The Teaching Delusion: Why teaching in our schools isn't good enough (and how we can make it better)

Product Information

Newspaper articles, PowerPoint presentations and all related activities are the medium to deliver a message. The medium usually has little value in itself. It is the messagethat is most important. I am a maths teacher looking to share good ideas for use in the classroom, with a current interest in integrating educational research into my practice. Categories In writing them, it is usually useful to include the terms ‘ know’, ‘ understand’ or ‘ be able to’, which helps communicate that the learning will relate to knowledge, understanding or skills, respectively. If students can ‘state’, ‘write’, ‘describe’, ‘explain’ or ‘draw’, this can evidence learning. Saying that ‘I know’, ‘I understand’ or ‘I am able to’ doesn’t evidence learning. While it might be true, it isn’t evidence. Success criteria should make clear what evidenceof learning needs to be produced. Most teachers and school leaders think they know what it takes to improve teaching, but they don't;

The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back by Bruce

We teach students knowledge so that they can ‘do things’ with it. The catch-all term for ‘do things’ is ‘skill’. ‘Describe’, ‘explain’, ‘predict’, ‘evaluate’ – these are all skills because they are all things that students do with the knowledge they are taught. In that sense, knowledge and skills are really two sides of the same coin. While for the purposes of discussion it can be helpful to draw a distinction between them, we should keep in mind that this distinction is actually artificial. Cognitive Load Theoryexplores the limits of working memory and how these can be overcome. Dylan Wiliam has described this as ‘the single most important thing for teachers to know’. 2If teachers need to know it, then school leaders need to know it too. As important as ensuring that all students have access to appropriate support when they need it is ensuring all students are appropriately challenged. When we get this right, we propel learning forward. When we get this wrong, we slow learning down. But what is an appropriate level of challenge? Jumping ditchesI had never thought about this before but, after reading your post and revisiting some original research by Vygotsky, I suspect there is no benefit to a younger child in separating the learning objective from the success criteria; indeed there may well be a strong advantage to our scaffolding function as teachers to combine them. Thank you, it made me think. Sadly, this is often misunderstood. In a misguided attempt to ‘personalise’ the curriculum according to interest and preference, some schools advocate approaches designed to do exactly this. They are making a big mistake. Principally, there are two reasons why. Consuming time and learning gaps There are some who believe that as students get older, they should be left to be more independent in their learning. Mistakenly, they believe that independent learning skills develop with age. But, of course, they don’t. Whilst it is true that as children grow and develop they become increasingly independent in relation to particular practical things and in decision-making, the ability to learn independently is not so closely aligned to age. 2 Not everyone understands this. There are some who believe that independent learning means minimising the role of the teacher at every stage in the learning process. For them, teacher-talk is bad; student-talk is good. Direct-interactive instruction is oppressive; discovery learning is liberating. Textbooks are old-fashioned; online research is the future. The irony is that all of this will actually make it less likelythat students will ever become independent.

The Teaching Delusion About – The Teaching Delusion

Just as building muscle allows us to lift heavier weights, developing long- term memory allows students to think about more complex things. Ironically, gaps are the very thing that differentiation should be fighting to prevent. ‘Equity of opportunity’ through access to a core curriculum, and ‘differentiation’ as different content and activities, are diametrically opposed to one another. The problems with a personalised approachIn The Teaching Delusion, I quoted Bart Simpson and I think the quotation is appropriate again here:

The Teaching Delusion 3: Power Up Your Pedagogy The Teaching Delusion 3: Power Up Your Pedagogy

Learning intentions are statements which summarise the purpose of a lesson in terms of learning. A useful acronym is WALT: ‘What weAreLearningToday’.Students will apply their learning from the core curriculum in different ways, both in and out of school. Some will extend it, others won’t. Some will use it creatively, others won’t. Such differences in how learning is applied are not particularly important. What is most important is that allstudents have the opportunityto choose what to do with their learning from our core curriculum. This means that all students need to have been taught it. The amount of intrinsic load that working memory experiences is related to the complexityof content being presented. The more complex content is, the more intrinsic load it is likely to cause. For example, the calculation 346 × 654 is likely to cause more intrinsic load than 6 × 12. And this is the message that Robertson finishes with. A focus on improving teaching being the main job of school leaders.