Simplicity Rules

How Simplifying What We Do in the Classroom Can Benefit Children

Jo Facer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138488632
• eBook ISBN: 9781351039765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Teaching: the best job in the world. Yet, increasingly, it is considered one of the toughest professions. In recent years, practices have arisen and become widespread which overcomplicate teaching and increase teacher workload, while only having a marginal impact on pupil learning. Simplicity Rules explores how children learn and the most effective ways to teach them, focusing on achieving results using strategies that are low effort and high impact, along with a comprehensive framework underpinning the ideas.

Covering what to teach, talk, practice, starting a lesson, ending a lesson, and feedback alongside practical methods to reduce workload as well as simpler and clearer systems to support teachers in the long term, this book asks:

• Is this the very best use of my time as a teacher?
• What is the learning impact for the child?
• What is the impact on my own workload?
• Are the results worth this effort?

Promoting a simplification of teaching practices, Simplicity Rules is an essential guide for school teachers of all levels of experience, and school leaders.

1	How children learn

It makes sense, before we dive into exploring how to teach simply, to recall what we know from scientific and educational research about how children learn. Evidently, we need to ensure we teach the requisite content knowledge and that children understand it. We look at the best ways to ensure learning is memorable, and touch on some factors which might impact on the memorability of the content, such as cultural literacy.

Knowledge or skills

What does it mean to have ‘learned’ something? At its most basic, we tend to think of learning as leading to being able to do something we couldn’t previously. This is clearest at primary level, when children go from not being able to read to being able to read; not being able to write to writing. As children grow older, this concept becomes more and more contentious. When children can already read and write, what does it mean to ‘read better’ or ‘write better’? For the former, it might be argued that reading age tests can guide us, but anyone who has given these, even to year 7 children, will attest to the difficulty of 11-year-olds ‘capping out’ the test: reaching the highest ‘reading age’ already. And what about every other subject?

In education, currently two broad camps exist. One camp says learning means children have mastered a skill. The other says children have mastered components of knowledge.

Knowledge

Mastering a skill makes sense when we are talking about art, design, and technology practical work, and sports. But how do we teach the ‘skill’ of ‘analysis’?

A few years ago, a teacher I worked with told me about a pupil who wanted to know how to get better at history. He showed him his history book, wherein was inscribed his teacher’s feedback: ‘You need more analysis.’ And yet my colleague’s response on questioning the child on that particular historical period was ‘you don’t know enough about these events. So how can you possibly analyse it?’ The feedback was not helpful, because to analyse more he needed to know more. And children, like anyone, cannot know what they don’t know.

The opposing view to ‘skills,’ if the two can really be said to be ‘opposing’ at all, is that learning means mastering knowledge components. We can tell if a child has learned a fact, because we teach them the square root of nine in today’s lesson, and we see if they still know it tomorrow. We teach them that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, and see if they still know that in their final assessment. But these isolated facts are nowhere near enough. Whether or not a child can write does not solely depend on how many facts they have learned.

Even if you are committed to the idea that learning is all about skills, it can still be helpful to consider learning as ‘knowledge based.’ This is because breaking down ‘skills’ into knowledge components makes them easier to teach. As an English teacher, when I read my pupils’ books, I can see that their writing would be improved if they wrote more fluently. But to guide them to write more fluently, it would help if I broke down that advice into knowledge components. For my lowest-achieving pupils, they need to know that sentences begin with capital letters and end with full stops. They need to know that paragraphs are made up of sentences, each of which should contain a complete thought, and that each paragraph should be focused on one idea. They need to know how to embed quotations. They need to know some words, and what those words mean, before they can string them into a sentence.

Cognitive scientists would add a crucial caveat to the foregoing. They would add that ‘if nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.’¹ If I know when the Battle of Hastings was today, but I don’t know it in two weeks’ time, can I really be said to have ‘learned’ that isolated fact? We can all think back to our GCSEs and wonder how on earth we managed that top grade in French although we can’t speak a word, or that top grade in chemistry even though we can’t even remember the chemical symbol for the most basic of elements. Is knowing it ‘at some point’ really enough?

Understanding

As teachers, thankfully we aren’t directly responsible for what our children remember when they are 35-year-old professionals. We often use their results at key tests to determine how well they have ‘learned.’ But, as we explore later, success in these tests is not solely determined by how well we drill children in the specification.

