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Just Because They’re Engaged, Doesn’t Mean They’re Learning
I’ve written a new piece for the Chartered College of Teaching journal, Impact with Dr Jim Heal (Deans for Impact)
One of the difficulties with determining what is effective in a classroom is that very often, what looks like it should work does not and vice versa. Take, for example, the notion of engagement. On the surface, this would seem like a necessary condition for learning. However, there is some evidence that it may not be a sufficient one. Graham Nuthall explores this dichotomy in his seminal book The Hidden Lives of Learners (Nuthall, 2007, p. 24):
“Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40–50% of what the teacher is teaching.”
Nuthall’s work highlights the fact that students are keen to busy themselves doing tasks that give the appearance of learning but which actually might just be disposable activities that do not engender long-lasting and durable learning. In addition, there is the fact that students’ prior knowledge about a particular domain is really the key element in terms of how their learning will progress. As Tricot and Sweller (2014, p. 9) point out, ‘when performing a cognitive task requiring domain specific knowledge, the presence or absence of this knowledge is the best predictor of performance’. Without knowing what students know or don’t know, teachers might not be putting students in a place where they are transforming their understanding of a particular concept, and what might look like learning might in fact just be keeping busy.
How Learning Happens – Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What they Mean in Practice: A review
This is a satisfyingly thick book with short chapters allowing one to dip in and out without losing track. The title is rather cool, and I can imagine producing it with a flourish in the staff room to impress colleagues. Sadly though, in my experience most will not be particularly interested. Teachers seem to be most excited by professional discourse that addresses the affective side of education – anything that speaks of making students feel safer, more connected and more loved will create a buzz of interest – and it goes without saying that this will raise student achievement. This predominance of heart over mind ignores more intellectual aspects, such as the applications of cognitive science or educational psychology, which only rarely find their way into consideration, despite their significant effect on student progress and well-being. It is these later features that Paul Kirschner and Carl Henrick address in their…
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Interview with the Learning Agency
Paul and I were recently interviewed by Ulrich Boser from the Learning Agency. You can read the full interview here: https://www.the-learning-agency-lab.com/the-learning-curve/how-learning-happens
How Learning Happens: a GLOWING review
How Learning Happens – Kirschner & Hendrick – A Review
Sometimes you read books that change things. This book about seminal works is seminal in itself.
It might be assumed it is just no more than a summary of important psychological research for teachers organised nicely and illustrated in a sophisticated way. It would be good and worth your money if it was just that. However, it is far more. It is a springboard or launching off point for further study, deeper thought and greater reflections amongst time-poor teachers and leaders scrabbling for the time to understand what psychology has to say about their craft. Without doubt, this is a must read.
What’s in the book?
28 research papers are organised into six sections, covering a breadth of educational psychology insights for the classroom. From how the brain works, to contexts for learning, it also goes beyond this to consider ‘myths’ in education that lack an evidence base. Each work…
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Introducing…’How Learning Happens’
Almost two years ago, I was asked by Professor Paul Kirschner to write a book with him. The original title was ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ and the basic premise was to discuss what we felt were the foundational works in education psychology and present them to educators in a way that would hopefully inform their practice. To be asked by someone of Paul’s stature was a huge honour for me and I really enjoyed reading through almost 100 years of the best evidence on learning and the weekly meetings over Skype talking about the book (and football).
The chapters are divided into six sections. In the first section we describe how our brains work and what that means for learning and teaching. This is followed by sections on the prerequisites for learning, how learning can be supported, teacher activities, and learning in context. When we got near the end of the book we thought it would be good to provide some cautionary tales so in the final section we discuss what can only be described as educational Novichok in a chapter called ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Education’ which you can download for free here.
It was a fantastic experience to write this book with someone like Paul. His knowledge on this topic is vast and he has a unique ability to make the highly complex accessible and explain even the most difficult psychological processes in a clear and concise way. I learned an awful lot from him over the 18 months we worked together about how learning happens and I hope you learn something from it too.
