Responsive Teaching

Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice

Harry Fletcher-Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138296879
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351583862
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This essential guide helps teachers refine their approach to fundamental challenges in the classroom. Based on research from cognitive science and formative assessment, it ensures teachers can offer all students the support and challenge they need and can do so sustainably.

Written by an experienced teacher and teacher educator, the book balances evidence-informed principles and practical suggestions. It contains:

• A detailed exploration of six core problems that all teachers face in planning lessons, assessing learning and responding to students,
• Effective practical strategies to address each of these problems across a range of subjects,
• Useful examples of each strategy in practice and accounts from teachers already using these approaches,
• Checklists to apply each principle successfully and advice tailored to teachers with specific responsibilities.

This innovative book is a valuable resource for new and experienced teachers alike who wish to become more responsive teachers. It offers the evidence, practical strategies and supportive advice needed to make sustainable, worthwhile changes.

1
How can we plan a unit, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time?

The problem

There is so much to teach and not enough time in which to teach it; we cannot respond to student learning until we are sure what matters most.

The evidence

Focus on the most powerful knowledge

Specify what students are to learn

Identify connections between ideas

Plan for units, not lessons

The principle

Responsive teachers specify what students will know and be able to do

Practical tools

Knowledge organisers

Pedagogical content knowledge unit planners

• – Representations
• – Misconceptions
• – Horizon knowledge
• – Sequence

Experience – Emma McCrea/Marcus Bennison

Planning subject knowledge for teaching

Checklist

The problem

There is so much to teach, and not enough time in which to teach it: we cannot respond to student learning until we are sure what matters most.

Maya has been teaching the class for eighteen months when she realises she’s in trouble. She has taught as fast as she can, faster than she’d like, and yet she’s still only covered around half of what she wants students to learn. Students are expected to know so much more with the new specifications, and Maya wants to teach more than just the specification. Even what she’s covered doesn’t seem to be sinking in. She tests her students and finds that much of what she taught last year has evaporated; absentees struggle, having missed their one chance to grasp a topic. Planning takes ages, as Maya struggles to establish what matters most from the syllabus and find ways to explain it. Despite her planning, what students recall at the end of a unit feels like a lottery based on how each lesson went. As soon as one lesson is done, Maya begins preparing the next, an exhausting treadmill, and while Maya and her colleagues share lesson plans and resources, Maya rarely finds this useful.

Maya wants to respond to students’ needs, but she is spending all her time struggling to plan effectively. She cannot assess what students have learned, and respond, until she is clear about what she most wants them to learn. Maya concludes that she needs to begin by reviewing how she approaches planning and identify:

• What should she prioritise?
• How can she create detailed, flexible plans?
• How can she make these plans useful for colleagues?

The evidence

Focus on the most powerful knowledge

Specify what students are to learn

Identify connections between ideas

Plan for units, not lessons

Graham Nuthall (2007) examined student learning minutely, tracking, for example, how an individual student’s confusion of refraction, reflection and magnification developed with every new task across a unit of learning, rendering much of the information she was exposed to meaningless. He reached a deceptively simple conclusion:

We discovered that a student needs to encounter, on at least three different occasions, the complete set of the information she or he needed to understand a concept. If the information was incomplete, or not experienced on three different occasions, the student did not learn the concept.

(p. 63)

Therefore, he argued:

Student learning primarily depends on the information they are exposed to. This means that activities need careful designing so that students cannot avoid interacting with this relevant information. It also means being very careful about the form of the information that is encountered.

(p. 79)

Maya realises she must convert her general ambitions for students into specific goals and design repeated opportunities to meet these goals. Her role is not curriculum design, but planning teaching which will allow students to learn the concepts set out in broad terms by the curriculum (Young, 2014a, pp. 94–97). Her reading of the evidence convinces her that her planning should be specific and knowledge-focused, should connect ideas and should be shaped around units, rather than lessons.

1. Focus on powerful knowledge

Maya has to decide the most important things for students to learn. She finds Anna Sfard’s (1998) discussion of competing metaphors of learning helpful. Learning may be seen as:

• Acquisition: gaining “basic units of knowledge that can be accumulated, gradually refined, and combined to form ever richer cognitive structures” (p. 5).
• Participation: becoming a member of a community, able to “communicate in the language of this community and act according to its particular norms” (p. 6).

This seems to explain many differences between teachers, from the purpose of education to the best activity in a lesson. Teachers focused on acquisition might see teacher explanation as an efficient way for students to gain knowledge; those focused on participation might see students’ pursuit of the scientific method as more important than their reaching correct conclusions today. Sfard suggests that the two metaphors are not exclusive: Maya comes to believe that acquiring knowledge and using it with increased flexibility allows students to participate by introducing them to communities of specialists (Young, 2014a, p. 101). An apprentice carpenter would not be left to trial and error among peers – their acquisition of knowledge and skill through increasingly challenging tasks culminates in the creation of a masterpiece, demonstrating their learning and qualifying them to participate as a carpenter. Acquisition and participation rely on students gradually developing fluency, automating simple procedures and developing more complicated mental models. Maya concludes that acquiring knowledge will qualify students to participate in the domains they wish to master; this requires identifying which knowledge matters most.

With limited time, Maya prioritises powerful knowledge, which will help her students understand the world and study, work and live as they wish (Young, 2014b). This is organised within subjects and:

1. Has explanatory power: knowledge of the Ancient World helps students understand literature, art and music; the ability to add integers prepares students to add fractions and decimals and to multiply.
2. Is unlikely to be encountered outside school: technical terms and classic literature are less likely to be encountered outside school than everyday language and young adult fiction.

Maya views powerful knowledge critically; it is not perfect and not fixed, and the choices and motives of those selecting it can be questioned (Young, 2014b). She recognises the value and the limits of the canon, and ensures the inclusion of women authors and mathematicians from outside the European tradition. Teaching powerful knowledge is not the sole solution to social problems, but Maya is convinced that all students are entitled to this knowledge and the understanding it allows (Young, 2014b). Learning familiar topics can be beneficial and enjoyable, but Maya uses them as intermediate steps to educate her students, broadening their horizons by leading them beyond what they already know.

• Maya prioritises teaching the most powerful knowledge.

2. Specify what students should learn

Maya finds that effective planning must be surprisingly specific. Vague objectives are common in education (Millar, 2016). One example sticks with Maya: “Can compare two fractions to identify the larger” sounds specific, but students’ success depends on the fractions selected:

• $\frac{3}{7}\text{and}\frac{5}{7}$ 90% of students were correct.
• $\frac{3}{4}\text{and}\frac{4}{5}$ 75% of students were correct.
• $\frac{5}{7}\text{and}\frac{5}{9}$ 15% of students were correct.

(Hart, 1981, in Wiliam, 2010, pp. 254–255)

Even a seemingly precise objective does not establish what students should be able to do. A clear standard would speci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: getting responsive teaching wrong
• 1 How can we plan a unit, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time?
• 2 How can we plan a lesson, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time?
• 3 How can we show students what success looks like?
• 4 How can we tell what students learned in the lesson?
• 5 How can we tell what students are thinking?
• 6 How can we help every student improve?
• 7 How can we make this work in reality?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index