This came as huge blow to my self-confidence and I spent the next few years reinventing myself as a trendy, progressive teacher. Out with modelling and whole class instruction; in with group work, problem solving and PLTS. It worked. Lesson observations were given the thumbs up, the kids were having a great time and results were going up. Smiles all round.

When I started writing this blog back in July 2011 I was very much into experimenting with saying less and less, and making the kids discover more and more for themselves. In fact, in one of my earliest posts, I explained how the very title of the blog came from a technique of getting students to act as teachers in order to leave me free to ‘observe’ learning. Occasionally, some of the more academic students complained that they wanted me to ‘just tell them stuff’ but I dismissed that as the product of too much spoon-feeding from other, less exciting teachers.

Signing up to Twitter gradually made a difference. The process of engaging in debate with other teachers who had actually bothered to learn about education came as a real eye opener. I was confounded the first time I ran up against Andrew Old embarking on one of his trade mark Direction Instruction diatribes. Could thinking, rational teachers still actually believe this? Clearly they could, and I wanted to know why. I started to read. First Hattie’s Visible Learning, and then others, including Willingham, Hirsch and Engelmann. OK, I conceded: there is a place for this kind of teaching. What’s needed is balance.

I started writing about integrating right and left wing teaching in such posts as What’s deep learning and How do you do it? and Why aren’t we supposed to teach anymore? I stated to wonder whether my love affair with teaching skills was all It was cracked up to be and started asking Should we be teaching knowledge or skills? and Is it better to be told, or to discover a fact? On the way I encountered problems such as The Learning Pyramid but still felt the need to justify Why group work works for me. Now, I’m not completely recanting – I still believe students need to be given opportunities to work collaboratively – but I’m definitely a lot clearer on why I might want them to do it. My beliefs have shifted quite a lot. I am now firmly convinced of the need to teach students a curriculum which is predicated on expanding their horizons and giving them knowledge of the world beyond the sometimes narrow confines of their lives and have become increasingly passionate about grammar. I’m even beginning to doubt the primacy of AfL!

But perhaps the biggest shift in my thinking is on the troublesome topic of teacher talk. You see, when that inspector told me I talked too much he was basing that judgement on a body of thinking which had identified that much of what teachers were saying was guff. Teachers had had carte blanche to bang on in whatever tedious manner they decided was appropriate for far too long. It was right and proper that this view should be challenged. But, predictably, as soon as it became acceptable to critique teachers’ talk, ill-informed idiots began to interpret this as a preference for teachers not talking at all. Sort of reminds my about all the wrong-headed nonsense that’s been spouted in the name of progress. 

This is something that had become increasing apparent to me over the past year or so, but it wasn’t until hearing about the work Lee Donaghy is engaged in at Park View School in Birmingham that it all clicked into place. Teachers absolutely must talk if students are actually going to learn anything worthwhile; the trick is to make that talk as efficient and instructive as possible. I’ve spent the past few months experimenting with the teaching & learning cycle Lee describes and have come to the (possibly unoriginal) conclusion that its success is dependent on the quality of teacher talk. You see students ability to write well depends on their ability to speak well. As teacher we are modelling speech all the time. We don’t really get a choice about this – we’re either doing it badly or well. This cycle provides a model for ensuring that our talk makes the strongest possible impact on students’ ability to write, speak and thinkin academic register.

Genre pedagogy – T&L cycle

Stage 1 is dependent on the teacher being able to explain clearly and coherently. Alex Quigley has suggested some top tips for doing this effectively, and every teacher should give time to telling compelling stories, making analogies which shed new light on a topic and introducing academic language into their explanations. This type of teacher talk is essential if we value students being able to express abstract and unfamiliar concepts in anything other than broken, inarticulate approximations. Understanding requires knowledge of language: if you don’t have the words for a thing then you can’t think about it usefully.

Stage 2 requires teachers to model their thinking. We need to be able to show how our thoughts become writing. When students speak they rarely consider the structure of what they’re saying. Often it isn’t in sentences, and they are, quite literally, unable to organise it into anything coherent enough to remember, let alone write down. I use what I call Thought Stems to force students to focus on how not just what they’re saying.

So instead of the insipid, unfocussed open questions, and pointlessly meandering, conversational verbiage into which teacher lead discussion often descends, students are required to express their thoughts using academic language. They are forced to turn the unformed maelstrom of ideas into something that has structure and, crucially, which they can remember well enough to write down. This stage also depends on discussion.

While not all discussion has to be teacher lead, student lead discussions are only successful when teachers have modelled what a good discussion looks like. Classroom discussions need to involve every students and the outworn dialogic structure of Initiation – Response – Evaluation will not achieve this. I

RE goes a like this:

Teacher: What is the chemical symbol for Oxygen?

