Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

What happens when you ask your pupils to write 10% braver?

woman sitting on mountain
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I observed one of my PGCE English trainees teaching her top set Year 9 all girls group. Following a very inspirational first half of the lesson, where the class really impressed us all with the depth of their comments, reflections and ability to engage with really quite sophisticated ideas through oracy, they then had to take those ideas and express them in written format. What emerged was writing that whilst grammatically correct and stylistically appropriate, lacked the originality and interpretation that had appeared in the earlier oral exchanges. Oracy in English is an important topic and has featured in not only NATE conferences (National Association for the Teaching of English), but is high on the agenda of labour’s vision for education in the second half of the 2020s should it win the next general election. High quality oracy can be a powerful tool in English, but it also needs a good link to powerful writing.

This is a common problem in English lessons. Trying to translate sharp and insightful ideas that emerge at the thinking process through oracy and then trying to capture them in written format. It doesn’t always flow from one to the other and all English teachers work hard on this process with their pupils.

When we were discussing the lesson afterwards I mentioned that I had seen the hashtag #10braver featured in the women’s ed hashtag #WomenEd which I follow on Twitter and that I thought it would be an idea for the PGCE trainee to tell the girls in the class about this movement, to give them their work back and then ask them to rewrite it ‘10% Braver’. She could then ask them to reflect metacognitively afterwards on what the difference was and if they indeed were, as Arsene Wenger would say, playing with the handbrake on. It’s quite a typical strategy for English teachers. You are telling them about real life people using English within their actual lives and asking the pupils to respond just like others in society do.

Now this anecdote makes for a nice story –  this little narrative about my PGCE trainee and the 10% Braver hashtag and I’ve certainly told it a few times. However, having told this story recently to some of my peers they then said – so what happened next? It was a good question. When the trainee was next in I asked her – what happened next? And asked her to write the next bit of this blog.  This is what she wrote:

From my teaching experience to date, one of the most frustrating elements of the classroom environment can be managing the transition from class discussion to extended writing tasks. Often, students will provide wonderful verbal responses to topics which they can then emulate and extend upon. The well coined phrase of ‘but I don’t know what to write’ then rears its head; leaving the teacher wondering if they were in the same room, or indeed, taking part in the same lesson.

Having discussed this with my subject tutor at the university who is keen on educational research and strategies to combat such things, the concept of ‘10% Braver’ was introduced into my teacher toolkit (and is now constantly called upon!). Whilst the suggestion was originally designed to help make the female students in my class take risks in their writing, I have found that is it equally as beneficial to my male students. They also respond to this kind of exhortation feedback.

Returning to the original class, below is a sample of work taken from a female student in year 10; the italicised response is the 10% braver piece of writing – I have also included some student voice reflection about why she felt empowered.

‘Within this extract Shakespeare presents the relationship between the witches and Macbeth as disrespectful. This is shown when Macbeth says ‘midnight hags!’ The use of the exclamation mark suggests that he is shouting at the witches. Also, the use of the noun ‘hags’ shows Macbeth has no respect for the witches identity.

This negative bond is shown further on in the extract when Macbeth says to the witches ‘I charge you.’ This shows there is an imbalance of power between them and implies that Macbeth wants ultimate power of them.’

[The work was then peer assessed and reviewed by the teacher – the target was: to be ‘10% Braver’ in her response.]

‘This is implied with the verb ‘speak’ because it is a very demanding tone of language. Also, it suggests he doesn’t treat them with respect as ‘speak’ includes a plosive which gives a harsh/nasty sound to the Macbeth speech.’

When asked about the impact of the feedback, the student said: ‘I felt 10% Braver writing my target response because I was encouraged by my peers and my teacher. This gave me the confidence to go outside of my comfort zone and express my opinions within my writing. Usually, what stops me from writing like this is that I don’t want to write the ‘wrong’ thing within my answer. By someone saying ‘do it,’ it boosts my confidence and makes me believe in myself.’

As an ITE educator and as an English teacher, I think this shows that we need to think about how we get pupils to express their ideas, about how the pressure of performance works and what it is they are trying to avoid as much as they are trying to achieve. In the blog, 10 things they hate about your subject, I was trying to unpick ‘large’ issues with performance. What I think this blog shows is that there are micro-performance issues happening at all sorts of levels: from the Year 10 English classroom right up to senior leaders in education. The nature of high stakes in modern life is holding many back from achieving and expressing what they really want to say and do. There’s a message here. We need to start getting everyone in education to be 10% braver.

passmores

Posted on by Dr James Shea

A curriculum for the white working class

WWC Boys

Recently there has been tensions between the Heads’ Roundtable and OFSTED over the alleged existence of system bias against schools with large numbers of white working class pupils. OFSTED has rejected this interpretation of the data and further clarified some of the data used in the original piece. They say that they acknowledge ‘factors’ that make it harder for these schools such as not being close to art galleries and museums and working with monocultural communities. Amanda Spielman has waded into the argument accusing this cultural group of people as ‘lacking aspirations and drive’ in particular when compared to migrants to the country.