Before we concern ourselves with memory, there is an earlier stage to the mystery of learning. For children to learn, they must understand what we are teaching them.

The biggest argument against ‘knowledge led’ teaching is that it leads to children parroting lists of facts with no understanding of what they are saying. (I often think of this view sympathetically when I hear primary school–age pupils rapping songs that are currently playing on ‘young people’s’ radio stations: they ‘know’ all the words, but, thank goodness, they really have no idea of what those words mean. A colleague of mine a few years back stopped a year 7 who was singing Jason Derulo’s 2013 ‘Talk Dirty to Me’ and asked the girl what it meant to ‘talk dirty.’ The girl blushed, giggled, and said: ‘I think it’s about … poo!’)

Rote learning can be argued to have a place in learning, albeit a limited one. In the very earliest stages of language learning, it can be helpful to simply learn the translation of vocabulary, even without a detailed understanding of how to combine those words into a sentence, because, well, you have to start somewhere, and at some point you simply need to know that the Latin word for ‘table’ is, forgettably, ‘mensa.’ There isn’t really an easy trick to that – the two words look completely different, and unless your teacher is some kind of magician who can think of a handy trick to help you remember each and every word in the language, you really just have to learn it. In maths, if you learn all of your times tables off by heart, you will have an excellent base from which to further manipulate numbers. But in both cases, rote knowledge of times tables or frequently occurring words won’t get you very far.

Questioning

Children must, as the absolute baseline of learning, understand what we are teaching them. If they have not understood what every word and concept means, having it in the memory to reel out on command is meaningless. This is exemplified by a comment by a Reddit user, who when told ‘knowledge is power: Francis Bacon,’ with limited knowledge heard this as ‘knowledge is power: France is bacon.’ They struggled to understand the second part of the phrase, but recited it for years and saw people nodding in agreement, only to have the penny drop years later when they finally saw it written down.² How many children are out there right now, able to reel off dates and quotes, without actually knowing what they are saying? Rote learning is beguilingly easy when children are receptive. We have to spend time ensuring pupils understand what they are learning first.

Which is why I would go as far as to say: the most important part of pedagogy that every teacher must master is the art of questioning. How do we know whether children understand what we are teaching them? We need to ask them.

The problem is, it is remarkably difficult to know the right questions to ask to ensure every pupil has accurately understood the topic being taught in all its nuance. Moreover, we are dealing with up to 34 children at a time, which complicates matters. Although some schools would like to believe that a single ‘hinge question’ that all pupils answer will give the teacher the required data to know whether they have ‘got it,’ the content of our lessons is rarely simple enough to be assessed accurately by one magical question. (I once worked in a school that tried to include this: at the halfway point of a lesson, teachers had to ask one question and have a whole-class response to judge whether pupils were on track to understand the lesson. This may be fine if the sole content of your lesson is ‘know what a simile is,’ but it is rather more challenging when you have to also read and understand Chapter 3 of Oliver Twist in all its complexity.)

So, I would say, questioning is about knowing the multiple questions you will ask of the multiple children in your class. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the best preparation a teacher can do for their lesson is to script their questions. This is as easy as taking the lesson content – be it a worksheet, textbook, or novel chapter – and annotating it, not with our ideas but with our questions. Beside a passage revealing the plight of the poor workhouse boys in Oliver Twist, then, you would not write ‘poverty displayed’ but instead ‘What does Dickens reveal about the workhouse boys?’ You might then write ‘Which words tell us this?’ Alternatively, if your class already comprehends the material, you might write ‘How does Dickens display their poverty?’ or ‘How does Dickens make the reader feel sympathy?’

This may sound simple – and I hope that almost all of the advice in this book is simple – but it is probably the most complex aspect of teaching. To know which questions to ask, you need to know: what are the key points you want students to understand? What are the misconceptions they may have over an aspect of the learning? What does the class as a whole struggle with? What do individual students in the class struggle with? What questions can ensure they are practising the things they most frequently struggle with? At root, effective questioning requires a deep knowledge of the curriculum content combined with a deep knowledge of the pupils in the class.

