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

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Newspaper articles, PowerPoint presentations and all related activities are the medium to deliver a message.

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

Carefully planned whole school and department sessions will then allow us to see what different people think, and slowly build towards a shared understanding. Some schools insist that teachers get students to do that, but students learn nothing from doing so and it just wastes valuable learning time.

As a result, their articles and presentations lack substance, or are filled with information copied from elsewhere. Referring back to learning intentions reminds me of the Learning Map that Jim Knight discusses in High-Impact Instruction that I have been playing around with.

The Teaching Delusion - Some Reflections - Interactive Maths The Teaching Delusion - Some Reflections - Interactive Maths

Hands up if you’ve ever been given lesson observation feedback that you didn’t understand, didn’t agree with, or just thought was plain rubbish.When success criteria are written as ‘ I can…’ statements, they include verbswhich make clear the evidence required to demonstrate learning. Those who’ve been giving feedback telling teachers to ‘differentiate more’, ‘talk less’, or ‘let students lead their own learning’ have a lot to answer for. As teachers and school leaders, we should be doing as much as we can to ensure that everystudent has the same opportunity. Different students will need different levels of support, and some will be able to cope with more challengemore quickly than others, but we aren’t going to start segregating students within our class and deliberately create learning gaps.

5-Minute Guide to: Differentiation – The Teaching Delusion A 5-Minute Guide to: Differentiation – The Teaching Delusion

I ask a question for students to do on their mini-whiteboards, give them time to complete it themselves, then share with their partner. As a self-improvement and coaching resource, it is essential reading for all teachers and school leaders. However, if you had tried and failed to jump an even wider ditch beforehaving success with the three-metre one, you might not have bothered with the three-metre ditch, deciding that you don’t really like jumping ditches and you’ll look for a bridge instead.On the other hand, we serve a community of children and their parents (who, in my case, pay a fair amount of money for our services), and it is also our duty to them to do the best job we can, which includes continually improving our teaching. Even if the sixteen-year-old is more motivatedto learn (which isn’t guaranteed) or has developed better study skills(that many haven’t), they will be as novice in the particular knowledge domain they are learning as the equivalent for the eight-year-old. For example, if we want students to be able to debate the causes of climate change (a skill), they first need to learn specific declarative knowledgeabout the causes of climate change. In schools like this, it is common to see students being asked to ‘do things’ before they have the necessary knowledge to do them. Robertson also goes into the details of how to run effective lesson observations, and what the observer needs to do to make it useful.

The Teaching Delusion A 3-Minute Discussion of: Independent - The Teaching Delusion

Describe’, ‘explain’, ‘predict’, ‘evaluate’ – these are all skills because they are all things that students do with the knowledge they are taught. What they don’t want is to be criticised, patronised, sent down blind alleys, or left utterly confused. This process of evaluation is what is important, rather than the finished sheet (which could be thrown in the bin). The pressures of "covering the curriculum" can get to us all, and I know that when they get to me, this is where I cut corners.Teaching students how to learn by themselves, without the need for teachers, is what they believe schools should be aiming to do.