“So often I’ve been asked to recommend a starting text for educators interested in the workings of the mind―now I have one. The text Kirschner and Hendrick offer alongside each seminal article does a wonderful job of situating the content in the broader scientific context, and in the classroom.”
– Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies, University of Virginia
“As the volume of research into psychology and education grows, it becomes ever harder for researchers, let alone teachers, to keep up with the latest findings. Moreover, striking results often turn out to be difficult, or impossible to replicate. What teachers need, therefore, is good guidance about research that has stood the test of time, and practical guidance about how these well-established findings might be used to inform teaching practice, and this is why this is such an extraordinary, wonderful and important book. Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick have selected the most important research publications in the psychology of education, and, for each publication, they have provided a summary of the research, the main conclusions, and a series of practical suggestions for how the findings might inform teaching practice. I know of no other book that provides such a rigorous, accessible and practical summary of the last fifty years of research in educational psychology, and anyone who wants to understand how research can improve teaching needs to read this book. Highly recommended.”
– Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London
“It’s hard to overstate just how fabulous this book is; a book I’ve wanted to exist for years and now here it is. A judicious and comprehensive selection of seminal research papers presented by two expert communicators, this is absolutely superb – from the mouth-watering list of contents, and through each of the chapters. I meet teachers in schools every week who, on hearing about various findings from research, feel liberated, enlightened with a whole new perspective on the problems they wrestle with in their classrooms. Teachers are busy – often overwhelmed – and all too frequently have not yet found the time or had the opportunity to engage with research that underpins the profession they’ve committed their lives to. This book is going to change that for a lot of people. The format is excellent, presenting the original papers alongside insightful commentary and key practical recommendations; a brilliant idea executed with style! Every school should have this book and every teacher should read it.”
– Tom Sherrington, education consultant; author of The Learning Rainforest and Rosenshine’s Principles in Action
“Teachers are rightly encouraged to base their practice on research – but education research is a huge field and it’s hard to know where to start. This book provides the answer: it’s valuable in its own right as a summary of some key research papers, and it’s also a great starting point for further reading and research.”
– Daisy Christodolou, Director of Education at No More Marking
“With the increasing volume of calls for education to become more evidence based, teachers everywhere have shaken their heads and wondered where on earth they’re supposed to find the time to locate, read and evaluate the ever-increasing acreage of research papers out there. Worry no more. In How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice, Kirschner and Hendrick have done the hard work so that you don’t have to. The volume you have in your hands has compiled some of the most important and prominent research papers in the field of education and distilled them into a form that is genuinely useful to anyone chipping away at the chalk face. But, not only is this a resource of unparalleled utility, it’s also a fascinating and world-enlarging read.”
– David Didau, author of Making Kids Cleverer
“Future historians of education will look back on this period as a Renaissance; a time when dogma and orthodoxy were being challenged, and gate keepers, priesthoods and shamans felt the ground shift beneath their feet. The sleep of reason has bred monsters of pedagogy, and they have been fattened and nurtured by the relative ignorance of the teaching profession. Not a general ignorance, but a specific one: ignorance of the evidence bases behind the claims made in education. This Renaissance has been accompanied by an evolution, as teachers and academics reach out to one another and seek sincere, authentic dialogue. But, unless we stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us, each generation is doomed to rediscover what their ancestors painstakingly uncovered. For the health of the profession, we need the best of what we know in one place, so that successive generations of educators can carry on from their ancestors, and carry the conversation into the future rather than tread water endlessly.
This book is the perfect resource with which to do so. I can give no higher accolade than to say that every teacher should be familiar with the research it represents, its chapters should be required reading on every teacher induction course, and no teacher should account themselves a professional until they can demonstrate its acquaintance. I wish I had read it in the infancy of my career.”