Student: O

Teacher: Well done.

While this kind of ‘guess what’s in the teacher’s head’ questioning has it’s place in assessing what a student has memorised, it’s not at all useful for getting them to think. Instead, we need questioning that ‘requires students to think, not just to report someone else’s thinking.’ (Martin Nystrand) To that end, questions should have clear and specific purposes such as to clarify (what did you mean by that?), probe (can you tell me more about that?) and recommend (which answer do you think is best?).

Another problem with IRE is that once the teacher has selected a victim, everyone else in the room can relax: they’re safe from further interrogation until the teacher has evaluated (well done) their stooge’s response. If instead students are expected to evaluate their classmate’s responses by bouncing questions around the class expectations for participation are that much higher. Rather than wasting time with the confusion that is Bloom’s Taxonomy, I recommend 3 question stems to encourage students to evaluate each other’s responses:

So questioning couldlook like this:

Teacher: With your partner, discuss what you know about Oxygen. (suitable pause) Dan, what do you know about Oxygen?

Dan: O is the chemical symbol for Oxygen.

Teacher: Emma, is he right?

Emma: Er… yes?

Teacher: What else do you know about Oxygen?

Emma: You breathe it.

Teacher: Sam, which of those answers do you think is the most interesting?

Now, at this point students are often very good at snookering us with the classic, ‘I don’t know’ gambit. The appropriate riposte to this is to say something along the lines of, “I know you don’t know – I’m asking what you think.” We need to stand firm and make sure that they do think. You could hover over them and stress them out, or you could give them some discussion time. Either way,  as long as you’re clear why you’re asking the questions and let go of the need for ‘right’ answers, all will be well.

Stage 3 is where group work comes in. In order to avoid cognitive overload, students need to transfer what they’ve learned from working to long term memory. As any fool knows, the best why to do this is use what you’ve learned. Ideally, students will be forced to recall this learning multiple times until it’s second nature. This is particularly important when we’re encouraging students to shift ideas from thought, to speech, to writing. They will revert very quickly to using everyday language and we need to be on hand to gently coax them back to the unfamiliar academic register required to master the subject you are responsible for teaching.

- Getting students to work together to design their own thought stems using mark schemes to find key command words

- Student lead feedback – make students lead feedback and discussions. Some students are naturally very good at this but the less confident could lead sessions in pairs or use prompt sheets

- Paired writing – encourage students to discuss language and sentence choices at the point of writing

- Listening triads – to help students focus on how they speak not just what they say, get 2 students to discuss a question and the third to record their conversation – this can result in some surprising revelations

- Value listening by asking students to feedback what they’ve heard rather than what they’ve said in a discussion.

But the teacher is still required to talk, if not to engage in whole class instruction. Our job is to help students organise ideas so that they can be used independently. One of my favourite methods for doing this is to use Question Formulation Technique. John Sayer’s Deeper Questioning Grid is a useful tool to help students refine their questions:

Finally it’s the end of the week and we have survived! Not only have we survived we have also raised £1250 for charity.

For breakfast I had a massive bowl of porridge and then also finished off the remainders in the pan. Lunch was usual and supper was jacket potato with baked beans and vegetables.

It is the last day and we have got some food left. Right now I am finishing the milk with two rich tea biscuits. We have still got a lot of sugar and some rice left but apart from that we have eaten it all. Although on Monday I kind of cheated by going to a friend’s house, we invited her round last night and fed her out of our weekly food. I think she probably had enough to eat but we gave her a yoghurt and an apple, not from our food, just in case, because we were in a dancing show.

The week has been enjoyable and encouraging because we have realised that it matters to a lot of people how penniless people live.
We have been very grateful for all the generous sponsors. Also on the doorstep we found a cake from a friend. Really what we would like to do with that cake is eat it! But we will save it until tomorrow breakfast.

By the way we have raised £1267 which is actually a really big number. And, we’re 29th in the leader board for most money raised! We hope they spend it all wisely. If you didn’t get round to sponsoring us, don’t worry – you still can! Just click the link.

It has been a lovely week and I have really enjoyed writing to you. Maybe we’ll do it again next year?  But that’s it. Goodnight.

I woke up this morning feeling quite peckish. So, after getting dressed, I ran downstairs and weighed out the porridge. As a family, we are allowed 300g a day, which is actually quite a lot. We also have 500ml of whole milk a day too – but this isn’t quite enough so we have to make the porridge with a mix of water and milk. I’m really glad we bought a bag a sugar otherwise it would taste a bit disgusting!