Heady stuff indeed. However, we can hardly be surprised when schools are partly measured by how well the pupils achieve the specific knowledge that is defined by GCSEs (Outstanding schools especially). Why does OFSTED give some schools lower grades? Because it measures schools partly on their ability to deliver the knowledge based outcomes of GCSEs and, according to the Chief Inspector, these schools’ cohorts and families do not aspire to achieve them – as evidenced by their own interpretation.

Ofsted grades

OFSTED says schools whose cohorts cannot (will not?) achieve these outcomes are offering an inferior education and so this justifies them being  downgraded. They acknowledge the difficulties in hiring staff, in countering factors, but retain the right to downgrade these schools.

A child will learn from the culture that they grow up in what kind of knowledge will be helpful to them, or is valued within that community –  and what knowledge is a waste of their time. They then aspire to achieve that knowledge which is valued. Their parents’ opinions,  based on the knowledge & experience that their parents have, will also be influential as will the school teachers that they meet and experience. Contextual events might also affect these aspirations. The loss of local manufacturing jobs could influence families to reconsider a career in manufacturing for their child. Aspirations are a complex thing.

So, it isn’t that the white working class are not aspirational. They are perhaps, just not aspiring to develop knowledge of the curriculum being offered to them. Schools do not have the freedom to offer an alternative range of curricula due to accountability frameworks. And then, even despite their best efforts, they are still being told they are not meeting the requirements of the system – to make large numbers of white working class pupils aspire to develop the knowledge identified by OFSTED.
This possibly brings us back to curriculum design. Certainly, this point has been raised before: e.g. @paulgarvey4

Paul Garvey

If we are trying to select, with more detail, knowledge for the curriculum, then we have to have more debate about what this knowledge is. I’ve already written about how we need to develop more tacit knowledge rather than just explicit knowledge. But it goes further. Pupils are learning knowledge from their cultures. They are learning knowledge from their online interactions with others. They are learning knowledge from electronic stores of knowledge with direct instruction built in – YouTube features so many of these (and I have issues with some of this learning which I have written about in my book). We are making value judgments about this knowledge, so that we only value very specific domains of knowledge as being suitable for assessing pupils and schools. Much of what we should be doing is building curriculua that go further than  they  do currently –  as OFSTED duly acknowledge. We should be working with pupils on ways to acquire knowledge, to evaluate knowledge, to build new knowledge, to transpose knowledge to new contexts and so forth.

Yet, the moment you stipulate one curriculum over another, to recognise the value that either academic or non-academic knowledge has, then you run into issues. Many that I speak to tear themselves in two over this. Is an alternative curriculum like that offered in Germany  one of  low expectations (a technical education) or is it a suitable curriculum (they culturally aspire to achieve it)? Who chooses the curriculum that a child studies? If a school says, we are an academic school, don’t send your pupil here if that is not what you want for your child: is that acceptable? What if the child has a Special Educational Need or Disability?

passmores

Who decides what an appropriate curriculum is for the children of taxpayers? Is it the government of the day? OFSTED? The schools? The parents? I don’t think we have the answers yet and downgrading the OFSTED rating of schools serving these communities just seems to encourage schools to reject specific types of pupils in the hope that it will benefit their potential OFSTED outcomes. As Stephen Tierney says, it is career-ending suicide to take on leadership of some of these schools. That doesn’t sound like we have got it right to me.

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

Designing a knowledge rich curriculum? A discussion around knowledge…

adorable blur bookcase books
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Epistemology is a personal thing (I’m going to leave numbers alone here), but with the current Hirsch-fuelled push for knowledge in school curriculums/curricula, how one perceives knowledge is, and must be, important. I’m of the opinion that we don’t just teach knowledge to children – a posteriori, we develop their abilities to create knowledge in future known and unknown situations, a priori. I don’t just want explicit knowledge taught to them, I want them to develop tacit knowledge. We need children to develop motivation and curiosity into finding or creating, through reasoning, new knowledge of all kinds.  Because once their teacher has gone, we need them to be good at creating or sourcing knowledge and knowing that it is knowledge and not buzzfeed bunkum.

Yet, I’m not convinced we have really dug into our ideas about knowledge and its longevity. If children need some knowledge only for a GCSE assessment and never ever again then the experience of learning that knowledge needs to confer upon them some kind of transoposable habitus type advantage else what is the point of learning it? Habitus, is a Bourdesian term:

“…acquired, socially constituted dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.13)

and it does have limitations as it is not empirical evidence (it featured in the somewhat criticised EEF’s study on setting). Yet there are many times when we want to know about non-empirical knowledge – powerful knowledge even. The habits and tacit knowledge that people develop through being a part of society are still seen as important even if we reject Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.