That is why I say again that the most effective planning a teacher can do is to know the content of the lesson, work out what the children will struggle with, and work out how they will know the children have understood it. The teacher then needs to script questions that will clarify confusions, highlight key ideas, and give them information on who ‘gets it’ and who does not.

How to question a class

The practice of questioning has attracted some debate over the past several years. How do we decide who to ask questions of? Clearly, if we solely rely on asking pupils who put their hands up we will end up with a number of ‘false positives,’ whereby we wishfully imagine the keen pupil who has readily given the right answer represents the average level of learning of all pupils, including those hiding from our questioning gaze, hoping they won’t be asked. If we only ask the very keenest and most confident children for their responses, and their responses are correct, we might move on with our lesson far too rapidly, not realising that perhaps two thirds of the class are being left behind.

Some in education have advocated ‘hands down questioning,’ meaning that students are instructed to never raise their hands, and teachers always choose who answers their questions. The major benefit of hands down questioning is that because teachers always choose who answers each question, all pupils must be always ready to respond. For every question the teacher asks, every pupil must be thinking of their answer. If teachers only ask for hands up, then pupils might easily think: ‘oh, I’m tired and that’s a tough question. I’ll sit this one out and start focusing next time.’

While hands down questioning is good to keep all pupils on their toes, I would advise teachers against ‘random name generators’ or ‘lolly sticks’ with pupils’ names on them. Why? Sometimes you ask a question of the whole class, but you particularly want one pupil to answer it. Maybe it’s a pupil who has really struggled with this idea in the past. Maybe it’s a pupil who missed a lesson last week and you’re checking they understand as they’ve had less subject instruction than others. Maybe it’s a pupil who is often lazy. Maybe it’s a pupil who is often disruptive of your lesson and needs a ‘win,’ and you know they know the answer to this one (more on behaviour management in Chapter 2). There are a myriad of reasons you might want to have a particular pupil answer a particular question: don’t deny yourself the right to choose the pupil.

At the same time, I have become a recent convert to ‘hands up’ questioning. Hands up gives us some important data: who is engaged in the learning? Who wants to try answering the difficult questions? Who thinks they understand at this moment in time? When you ask a question and get a sea of hands in the air, that may mean the pitch of the lesson is too low – although it is not necessarily a bad thing to have every pupil knowing the answer at least some of the time, particularly for core concepts you want them to ‘overlearn.’³ More importantly, if you ask a question and no one, or almost no one, puts their hand up, you know you need to re-explain.

Just because you allow hands up does not mean you can’t suddenly ask a question of a pupil with their hand down. You, after all, are the teacher, the one who makes all the decisions in your classroom. That said, if you only take pupils with their hands down, the others will swiftly stop bothering to put their hands up – ‘what’s the point? Miss is more likely to call on me if I keep my hand down.’ You need to judge it. I like to mix it up, perhaps with a class where most pupils put their hands up taking five hands up for every ‘cold call’ of a kid with their hand down, depending on the particular question I am asking and the particular child I want to ask.

With a class who are reluctant to put their hands up – in my experience, older pupils in lower attaining groupings – I rarely use hands up questions as too few pupils participate for this to work. I will often narrate: ‘hands down – I’m going to decide who is answering,’ for the benefit of the two in 20 who actually do wish to put their hands up.

Improving how we ask questions is one of the best areas we can place our professional development efforts. If you’re lucky enough to have someone who comes and observes you regularly, ask them for feedback on which questions worked well and which did not. A question which works well is one which consolidates learning, checks understanding, moves the lesson on, probes understanding, or pre-empts a misconception. A question that doesn’t work is one which is usually pitched incorrectly: stupidly easy, and everyone knows the answer, or stupidly difficult and no one does.

Memory

After pupils have understood the content of a lesson, the next stage is to commit that content to memory. We are lucky that such extensive research by cognitive scientists has already been undertaken on how memory works. A number of key facts about memory are pertinent to teaching. These are: short-term m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 How children learn
• 2 Good behaviour
• 3 What to teach
• 4 Resources
• 5 Starting a lesson
• 6 Reading in a lesson
• 7 Writing
• 8 Talk in a lesson
• 9 Practice in a lesson
• 10 Ending a lesson
• 11 Feedback
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements