Mark's Learning Log

Have you ever struggled with teaching or assessing growth in learners understandings – I do? It’s easier to teach and assess skills. I like the example many people give of coaching a sports team – you teach skills that are observable – clear cut. They can either demonstrate the skill to a certain level or not. If you put in the effort you can learn the skill. This is quite likely one reason I like to coach basketball at school, domestic and representative level. I teach skills as well as offensive and defensive systems and you can see who can do it on the court – during games – its immediate and clear.

Learners understandings about various concepts we teach however are complex, often messy and certainly not that clear cut. I have taken to reading the work of David Perkins from Harvard University Project Zero who really delves into this work to try and get a better picture of how to do this challenging work. Its one of the more significant changes in education today.   

David Perkins wrote an article on teaching for understanding which I distributed to all teachers late in term 1.

The article prompted me to start reading his book: Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child. 

His book, which I am still reading, describes how “fragile” knowledge can be if its either: missing, inert [people don’t use what they know], naive or ritual [just part of the school game].  Perkins present lots of information about how people leave school with too fragile knowledge and some poor thinking habits.

Some of his images and quotes really resonate with me:

– ” schooling minds is much more than schooling memories”

He makes a case against the trivial pursuit theory of schooling – that’s its a matter of accumulating a large repertoire of facts and routines – rather than

– “learning is a consequence of thinking”

He argues that its better for students to understand something well rather than cover lots of facts in lots of subjects.

I found his thinking that lots of educators use the ability counts most theory quite unsettling. He argued that in many western countries which includes Australia – success in learning depends on ability more than effort – in contrast to many Asian countries.

I am currently rereading the chapter on working towards a pedagogy of understanding – which at first glance looks to affirm our work on inquiry learning – with the odd challenge or two. I expect a write another post soon on Perkins work particularly around making thinking visible.

At this week’s leadership meeting I set the context for our reading of John Hattie’s article on building teacher quality. The article lists a number of key strategies [e.g. feedback] that have the greatest effect size on student learning. It concludes: “expert teachers do differ from experienced teachers …. most critically in the depth of processing that their students attain. Students who are taught by expert teachers exhibit an understanding of the concept targeted in instruction that is more integrated, coherent and at a higher level of abstraction”

As you can imagine this prompted some discussion by those gathered around the table that are largely responsible for improving the instruction capacity of teachers in their teams. Our initial discussions related to our own learning journeys. The team leaders began to highlight some key influences over the past few years and with some sense of relief for me as principal our coaches: Anne Hammond and Kath Murdoch rated highly. Both Anne and Kath have similar key messages – have a clear transparent purpose and focus for the lesson / sequence of lessons and make sure students understand it, provide feedback to students on the focus [teachers often crowd feedback] and make sure that the purpose is connected to their lives in real ways.One of our key improvement areas is in student writing and the leaders began to list some instructional strategies at the surface level they had learnt from the coaches:  – when teaching students to proofread for spelling get them to start from the bottom of the page and work up  – and when giving senior students feedback on writing [if its spelling focus] write sp in the column and get them to do the work, find the error and work out its correction – its about student ownership and work – remembering that if the writing purpose is not bound for publication then don’t over correct – a small focus and specific feedback on a few items rather than a page of red marks.     They made a commitment to share more of these strategies with the wider staff by writing TIPS from ANNE or KATH notes on our SharePoint. According to Hattie those present were showing the following characteristic of experts:  – expert teachers are more adept at developing and testing … instructional strategies and they were showing more emotionality about the success and failures in their work.