What S the Thinking Behind This Chapter?

WHAT’S THE THINKING BEHIND THIS CHAPTER?

Some teachers, mostly in secondary schools, argue that in this target-focused age, surely it’s quicker just to tell. They talk about many of their learners wanting their learning broken down into bite-sized chunks that are easily digested without them having to think too much. Some teachers even speak of the almost tangible sound of plastic spoons being put down on classroom tables. One teacher recalled a conversation where a learner objected to having to think. ‘Why don’t you just tell me the answer?’ the learner complained.

However, and this is the nub of this chapter, there’s a huge amount of research and practice which strongly suggests that effective learning is achieved by the diametric opposite of spoon-feeding. The key words in this approach are challenge, engagement, and flow, plus the practice of CATERing for the needs of all learners. In the rest of this chapter, we describe some strategies that create excellent practice and outline some of the research that underpins it.

CHALLENGE: IT’S WHAT THE EXPERTS DO

In his book, Visible Learning for Teachers, John Hattie, drawing on numerous examples of research and practice, draws a distinction between ‘expert’ teachers and ‘experienced’ teachers. He concludes:

[E]xpert teachers do differ from experienced teachers – particularly in the degree of challenge that they present to learners, and most critically, in the depth to which learners learn to process information. Learners who are taught by expert teachers exhibit an understanding of the concepts targeted that is more integrated, more coherent, and at a higher level of abstraction than the understanding achieved by learners in classes taught by experienced, but not expert teachers.

Our own experience over the last six years of leading the OTI programme in hundreds of schools has been the same. Those teachers who consistently achieve outstanding results, the ones that you’d want to teach your own children, all share this characteristic: they delight in making their learners’ brains hurt and plan their lessons accordingly.

When teachers plan lessons that are high in challenge, we’ve found that the feedback these lessons provide has been more effective in helping learners to close gaps. The greater level of challenge provides richer opportunities for questioning and for generating the proof, or otherwise, that learners have closed gaps. In particular, it provides the teacher with more valuable feedback on where learners are getting stuck or are struggling – feedback that can help the teacher to quickly reshape the lesson to address the problem areas.

Without these high levels of challenge, and subsequent feedback, a lesson might easily proceed without the teacher or learners even being aware that there is a problem! One teacher described a particular activity he had planned for a lesson as being, ‘A great opportunity to test the class’s understanding to breaking point. I want to see if they really have mastered this learning.’ Without high challenge, it is difficult to establish the extent to which learners fully understand the new learning being presented and therefore the effectiveness, or lack of it, of the teaching and learning taking place.

CHALLENGE AND MEMORY

A crucial element of learning is the ability to remember things. In his thought-provoking book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, examines the reasons why learners often forget what they have been taught. His conclusion is that ‘memory is the residue of thought’.2 Therefore, if you don’t spend time thinking about information and grappling with challenges, then there is less chance of you remembering it.

We observed an excellent example of this when science teacher Steve Cullen created a fantastic challenge for his Year 8 biology class. The class arrived at the lesson to be greeted by the ‘bleep, bleep’ of a life support machine. Steve settled the class and informed them that they were working as trainee doctors in an accident and emergency unit. They then proceeded to work on a really thought-provoking scenario that we’ll explain in more depth later in this chapter.

Steve contacted us a couple of weeks after the lesson. When we met up with him he had a massive smile on his face. He explained that the end-of-unit test results for these learners were much better than anything they had previously achieved. He was delighted. Why were these results so much better? Why were the learners able to remember so much more of what they had been taught? The answer lay in the experiential challenge he had set them: making them think about a true-to-life scenario and some possible applications of what they were learning about. They had applied their knowledge and understanding to a real scenario and this had not only helped them to make meaning of it, but it also supported them to remember it.

Creating challenges in lessons that encourage learners to experience and think about the meaning of what is being taught is crucial to learning and sense-making. Whatever is meaningful and real enables learners to process more deeply and remember more effectively.

Extract from Chapter 5 – Challenge, Teaching Backwards