Attractive waste bin?
How best to teach: knowledge-led or
skills-led lessons?
“Let truth and falsehood
grapple:
who ever knew truth put to the
worse, in a free and open encounter?”
John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
Knowledge lessons prioritise memory,
instruction and practice;
Skills lessons prioritise engagement,
collaboration and reflection.
Last week I (and others) argued that a debate on skills and knowledge is worth having in education.
I see a knowledge-led curriculum with mastery assessment and effective instruction
as a frontier that has the potential to tackle the long tail of underachievement,
particularly in challenging English schools with
disadvantaged pupils.
The question of how best to teach is hotly contested.
There are distinctive and fundamental differences in
pedagogy between those
who advocate a knowledge-led approach and those who
advocate a skills-led approach.
The purpose of the skills-led approach is to prioritise
and develop transferable skills
like collaboration and empathy. The content studied is
not so important as transferring their skills
to any content or text, whether books, articles or
multi-modal media.
In contrast, the purpose of the knowledge-led approach is
to prioritise and build cultural capital:
in English, textual, contextual and grammatical knowledge
– subject-specific content.
These are contrasting mindsets; they result in different
pedagogies.
Simplified, we can see them as two different models.
The structure of a skills-based lesson is a starter for engagement,
activities for collaboration,
and a plenary for reflection. Since this three-part lesson had a £500
million endorsement
in the National Strategies by the Department for
Education and Skills, such skills-based thinking
has pervaded English state schools. It’s hard for many
teachers who have learned to teach like this
to imagine lesson planning without considering starters
and plenaries, engagement and reflection, student-led activities and
collaborative groupwork.
For many, this is the very definition of best pedagogical
practice.
Conversely, a knowledge-based lesson prioritises memory, instruction and practice.
But far from ‘already doing all of this’,
few state school lessons prioritise extended writing practice, extended
teacher-led direction, memory drills or multiple-choice questions.
Taking English as an example, as that is what I teach,
I’ll give two examples in lessons on reading and writing
of these differences.
Reading a Novel
When planning a lesson on a novel in the skills-based
mindset, the questions you generally ask are: how will I hook my pupil’s
interest and engage their enthusiasm?
What activities will I get my pupils to lead collectively
in groups?
How will I get my pupils to reflect on what they’ve
learned?
Planning a skills lesson on a novel
As a starter, for example, you might consider several
options:
images to develop pupils’ inference skills, or youtube
videos – both are engaging.
You might consider an energising quizgame like Blockbusters, Countdown, The Weakest Link
or Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire – quiz show games combine visuals and
music,
competition and spectacle, ‘beat-the-clock’ time-pressure
and audience participation
like ‘phone a friend’ or ‘ask the audience’. Hundreds and
thousands of starters to pick from
are shared on websites like the TES online. Many are fun;
most aim to entertain.
As activities, for instance, you might consider the
options of setting up a cardsort in groups,
such as a diamond nine discussion, designing a visual
poster in pairs, creating a mindmap
on big A2 sugar paper with markers in teams, making a
storyboard by drawing the characters,
or co-teaching each other using a groupwork activity such
as carousel, jigsaw, marketplace,
home and away groups or ambassadors. You could get them
to write a diary entry
from one of the characters, to develop their empathy. You
might get them to use a strategy
such as skimming and scanning to highlight parts of the
text. You could get them
to create a real-world product such as puppets for a
puppet show of the chapter,
a trailer for a film production of the book or a blurb
for a book cover or a letter to publishers
for a new abridged edition, to encourage pupils to
develop their higher-order skills like experts.
For your plenary, you might consider the options of
self-reflection, such as traffic-lighting
their confidence with red (hesitant), amber (uncertain)
or green (confident)
against the learning outcomes or objectives, writing a
post-it-note to summarise what they learned, presenting to other groups, or
creating a freeze-frame in groups or pairs, in the shape of a character,
episode or theme, while the rest try to guess which it represents.
Hundreds and thousands of plenaries to pick from are
shared in teacher training.
Many are fun; most are happy to get pupils reflecting on
their learning.
Planning a knowledge lesson on a novel
When planning a lesson on a novel in the knowledge-based
mindset, the questions you ask are:
what knowledge of the text and context do they need to
consolidate?
What new knowledge of the plot, characters, themes or
language should I instruct them in?
How will they practise using and combining their new and
prior knowledge?