Putting sugar on my porridge

When I got to school, a lot of my friends said they’d seen me on TV last night. Also, my friend Evie and her family have sponsored us for £25. They think they might try living below the line next year. If anyone else wants to do this my top tip would be to weigh out portions at the start of the week so you don’t run out. My packed lunch was fine, but the same as yesterday’s.

Supper was delicious! We had a huge bowl of chicken risotto made with stock from the bones of Sunday’s chicken. It was big I’ve only just finished it! I’m not hungry now and I’m hoping my tummy will be full until breakfast tomorrow.

So far we’ve raised £683 but daddy says they’ve added it up wrong. Maybe by the end of the week we’ll have more than £700!

Thank you for reading, goodnight.

Don’t forget, you can still support us – click here

Today I started with an enormous bowl of porridge, my sister Maddie didn’t manage to eat it all at breakfast, but she finished it after school. In my packed lunch I had a cheese sandwich, a creme caramel from Lidl, an apple and a few carrot sticks. It wasn’t too bad and it kept me going until supper. But I’ve got a bit of a confession to make – I went round to a friend’s after school and had pizza! I suppose this might be cheating but if you really were poor your friends might invite you round sometimes.At the moment I’m still feeling quite excited about it all but mummy says I’ll be bored by the end of the week.

Also today, I watched us on ITV news. The whole family were on speaking about why we’re living below the line. I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t in it that much but at the end there was a little clip of the whole family having fun in the garden. I had done an interview but it was cut out although they did say they would only show 2 minutes from all the filming they did. I especially liked the bit where me and Maddie unloaded all our food and chatted about it.

So far we have raised £413 but we really want to get to £500. Special thanks to Tom, Clare and Antonia for writing such nice comments on yesterday’s blog!

That’s it for today, but I’ll write again tomorrow. Good night to you all.

A reminder that if you want to sponsor us you can do so here.

Today has been our first day of living below the line. For my breakfast I had a bowl of porridge and a piece of toast. This was enough to fill me up until lunch. Then, for lunch we had  a delicious meal of rice, chicken and tomato sauce. Supper was just baked beans on toast and a rich tea biscuit. I’ve just had another piece of toast, and that’s it for the day!

This shows me how some people live and that they have much less than we do. I’m not particularly hungry but I know that this minute thousands of people are starving and maybe rummaging through bins on dumps. I feel quite proud that I’m not just doing this to show how other people live but also to try to experience their hard lives. But I’ll never really know what it’s like.

Here I am being filmed with my sister Maddie

Earlier today a camera man from ITV news came to interview us. And yesterday a photographer from North Somerset Times came to take pictures of us and our food. I’m hoping that this means more people will sponsor us now that they know about it.

I really hope you will sponsor us too. Good night, Olivia.

Today we’ve managed to raise £188 between us – if you feel able to make a contribution, please click here.

Related posts

Living below the line

Obviously, we’ve all enthusiastically condemned Ian Duncan Smith for boasting that he could survive on practically nothing but Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition at Kings College London claims we can live healthily on £12 a week – a calorific intake of between 2500-2000 should be fairly easy to achieve with careful planning.

But this is almost twice our budget. We’re allowed £1 each a day for food and have so far spent £18.90. We’ve planned our meals carefully and will have porridge (made with whole milk) for breakfast every morning, cheese sandwiches for lunch and we have a combination of chicken thighs, rice, pasta, potatoes and passata for evening meals.

I’m a little shocked at some of the things we’ve discovered through the process of shopping for this venture. Oddly enough, grated cheese is much the cheapest way of buying cheese, butter is cheaper than margarine, and it’s possible to get lemon curd for 27p a jar. Really. Also, maybe everyone else already knows this, but apparently the cheapest food in supermarkets is always on the bottom shelf. Everything I normally buy is conveniently placed at eye level; there’s a whole world of stuff that I was only peripherally aware of lurking down there. Ethics go out the window very quickly. It’s been made starkly clear how most of our so-called ethical choices are a sheer luxury. Such indulgences are just not an option on our budget.

Olivia’s photo of some of our food for the week

Yesterday a very nice man from the local paper came to take a picture of our food and, hopefully, a picture of us all gurning and looking well-fed will appear in the Weston Mercury some time during the week. Some time this morning some chaps from ITV are dropping by to interview us all. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Of course, the reality for most people who live like this it just isn’t newsworthy. So, hopefully, a middle class family doing this for ‘charidee’ may well help us think a little more about those who have not.

If you want to donate part of the cost of your weekly grocery bill, please click here.

The most astonishing example of hyperbole ever!

As the chap heading up Literacy at my school, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking around the subject over the past year. I’ve become particularly interested in the need for oral language to develop written language and have been working with subject leaders to determine how students can think, speak and write like subject specialists. Kelly Hawkins, the head of Art at Clevedon School, has been getting her students to ‘think like artists’ for some time and it seemed a natural extension to work with teachers to encourage students to speak like geographers and write like scientists. I’ve written about some of my ideas on oracy here.

