How much has education changed in the last twenty years?
Like most of Britain during lock-down, my Dad did some organising and came across my old school books from Year 7. Going back through them has been utterly fascinating. So, what has changed since 1997 and what have I learnt from the experience (apart from the fact that my handwriting was better when I was 11 than it is now)?
Over the last twenty years, many schools moved away from ‘knowledge-led’ or ‘knowledge rich’ curricula in favour of skills driven curricula. The pressures of modular exams, controlled assessments and then the introduction of more rigorous closed book exams are partly to blame. Thankfully, many schools are now returning to curriculum plans which are based in widening and deepening students’ knowledge within the subject domains they teach.
The example is taken from a year 7 English lesson which appears to have preceded a ‘whole text’ reading of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. This is an effective way to support novice learners by ‘front loading’ the reading of a text with some literary and historical context to build secure schema as outlined below by Tom Sherrington:
Beyond the knowledge specified for each unit, a knowledge-rich curriculum is planned vertically and horizontally giving thought to the optimum knowledge sequence for building secure schema – a kinetic model for materials; a timeline for historical events; a sense of the canon in literature; a sense of place; a framework for understanding cultural diversity and human development and evolution.
But in my earlier teaching career, this was discouraged as it was felt that context needed to be woven in and linked to content. In fact, many teachers wouldn’t have taught the origins of England and its language because it isn’t directly explored within the novel The Hobbit and students may not be required to recall it in an assessment. It is important, however, for understanding Tolkien’s reasons for writing The Hobbit. He was a scholar of Anglo Saxon language and favoured the Mercian dialect found in texts such a Beowulf. This fascination of his inspired him to devise the ‘Elvish’ languages of Middle Earth and the Maps he illustrated for the novel contain phrases written in the Anglo Saxon alphabet.
They don’t need to know that though.
Sadly, this is a phrase I have heard from teachers on numerous occasions. Over the years, we have become so focused on exam results and what students ‘need’ to know to be successful that we have forgotten what students ‘could’ know. Knowledge is power after all and we are empowering our students by arming them with as much knowledge as we possibly can. Schools often advocate the teaching of extracts over whole novels now for students to practise their skills but, this again limits students’ schema and therefore ability to compute information efficiently.
In fact, the use of the diagram in the example above actually increases successful encoding of information. So in this sense, you could say that my Year 7 English teacher had got it ‘right’, was ahead of her time, or that we have strayed too far away from what works and what is right (depending on how you look at it).
Diagrams contain computational advantage compared to text because they support information search and enable viewers to extract information by relying on automatic, perceptual processes.
The Visual Argument- Ioanna Vekiri
The example shows my teacher tirelessly correcting every spelling and grammatical mistake. To do this for a whole class must have taken her hours and this is evidence of her dedication to us as students. It may also be the case that the marking policy stipulated that she do this, as many policies have- and some still do. But is it effective? Does it contribute to successful learning?
If you take the fact that I recently wrote a scheme for the Hobbit and spelt Tolkien incorrectly on a PPT then probably not. The fact is, merely reading something does not mean we have learnt it. I’m not even sure how much attention I would have paid to it. A better strategy might have been to circle the incorrect spellings and set me the task of finding the correct spellings in a dictionary and writing them down before memorising them. This would boost independence, metacognition and even reduce teacher workload.
Marking has two purposes. One, students act on feedback and make progress over time. Two, it informs future planning and teaching.
Ross McGill
The quote above, from one marking policy, raises many questions about outdated policies which are not based in research or evidence. If you had asked me 10 years ago what ‘marking’ meant and if it was important, my thinking would be that it meant I was writing reams of comments on students’ work and that, that was the only way I would know where they were at and how they would know how to improve. I spent hours scribbling in books trying to conform to marking policies which stated that the books needed to be marked in detail every two weeks. Often I was marking drafts at 1am the night before a marking scrutiny where final drafts had already been produced. At times, I was writing more than the students had in the work I was marking. It was time consuming and yet not timely. It had no impact because I was focusing on the word ‘marking’ and not feedback. I truly believe that the best thing we can do as teachers, for our students is to understand the difference. So what is feedback?
Feedback is information given to the learner or teacher about the learner’s performance relative to learning goals or outcomes. It should aim towards (and be capable of producing) improvement in students’ learning. Feedback redirects or refocuses either the teacher’s or the learner’s actions to achieve a goal, by aligning effort and activity with an outcome. It can be about the output of the activity, the process of the activity, the student’s management of their learning or self-regulation, or them as individuals (which tends to be the least effective). This feedback can be verbal or written, or can be given through tests or via digital technology. It can come from a teacher or someone taking a teaching role, or from peers.
Education Endowment Foundation
The definition above is what underpins our marking and feedback policy at CSIA. We want to ensure that feedback is motivating, meaningful and manageable.