For instance, with memory in mind, you’d decide which
content requires consolidation:
which factual recall questions on the plot, characters,
themes or context do I ask of the whole class? The recap could consist of
whole-class questioning,
silent individual answers to multiple-choice questions or
pair discussion,
but seldom larger groups, which risk distraction.
Within instruction, you’d carefully select the text
extract from the novel
and design factual comprehension and comparison questions
to ask in an extended,
in-depth, whole-class reading of the text. Occasional
pair discussion would be combined
with individual thinking or writing time before
whole-class discussion.
You’d check for understanding using multiple-choice
hinge-questions that all pupils answer visibly, so that you see who’s not got
it yet.
Within practice, you’d set students the key lesson
question with a series of sub-questions
for the extended individual writing practice. This would
eschew empathy tasks like diary entries
and postcards home in favour of making connections
between context, text, character,
plot and themes, depending on the focus of the lesson.
This might take the form of a paragraph in books or a
single sentence or two on an exit ticket,
to check that they’ve learned what’s been taught.
Writing to Persuade
When planning a lesson on writing to persuade in the
skills-based mindset,
you still plan engaging starters, collaborative
activities and reflective plenaries.
The starter might be a stimulating question, ideally with
provocative visual or audiovisual stimulus, or a cardsort to match persuasive
techniques (using the AFOREST acronym as a generic mnemonic) to definitions.
The activities might be an opinion grid with post-its or stalls round the room
before drafting a persuasive speech on a topic that
ideally is relevant to them:
at Key Stage 3 or 4 this might be on a TV program they
love or loathe, or celebrities as role models. After drafting an assembly
speech or magazine article to a real-world audience of young people,
the plenary might be for the confident pupils to read out
their writing,
or for everyone to peer-assess or self-evaluate,
which has the added benefit of saving teachers’ time on
marking.
When planning a lesson on persuasive writing in a
knowledge-led mindset,
you still plan for memory, instruction and practice. The
recap would eschew acronyms
and instead consolidate pupil’s knowledge of classical
rhetorical devices such as enargia,
epiplexis and anaphora through examples in great
historical speeches of world leaders.
The instruction would eschew relevant topics and instead
broaden pupils’ cultural horizons
by focusing on a key moment, dilemma or speech in the
biography of a leader who spoke in English such as Elizabeth I, Lincoln,
Bright, Churchill, Gandhi, King, Malcolm X, Mandela or Obama.
The practice would involve either writing an analysis of
the speech
or arguing for or against the leader’s approach,
though this is complex and would require extensive
contextual and content knowledge.
Teacher marking would be prioritised over peer-assessment
and self-evaluation.
Contrasting Objectives
What we see from these two examples is not only that the
sequence within lessons differ
between the skills and the knowledge approach; the
objectives differ, too.
Those who prioritise skills-based approach tend to choose
verbs for their objectives
such as evaluate, create, co-teach, infer, predict,
assess, question, generate, investigate, transform, reflect, co-construct.
Those who prioritise knowledge over skills tend to think
of questions that are seen as ‘lower-order’ by skills advocates, aiming for
pupils to know, understand, remember, recall, apply, describe,
explain and connect their knowledge.
Conflicting Theories
The underpinning rationale for the contrasting approaches
is based on conflicting theories.
The generic skills approach is based on Bloom’s Taxonomy,
a pervasive cross-subject feature
of Initial Teacher Training and Continuing Professional
Development. In this theory, knowledge
and recall is at the bottom, a ‘lower order skill’;
‘higher-order’ skills are evaluation and synthesis.
In the eyes of a knowledge advocate, the
almost-inevitable logic of Bloom’s pyramid
is that extensive cultural knowledge is neglected. For
the skills advocate, learning styles, independent learning and learning to
learn are much more useful and transferable than mere facts.
The approach of instruction in subject knowledge is based
on Engelmann’s theory of
instruction, corroborated by Hattie’s meta-analyses.
Instruction is most effective when concepts
are explicitly explained through sequences of examples,
questions, practice and instant feedback. For the knowledge advocate, Hattie
corroborates Hirsch and Willingham that broad knowledge, long-term memory and deliberate practice are
vital for learning.
Underlying these contrasting mindsets and rationales are
conflicting ideologies of education.
Underneath the skills mindset is constructivism, which
holds that pupils must construct
their own learning, and that teachers must facilitate
student-led activities
rather than instruct and direct learning. Underneath the
knowledge mindset is cognitivism,
which holds that subject knowledge and explicit
teacher-led instruction are essential for novices across all domains.