But reading about the work of Lee Donaghy at Park View School in Birmingham has highlighted not only that I’m on the right track but just how much further I have to go. I’ve been able to think about little else for the wast week or so and have been playing through teaching sequences in my mind and thinking feverishly about how to develop nominalisations (really!) with my students to improve the quality of their thought. This post is mainly a reblogging the five blog posts Lee has published so far in an effort to get my head around the concept of genre pedagogy and start using it at my own school PDQ!

Here’s a preview of their work:

His first post is simply called Theory. In it he explains Michael Halliday’s thinking about functional grammar, and the fact that students need to be able to operate in an academic register in order to succeed at school.

The second post is imaginatively titled More Theory, but don’t let that put you off.. This one deals with shifting students from every day to abstract language, and references the work of Pauline Gibbons on Scaffolding Language. (On Lee’s recommendation I’ve bought this book and am currently working my way through it – so far it’s excellent.) Lee explains that the approach his school has adopted is underpinned by Vygotsky’s theory that learning takes place in the zone of proximal development, which leads to conclusion that teachers must temporarily scaffold learning in order that students can achieve independent mastery.

In blog 3, Lee goes on to explain the teaching and learning cycle founded on the theory discussed in the previous two posts. This cycle specifically scaffolds students’ language use to support their independent mastery of academic language.

Firstly, setting the context and building the field (explaining the shoe, what it is and how it works); secondly, modelling and deconstruction (the demonstration of how to do it and the accompanying explanation); thirdly, joint construction (letting them have a go but continuing to give guidance – doing it together); lastly, independent construction (stepping back to let them demonstrate their new skill).

This has caused me to rethink the T&L cycle I use to plan learning sequences in order that we focus more specifically on language use:

Lee then goes on to discuss Genre Pedagogy. This is a methodology of teaching and learning that has language use at its heart, and is based on the work on yet another Australian academic, Jim Martin. (I’ve ordered his book, Learning to Write/Reading to Learn and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.) The theory is that all communication has a specific purpose, or genre, and that the language used in a specific text will be determined by this genre. Excitingly, Martin has already mapped out taxonomies of school genres and identified the types of writing in which student need to become proficient in order to succeed in different subject disciplines. This is fascinating stuff and will require a lot of assimilation before I’ll feel confident about implementing at my school. But assimilate I will.

The fifth post deals with concrete examples of how genre pedagogy works in practice and is an illuminating read. Lee and his team have really blazed a trail and I’m determined to make the most of this pioneering work they’ve done.

I’ve learned so much extraordinarily useful stuff on Twitter but this is (literally) keeping me awake at night considering the impact it will have on my own teaching and the benefit on my students’ development. Great work!

Effective reform must start with the understanding that the curriculum is the central focus and the central business of schools. Effective curricula are the sina que non of the system that is capable of delivering a quality education to all kids.

Siegfried Engelmann

At the start of the year I foolishly asked what the good people of Twitter would like me to write about. The message came back, loud and clear, that you wanted to know my thoughts on the Key Stage 3 curriculum. Well, whadda you know? Through my usual process of bathing in ideas until good and clean, I now have what I think is a way forward.

Three main considerations have been playing on my mind throughout this process:

Not on *my* watch!

1. Knowledge is power. (But France is not bacon) The more you know, the easier it is to learn. It’s no good dismissing knowledge and saying, you can just look it up, because whilst that is undoubtedly true you need to know a stack of stuff to make sense of what ever it is you’ve looked up. How much quicker and easier to just know that Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark and that Vespasian was the Roman Emperor that eventually succeeded the Julio-Claudians, and that the Julio-Claudians were a loosely knit family of inbreds, perverts and sociopaths who oversaw the transformation of Rome from a bloated oligarchy to a slightly more streamlined monarchy. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is that I want our curriculum to enrich our students’ cultural capital; to give them access to a broad base of interesting and useful cultural concepts into which they will be able to contextualise new ideas and knowledge in a rich tapestry of learning. To this end, I want to try delivering English through a range of good quality texts that will increase students’ ability to make links and connections between their cultural heritage and the world in which they live.

This does not necessarily mean that we should teaching the ‘canon’ (although I do think we need to do some of this) but it does mean that it’s not  OK to use store cupboard favourites like Stone Cold as class readers. Whilst this may be a perfectly enjoyable read it’s not particularly worthy of study. I think even Swindells would be reasonably content to agree this point. So, while we should encourage students to read anything and everything, we should only actually study texts which build cultural capital.

