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

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Like so many principles and initiatives in education, ‘differentiation’ has evolved into something it never should have been: it has undergone a ‘lethal mutation’. 1 A sixteen-year-old student who knows very little about general relatively won’t necessarily be better at learning this independently than an eight- year-old student learning about air resistance. The difference between the sixteen-year-old and the eight-year-old is much more likely to relate to the complexityof what they are learning. To consider this, let’s think about the challenge of jumping across a ditch. If the ditch you are to jump across is one metre wide, that’s probably not much of a challenge. You could do it, but it wouldn’t prove particularly satisfying or memorable.

The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back by Bruce

With this in mind, it doesn’t make sense to be arguing for a ‘skills-based curriculum’ or against a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’. Allcurricula are knowledge-based, skills-orientated. Intrinsic loadis the natural, unavoidable loadcaused by thinking about anything. It is essential to learning. It is important that learning intentions are clearly communicated with students. Good practice is to do this both verbally and visually. However, saying this is very different from saying that students need to copy downthe learning intentions (and success criteria) for lessons. Some schools insist that teachers get students to do that, but students learn nothing from doing so and it just wastes valuable learning time. Revisiting learning intentionsExcessive intrinsic load can also be avoided if complex content is broken down and presented in smaller, cumulative chunks. The natural intrinsic load of the content is still there, but this is processed gradually, rather than all at once. Long-term memory can be used to store each chunk, giving working memory access to it, when required. Once learned, one by one the chunks can be brought together and processed in working memory. Nowstudents are able to think about the full complexity of the content, but the load is reduced. Long-term memory is helping working memory out.

The Teaching Delusion: Why teaching in our classrooms and

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. If we want them to be able to perform a particular dance (a different skill), they first need to learn specific procedural knowledgeabout this dance. The principle that teachers should be aiming to do themselves out of a job isn’t a bad one. Nor is the idea that we want students to become less and less dependent on teachers as they learn. Where the concept of ‘independent learning’ goes wrong is when people start to talk about particular ‘independent learning skills’ that students can be taught. The theory goes that, once these skills have been acquired, students will be free of the need for teachers. 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. If students are being asked to write an article or make a presentation to applyknowledge they have learned, this wouldlikely be a worthwhile activity. It would be an opportunity for students to simultaneously consolidateand demonstratethe knowledge they have learned. Rather than write an article or make a presentation for the sake of it, because it seemed like a ‘fun’ thing to do, the activity would have real value, pulling knowledge together in a coherent way. It would help evidence understanding. But clearly, for this to be the case, students would first need to have learned specific knowledge. In chapter 4, Robertson starts to build toward implications for actual teaching. This chapter acts as a brief summary of ideas from a variety of sources in this field, including:Learning intentions are statements which summarise the purpose of a lesson in terms of learning. A useful acronym is WALT: ‘What weAreLearningToday’. 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. Any debate about whether skills are more important than knowledge – or vice versa – is a false one. Both are equally important. 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.