Knap weed, slender and creeping thistle.
The Cult of Outstanding™: the problem with ‘outstanding’
lessons
First of all I need to come clean. Up until pretty
recently I was a fully paid up member of
the Cult of Outstanding™. Last January I considered
myself to be a teacher at the height
of my powers. In the spirit of self-congratulation I
posted a blog entitled Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson in which
I detailed a lesson which I confidently supposed was the apotheosis
of great teaching, and stood back to receive plaudits.
And indeed they were forthcoming.
I was roundly congratulated and felt myself
extraordinarily clever.
And then Cristina Milos got in touch to tell me
that there was no such thing as an outstanding lesson. I was, she patiently
pointed out, deluding myself. When I sputtered my objections she directed me to
a video of Robert Bjork explaining the need to dissociate learning from
performance.
Now no one enjoys being told they’re a fool, but I have
to say that I’m profoundly grateful
to Cristina for not pulling her punches; nothing else has
had anywhere near the impact
on my thinking about teaching and learning. When you
start thinking in this way,
it becomes increasingly obvious just how little we know
and understand about what we do.
The more I’ve read and the deeper I’ve delved into this,
the more convinced I’ve become
that in our efforts to cast teachers in the mould
supposedly preferred by Ofsted we are unwittingly, but actively, undermining
our pupils’ ability to learn. Understandably, this is not a popular message.
A lot of very influential people have got an awful lot
invested in the belief
that the pedagogical methodologies popularly understood
to result in
‘outstanding’ lessons are the right way to teach.
In fact it may well be easier for a rich man to pass
through the eye of a needle than for an
Ofsted inspector, an education consultant or a school
leader to admit that they’ve been wrong.
But are they wrong? So far this is just a piece
of polemic and can be easily dismissed
as the ravings of a loon. Well, I think you’d agree that
most teachers in most schools
are expected to teach lessons in which students make
visible progress.
Although the past year or so has seen the pernicious myth
of ‘progress in 20 minutes’
rightly debunked, as a profession we still believe that
the best lessons are those in which pupils
are learning. Now as a whole raft of academics have
proved (at least to my mind) learning is, in fact, invisible. Judging the
effectiveness of teaching by assessing what pupils can do during a lesson
is arrant foolishness. It would be like me telling you
that the capital of Poland was Warsaw
and then asking, a few minutes later, what the capital of
Poland was. What’s that? Warsaw, you say? Oh jolly good. Marvellous
progress. This is an obviously risible example
but not really so very different from the literally
thousands of lessons I’ve taught
in which I’ve shown pupils how to do something and then
proudly watched them do it themselves. They are merely responding to cues.
They may have learned something, but this can
only be inferred from their performance.
Now the truly mind-bending bit of all this is that
sometimes (often?) current performance
is not only a poor indication of learning, it actually
seems to prevent it. When we design lessons that boost pupils’ performance, the
net result is that we are retarding the likelihood that they will learn.
Conversely “Conditions that induce the most errors during acquisition are often
the very conditions that lead to the most learning!” (Bjork 2013) So are all
those slickly outstanding lessons
we’ve venerated for so long really just fluff and
nonsense?
Lessons which are generally judged to be outstanding are
characterised by pupils
being visibly engaged and ‘getting it’. Ofsted’s criteria
for outstanding teaching and learning
include the following:
Sustained & rapid progress
Consistently high expectations
Excellent subject knowledge
Systematic, accurate assessment
Well judged, imaginative teaching strategies
Sharply focused & timely support
Enthusiasm, participation & commitment
Resilience, confidence & independence
Frequent & consistently high quality feedback
Engagement, courtesy, collaboration & cooperation
In order to thoroughly expose the Cult of Outstanding™,
we might do well to investigate each of these criteria in
turn.
Sustained & rapid progress
I’ve already written extensively about the problems
with progress so let me summarise
by asking this: if we do something really quickly is it
likely to last? I contend that rapid and sustained progress are mutually
exclusive: they cancel each other out. You can have one or the other.
We have to choose and I’d strongly recommend sustained
progress. The problem is that the route
to sustained progress is deeply counter-intuitive. We’re
all a lot more comfortable with the idea
of making rapid progress because it ‘feels right’. But
there’s a significant body of research
which suggests that slowing performance and increasing
the errors made during instruction
has a significant impact on our ability to retain and
transfer skills and knowledge.
