Mayer's research doesn't show learning is worse if it features an image of the speaker - just that it isn't any better. If you don't have slides to share, or you do just want students to be able to see you, then go for a plain background that minimises distraction. Bookshelves, pictures, elaborate patterns, pot plants...all these can be distracting! I think we are all realising this as we watch people being interviewed from home and spend more time wondering about their book and art choices than about what they are saying. I am certainly guilty of this - I delivered a webinar a few weeks ago with a collection of lovely yellow Wisdens in the background.

Integrate the speaker and the content
This is potentially very powerful, particularly for subjects like science, but it is also quite hard to achieve and probably needs a technique like green screen. With this approach, the speaker can walk around and interact with the slides or the content they are presenting. This allows you to take advantage of other multimedia principles: the signalling principle, for example, which is about the benefits of drawing a student's attention to specific information. Integrating the speaker and content like this also prevents the 'split attention effect', which is when learners struggle to integrate information from two different sources. Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski's online course,Learning How to Learn, provides some great examples of how this can work in practice. They have also written up their design approach in a Nature paper here.

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What does the research say about designing video lessons? - Daisy Christodoulou

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Education technology is really powerful. The problem is that it is just as easy to use that power badly as to use it well. You can see this with video lessons - clearly video allows you to do all kinds of cool things, but how many of these cool things will help students to learn...

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Remote learning: why hasn’t it worked before and what can we do to change that?

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Remote learning: why hasn’t it worked before and what can we do to change that?

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Back in 2008, the business professor Clayton Christensen made a prediction that by 2019, half of all US high school classes would be taken online. It's now 2020 and this prediction is not even close to being true, in the US or any other country.

Similarly, big predictions that online courses would completely disrupt university education have also failed to come true (notwithstanding success stories like the UK's Open University who pioneered remote learning in a pre-online world). Why is this? Is it fundamentally impossible to get remote learning to work as well as classroom-based learning? Are there things we could do to improve it that we are not doing? Or is it all just inertia - will an external shock like coronavirus make us realise that we can make it work after all?

Remote learning and disruptive innovation
Christensen made his prediction based on his general theory of disruptive innovation. According to this theory, disruptive innovation happens in the following way. You have an incumbent - let's say an encyclopedia publisher, the Encyclopedia Britannica - who has a well-established product with a well-established customer base.

Then a disruptive innovator comes along - in this case Wikipedia. To begin with, the innovator's product isn't as good as that of the incumbent's. It's not as high quality or as reliable. But it is much more accessible than the incumbent's product - in the case of Wikipedia, it's free and easy to access online. And so it has great appeal for people who, for whatever reason, can't access the Encyclopedia Britannica. And whilst to begin with Wikipedia might not be as reliable or high quality as the Encyclopedia Britannica, over time it will keep on improving until it gets to the point that it is not just more accessible than the incumbent - it's actually better too. And then bingo, the innovator takes over and the incumbent disappears.

How would this work applied to education and remote learning? In his book Disrupting Class, Christensen lays out the essential ways you could apply this theory to education more generally. Currently, there are already a couple of percent of students who, for various reasons, cannot access traditional schools. Christensen's theory is that virtual schools will start out delivering education to this small group of students. To begin with, it will not be as good as what you get in traditional classrooms. But over time, it will get better until it ends up being as good or better as what is on offer in schools. More and more students will then move over to learning remotely, in virtual classrooms.

I have a lot of respect for the general principles of Christensen's theory. Unlike a lot of business theories, there's some good evidence backing it up, and some pretty good examples from a whole range of different sectors. I also think the general principle of what he outlines about education is at least plausible. So why didn't his prediction come true? I think there are three, linked, reasons: two that can be solved, and one that is harder and possibly insurmountable. These are the three important principles to remember when setting up remote learning - and which, unfortunately, are often ignored.

Use high-quality, well-designed content
Too many online learning programmes assume that if you are studying online, you've got easy access to all the facts and content you will need via the internet. For example, Google's teacher training resources tell teachers that "we have access to every bit of info we need at all times. It is therefore no longer relevant to focus on teaching facts." This might seem plausible, but it is actually a terrible idea. We need facts in long-term memory to be able to think. Content can't be divorced from skills. Imagine reading a novel where you don't know what half the words mean: sure you could stop to look up every word online but how much pleasure and understanding are you going to get from the novel? Technology shouldn't be used to eliminate memorisation, but to make it more fun and efficient.

Not only that, but all online content is not created equal. It varies in quality, reliability and design. One of the side-effects of the common idea that "content doesn't matter" is that it's assumed that if students can't find what they need online, then teachers can easily throw something together that will do the job. But creating high-quality text is not easy. Creating high-quality multimedia resources is even harder. There is an extensive research literature on multimedia instructional design: Richard Mayer has come up with over 30 principles of multimedia design, and creating resources that make the most of these principles is hard.

