With the growing popularity of cognitive load theory (CLT), we are seeing teachers adapt their teaching: removing the irrelevant, the cul de sacs and the diverting tangents from their teaching. Pupils can meet a piece of novel information mid lesson that they can’t locate within their schemas of knowledge and that can overload the working memory. They could also form misconceptions from incorrectly located knowledge. Yet before all of these fascinating and intriguing diversions are removed from your teaching we’d urge you to pause and consider the nature of self-regulated knowledge acquisition.
When you first hear something on edutwitter or in education that seems to be gaining traction what do you do? Dig a little more? Learn a little more? Well the same happens with pupils. Their epistemic curiosity is driven by trying to locate new knowledge within their current schemas of knowledge. If they are unsuccessful, but still curious, then they accumulate new knowledge to expand a schema or build a new schema so that they are able to locate this new knowledge and further knowledge from the same field. Those intertextual or intersubject references of yours may be sometimes lost on most of the class, but for some of the class those references make them go off and read a new book, watch a film or start reading up on a subject – all wholly self regulated. They may be novices, but they can still be in schema building mode. Litman’s seminal work from 2008 on this divides it into two areas – curiosity and FOMO. Either you simply are curious to know more or others know about it, you don’t and you don’t like that so are driven to find out more.
Curiosity is an innate human characteristic, but it’s also definable. It’s a compelling desire to acquire further knowledge or develop a particular skill. Linked with strong self-regulation it can be ultimately rewarding. If you are designing a curriculum you have to think – am I building this into my teaching? Are you giving them La Grande Permissionto go off and independently acquire new knowledge in order to epistemically locate a nugget of knowledge that you have exposed them to?
An inspired child is one happily gorging themselves on your subject; their amplified curiosity pushing them to accumulate new knowledge or abilities beyond that which they are learning in your lessons. As an English teacher, I knew that children I inspired would be reading and writing beyond that which I was doing in lessons. They were no longer only learning my subject in lessons, my subject had become part of their identity. Accumulating new knowledge and abilities in English was part of their identity and driven by them – in addition to learning the curriculum which I had designed for them. I’m no different. My curiosity in my subject is continuous, self regulated and it forms part of my identity. When I teach, I don’t just pass on knowledge, I also pass on the curiosity that drives the passion for my subject.
There’s a world of self-regulated learning out there for the curious child and any curriculum you design needs to consider how you broker that curiosity to them.
Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction provide a useful summary of some important ideas that we would encourage our trainee teachers to read and think about. The practice of instruction is an important aspect of teaching which many professionals need to be concerned with in their day to day work. However, as academics, one of our roles is to encourage our trainees to question the wide range of evidential and philosophical positions that they encounter, and before Rosenshine’s work becomes a kind of unchallengeable orthodoxy (something that happens with influential educationalists’ work – c.f. Lev Vygotsky) we would raise two questions that we think speak to the wider question of culture and its effect on education
To what extent are Rosenshine’s principles (and the research that he bases them on) facilitated by the cultural context within which he is working?
To what extent can any educational idea be successful if the cultural environment that it is being introduced to – both within and outside schools – does not see view that idea as desirable or compatible?
In raising these questions, we don’t seek to denigrate Rosenshine’s (or any other thinker’s) work, but rather get trainees and their mentors to think about the wide range of processes at work in teaching and learning. However for at least one or two of us in the UoB team we would posit that culture might be the most significant, and perhaps unrecognised factor involved in these processes. What we’re referring to when we talk about culture is in some senses, an intangible combination of location, class, race, gender and ethnicity, but for simplicity’s sake, we might see it as the interconnectedness of three things; who I am, where I come from and how those things shape my world view. This might also apply to groups of people or organisations, so culture could also refer to who we are and how we see the world.
Writing in the TES recently teacher and blogger Mark Enser suggested that he thought that every UK teacher’s practice could be improved by adopting Barak Rosenshine’s principles of instruction. However, he also commented that he thought that it would take a culture shift to effect such a change in UK schools. Enser is right about this – to move to the kind of culture in which instruction was the focus of all teaching would require some big movements in the way that both educational policy is made, schools are run and teachers are developed. Attempting such a shift would lead to that second one of our two questions above; is such a shift achievable, or indeed, desirable? To explore this further for a minute, let us return to Rosenshine, an academic working at an American University (Illinois, in this case) and working with people who are going on to teach in American elementary schools, high schools and colleges. Anyone who has spent any time in the American education system will know that instruction is very important; indeed, many of the people who work in these institutions will be referred to as instructors. Within this education system, they are expected to instruct, to lecture, to set quizzes and tests and to confer grades on their students.
We would suggest that this is something subtly different to the Northern European conception of a teacher. In the European tradition, instruction has only been a part of what the teacher is expected to do. Some people might think that this is what needs changing about UK schools– that teachers need to be left to teach – but notice here that they don’t say “teachers need to be left to instruct”. We might suggest then that the culture of Northern European education – as opposed to an American, or Far Eastern one perhaps – is one in which the teacher has a more holistic, and certainly more pastoral, role. The teacher standards (regardless of what one thinks of them) in both the UK and the Netherlands would seem to indicate this. We could of course, have a national conversation about whether or not we think that this should be the role of the teacher, but right now, in many ways, this is the culture of UK education.