Simply put, we learn better by struggling. But this is
not what happens in an outstanding lesson where pupils are expected to
demonstrate rapid progress and not look confused
as they grapple with challenging concepts.
Consistently high expectations
On the face of it you’d think I would have little to
argue against here.
And on the face of it, you’d be right. But consistently
high expectations of what?
If our expectation as teachers is that pupils perform to
a high level only in our lessons
then we may will be guilty of engineering a situation
which makes it harder for them to retain
and transfer what we’re teaching. This leads to a culture
where it becomes routine for pupils
not to remember or be able to apply the basics. Consider
this: in a Year 11 English lesson,
we read an article about Barrack Obama taking a 5% pay
cut to show support for the plight
of the American economy. We decided to award him a nicely
rounded salary of $150,000
and calculate what this 5% reduction might represent. I
was appalled when the class,
which contained some very bright mathematicians, signally
failed to work out what is, even for me,
a pretty simple sum. I’m fairly sure the same thing goes
on when students I know for a fact can spell and paragraph accurately in my
lessons suddenly lose this ability in, say, geography or science.
Excellent subject knowledge
OK, you got me. Having expert subject knowledge is highly
desirable and likely to result
in pupils making significant gains in their learning. In
particular, it pays teachers to understand
the likely mistakes and misconceptions pupils are likely
to make in a given subject.
If these mistakes are anticipated and headed off before
they become ingrained
then a great deal of harm is avoided. Naturally it’s not
sufficient to merely have great
subject knowledge, but it is necessary and your
kids ain’t gonna get very far if you’ve
not got it.
Systematic, accurate assessment
Again, this seems obvious doesn’t it? How can systematic
and accurate assessment be a bad thing? The short answer is that it can’t. But
the problem is that very little assessment is accurate
and systematic in the right way. Most mark schemes are
highly subjective and do little to encourage accuracy. Daisy Christodoulou has
written eloquently about what she calls ‘the adverb problem‘
and this is something of which we should be ever mindful.
Our assessment is a lot more inaccurate and vague than
we’d like to admit.
Well judged, imaginative teaching strategies
Of course well-judged teaching strategies are brilliant.
But if we believe that improving pupils’ performance is the desired outcome
then it’s highly unlikely that the strategies we select
will be well-judged. It’s certainly very rare for a
lesson to be judged outstanding if pupils
are still struggling by the end of the lesson; this is
normally judged inadequate.
But if sustained progress is our goal then neat
resolutions and slick performances
will undermine our aim. And we don’t really mean
‘imaginative’, do we?
What we mean is ‘conforming to a fairly narrow set of
expectations
of what constitutes good teaching’. And that just isn’t
the same.
Sharply focused & timely support
Providing effective support is, of course, highly
desirable, but too much support
will create learned helplessness. Also we often support
pupils because we’re obsessed
with improving their performance. But there’s nothing
inherently wrong with struggle,
in fact it’s often essential for information to wend its
way from working to long term memory.
So why are we so squeamish about children being stuck? We’d
do better sometimes to set out
our stall to celebrate what’s hard and damn what comes
easily. There’s a toxic trend in our society
to dismiss hard work as the preserve of thickos and
plodders. It’s in our language: ‘Hard luck!’, ‘
Easy does it!’ All this sharply focussed support may well
be eroding the confidence and resilience
we so desire in our students. The point of scaffolding is
that it must be removed.
The problem with outstanding lessons is that they rarely
devote the time necessary
for effective explanations or modelling (see below) for
fear that the teacher
will be accused on talking for too long.
Enthusiasm, participation & commitment
These, along with engagement, are the very stuff of
Robert Coe’s ‘poor proxies for learning’.
These things are lovely and certainly sociably desirable,
but the tell us nothing about the quality
of pupils’ learning. It’s relatively well-known that
doodling can increase your retention
and in the past I’ve taught children whose apparent
attention is lessons is minimal
and yet they learn. One boy I shepherded through GCSEs
spent 2 years building piles of rubbers
only to get an A*! We can, and should, insist on good
behaviour because the alternative is horrible. But we must be informed and
honest enough to acknowledge that observation feedback like
‘that boy at the back was off-task for 3 minutes’ is
utterly meaningless.
Resilience, confidence & independence
I’m all for pupils being resilient, confident and
independent. Who wouldn’t be?