– Tom Bennett, Founder, researchED
American edition of What Does This Look Like in the Classroom? with new foreword by Dylan Wiliam
Delighted to announce that the American edition of ‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ has been released this week with a new foreword by Dylan Wiliam which you can read here.
The book is the third volume in @Learn_Sci‘s Dylan Wiliam Center Collection
In 1999, Paul Black and I were working with a group of math and science teachers. We had just completed a major review of the research on the impact of assessment on learning, and we had published our findings in a rather dense 65-page academic journal article.1 However, since we thought our findings would be of interest to practitioners and policy-makers, we also wrote a more accessible summary of our research, and its implications, which was published in Phi Delta Kappan magazine.2
One of the most surprising findings of our review, which we were sharing with the teachers, related to research on feedback. A particularly comprehensive review of feedback in schools, colleges and workplaces by two American psychologists—Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi—had found that while feedback was often helpful in improving achievement, in 38% of the well-designed studies they had found, feedback actually lowered performance.3 In other words, in almost two out of every five cases, the participants in the research studies would have performed better if the feedback had not been given at all.
In trying to makes sense of their findings, Kluger and DeNisi suggested that feedback was less effective when it was focused on the individual (what psychologists call “ego-involving”) and more effective when it was focused on the task in which the students were engaged (“task-involving”). We therefore suggested to the teachers that to make their feedback to students more effective, they should give task-involving rather than ego-involving feedback.
Most of the teachers seemed to find this advice useful, but one teacher, after some thought, asked, “So does this mean I should not say ‘well done’ to a student?” Paul and I looked at each other, and realized that we didn’t know the answer to the question. We knew, from the work of a number of researchers, that in the longer term, praise for effort would be more likely to be successful than praise for ability. However, without knowing more about the relationship between the teacher and the student, about the context of the work, and a whole host of other factors, we could not be sure whether “Well done” would be task-involving or ego-involving feedback.
What is ironic in all this, is that we had failed to take the advice we had given teachers a year earlier in the Phi Delta Kappan article, where we said,
if the substantial rewards promised by the research evidence are to be secured, each teacher must find his or her own ways of incorporating the lessons and ideas set out above into his or her own patterns of classroom work and into the cultural norms and expectations of a particular school community. (p. 146)
The important point here is that the standard model of research dissemination, where researchers discover things, and then tell teachers about their findings, so that teachers can then implement them in their own classrooms, simply cannot work. As Carl Hendrick and Robin MacPherson point out in this book, classrooms are too complex for the results of
research studies to be implemented as a series of instructions to be followed. Rather, the work that teachers do in finding out how to apply insights from research in their own classrooms is a process of creating new knowledge, albeit of a distinct, and local kind. This is why this book is so unusual and important. It is not an instruction manual on how to do “evidence-based teaching” (whatever that might mean). It is, instead, an invitation to every educator to reflect on some of the most important issues in education in general—and teaching in particular—and to think about how educational research might be used as a guide for careful thinking about, and exploration of, practice.
A second unusual—and welcome—feature of this book is the way it was put together. Carl and Robin started by identifying a number of issues that are relevant to every teacher—student discipline and behavior, motivation, grading, classroom practice, reading, inclusion, memory, technology and so on. At this point, most authors would have written advice for teachers on these issues, but of course, the danger with such an approach is that it reflects the concerns of the authors, rather than of the potential reader—what philosopher Karl Popper described as “unwanted answers to unasked questions.”4
Instead, in a novel twist, Carl and Robin decided to ask practicing teachers what were for them the most important questions in each of the areas. Then, again counter to what most writers would have done, they posed the questions to both academic experts and those with expertise in classroom practice. The result is a marvelous combination of insights into teaching that are both authoritative and immediately relevant to classroom practice.
If you have read the previous volumes in the “Dylan Wiliam Center Collection” —Craig Barton’s How I wish I’d taught maths and Tom Sherrington’s The learning rainforest—you will know that our aim has been to bring to North American readers the very best of authoritative writing on education from around the world. While the questions that were posed by the teachers that Carl and Robin worked with may appear to be focused on issues that are of particular concern to teachers in England, the extraordinary range of expertise of those responding to these questions means that the answers are relevant to every American educator. The very best writing on educational research, in an accessible form—solutions you can trust.
References
1 Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5(1), 7-74.
2 Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.
3 Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: a historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284.
4 Popper, K. (1992 p. 41). Unended quest: An intellectual biography. London, UK: Routledge.
The Problem with Growth Mindset
It is difficult to think of an idea in the recent educational past that has had as much traction as growth mindset. In researching this topic, I set a Google alert and was genuinely surprised at the amount of articles dedicated to, or referencing it on a daily basis. Growth mindset is a cultural juggernaut its followers are legion. However, recent evidence would suggest that it’s not the educational elixir of life that many of its proponents claim it to be. They might protest that it’s a sound theory infected by poor implementation but there is another argument to say that growth mindset was fatally flawed from the outset and it is now more virus than host at this stage.
Certainly when viewed as an intervention, there are reasons to be sceptical but when viewed as a guiding principle or a set of values, few can disagree with the power of this idea. Perhaps the problem is that growth mindset has travelled too far from its original intent and should be seen as more of a philosophy and less of an ‘intervention.’ Although we have mapped much of the terrain of how we learn, there is still a vast hinterland unavailable to us. Growth mindset appears to be a viable construct in the lab, but when administered in the classroom, doesn’t appear to be working. Rather like Dr. Rank in Ibsen’s famous play, we might be able to diagnose the illness but ultimately, we are powerless to cure it.
There is a story of uncertain origin about a visitor to the home of Nobel Prize-winning Physicist Neils Bohr who was surprised to discover a horseshoe nailed above the door of his home. This symbol of superstition was not something he expected to find at the abode of such an eminent man of science. Could the man who made such important discoveries in the fields of atomic structure and quantum theory really believe that a horseshoe brings good luck? When asked, Bohr’s reply was characteristically elusive: “of course I don’t believe in it, but I understand it brings you luck, whether you believe in it or not.” Despite a lack of evidence, in many schools today growth mindset theory functions as a kind of Bohr’s horseshoe hanging over the front gates; it ‘works’ whether you believe in it or not.
At any rate, I have written a long-ish essay on this topic for Aeon which you can read here.
How should students revise? A brief guide
One of the biggest lessons from research is that many students don’t really know how to study. Various studies have shown that students rate re-reading and highlighting as the most effective ways of revising when in reality they are often a waste of time giving an illusion of competence in the short term at the expense of long term gains.
Students may spend large amounts of additional time studying despite no gain in later memory for the items, a phenomenon called ‘‘labour-in-vain’’ during learning (Nelson & Leonesio,1988). Recent research with educationally relevant materials has shown that repeatedly reading prose passages produces limited benefits beyond a single reading. (Karpicke, Roediger, Butler, 2009)
In contrast, retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving are some of the most productive ways of revising material but how many students are familiar with this? I think there is often a tendency to focus too much on what teachers are doing and less on what students are doing.
Recently I got the chance to talk to some year 10 students from across our partnership of schools about study skills and I put together a brief guide to help them. The idea was to introduce them to five powerful approaches to studying in a language they can understand with the opportunity to apply them to a period of revision designed by them. All materials are below.
Thanks to the brilliant Olivier Cavigioli for the illustrations and design.
Once you talk students through these key principles, you can get them to plan their revision using a revision planner like this depending on how much time they have left:
Further reading:
Koriat, Bjork ‘Illusions of Competence in Monitoring One’s Knowledge During Study’ 2005
‘Four Quarters Marking’ – A Workload Solution?
In our new book ‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ we interviewed Dylan Wiliam on how to implement research on assessment in the classroom.
