As important as ensuring that all students have access to appropriate support when they need it is ensuring all students are appropriately challenged. When we get this right, we propel learning forward. When we get this wrong, we slow learning down. But what is an appropriate level of challenge? Jumping ditches If students can ‘state’, ‘write’, ‘describe’, ‘explain’ or ‘draw’, this can evidence learning. Saying that ‘I know’, ‘I understand’ or ‘I am able to’ doesn’t evidence learning. While it might be true, it isn’t evidence. Success criteria should make clear what evidenceof learning needs to be produced. Just as building muscle allows us to lift heavier weights, developing long- term memory allows students to think about more complex things. Newspaper articles, PowerPoint presentations and all related activities are the medium to deliver a message. The medium usually has little value in itself. It is the messagethat is most important.

The Teaching Delusion A Five Minute Guide To… Learning - The Teaching Delusion

Thisis how we should be thinking about differentiation in schools: differing levels of support and challenge as common content is taught. We can reasonably expect teachers to be able to do this, and it won’t create learning gaps. The 80% Success Rule Chapter 3 is an exploration of "The science of how we learn", and Robertson works through 7 keys ideas: Teachers across the country are tying themselves in knots with learning intentions and success criteria. Some are using them well; some are not. Some aren’t using them at all.Excessive intrinsic load can also be avoided if complex content is broken down and presented in smaller, cumulative chunks. The natural intrinsic load of the content is still there, but this is processed gradually, rather than all at once. Long-term memory can be used to store each chunk, giving working memory access to it, when required. Once learned, one by one the chunks can be brought together and processed in working memory. Nowstudents are able to think about the full complexity of the content, but the load is reduced. Long-term memory is helping working memory out. And now to what I found to be the most interesting and useful part of the whole book: the Lesson Evaluation Toolkit. Robertson sells this as a key part to developing a culture of improving teaching, as it can be used in many ways: In chapter 4, Robertson starts to build toward implications for actual teaching. This chapter acts as a brief summary of ideas from a variety of sources in this field, including: Lovell, O. (2020) Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd.

The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back by Bruce

This does not mean that we are aiming to produce clones. Far from it! Rather, it means that we want allstudents to know and be able to do specific things, as a minimum. In other words, we want allstudents to learn our core curriculum. This is about social justice and inclusion. It might take some longer than others, and some might need more support than others, but everyone should be aiming to learn this curriculum, in full. When performing a skill, you are applying specific knowledge of things you know about (declarative knowledge) or how to do (procedural knowledge). Skills are knowledge in action. They emerge from knowledge:

There are some who believe that as students get older, they should be left to be more independent in their learning. Mistakenly, they believe that independent learning skills develop with age. But, of course, they don’t. Whilst it is true that as children grow and develop they become increasingly independent in relation to particular practical things and in decision-making, the ability to learn independently is not so closely aligned to age. 2 Learning intentions are statements which summarise the purpose of a lesson in terms of learning. A useful acronym is WALT: ‘What weAreLearningToday’. The first is that such approaches to differentiation consume teacher timeto such an extent that it not only becomes unreasonable, but unmanageable. The perceived benefits could never balance with the very real costs. No teacher should be expected to differentiate like this. Ever. Students are all different. They arrive at our lessons knowing and being able to do all kinds of different things. This is entirely natural and something we will never be able to change. Which is fine – difference is very often a good thing!

The Teaching Delusion 3, Power Up Your Pedagogy by Bruce The Teaching Delusion 3, Power Up Your Pedagogy by Bruce

The reason that students will always need teachers is because, by definition, students are novicesand teachers are experts(certainly, we assume that they are). The best way for novices to learn is through ‘Specific Teaching’ approaches with experts. If we leave them to learn independently as novices, they won’t learn as well as they would have with an expert. The amount of intrinsic load that working memory experiences is related to the complexityof content being presented. The more complex content is, the more intrinsic load it is likely to cause. For example, the calculation 346 × 654 is likely to cause more intrinsic load than 6 × 12. Any debate about whether skills are more important than knowledge – or vice versa – is a false one. Both are equally important.

Effectively, intrinsic load is ‘good load’ and extraneous load is ‘bad load’. That’s perhaps oversimplifying things a little, but it helps to reinforce a key point: to maximise student learning, we should be aiming to optimiseintrinsic load and minimiseextraneous load. 4 Because all of these things cause extraneous load, none of them are good for learning. The more extraneous load there is, the less intrinsic load working memory can process. Hence, the less it can think about the things that are most important for it to be thinking about. Because every lesson is about learning, every lesson should have a clear learning intention, whether this be for students to learn something new, to consolidate their learning (through practice or revision) or to demonstrate their learning. Activities that require students to recall knowledge from previous lessons, which may or may not be relevant to this lesson, but which needs to be learned as part of the course;