Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

Designing a knowledge rich curriculum? A discussion around knowledge…

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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.

Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

“Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not”: Renewing perceptions of Teacher Education in the UK

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About a year ago, the Head of our School of Teacher Education, Juliet Fern, wrote an article in the Guardian, suggesting that Universities should take a more advanced role in the way that teachers get trained later on in their career, as a way of helping stop some of the problems that we have with teacher retention in this country. What was most revealing to us as a group of academics were the “below the line” comments concerning what Juliet had written.

In between the widespread apathy and general derision towards the idea of Universities playing any kind of role in teacher education, there was a huge amount of misunderstanding and a significant lack of knowledge about what it is that teams like the one we belong to here at UOB are trying to do. Like the character of Arthur Seaton, (from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, whose words above were  subsequently appropriated by the Arctic Monkeys)  we felt the need to address what people think they know about us.

Currently, we’re considering in some detail about what our PGCE should really be like. This is because we’re involved in one of those review processes that Universities conduct on a semi-regular basis. However, instead of seeing this as a box-ticking exercise, we’ve taken the opportunity, as a team, to think very carefully about what it is we believe in. A close look at the comments below Juliet’s article would suggest that we don’t believe in (or know) very much, but this is a public narrative that we would want to challenge. The fine detail can be found  in our PGCE Rationale Document  but perhaps more succinctly, the kind of teacher education we pursue here at UoB is about three things

  1. A pluralistic approach to teaching and learning
  2. Creating a mobile, but sustainable workforce
  3. Developing teachers who can think for themselves

That first one is from an academic point of view, the most important. At the heart of the PGCE course is the notion that trainees need to recognise that there are many ways of teaching the young people that we work with and that this recognition requires that they think about how they view things like knowledge, skills, pedagogy and evidence. For us as academics, it means exposing them to as many different perspectives on teaching and learning as possible, but also acknowledging that this exposure needs to happen in philosophical and theoretical terms as well as practical ones. Consequently, we are unapologetic about teaching a range of philosophical and theoretical ideas about education alongside practical strategies that trainees need in the classroom.  Recent work by Steve Courtney from the University of Manchester makes this argument better than we can, but suffice to say this first principle of teacher education is tied into a belief that teacher education must be, at least, partly located in the University, and not wholly in schools.

From a professional point of view, the second principle is most important. More than ever, we need a mobile workforce, who can work in a range of different environments. We are fortunate that we have a diverse school partnership here at UoB, from the neo-traditional to the progressive and also those who reject this dichotomy. Our trainees need to be able to work in these environments and everywhere in between, and our PGCE must prepare them for this, even if the trainees don’t personally concur with the educational philosophy of a particular setting. This level of preparedness is essential in a time of massive teacher shortages.

Finally, we would conjecture that those teacher shortages have occurred because of an inability to get teachers to do the third thing on our list. We are interested in developing teachers who stay in the profession for the long term, mainly by encouraging them to think beyond their immediate environment, and to think about the bigger picture; so not asking just, “How can I contribute to this school?” but also, “How can I contribute to the wider profession through my work in a number of schools?” . Not just “Can I get a job?” but “Can I get the right job for me?”. Not just “What do I need to know to pass this course?”, but ” What do I need to know to make a successful go of the profession?” This kind of sustainable thinking about teacher education is what Juliet Fern was hinting about in her original article. It is the kind of approach to teacher education we have seen in  the Netherlands, which has, historically at least, seen much better teacher retention rates.

It is also, as Viv Ellis has pointed out, similar to the approach of the Norwegians – an education system refreshingly free of some of the simplistic debate about teacher education seen on social media. We believe that this approach will produce a more resilient, more professional, more academically engaged and more effective teaching profession. Interestingly, a number of colleagues from other institutions agree with us and we particularly welcome Teacher Education Exchange’s comments on Subject Knowledge, which are in sharp contrast to some other developments in this area (It is worth noting, that many items on the Brierly Price Prior (BPP)PGCE reading list are also on ours – pluralism has advantages for everyone!) We also believe that we will make mistakes along the way, but like all education, these are the things we learn from.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

10 things they hate about your subject

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Does it worry you when a pupil says they hate your subject? It should. That’s a strong word hate. And then applied to your subject like a knife in the heart. Nobody should be hating a subject. They especially should not be hating your subject.

Well actually, they hate performing in your subject.

They hate performing in P.E.

They hate writing for the view of others.

They hate reading aloud.

They hate doing maths and showing their working out publicly.

They hate taking exams in your subject.

In all of these, they hate performing in your subject. They hate publicly displaying: their body, their misconceptions in maths, their ineptitude in speaking modern languages, their poor reading aloud in front of others and their difficulty writing out their ideas; for public ridicule as they see it.

So who are ‘they’? They are pupils and adults who have had a negative experience of performance in your subject and have developed an aversion to it. This can be especially cemented when they do the final performance – the examination or assessment. And all of this fits into the contemporary agenda of mental health, but don’t think it is a new problem. It’s just modern life involves more performance these days.

Pupils who dislike performance based aspects of a subject can be found in any room of people. I’ve met so many people who tell me a variation along the lines of: ‘I had a negative experience performing in an area of a subject and this has affected me in all walks of life.’ These people make life choices, career choices, struggle in specific relevant situations and employ avoidance of activities & circumstances: a life time of different experiences all rooted in a negative experience of performing in a subject at school, e.g. ‘I didn’t like speaking in front of the class and now I avoid all public speaking wherever possible.’ I meet TEACHERS who don’t like public speaking. It’s a real thing this is. Teachers!

This must not be confused with the stretch and challenge agenda.  This agenda is focused on removing differentiated learning outcomes. A good teacher knows exactly where a pupil’s comfort zones and barriers to learning are. They engage with the pupil using a high quality relationship to create trust. Once established, they then use that trust to take the pupil beyond their comfort zone in such a way that the pupil feels supported and stretched at the same time.

One question I find helpful to ask myself is this: do I want them to read 3 books or 1000 books? If I want to achieve the latter, then I need to find a way to ensure a pupil enjoys the performance of reading. Does a P.E. teacher want the pupil to play the sport in school and never again or do they want them to enjoy sport itself for life? We have to think about the long term outcomes even when we are thinking about assessment outcomes. It is important – we need to achieve both the outcomes (performing in assessment) and the inspiration (performing in life) together. There is no good in having one without the other.

Don’t forget there is a good side to performance – I am not saying performance is a bad thing. I read an interesting article on science experiments which said the reasons for doing experiments are a mix of learning and of generating curiosity, motivation and an interest in chemistry. It suggests that when children meet challenge, if they have enjoyed challenge before in the subject they are more likely to persevere and to have better self-efficacy. It is a bit like doing a five kilometre run and then going home and doing some quite difficult mathematics made much more interesting by the fact that your five kilometre running performance has provided the data. Successful performance is brilliant. Life changing. Inspiring. Alas, so is a negative experience of performance and not in a good way.

The next time you meet a child or adult who dislikes your subject, ask some questions. What is it they don’t like? Is it a performance aspect? Is there a single incident which has taken root and created this aversion? Install a new updated experience of performance. One in which they are taught properly this time. Don’t let them move forward still hating your subject: for the rest of their lives.

Be like #GarethSouthgatewould – teach them to own the process.