2. Knowledge of grammar is particularly important. This body of knowledge is domain specific stuff which needs to taught if students are to be able to express themselves accurately. As Ted Hughes said, “Conscious manipulation of syntax deepens engagement and releases invention.” Clearly this is something every English teacher ought to be concerned with. But there is a wider importance to knowledge of language; students need to be able to navigate their way through the strictures of academic register. Obviously kids know how to speak and by and large they’re almost all able to read and write by the time they arrive at secondary school. To a point. As Daisy Christodoulou pointed out in her workshop at TLA Berkhamsted, students tend to write things like this:

It makes sense but clearly they have little or no understanding of what a sentence is. Does this matter? Clearly they can communicate their thoughts; why burden them with knowledge of grammar? Well, my thinking is that knowing the rules allows you to break them. If you don’t know what’s ‘right’, you’re not able to make an informed choice. Another problem that Daisy highlighted is that if you don’t have grammatical knowledge you can’t express yourself with any precision. Take this example:

JB Priestley also presents Mr Birling as confident he says to Gerald with no hesitation at all ‘But what I wanted to say is there’s a fair chance that I might find my way into the next Honours List’ he shows he’s confident in his business and in himself and he’s not telling Gerald he’s going to have a knighthood he’s boasting.

This is an able student but their inability to express themselves precisely is getting in the way of their ability to interpret and analyse the scene. Daisy offered us this improved version to demonstrate how a little grammatical knowledge can improve the quality of students’ thought and uncover hidden knowledge:

The concept of deliberate practice is one what has occupied me of late and is perfectly in line with my thinking on how students should be encouraged to learn. So, to this end, I’ve incorporated Daisy’s idea of a lesson a week of decontextualised grammar drilling as a key component in our curriculum. If you want to read more (and you really should) she writes eloquently on her own thinking here.

3. What cognitive psychology tells us about learning. Ever since being confronted with Robert Bjork’s concept of ‘desirable difficulties’ I’ve been puzzling out how best to make use of his ideas of spacing and interleaving instruction so that students have a better chance of retaining and transferring what they’ve learned. Bjork makes the point that “people tend to learn in blocks, mastering one thing before moving on to the next.” If instead we interleave what we want students to learn we will get reduced performance. This is troubling to both teachers and students in a world obsessed by rapid and sustained progress. But over time, the benefit of “seating” all these small pieces of knowledge pays dividends. Bjork says, “If information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful.” Spacing works in a similar way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.” So, if you take notes after a class instead of during the process of struggling to remember what was said will act on your ability to remember it in the future. There it is in black and white: copying off the board is not useful!

But English has always been a subject which in many ways is detached from a specific body of knowledge and has always been subject to the idea of threading together warp and weft. Do we interleave instinctively? Well, mebbe, but I don’t want to leave the process to chance. I’ve written before about using the learning loop to continually revisit knowledge but now I’ve applied some of this thinking to curriculum planning. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

In the past we built up over a term to either a reading or a writing assessment. But if the components of reading and writing are interleaved throughout the year, students’ progress should be stronger over time. We’ll see.

Anyhoo, here’s the first draft of our Key Stage 3 programme of study for next year based on a conflation of the 3 points discussed above:

As always, I’d welcome any feedback. This is a work in progress and I’m aware that there may be some weak points. Please note however, the omission of ‘media’ is quite deliberate. Nonfiction articles that link to the texts being studied will be read and analysed but no more studying popular culture. Sure it’s ‘engaging’ but kids can do all that at home. School is for the stuff they would not otherwise be bothered to learn.

Related posts

What to know: the importance of cultural capital

Does creativity need rules?

The problem with progress part 1: learning vs performance

Does he look happy?

Today I got to rub shoulders with the great and the good at Bethnal Green Academy (second most improved school in the land, dontcha know?) for the Teach First sponsored launch of Ben Goldacre‘s thoughts on Building Evidence into Education.

I somehow found myself on a guest list that included Michael Gove, Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF and sundry academics and educational big wigs. Fortunately there were also a few familiar faces: I was joined by fellow rent-a-gob Tom Bennett who is an old hand at these sorts of affairs and handled himself with considerable savoir faire and aplomb, as well as the ever elegant and debonaire David Weston, chief executive of the Teacher Development Trust.

Gove opened proceedings by announcing that the best policy is formulated and developed by practitioners, and added that the views of politicians are a poor second to the practical experience of teachers. I was slightly startled, as this belief has remained cunningly concealed for the entirety of his tenure to date. I look forward to being consulted and having my views respected in the near future.