The irony is that in my earlier career whilst furiously scribbling in books, I was actually utilising formative feedback effectively. I was using strategies such as verbal feedback and peer assessment successfully (eventually after an extensive period of trial and error). I was also reading students’ books at the end of every day and using my findings to inform planning. So why was I doing this? Because I knew it worked. But I still had to write numerous comments in books because all the other strategies were not seen. How would anyone know I was giving feedback if they couldn’t see it? And, wasn’t it important to write nice comments which made the students feel good about themselves and motivated to study?
This is why the purple pen strategy for DIRT is so useful. You can visibly see the improvements the students have made in response to feedback. This is surely the main goal of feedback and therefore seeing the actual feedback is not necessary if there is clear evidence of progress.
Well, I loved my Year 7 English teacher and I had a belief that I was ‘good’ at English which ensured my enjoyment and encouraged me to study it beyond GCSE. This was probably a fallacy. It was probably a false belief that I had a natural aptitude for this subject but it is a self fulling prophecy. Maybe it was comments like those above which made me believe that. At least comments like these say specifically what I was doing well rather than ‘ good work’ or ‘nice’ which are largely meaningless.
But here is the but: I was awarded 18/20 for this poem. There is no evidence of a mark scheme or success criteria and, whilst it is possible that I had access to one, this feedback does not tell me in any way how to improve. What did I need to do to gain those two marks? It certainly isn’t a faultless piece of work.
It may have been useful for my teacher to have used some kind of DIRT strategy therefore reducing workload and encouraging more rapid progress. However, if we look at how far education has come, this really isn’t any different to a lot of marking I see now. This therefore is not an issue with historic educational policy and trends but more of an issue surrounding what does and doesn’t constitute effective practice. But it’s still important to write positive comments to boost morale right? And I should still give feedback frequently and immediately even if it isn’t in written form right? Maybe not…
Numerous studies—some of them dating back decades—have shown that frequent and immediate feedback can, contrary to intuition, degrade learning.
Bjork and Soderstrom
I’ve even heard of some schools which have banned positive praise in an attempt to encourage students to focus on their targets. I’m not sure how I feel about this personally and am yet to find a set of research data to prove or disprove the theory. However, I am mindful that just because I’ve always done it, doesn’t mean it is the right the thing to do (by ‘right’ I mean an effective strategy which directly contributes to successful attainment of a learning goal).
Over the last few years I have had to radically change the way I think about certain teaching strategies. I have lied to myself for years that certain empirical assumptions are accurate because they are held by so many. For example, I really believed for a long time that if students were having fun, they were more likely to be successful.
Take the example from my year 7 school book. This is the ultimate ‘busy work’ task as Cate McGovern would call it. It keeps students busy but it isn’t really clear how much they are learning. Besides, how long did it take me to draw the grid let alone fill it in and what is it that I’m actually learning here? I’m not sure. Note also the wasteful ‘tick’ which adds nothing (surely by completing the word search this was evidence in itself that I had completed the task accurately).
Historically, I have been guilty of assuming that when students are really ‘getting’ a task and racing through them they were learning successfully. Ultimately though, this is inaccurate. In actual fact, learning which is successful often has the appearance of low performance. Robert Bjork (1994) refers to this as desirable difficulties. These are learning strategies which are desirable because they lead to better long-term retention and transfer of knowledge, and they are difficult because they pose challenges that slow the rate of current progress and induce more mistakes during instruction or training. Therefore there is distinct difference between learning and performance and we, as educators, need to be aware of this and able to spot the difference.
Memory is the residue of thought
Daniel T Willingham
Let’s return to the word search again an the idea of fun improving learning. We should never confuse fun (unhelpful in generative learning) with engagement (helpful in the process of encoding through attention and motivation).
Take the quote above from Daniel Willingham. What he means here is that what we think about most is what we remember. I can fully imagine a scenario where I went home and told my parents that I had, had a fun day and ‘done’ a word search. I may not have been able to tell them what I had learned during that activity.
I wholeheartedly believe that to increase engagement and encourage students to place a high value on our subjects, we need to make the lessons more difficult (not too difficult of course) in a desirable way.
Now, if we return to the initial question, how much has education changed in the last twenty years? Well, if we take this very narrow example, we can see that not a huge amount has changed. Some strategies have come back round again, some teaching and marking is still ineffective and some more effective.
However, I think the most exciting change to education during my career to date, is the growing discussions around theory and educational research. We are no longer forced to implement strategies because someone visited a school and quite liked the look of it. Policy makers (even DfE and Ofsted believe it or not!) are beginning to understand how learning happens, what is effective and what isn’t and how to reduce unnecessary teacher workload which is fantastic news.
A seismic shift in educational thinking is happening; it is our duty to ensure we shift with it.