Is extraneous knowledge actually part of successful habitus of powerful knowledge? Do we seek to locate it and thus it drives an innate curiosity which develops our ability to develop tacit knowledge? Knowledge of the powerful does seem to be the ability to challenge and locate the knowledge that is being presented as well as knowledge which others can’t easily seen as readily powerful (ballet, plays, etc.)  – something Bernstein has inspired quite a bit of work around. I once read Don Quixote simply to understand an intertextual reference in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Should we all understand when someone is tilting at windmills? Or are we reinforcing the cultural elitism of this sort of ‘knowledge of the powerful’ by insisting on this?

One of the things I wrote about in my book was rapid knowledge acquisition and disposal. Disposable knowledge I called it. If you want to do something quite obscure in Office Word or Excel, just as a once off, with no need to understand how it works, you don’t go on a long in-depth course on Office. You simply google and youtube the knowledge, find some direct instruction, apply it, and then forget it. If you need to know it again, you’ll google it again, get the direct instruction and achieve the outcome again. You use google as your long term repository of such specific knowledge and the direct instruction needed to access it for your needs. That to me is a really key skill for the modern world. It’s still based around knowledge, but it rejects rote learning, retention and the rest for some types of knowledge. It also suggests that direct instruction could be used in the wrong way as well as the right way. It really depends on why I need the knowledge. If I need the knowledge on a regular basis or I need to understand why and how the knowledge interacts with other knowledge then that is quite different. This is where key knowledge comes in – vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, foundational concepts and so forth.

I’ve also got issue with the verisimilitude of knowledge, to use one of my favourite Sherlockian words. That’s the truthfulness of the knowledge. In a post truth world, these are good questions to ask. I learn facts, but when I go to use them again later in life I have to check my understanding because the chances are that what I thought were ‘facts’ have shifted. A simple example would be ‘dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid.’ I would have to check the knowledge behind my fact every time I needed to use that as the ‘truthfulness’ of that ‘fact’ habitually shifts.

Facts are also contextual. Ask yourself: what were the years of WWII? At one level, you’ll say 1939-1945. However, a historian would say – ah, well, that’s a very European perspective. So facts change depending on the level or perspective of which you are studying them and we aren’t really debating that transition of knowledge from one level to another enough. It suggests we need to really think more about curriculums/curricula for KS3, 4 and 5 and how they connect.

I note the MP David Lammy’s outrage at the lack of black students in Oxbridge. Let’s be honest, it is not the knowledge they learn for the GCSEs and A Levels that are getting white, privileged and privately educated children into Oxbridge. There are many state educated children from a whole range of backgrounds that apply, don’t get in and yet have the same grades. The successful applicants must be learning some kind of knowledge not taught as part of the GCSE and A level curriculum. Even the schools with the strongest behaviourist approaches are not producing the knowledge being looked for here. What is that knowledge? How is it perceived by the interviewing tutors? I rather think it is more tacit knowledge than the explicit knowledge of the GCSE and A level assessments. Is it the subjectivity of the selection process or is it the poor design of curriculum in schools? Certainly others think the problem lies with schools not Oxbridge. 

One modern knowledge or skill, explicit or tacit, I am currently writing about as part of research, is that the modern student arrives with a transposable habitus of resolving problems through electronic social and work networking through multiple layers of privacy. If we meet a problem the first thing we do is employ our networks and communities to research and resolve the issue with the privacy setting adjusted depending on the type of problem to ensure we can get the level of criticality required. Even the highest cabinet ministers and MPs have WhatsApp groups to help them collaborate around problems like this. Reese-Mogg directly influences the Conservative party through his powerful European WhatsApp group. Collaboration is in the PISA test. Should we be teaching them knowledge about how to develop physical and electronic social networks to resolve problems? To understand how privacy can change the type of information being constructed? Is social interaction knowledge another domain that we need to develop in young people? And I mean physical social interaction not just electronic!

We also need to revisit the concept of ‘skill’ to reconcile the many contrary ideas currently manifesting around this area. We can teach the knowledge of grammar over and over, but it is not delivering quality composition. Originality, curiosity driven by extraneous knowledge, non-empirical knowledge, reader response and so forth are all shadowy areas in the notion of skill and the knowledge behind skill. When I read about the education systems we are supposed to be emulating, such as Singapore, then they all seem to be moving towards a model of developing skills and other non-empirical aims or virtues such as resilience or, something attracting funding in the UK, ‘character’, through a beefed up arts and outdoors curriculum with a reduction on the pedagogies of rote learning – we seem to be swapping curriculums (I’m going Amercian with this term I think) and pedagogies with those we seek to emulate.

What does this mean for teachers? It means before we head down the labelled ‘knowledge rich’  path that is currently vogue with some (and be warned, read: learning pyramids, learning styles, growth mindset, brain gym and every other clickbaitish educoncept that people cite repeatedly for a short period of time) there is a need to investigate the mapping (as Sue Cowley argues) and teaching of knowledge (as Debra Kidd explores) and the way knowledge interacts with the development of skill so that we can bring better criticality to the debate behind teaching knowledge in order to ensure that it is used effectively and with longevity. It is good to see the debate is moving, but there is still a need to develop some of the answers.