He quickly handed over to the impish and chaotically be-coifed Ben Goldacre who acknowledged the difficulty of teachers being told what to do by outsiders. Evidence in education is actually about “empowering teachers, and setting a profession free from governments, ministers and civil servants”. It would be “bizarre”, Goldacre told us, for the Department of Health to tell doctors which treatments to use and it should be seen as equally odd that The DfE routinely instructs teachers on how to teach. (Mr Gove nodded vigorously at this so presumably he intends to stop doing it.) He set out his stall by stating that teachers should undertake randomised trials as a regular part of their professional practice and that the results of these trials should be widely disseminated to teachers. This would, he suggested, lead to teachers being more thoughtful, critical consumers of educational research and would enable them to generate new ideas for future research.

But what of the accusation that running randomised trials is unethical? If you believe a particular course of action is the best one, is it fair to deny it some students? Medicine and social science are littered with examples of treatments or initiatives which practitioners have been convinced were right only to find that, after reluctantly engaging in ramdomised clinical trials, that they were actually causing more harm than good. The point is that how will we ever know whether our pet pedagogical theory actually has the impact we think it has unless we submit it to fair testing? It’s all well and good to cry that what works is what works, but how do we know? Yes, your exam results might be good, but might they be even better if you stopped whatever it was you so passionately believed in?

Perhaps a more meaningful criticism of epidemiology in education is Ben’s belief that medicine and education are essentially comparable. They’re not. Although patients and students, doctors and teachers might share some superficial similarities there are many more differences. You can reproduce the effects of a drug in controlled conditions and therefore be fairly certain it’s having an effect. You can’t do the same with a pedagogical intervention: teacher quality, student motivation, time of day, a fly in the room, someone farting can all cause wildly unpredictable,  unreproduceable results. Not only that, we have the Hawthorne Effect: a point raised by both Tom Bennett and a student in the audience. If we conduct trials on students we will affect their behaviour just because they know we’re conducting the trial. This being the case, what can RCTs really tell us? And if they tell us something that defies common sense, what then?

Ben told us the RCTs ought to be made straightforward to run and increasingly commonplace; it should be the norm for teachers to be conducting fair tests on new ideas. The problem is that, currently, there’s nowhere for geeky teachers to go to register their willingness to take part in such trials. What’s needed is perhaps a network which connects teachers together so that they can participate in large studies with the view to being able to design their own methodologically robust research questions. Now, where on earth could we find such a network? Whilst it might require slightly more than just a teachergeek hashtag, it wouldn’t require much more. All it would need would be for universities and research institutions to commit to it and we’d be away.

Ben ended with a call to arms, stating that teaching was poised on a “precipice” and that teachers needed to claim their professional independence. Cue more acquiescent nodding from Mr Gove.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, but I a few issues with Ben’s proposals. Firstly, although there is widespread acceptance of the view that the best way to improve schools is to improve the quality of teachers, there is also a well worn and very public discourse that teachers are not knowledgeable enough to be trustworthy. And the problem with that, is that it’s true. I’m somewhat of a rarity in that I spend so much time and effort reading about education research and reflecting so publicly on my practice. Yeah, of course loads of other people read edu-books and blog (many of them much better than I do) but we’re in a tiny minority. I’m constantly shocked about how little many teachers know about teaching.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve become used to enacting top down policy and being rewarded for compliance. How many heads would be happy for their staff to run randomised trials on their school’s behaviour policy? What would happen if something went wrong? And, more crucially, what would happen if you found it was causing more harm than good? Would this finding be welcomed? Currently, being seen as ‘challenging’ is not a good thing. We know that, unless we want our cards marked, we’re supposed to keep our heads down and do what we’re told.

Kevan Collins suggested that we need more professional autonomy and that teachers and school leaders need to act like professionals if they want to be treated like professionals. I agree. But this isn’t going to happen by itself. One audience member made the point that policy makers should run randomised trials on new policy areas before rolling them out across the whole country. This seemed to make perfect sense and be the kind of clear lead an Education Secretary should espouse. I was dumbfounded by the, apparently, apolitical Goldacre say in response that we can hardly expect policy makers to run randomised trials unless we, as teachers, embed the culture in our profession from the ground up.

What Ben fails to understand is the lamentable state of much of the guff that gets touted about in the name of CPD. There is no quality control. Still, in 2013, there are teachers being trained in Brain Gym, learning styles, multiple intelligences and all sorts of other ineffective atrocities. If we really want a future where teachers claim their professional status and commit to being critical and reflective (and I do) then, unfortunately, we need some top down policies imposed to make it happen.

For all the perceived faults with the NPQH, getting rid of the requirement for heads to pass some kind of qualification is a most retrograde step. All school leaders, especially those responsible in any way for the training and professional development of other teachers must be required to complete some sort of professional qualification in education theory and research methods. What goes on in ITT is haphazard at best and then, for the most part, teachers are left to their own devices and abandoned to the tender mercies of ignorant school leaders. Sure, they’re well intentioned, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with!