Barbara Oakley & Terrence Sejnowski are the creators of Learning How to Learn, the world's most popular online course. They used Mayer's principles in the design of their videos, and wrote a paper for Nature about the process. In relative terms, their videos did not cost that much - but they still required more time, money and specialist expertise than most teachers have to spare. We can't expect teachers to create all this content. Ideally we need online learning platforms that integrate high-quality, coherent and well-sequenced content; in the absence of those, we need to curate the best online and offline sources of content.

Get the right kind of interactivity
Of course, on its own high-quality content on its own is not enough. If it were, then much older learning technologies would have totally solved the remote learning problem: the printing press and camera! Indeed, Thomas Edison predicted this in 1913, arguing that within ten years education would be carried out via motion pictures. His prediction was wrong just as Christensen's was, because a teaching and learning are interactive. Good teachers do more than just present content; they are constantly questioning, listening, and reacting to their students.

Of course, modern technology has the potential to be interactive, and interactivity and personalisation are major selling points of many modern ed tech programmes. Unfortunately, they often interpret personalisation in a pseudoscientific way. Ironically, this can be seen in Christensen's own work. In the same book where he makes his prediction about online courses, he also says that they will be transformative because they will allow students to receive personalised instruction based on their own learning style. But there is no evidence learning styles exist. Study after study shows that what matters is not the preferred learning style of the student, but the best learning style for the content being studied. But the education technology world is not listening to this evidence. Summit Learning, an online learning platform which is funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation and has been praised by Bill Gates, is also heavily invested in learning styles.

What about different types of interactivity - video-conferencing, for example? This might provide some benefits, but the technical obstacles shouldn't be underestimated: expecting every student and teacher to have a reliable enough internet connection to allow for video calls between 25+ different computers is highly optimistic.

Instead of attempting to replicate the classroom via a video-conference, we could think of simpler ways of achieving the interactivity that is crucial to teaching and learning. Adaptive learning platforms are designed to personalise instruction - not on the basis of non-existent learning styles, but using information about a student's previous studies. The most complex adaptive platforms consist of thousands of questions and videos and detailed information about the student's understanding. These often need some kind of teacher and student training before implementation. But other adaptive platforms are much simpler. Some are essentially just collections of flashcards combined with a spaced-repetition algorithm that displays each flashcard at the ideal moment.

It sounds simple, but decades of research show this is one of the most effective ways to study. Some flashcard apps are free, and some support offline use for students with unreliable internet connections. They also provide teachers and students with data on the time spent studying and patterns of strengths and weaknesses. While learning styles have no research backing them up but are absurdly popular, spaced-repetition is the exact opposite: it has enormous amounts of research behind it, but remains underused.

Remember we're not brains in a jar
The final reason why remote learning hasn't worked so far - and the reason that may be hardest to overcome - is that there may be ways, particularly for young children, in which the physical presence of a human is necessary, or other ways in which physicality matters.

For example, we know that young children pay attention when they hear adults speaking, but not when they hear the same adults saying the same things on a video, and we know that handwriting has value over typewriting when it comes to learning to read and taking notes. Teachers provide motivation, encouragement and supervision, and you can't switch them off by giving them a one-star rating in the app store. There are ways around some of these issues: for example, at No More Marking, where I work, we assess student writing online, but it can still be hand-written and then scanned in.

The best programmes
There are some terrible online learning resources out there, but there are also some brilliant ones, even if they are not always getting the attention or funding they deserve. In my research forTeachers vs Tech, I had a lot of fun trying out different learning apps and talking to the people involved in making them. Here are some of my favourites. (I don't work for or have any financial connection with any of the below!)

Duolingo: probably the most famous language learning app, with enough data to be able to change our understanding of how we learn languages

Memrise: another language learning app - one thing I particularly like about this one is that they have lots of videos of real humans speaking the language, so you can hear the different ways words actually get pronounced.

Smartick: comprehensive adaptive maths programme for 4 - 14 year olds

Anki: a spaced-repetition flashcard app. You can download pre-made decks, but most people I know use it to create their own. Very powerful but not particularly shiny or gamified - perhaps better for older students. I use this myself and I love it.

Quizlet: another spaced repetition flashcard app - perhaps more suitable for younger students.

Times Tables Rock Stars: Making times tables fun.