The problem here is that we’ve got ourselves into the
perfectly understandable muddle
of believe that independent learning will result in
independence. It doesn’t; independent learning actually makes pupils more
dependent. If we really value independence and want our pupils
to be confident and resilient then we’re much better off
teaching them.
I’ve written extensively about the teaching sequence
for developing independence, but just to recap, the process is broken down into
4 stages:
Explaining – you can’t think about what you
don’t know so if we want our pupils
to do anything interesting or creative we must give them
the vocabulary
and background
knowledge required to explore a subject.
Modelling – no one is ever going to get good
at anything unless they go through the process
of deconstructing high quality examples and then ‘seeing’
the expert thought processes
which go into creating an expert example. The road to hell
is paved with vague success criteria.
Scaffolding – once pupils have had new
concepts explained and had great examples modelled
then they’re ready to have a go. Our job is to make sure
that everyone is challenged to do something they will find difficult and help
them deal with the frustration of not being able to get it.
Practising – pupils are now ready to work
independently. Our role is to be aware of the fact
that practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes
permanent. We must be vigilant about
the mistakes pupils are likely make and prevent them
prevent them becoming embedded.
Frequent & consistently high quality feedback
Yet again this appears entirely desirable. That is until
we examine the staggering weight of research that suggests that delaying and
reducing feedback, while having a negative impact of short term performance
gains, tends to boost long term retention and transfer.
This leads us, inevitably, down a rabbit hole of trying
to determine exactly what ‘high quality’ feedback might be. Is it high quality
if it visibly supports pupils’ performance in the classroom?
Or is it high quality if it means that they’re more
likely to pass an exam? This issue is that one of these is easy to check for
during an observation and the other isn’t. Guess which we tend to prefer?
Contrary to what almost everyone else would have us
believe, Bjork tell us this: “Numerous studies—some of them dating back
decades—have shown that frequent and immediate feedback can, contrary to
intuition, degrade learning.” This is an earth shattering bombshell
and goes completely against the grain. I intend to devote
my next post to dealing with this at length.
Engagement, courtesy, collaboration & cooperation
We’ve already dealt with engagement above and no right
thinking teacher would object
to politeness except to say that it has very little
bearing on learning. But collaboration
and cooperation betray a preference for group work.
There’s a time and a place for group work:
it slots in neatly to the scaffolding phase of teaching.
But the idea that all lessons should contain collaborative or cooperative
learning is preposterous.
Thank goodness that the subsidiary guidance to
inspectors added in December 2013 confirms this:
Do not expect to see ‘independent learning’ in all
lessons and do not make the assumption that
this is always necessary or desirable. On occasions,
too, pupils are rightly passive rather than active recipients of learning.
Do not criticise ‘passivity’ as a matter of course and certainly
not unless
it is evidently stopping pupils from learning new
knowledge or gaining skills and understanding.
It’s become abundantly clear to me that what might appear
to be passive may well conceal
a vigorous and seismic inner turmoil that heralds real
learning. So the next time you think
you’ve seen an outstanding lesson, think again. There’s
no such thing! We can certainly have outstanding teaching – it’s the preserve
of those teachers who get consistent and startling results, where
students really learn. The received wisdom on what an outstanding
lesson is,
actively obstructs outstanding teaching. We all need the
humility to accept that our preferences
and biases are just that: ours. They do not lead to
better learning. And further, it is my considered and contentious opinion that
the pursuit of outstanding lessons has done more to damage education than any
of the more obvious goonery like VAK and Brain Gym that we’ve had to put up
with
over the years.
The fact that Ofsted appear to be officially distancing
themselves from some of the more deluded facets of Outstanding™ lessons can
only be good news. But that still leaves us with a situation
where most inspectors and school leaders have got where
they are on the strength of their ability
to dance the rapid progress jig.
Will they be able to admit the possibility that they were
hoodwinked by the Cult of Outstanding?
I’m sure you’ll have an opinion on all this and I look
forward to discussing it in the comments below.
Related posts
Don’t trust your gut: a little bit more o the problem
with grading lessons
Deliberately difficult: why it might be better to make learning harder
Deliberately difficult: why it might be better to make learning harder
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/learning/cult-outstanding/
Turbo Charged Reading: Read
fast>>>Remember all>>>Years later
Contact
M’reen at: read@turbochargedreading.com
You can TCR specialist
and language dictionaries that are spontaneously accessed.
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.
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
How
to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when 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 which takes
advantage of the experience and expertise of others.
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.”