I’d had high hopes that I’d leave invigorated and clear on how I could set about restructuring my own practice with deep roots in evidence and research. I ended up none the wiser. At the close we were told that everyone obviously agreed with Ben’s ideas, and given absolutely no way forward. We all clapped politely and filtered out in dribs and drabs. The consensus I gleaned from conversations with fellow delegates was that it all sounds lovely but utterly impractical.

So, there it is: a warm. fuzzy, pie-in-the-sky idea which, without clear leadership, will be mere sound and fury, signifying ab-sol-utely nothing! I very much hope all Michael Gove’s nodding translates into meaningful action. But I don’t expect all that much. Obviously, I will continue developing my own professional practice and will attempt to run my own small scale RCTs (I have an idea for a short term trial looking at teaching strategies in the lead up to Year 10 mock exams after Easter), but will anyone else join in?

Judgement: requires improvement

Here’s a pdf of Ben’s paper: see what you think. Am I being harsh?

And here’s an alternative view on the same event: Evidenced Based Practice: why number-crunching tells only part of the story by @drbeckyallen

Is this all you need to know about motivation, learning and professional development? No, probably not. But, it is a beguilingly complete way of tying together many of the theories which have baffled and bedevilled me over the past few years. Here they all are, neatly and beautifully packaged for your convenience.

I love the pack that Pete Jones (@Pekabelo) has designed this as a tube map as it resonates with an idea I read about recently about ‘staying on the bus’. All too often in life we ‘get off the bus’ as soon as we get to some sort of destination. Rarely do we stay on the bus for the long haul. The Helsinki Bus Station Theory suggests that if we ‘stay on the bus’ we’ll learn more than we ever thought possible. The reason we get off the bus is because we see all sorts of shiny objects twinkling by the roadside and decide that there must be a quicker way to get what we want. So, we get off the bus, grab a cab and miss out on what we really want.

For those who might be feeling that ‘mastery’ is an unobtainably giddy height to which mere mortals cannot aspire, let’s quantify and distil the term to something on which we can agree. Gladwell’s bastardisation of Erikson’s work into the neat figure of 10,000 hours may not be in any way true, but it is a useful way of looking at mastery in that it does describe the fact there isn’t a short cut – mastery, however we define it, takes time. But, and this is the good news, if we want it enough, if we’re prepared to put in the effort, mastery is achievable.

It’s also worth pointing out that mastery is not perfection. It’s just being really good at something.

Resilience, effort and reflection

These are the traits or qualities required to keep us on the bus. To ability to carry on when it’s hard and despite the knocks is probably the chief life skill one can develop. As Billy Ocean says, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” But this isn’t all; we also need to be able to reflect on our journey, to take stock and reconsider. We need to acknowledge false starts and consider new directions. The one are where I think the Bus Station/Tube Map analogy falls down is that it’s too passive. Just staying on the bus and following the map doesn’t take account of the fact that sometimes we don’t know what to do next. Being reflective will help to keep us on track and make all that effort and resilience worthwhile.

Grit & growth mindset

So, the Grit/Flow cycle begins with the determination to work towards masters and the belief that, with hard work, mastery is possible. If  you don’t believe this, or are not willing to put in the work, you may as well not bother getting on the train because, for you my friend, the journey will end before it’s begun. This is not to say you should give up hope, just that you need to reconsider whether mastery for you, in this particular area, is something you want to commit to. As teachers our job is to convince recalcitrant blighters that a) they can and that b) they should work towards a goal. ‘Mastery’ may seem like like too glossy a coat to wear, but for the sake of convincing students to work, we can just call it ‘getting better’. The better you get, the closer you are to mastery. It all depends how long you’re prepared to stay on the bus.

I’m often suspicious of lesson time spent on metacognition: I’d rather they expanded their cultural capital instead, but maybe we should teach students to understand the process of learning to enable them to monitor, control and regulate their own practice? We should definitely encourage them to see that hard work is its own reward and that anything worth learning will be challenging. I often begin a new topic by telling students that it’s really hard, that they’ll struggle and that this is normal: if it wasn’t difficult what would be the point in doing it? I tell them that they will make mistakes and that this is not only OK, it’s essential. I tell them that they can achieve more than they believe possible if they’re prepared to put the effort in, and that whatever they do achieve will be exactly proportionate to that effort.

If, for some reason, you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few years and haven’t heard of Dr Carol Dweck’s Mindset theory, you can read about it here.

