In vogue teaching

I started out in the profession 14 years ago. I recently uncovered the notes from my training programme. It is pages long. Most of the advice jotted down is gold and set me in good stead, but I have uncovered fifteen items that were obviously assumed important at the time but are now seen as a bit of a waste of time. A valued colleague, Simon James, once commented that ‘silver bullets’ (fads) come in and out of fashion each decade, as if on a carousel. Well, 14 years into the profession, I’m starting to see this myself – crumbs, am I getting old?

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Here are the fifteen items:

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1.????APP. Assessing Pupil Progress was an attempt at making AFL practical and hands-on. APP for mathematics consisted of 208 areas of assessment focus across levels 1 to 8, giving between 20 and 25 areas for a pupil to complete per level. In hindsight, it was not a good application of AFL as it focussed too heavily on assessment rather than on the teacher’s response to assessment, and certainly wasn’t what Black & William had in mind when they wrote ‘Inside the Black Box’. Fast forward to 2023, and the terminology AFL is being phased out, replaced by ‘responsive teaching’.

2.????Learning styles. Each student used to fill in a learning style questionnaire to identify what type of learner he/she was. They would be labelled as a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner. One’d then tailor the resource to the 3 categories of child. This has been found to be somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy and doesn’t benefit the kid in the long-term.

3.????Lesson plans awash with buzzwords. There was a pressure to shoehorn lots of buzzwords into each lesson plan, e.g., real-life application, SEAL (Social & Emotional Aspects of Learning), cross-curricular, literacy, British values, SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social or Cultural) development, discovery learning, penny-drop moments and so forth. Trying to tick all these boxes each lesson was exhausting and took the teacher’s attention away from the learning.

4.???? Lesson plans vs planned lessons. Planning is of course critical and underpins effective teaching. However, there was an unhealthy obsession with lesson plans when I started out, the purpose of which seemed to be proxy evidence for an accountability paper trail. Lesson plans were a box-ticking exercise creating unnecessary workload for teachers, taking time away from the real business of planning, whilst offering a false comfort of purpose. Thankfully, sense has prevailed, I quote: “Ofsted no longer requires schools to provide curriculum planning in any specific format”.

5.??? Choice. One was encouraged to give the student a choice of task – this led to lots of carousel lessons which made behaviour management difficult and planning extensive, especially for a new teacher.

6. Group work. Early on, I was told that “a noisy classroom is a thinking classroom” – this did me few favours. While some subjects and topics do lend themselves well to group work, it is now widely believed that it is easier to get wrong than right; whereas the use of mini whiteboards is considered easier to get right than wrong. If 2010 was the decade of group work, then 2020 is the decade of the mini whiteboard.?

7. Textbooks. Textbook work used to be frowned upon as it was considered lazy planning. Instead, we scoured google and TES for wacky worksheets and crazy activities involving noise, glue and scissors. We were almost trying to disguise the Maths amongst fun. Not anymore - we now celebrate Maths for what is it - beautiful, satisfying and useful in its own right! Textbook exercises are now my bread and butter, and nowadays, when planning a lesson, the priority is routine with the vast majority of my lessons following the same structure of retrieval, clear modelling, independent practice (normally, but not always, a textbook exercise) and mass-participation AFL.?

8. Modelling. Clicking my way through PowerPoint slides has been replaced by modelling in an exercise book under the visualiser. It takes the form of ‘I do – we do – you do’ during which I pause to make the implicit explicit and use hinge questions to aid metacognition. I see two advantages of swapping PowerPoint for the visualiser: expectations of presentation are unequivocally clear, and it is powerful seeing the teacher do the maths.??

9.????Observations. Recently, the purpose has rightly moved from teacher-evaluation, to identifying targets to improve the learning. Observations used to be infrequent, summative, formal and graded, causing the teacher to deliver a one-off whizz-bang, all-singing all-dancing lesson, as he/she was being evaluated. This has been replaced by frequent, formative, less formal, target-driven observations where the teacher is not graded (the learning is assessed rather than the teaching). This shift in emphasis is a positive step and has caused a more productive process and a much better culture where T&L is a dialogue between SLT and teaching staff (every lesson can be better, whether you’re the Head or an NQT).?

10.????Differentiation. To differentiate, I was instructed to provide different worksheets and objectives for different students. These pre-defined expectations would inevitably become a self-fulfilling prophecy causing big knowledge gaps. This word is now being phased out, replaced by the term ‘adaptive teaching’. By raising the ceiling (rather than dropping to their level), one raises expectations and achievements. ‘Adaptive teaching’ methods include descriptive praise, stronger behaviour management, seating plans, reduction of extraneous sensory information, scaffolding, retrieval and sharing resources so that they can be accessed afterwards.

11.????Evidence. There was a heavy focus on evidencing the lesson content in the students’ exercise books. Amongst other trivialities, this involved a plethora of acronyms: WALT/LO, WILF/SC, EBI, WWW, WAGOLL, TILT, WINK among many. These days, there is much less copying from the board, and formative assessment is likely to be in the form of questioning or low-stake quizzes done on mini-whiteboards. This means the books look less thorough, but importantly, learning time is optimised and information gathered from AFL shapes the future planning which has a bigger impact on learning.

12.????Sanctions. Lines were my go-to form of punishment. This is now frowned upon as it causes the student to associate writing with punishment, giving the English department an uphill battle. Restorative chats are now preferred to menial tasks.

13.????Hooks. Hooks were high priority, as we strived to link the topic to something of interest to the students. Hooks are still good for engagement and I’m certainly not suggesting they’re scrapped, but they’re now viewed as a little overrated. “Memory is the residue of thought” (Willingham) and therefore the priority should be getting the students thinking deeply about the subject material, rather than a hook. For example, I used to teach fractions using bars of chocolate with 6x4 squares (24 is a nice denominator as it has a lot of factors), but the students’ attention was inevitably on chocolate consumption rather than developing a true understanding of a denominator. This meant learning was not maximised.

14.????Brain gym. We were encouraged to start lessons with ‘brain gym’ activities to connect the right and left hemispheres of the students; this was thought to improve learning. It turns out that this was a complete myth.

15.????Fidget toys. Fidget spinners, squashy stress balls and Pop It were all seen to increase focus in children who struggled with attention deficit. “Can you stop distracting yourself and others with the toy?” was typically met with the response “I’m allowed it”. Contrary to advice at the time, these objects have been found to have an adverse effect on concentration.

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So why has this happened? Why have fifteen common-place practices, now become redundant? Well, there are four schools of thought. Firstly (and cynically) it has sometimes seemed that policymakers have pushed through low-impact policies so that they can make their mark on the landscape. Secondly, the educational research has either been misinterpreted by schools or its execution has been rushed due to a lack of CPD time; it has then fallen out of fashion because it wasn’t implemented correctly. Thirdly, I think the teaching profession has (finally!) utilised scientifically rigorous research, such as Hattie's meta-analyses (in which John Hattie ranked 138 influences that are related to learning outcomes from very positive effects to very negative effects). The profession is then disseminating this info more effectively to the masses, helped by The National College and the Twittersphere where proposals can be thoroughly scrutinised. Fourthly, I think we all finally got sick of strategies with no rationale, and decided to go back to the bare bones of what helps students learn (rather than what helps a school pass an inspection, etc). We're a more discerning and sceptical generation of teachers, who need harder proof before we commit to things.

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The final two points give me hope. So, if we were to fast-forward to a decade from now, I don’t think we’ll be looking back on 2023 practice and grimacing. I certainly don’t think I’ll be able to name as many as fifteen things I am doing now that have little effect on learning… at least I really hope not!