A central problem in the area of assessment in the classroom has been in the way we often confuse marking and feedback. As Dylan Wiliam points out in our discussion, there is an extraordinary amount of energy expended by teachers on marking and often very little to show for it in the way of student benefit. Although feedback is one of the most effective drivers of learning, one of the more surprising findings is that a lot of it actually has a negative effect on student achievement.
A set of marked books is traditionally seen as an effective proxy for good teaching but there is a lot of evidence to say that this might not always be the case. This problem is on a scale that might surprise a lot of people:
Dylan: I once estimated that, if you price teacher’s time appropriately, in England we spend about two and a half billion pounds a year on feedback and it has almost no effect on student achievement.
Certainly students need to know where they make misconceptions or spelling errors and correcting those is important. Doing so also provides a useful diagnostic for teachers to inform what they will teach next, but the written comments at the end of a piece of work are often both the most time-consuming and also the most ineffective. For example, taking the following typical comments on a GCSE English essay:
- Try to phrase your analysis of language using more sophisticated vocabulary and phrasing.
- Try to expand on your points with more complex analysis of Macbeth’s character.
This is a good example of certain assessment practices where the feedback mainly focuses on what was deficient about it, which as Douglas Reeve’s notes, is “more like a post-mortem than a medical.” The other thing is that it doesn’t really tell the student what they need to do to improve. What is more useful to the student here? receiving vague comments like these or actually seeing sophisticated vocabulary, phrasing and analysis in action? It’s very difficult to be excellent if you don’t know what excellent looks like.
Often, teachers give both a grade and comments like those above to students, hoping that they somehow improve by the time their next piece of writing comes around a week later and then berate the student when, lo and behold, they make the same mistakes again. Perhaps part of the problem here is that we have very low expectations of what students are willing to do in response to a piece of work and do not afford them the opportunity to engage in the kind of tasks that might really improve their learning.
To address this problem, Dylan advocates a much more streamlined model of marking that is not only more manageable for teachers, but also allows students to have more ownership over the process:
Dylan: I recommend what I call ‘four quarters marking.’ I think that teachers should mark in detail, 25% of what students do, should skim another 25%, students should then self-assess about 25% with teachers monitoring the quality of that and finally, peer assessment should be the other 25%. It’s a sort of balanced diet of different kinds of marking and assessment.
Dylan Wiliam’s Four Quarters Marking (Oliver Caviglioli)
After producing a piece of work, instead of using abstract skills based success criteria, it is probably more powerful for students to have access to a bank of exemplar essays or worked solutions to see concrete examples of success against which to self-assess their own work. Marking everything in sight and leaving detailed comments is an established cultural norm now but this practice doesn’t appear to be based on good evidence. We know for example that many students will look at a grade and not engage with the feedback but is that feedback always useful anyway?
As we discuss in the book, a common issue we see again and again in using research in the classroom is the ‘Chinese whisper effect’ where by the time evidence works its way down to the level of the classroom, it’s a pale imitation of its original form. This is especially prevalent in the area of marking where convoluted policies such as triple marking are enacted as a means of raising pupil achievement whereas all they are doing is often increasing teacher workload. As Dylan Wiliam reminds us, “feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor,” but how do you change a culture that has traditionally been the opposite?
Dylan: In terms of what we do about this, I would say first of all, headteachers should lay down clear expectation to parents and say things like, “We are not going to give detailed feedback on more than 25% of what your child does. The reason for that is not because we’re lazy. It’s because there are better uses we could make of that time. We could mark everything your child does, but that would lead to lower quality teaching and then your child will learn less.” Heads have to establish those cultural norms. If a teacher is marking everything your child does, it’s bad teaching. It is using time in a way that does not have the greatest benefit for students.
As a profession, we are too some extent, we are our own worst enemy. Using marking policies that have little impact on student achievement and a negative impact on teacher workload and morale makes little sense. By adopting an approach like four quarters marking, we might go some way to address this issue and at the same time, give students more ownership over their own learning.
‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ is out later this month.
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