Relearning to Teach

Understanding the Principles of Great Teaching

David Fawcett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315447421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Relearning to Teach challenges the seemingly complex teaching profession and the various initiatives, strategies and ideas that are regularly suggested. It explores how teaching methods are used without a clear understanding of why, which leads to ineffective teaching that is believed to work – but ultimately doesn't. Cutting through the clutter of conventional teacher guidance, David Fawcett tackles myths head on, sharing the latest research and explaining how this will look translated to a classroom environment.

The book breaks down the complexities of teaching into manageable chunks and offers practical advice on how to take charge of your own CPD to become a more reflective and successful practitioner. Focusing on what's most relevant and helpful to build effective teaching practice and self-improvement it raises key questions such as:

• Is lesson planning just a box ticking exercise?

• Why do students remember in lessons, but forget in tests?

• Is asking more questions beneficial?

• Is feedback actually worth it?

Relearning to Teach is a must read for all teachers looking to pinpoint the why of teaching methods and to gain an understanding of the reasons why various pedagogies are used within the classroom.

Isn’t lesson planning just a box ticking exercise?¹

Planning the perfect lesson – is there such a thing?

Lesson planning was part of my professional training more than 20 years ago and I, as a young teacher, followed the script for a while without ever questioning the general scheme. It seemed to work and why wouldn’t it? It had both a logical flow and a simple, clear structure: set your objectives, design the activities, and then check for understanding. As one’s experience grows, however, you come to the realization that things should be simple but not simpler than they are, and that attending to nuance and complexity is the basis of excellence. The students were, indeed, learning: they were involved in all activities during the lesson, they had very good scores on tests, both national and international, and their feedback was always positive. Yet, over the course of a school year, small gaps would emerge, and connections between their previous learning and new content seemed to form with more difficulty than I expected. What was I doing wrong? I was planning according to the strategies I had learned and I stuck to the well-known cycle (objectives-activities-feedback) consistently.

Initially, I tried to address the issue by working on details: Should I time this and that activity differently? Should I use a different resource? Should I vary the type of feedback students give? and so on. Although some of these choices had an impact on student performance, it was temporary and it did not bring the desired change in the bigger picture. Then I began to look at the structure of planning as a whole and reversed two of the three components: what if designing assessment prior to activities makes it clearer for me to anticipate student learning? This small decision resulted in an important shift that forced me to look closer at aspects that previously I did not quite connect. Before I would plan for increased difficulty but I would rarely consider complexity of a concept that is, connecting it with more curricular elements. Also, now I could clearly plan for potential misconceptions because as soon as you ask yourself, “How will the student learn this?”, you begin to anticipate difficulties a learner experiences in the process. I also started to look at knowledge, concepts, and skills more holistically and, in the attempt to make them more coherent and integrate them in a whole, I started to plan for longer periods of time. Long-term planning was another change that resulted in greater learning gains because it made me think hard of how these elements enable students to connect, transfer, and consolidate their learning.

(Cristina Milos, Teacher, Rome)

Years of teaching has led me to notice an obsession with planning a “perfect” lesson. Through discussions in staff rooms, meetings or social media, there are many teachers who long to find out the mix that is right. We share, we borrow, we adapt and deliver. We aim to combine various ideas together to make a lesson of pure learning gold and leaves students in awe of the greatness that they have just experienced. There are many opinions on lesson planning as well. “Have you tried using the x framework?” “Make sure your lessons consist of . . . You’ll never fail”. “Always start your lessons with a . . .”. If you seek it, you will find it.

Part of this problem may span from lesson observations. Although not required any more by Ofsted, the necessity for a large number of schools to grade lessons has led to a culture of dependency. How many times over the years have you seen teachers panic more with an observation coming up than they do with the other lessons in that week? How many times after giving detailed feedback do you find the only thing that the teacher wants to know is what grade they got – not how well the planning of the lesson led to improved levels of learning? And why is this the case? Maybe because we feel that this observation is a measure of our performance as a teacher?

Lesson planning may also be hindered by the fact we honestly seek to find a “best method”. We hear of educational panaceas that will “improve learning by X per cent” and “ensure all of your lessons are outstanding”. We genuinely want to do well and the bombardment and confusion about what actually works makes it difficult to see what would be best for us. Then there are school priorities, whether it’s differentiation, literacy, numeracy, SMSC, feedback or more. With good intentions, we then look for ways to get them in our lesson. The culture of being magpies and adopting ideas without fully understanding them leads to them being implemented not as they were intended, and results aren’t what we expect.

The thing is that if we are not careful, lesson planning can become a box ticking exercise.For years, my lesson planning took numerous twists and turns. In essence, the core stayed the same but the rest fluctuated term by term. Having a starter ready for the students to work on, sharing knowledge, answering some exam questions and wrapping it up with a plenary became the norm. Add to this the 30-slide PowerPoint, the numerous worksheets, the card sorts, filling in blanks, getting facts from around the room and all of the other pyrotechnics and things became shallow and unnecessarily complex. Students would either be restless or so active that they weren’t really learning anything. They were simply the passengers on a huge ramble where I failed to consider whether they were actually being challenged to learn anything. Lessons had no meaningful recall, no real methods to embed and engrain knowledge. Instead they simply looked good. But maybe I need to be honest and realise that I was the main part of the problem. My first problem was referring to lessons as single entities. This brings me to my first principle.