Instruction is of course, a hugely important part of many educational processes. Improving the way that our trainees here at UoB give instruction is something that we focus on quite a lot. Rosenshine provides a good starting point for thinking about what teachers need to do with instruction. But what about those circumstances where we don’t want them to be instructing (we think there are some) or perhaps those circumstances where we need them to be more critical than Rosenshine’s principles require them to be? (And we should say here, that probably in opposition to a lot of people writing on the internet, that we believe “whataboutery” to be a thoroughly good thing, as it drives inquiry on). We have recently been engaged in some research[i] which suggests that there might be some difficulties for science teachers – who require a particular kind of ontological self- awareness – if they approach their instruction, or any other aspect of their teaching, in an uncritical way; a fact not lost on some American colleagues who are thinking along similar lines. Such criticality requires an understanding of the culture in which Rosenshine originally develops his research, and the cultures from which his research examples are drawn (largely Maths, Science and English classrooms in the USA and Australia). It also requires some understanding that the culture of school science requires that teachers’ instruction deals in things that are, at best, simplifications.
The importance of understanding culture, is importantly for us, acknowledged by a wide range of people in education who come at the problem from different perspectives. Tom Bennett, for example, arrived at the conclusion that the culture within a school is the single most important factor in determining how pupils behave. We often extend this by telling our students that they need to understand the culture that surrounds a school as well and this thinking is what leads to the second of the questions that we started with. If we want to promote a particular way of thinking about teaching and learning we need to understand the culture into which we are doing that promotion. Careful thought about this process is required beforehand if it is to work. For us this is best exemplified by the cautionary tales of the involvement of both Dulwich College and Wellington School in state education. Both instances suggest that knowing a little about the culture of the area that you are moving your educational philosophy into might be useful, and a consideration of the cultural differences between that philosophy and the world view of the people you are trying to introduce it to may also prevent misunderstandings. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt you might carry a big stick, but you still need to remember to walk softly.
“The research also shows that while teachers felt pupils enjoyed maths more when taught using the mastery methods, a survey of pupils did not back this up.
And the researchers warn that previous studies in East Asia have found that pupils are less likely to enjoy maths than those in England.”
The teachers thought the kids were enjoying their mathematics, but they were not. Naturally, there are some subsequent questions you might ask yourself:
Is it that important that they enjoy your subject?
Is it that important the method used to teach them enhances their enjoyment of your subject?
How did these teachers get a wrong perception?
These are important questions. For example, I enjoy running and being a runner. I don’t enjoy hills. I hate them. I don’t enjoy long steady runs. I tolerate them. But the fact that I have to do them to be a good runner doesn’t stop me from enjoying running. In fact, there is some part of me that finds hill running quite interesting and makes me curious. Lactate threshold training is a key part of running and I’m often to be found reading in-depth sport science texts about the very thing I hate. Curiouser and curiouser.
However, as an English teacher it is very important to me that people enjoy English. Even though sometimes English is tedious, frustrating, difficult and challenging in all sorts of ways (as well as being endlessly enjoyable), it is important to me that the end result is that they enjoy English and are fascinated to learn more about the subject even when it is a very difficult area. That ‘curiosity’ is what drives us to opt in to learn more about the subject independently and in our own time. It pushes the ‘subject’ into what we perceive as our leisure time and becomes part of our identity. We begin to source new knowledge in the subject independently and look to locate this knowledge within our current knowledge.
The current GCSEs in English Language and Literature are not holding their own in the marketplace of being pre-A Level recruiters. English is not a vocational subject, rather it develops transposable knowledge and skills which employers and students alike value. In addition, it is a deeply rewarding subject to study on personal and philosophical levels.
I am not one for ‘making lessons fun’. My subject is fun. However, I have to think about whether my perceptions as a teacher of my students are right. My running coach can easily ‘beast’ me to make me stronger, but that would probably put me off running or at least being taught by that coach. So it is important that a teacher has access to student voice. Sometimes it is challenging learning my subject, but I want the overall picture to be one of the students enjoying my subject: student voice is thus important.
Is it that important the methods I use to teach them enhances their enjoyment of the subject? That is difficult. I think I want the methods I use in teaching to enhance their curiosity in my subject. I want to make students stronger in such a way that they enjoy the challenges in learning more about my subject. I also want them to go on to study English at A Level and beyond.
And finally. How did these teachers get such a wrong perception of their students’ enjoyment? Did they mistake progress in learning for enjoyment? Making progress in your subject seems to be not enough to make students enjoy your subject. There must be a fostered curiosity whereby you see and appreciate the challenges within the subject and begin subsequently locating that new knowledge and curiosity within your identity. E.g. You become someone who reads interesting and difficult books as part of your identity.
it’s this last point that GCSE English isn’t fulfilling. The combination of specification, teaching methods and perceived employability are not competing with the STEM subjects. Whilst English teachers can make changes to the latter two, the first one remains out of their hands. There is a disconnect between the discipline of English with its focus on the study of language and its rich range of texts with an emphasis on reader response and the GCSE specifications for English Language and Literature. This is because English teachers do not have enough input into the GCSE specifications. At the moment, the boards are revisiting the specifications for their five year refresh and we need English teachers to have an open and consultative voice on this refresh to better help us to develop the next generation of life long students and teachers of English.
Peer Reviewed Education Blog 