Hegarty Maths: this is designed to supplement school maths lessons by providing homework practice

Diagnostic Questions: banks of questions designed to target misconceptions

UpLearn: online A-level courses that include adaptivity and spaced repetition

The Learning How to Learn MOOC: this is the world's most popular online course, discussed above. It practises what it preaches, too: the creators wrote a paper for Nature explaining how the principles of learning science informed their video design.

And of course, you can always turn to an even older learning technology - the book! If you've liked what you've read here, you could start with Teachers vs Tech, the book on which this blog is based.

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Remote learning: why hasn't it worked before and what can we do to change that? - Daisy Christodoulou

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Back in 2008, the business professor Clayton Christensen made a prediction that by 2019, half of all US high school classes would be taken online. It's now 2020 and this prediction is not even close to being true, in the US or any other country.

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Practice with Purpose: The Emerging Science of Teacher Expertise 

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Practice with Purpose: The Emerging Science of Teacher Expertise 

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Benjamin Riley, executive director of Deans for Impact, explains the principles of deliberate practice and why they matter for educator preparation.

Supporters

"At the center of the high quality clinical preparation offered in residencies is a cycle of learning, practice, and feedback executed through a gradual release of responsibility. Practice with Purpose articulates how to strengthen teacher candidate and early career teacher development-learning that can be applied by residencies, traditional, and alternative models of preparation. With a heightened focus on preparing teachers to better serve students, communities, and districts, it is incumbent upon teacher preparation programs to integrate theory and practice, and place practice at the center of teacher training."

Anissa Listak, founder and CEO, National Center for Teacher Residencies

" Practice with Purpose is a concise resource for teacher educators who want to take advantage of emerging knowledge about the power of deliberate practice. The simple but powerful principles, illustrations, and self-assessment questions are designed to help teacher educators efficiently take action to improve both individual courses and entire programs."

Francesca Forzani, associate director, TeachingWorks

"Five years ago, state education chiefs outlined a clear set of actions to transform educator preparation so every teacher is ready on day one to advance learning for all kids. We are excited to see Deans for Impact call for improvements aligned with these efforts to transform educator preparation and urge all state leaders to consider Practice with Purpose: The Emerging Science of Teacher Expertise as they continue to strengthen how teachers are prepared to enter the classroom."

Chris Minnich, executive director, Council of Chief State School Officers

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Practice with Purpose | Deans for Impact

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Practice with Purpose connects the principles of deliberate practice with the methods used to prepare and develop teaching skill.

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LEARNING: WHAT IS IT, AND HOW MIGHT WE CATALYSE IT?

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LEARNING: WHAT IS IT, AND HOW MIGHT WE CATALYSE IT?

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This second edition of 'Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?' by our Dean of Learning Design, Peps Mccrea, has been produced to share our thinking, guide our programmes, and stimulate discussion around the nature of learning and teaching.

This updated paper provides a coherent, high-level overview of the domain - organised around nine insights, with a taste of what the implications of these insights are for our classrooms.

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Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?

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This second edition of 'Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?' by our Dean of Learning Design, Peps Mccrea, has been produced to share our thinking, guide our programmes, and stimulate discussion around the nature of learning and teaching.

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Explaining the science of learning to teachers

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Explaining the science of learning to teachers

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Together, we codified our experiences and ideas into The Learning Curriculum: a guide for teacher educators teaching teachers the science of learning. Rob Coe called it "really useful", Dylan Wiliam described it as "very important" and teacher educators told us they found it invaluable in planning professional learning within schools.

Yet it was a first draft, and we knew we would want to revise it. We can now share the revised version, which reflects the continued experimentation of the Pilot Cohort of Teacher Educator Fellows, the insights and suggestions of Fellows in Cohort 1, and expert advice from Oliver Caviglioli, Efrat Furst, Peps McCrea, Nick Rose and Amber Walraven.
Download The Learning Curriculum 2.0 >
Our aim is unchanged: to provide teacher educators with the guidance and resources they need to teach teachers the science of learning.

We structure Version 2.0 around five principles of learning:

How can teachers help students to attend to learning?

How can teachers help students focus on what matters?

How can teachers help students encode information in long-term memory?

How can teachers find out what students already know?

How can teachers help students to remember what they learn?

The document clarifies and exemplifies each principle, and offers questions to check teachers' understanding. Additionally, we've sought to make this version more useful and usable by including:

Practical demonstrations illustrating the principles

Refined assessment questions

A glossary of key terms

Exemplar professional development session plans

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Explaining the science of learning to teachers

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Together, we codified our experiences and ideas into The Learning Curriculum: a guide for teacher educators teaching teachers the science of learning. Rob Coe called it "really useful", Dylan Wiliam described it as "very important" and teacher educators told us they found it invaluable in planning professional learning within schools.

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Seven recommendations for teaching self-regulated learning & metacognition