1 A lesson is the wrong unit in time

As a trainee teacher and NQT, the obsession was thrust upon me that I needed to look at planning perfect, isolated lessons. I remember late nights filling out lesson plans provided by my university, that separated a lesson into various sections (and sub sections). I would look at a topic and break it up into fragmented components and spend 60 minutes trying to get my students to learn it. I knew what I needed to get through, and with timings of each activity scripted down the side column, I even knew when I needed to move on. Once I had taught this lesson, I could tick it off and plan the next topic. Everything was neatly organised into these lessons and I could pop them into my folder to exemplify that I was becoming a lesson planning expert. Or was I?

Ask yourself these questions:

• What is wrong with planning isolated lessons?

• Do we focus too much on planning perfect lessons?

• What is a perfect lesson?

• If I’ve taught them this topic on this particular day, does it mean that they’ve actually learnt it?

• Is a single lesson long enough to teach them a complex or difficult concept sufficiently?

• What happens if students still don’t understand what you’ve taught them at the end of the lesson?

• Why might some people (including me) be so focused on planning individual lessons?

At first glance, you might say this problem is isolated purely to trainee teachers. Obviously, as a novice teacher we need guidance on how to structure lessons: A plan allows us to practice putting a lesson together, and gives us some guidance on what to do. But maybe this narrow view formed a habit where I focused on learning as single lessons? I can’t say it happens in all teacher training providers, but this focus on isolated lessons is common as Kat Howard, an English teacher from Leicestershire, also experienced.

The course itself is geared towards planning for the perfect “learning moment,” when this is not a realistic demonstration of how the learning process works. By additionally placing such emphasis upon grading lessons as a key component of the completion of a training session, it detracts from the value of learning over time, which leaves the candidate completely unprepared for the day-to-day requirements placed upon them within schools.

And it’s an experience that others, such as English teacher Susan Strachan, have also encountered.

As an ITT my training focused on how to plan a good lesson (singular), not how to plan a scheme of learning or how to plan a longer series of lessons. So, armed with this meagre knowledge I would happily spend 3–4 hours planning the “perfect” lesson, or so I thought. How naive of me to think that spending triple or more time on one lesson was productive or sustainable and, although I know that planning does get quicker and easier with time, choosing to plan single lessons in isolation meant that this was never going to happen.

So scrap planning lessons? Is that what you’re saying?

Knowing what we do on a day to day and lesson by lesson basis is important. What I am suggesting is a more holistic view. As Head of Maths, Bodil Isaksen (2015), writes: “A lesson is the wrong unit of time”: We need to think of it in the context of the whole unit or scheme of work. The fluidity of the lesson should be dependent on what you taught before, and based on what your formative assessment told you, what you need to teach today. As David Didau, an English teacher and author once told me, “Planning individual lessons encourages narrow thinking and thus promotes short term performance over learning. It’s better to plan sequences”. I totally agree with this sentiment. Yet, at times, usually during times when we are being observed, we still become focused on planning that illusive outstanding lesson (whatever that is?). Planning should be viewed as long term process.

When chatting to numerous teachers about how people plan lessons, one of the overwhelming themes that came back was the fact that more experienced teachers seem to seeing planning as a longer unit of time. They’re not planning six or seven isolated lessons in one go, but are instead thinking of a larger long-term goal where they want the class to end up, and planning how to get there. Take this for example.

Working with PGCE students for the past few years, some of them feel liberated when they watch some of my department teach and see that when the 60 minutes up and the lesson isn’t finished, we leave it there knowing we’ll pick it up from here next lesson. In some of the schools they’ve visited, that lesson needed to have been completed – not left to carry over. But why? Why cram everything in when you could ultimately end up with students who have covered the content, but learnt nothing?

Seeing lessons as a larger period of time allows us many more benefits that we might have initially not considered. By focusing on isolated lessons, we may have the thought that what needs to be taught today, has to be taught today. We break a subject into small chunks, which in turn causes us to block them. Today’s lesson is about discrimination towards women in sport. Tomorrow’s is about the role of the media. Next week’s is about role models. Looking at this, both you and I can see there is an obvious link between all three lessons. There has been (historically) a lack of women role models in sport, a lack of coverage by the media highlighting women role models, probably as a result from historic stereotyping and discrimination towards women in sport at all levels. All of these are seriously interlinked. However, planning lessons one topic at a time may miss the bigger context and connections on offer.

If you have ever come across the work of Robert Bjork (1992), you will know that what we see happening in lessons to what is actually learnt is completely different. In a well-designed perfect lesson, we may leave feeling that every student has understood the content and learnt it. We’ve taught it, we asked them questions, they’ve completed work and all the students seemed to have grasped it. However, have they really learnt it? What we might have seen is performance rather than learning. They are not the same thing. If we decide to plan in blocks, we may be given the false impression that students are really picking things up. However, to really learn things, students need to revisit these topics numerous times over a curriculum. Each time we space them out, force them to retrieve them or interleave them with other topics, we are helping them to remember it better next time. That is learning. Planning in isolation doesn’t help this process or way of thinking.

Planning in isolation can also cause us to feel pressured to finish up and move on. With curriculum time so precious, there is the temptation to start the next lesson with a new topic. The comeback is that if we allow misunderstanding to build up, we have a lot of learning gaps to cover at a later date when time is even more precious. Is it not better to nip things in the bud before they develop into serious misconceptions? Being flexible and seeing beyond isola...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Isn’t lesson planning just a box ticking exercise?
• 2. Why do they seem to remember in lessons, but then forget it in the test?
• 3. Asking more questions is better. Isn’t it?
• 4. For all the time and effort, is feedback actually worth it?
• 5. Differentiation: Isn’t that just making 30 worksheets for my 30 students?
• 6. Isn’t teaching English just for English teachers?
• 7. Are we just doing data because we’ve been told to do data?
• Getting a little better at getting a little better
• Index