A tale of two red herrings
Variety and Synthesis
The red herring here is not the skills-knowledge debate,
which needs to be had, and fully;
the red herrings here are variety and synthesis.
Variety as a Distraction
“Surely a diet of just one approach would kill
students’ desire to learn and our desire to teach?”
“The only “wrong” teaching strategy is using
the same one all the time…”
These two comments on my last blog are well meaning, but
the notion of a well-balanced variety
of constructivism and cognitivism, Vygotsky and
Willingham, Bloom and Engelmann,
generic transferable skills and subject-specific
knowledge is misguided.
Think about the dazzling, mind-boggling complexity of
pupils’ secondary school experience.
The challenge of understanding and remembering complex,
overlapping
and confusing concepts is highly demanding.
Remember the sheer number of subjects they study: around
10 different domains.
Often, the same verbal concept has a completely different
meaning across domains:
think of the multiple meanings of the word ‘structure’ in
Science, English, Maths, French and History.
Cognitivism and knowledge-led instruction prioritise clarity and memory to avoid confusion
and forgetting. Constructivism and skills-led
facilitation prioritise variety across
and within lessons, and downplay memory. With five different subjects a day, clarity in each subject is more helpful than variety for pupils. Knowledge-led instruction
focuses on:
Helping pupils understand complex abstract concepts
across their many subjects
Minimising confusion, maximising consolidation
Preventing pupils from misunderstanding what we’re
teaching
Preventing pupils’ misconceptions sinking in
Allowing less social loafing, more individual
accountability
Helping pupils remember what they’re learning
Helping poorer pupils catch up with richer kids
In a nutshell, variety is a distraction.
Content already varies; pedagogy should vary by domain,
rather than within or across lessons.
Kids get enough variety in the nature of a school day
organised across varying subjects.
Synthesis as a Mirage
“Why not do both? Why not synthesise
constructivism and cognivitism?”
Some say the skills and knowledge approaches are not
mutually exclusive.
On the contrary: the conflicting approaches are based on
conflicting theories of learning
that cannot usefully be reconciled or synthesized. If
it’s right that knowledge should be prioritised over skills, we should not seek
a cosy, happy medium between that idea
and the notion that skills should be prioritised over
knowledge. If one pupil believes 10+10 is 20,
and another believes it is 30, that does not mean the
right answer is 25!
The reason why cognitivism is the right answer to the
question of how best to teach,
and constructivism is much less helpful,
is because of its scientific approach and its specificity
of classroom insight.
Constructivism’s zone of proximal development is right
but vague;
its de-emphasis on teacher-led instruction is wrong and
unhelpful for lesson planning.
In contrast, cognivitism’s insights into preventing cognitive overload and building
long-term memory are both robust and very, very useful
for unit and lesson planning.
Count the Opportunity Cost
The best lens on the issue is opportunity cost. We
have limited time with pupils in lessons,
and teachers have limited time for resourcing too. The
opportunity cost of allowing my pupils
to focus on supposedly relevant topics they already know
about like celebrities,
TV and social networking, is that it limits my time to
help them catch up with richer kids
who get rich cultural knowledge at home. The opportunity
cost of spending entire lessons
making posters and trailers, doing enquiry circles and
opinion positioning, carousel groupwork
and fun games is that they have less time to focus on
broadening their horizons by reading
and writing about the greatest literature,
(auto)biographies and speeches ever written.
Given that poorer kids start secondary school thousands
of words behind richer kids in vocabulary,
it seems to me that we are widening the gap if English in
disadvantaged schools
is taught without an unrelenting focus on explicit
knowledge of context, novels, plays,
poems, grammar, rhetoric, spelling and vocabulary.
Is synthesising constructivism and cognitivism
a mirage?
In a nutshell, synthesis is a mirage. I choose to
prioritise knowledge over skills
for the sake of closing the educational achievement gap,
rather than aiming for variety,
relevance and synthesis for the sake of these notions as
ends in themselves.
***
However, just as the curriculum cannot be considered
without considering assessment,
lesson planning cannot be considered without considering
unit planning.
You can TCR software and engineering manuals for spontaneously recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what
I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A
practical overview of
Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
How to choose a
book. A Turbo Charged
Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like
to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check
out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com
gives many ways for you to work
with the stresses of life
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com
take advantage of business experience and expertise.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To quote the Dr Seuss
himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the
more places you'll go.”
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