Deliberate Practice

The next stop on the cycle is the commitment to Deliberate Practice. Part of the path to mastery is understanding the value of deliberate practice. Boring? Well, maybe not. Many students commit many hours to playing computer games where the goal is to master the game and reach the end.  They get constant and instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t and then they get the opportunity to try out this feedback again and again until they get it right. Kids that quickly throw in the towel at school are willing to persevere at Call of Duty until they overcome their limitations. Why do they do it? Because they want to win. Being killed endlessly is all kinds of frustrating; the pleasure comes from mastery.

But why is it that these same kids moan at doing something hard in class? What is it that ‘engages’ them with computer games but turns them off with, say, grammar? Well, mainly it’s because choosing to squish things in your own time is fun and writing stuff in books because you’re told to isn’t. But fun be damned. Hattie says in Visible Learning for Teachers, “Sometimes learning is not fun. Instead, it is just hard work; it is deliberate practice; it is simply doing some things many times over.” If our students always expect ‘fun’ lessons they will never get good at what we’re trying to teach them. We need to acknowledge that the kind of deliberate practice advocated here is not rote learning or repetitive ‘skill and drill’. Two important components are lashings of feedback and plenty of opportunities to perform.

Kids stick at computer games is because the feedback is instant, specific and useful; sometimes it will take some thinking about, but they know that there answer is there if they look for it. In school this isn’t always the case. Success criteria aren’t always clear enough about how students ‘win’ or how they get to the ‘end’. They have to wait until the end of the lesson for feedback and often don’t get any even then. Then, when we do give them some feedback, we ask them to do something else. They rarely get the opportunity to master one thing before being asked to start on some new, barely understood topic for reasons which are often hazy. This is the second part of the problem: we don’t give students nearly enough time to practise before moving them on in our reckless desire to cover all the content we have to get through. We tell ourselves (and them) that it’s all about ‘skills’ which student should be able to transfer from one subject to another but they don’t get the chance to ever master these skills in one area before being asked to jump though new, slightly differently shaped hoops.

‘Talent’ Developed

This then brings us to the development of ‘talent’. When you start to get good at something, you start to see the point. If we accept that talent is merely the endless hours of practice an individual has put into mastering a skill then we can help to explode some of the short cut culture which society seems to value so highly. We’re much too inclined to just see the performance of a professional athlete, musician or, dare I say it, teacher and conclude that, well, it’s alright for them. They have talent. And we don’t So why bother trying? What we don’t see are the hours and hours and deliberate practice that has gone in to to producing the performance. We don’t see the failures, the sweat or the frustration so we decide it mustn’t be there. There is not a musician or sports person alive who will not readily admit to the fact that natural ‘talent’ is almost irrelevant. You only get to the top of your game through determination and hard work. But when talent is developed, all the hard work seems to suddenly pay off and we’re granted magical moments when everything just ‘flows’.

Flow experiences

I spent much of last week grappling with the concept of flow. Initially I wanted to ditch it entirely but have now been persuaded that perhaps we can darin off the grubby bathwater whilst keeping the baby safe.

Last week, full of bombastic righteousness I said, “flow seems to be the antithesis of grit. Grit is carrying despite the pain. Grit is being able to practise until your fingers bleed. Grit is not fun. Grit is doing it even when it’s boring! This is the master skill. We should encourage students to delay the gratification of flow.” And I stand by this. The problem is that in a quick fix culture we believe we’re entitled to flow without effort and this is something that the ‘progress-every-20-minutes brigade’ only encourage.

I’m starting to worry about those lessons that just flow: are they learning or just performing really well? We’re conditioned to look at the tip of the iceberg and the graceful swan above the surface. We often say that learning is messy, but do we believe it? Bjork tells us that when learning is really happening, short term performance is reduced: it looks like we’re getting worse. That is why we shy away from gritty lessons; especially during observations. But if the journey is always hard we won’t stay on the bus. We need to glimpse the magic of flow in order to trudge on and experience it again. If life was just rehearsal, if sport was just training, what would be the point? We tain because we want to perform at our peak when it really matters. For our students this may well be in their examinations, for us it may well be in that high stakes observation when the inspector comes to call. What ever the reason, we want to be able to experience flow when it really matters.

And then have the grit & growth mindset to stay on the bus and continue the journey to mastery.

Acknowledgements

I owe a huge debt to the following lovely people for their help in cobbing together this post:

Alex Quigley for the hard graft of reading through research papers and provoking all of this tail chasing in the first place.

Tom Sherrington for challenging my thinking and being determined to hold to what he believed.

Roo Stenning for clarifying my thinking and chipping away at the edifice to discover the simplicity within. And for coming up with the suitably grandiose title!

And Pete Jones for the clear thinking and ‘talent’ which resulted in the Grit?Flow Cycle tube map.

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