Engagement - is it a matter of definition?

It might be but I suspect it is also a word which is heavily coloured by your view of what the purpose of education is as well.

Let me try and say what I believe engagement is and what it is not. I will also try and explain why I think these things. My focus is really on learning and I am influenced by the work of cognitive scientists such as Dan Willingham and my favourite, Dylan Wiliam.

I also hold strongly to the view of working memory as being a feature of all learners; a very limited route into the brain and an easily disturbed input. Distraction to the material (I can’t think of a better word) held in working memory will be highly damaging to learning. That distraction can be internal or external and teachers can add, inadvertently to the level of distraction. Teachers can also present material in chunks that are too large or too many which will prevent working memory from operating effectively.

I also think that there are some different purposes relating to learning which may be phase specific. In early years there can properly be an emphasis on providing children with experiences. If one has never been taken to a zoo, for example, by one’s parents then it would be important for some of that experience to be replicated by the teacher. Taking children on a visit or taking part in a classroom activity that mirrors the zoo experience in some way is valid. It is also inefficient as a learning process for several reasons. But I don’t see a way around this inefficiency.

So, what is it that I am using as my definition of engagement?

First of all engagement is a process that a child carries out in their brain when they are thinking. It is the processes that a learner uses to pay attention to the learning stimulus and to then make sense of that stimulus. In a simple example if we were teaching a child that 2 + 2 = 4, then one thing that they must do is to pay attention to what we say. The information that we transmit must get into working memory. It must get in undistorted and ready to be processes, again within working memory. Paying attention, knowing which parts of the environment to attend to and which bits to avoid are key to what I mean by engagement.

So the first part of engagement is to pay attention to what matters and to disregard that which does not matter. The teacher’s role in this is critical and a good teacher will know what to emphasis and what to disregard, or at least waive, as inclusion might do more to distract than support learning. One reason why I think humans will remain as teachers for a long time yet and not be replaced by machines!

After attending to the 2 + 2 = 4 lesson content the learner has to process this so that it makes sense; is memorable; can be used - initially in a very limited way, and later in more complex ways; attached to what is already known. To do this a learner must try to link the new knowledge about 2 + 2 = 4 to existing knowledge. The more links and the more secure these links the better the understanding.

We can teach children how they can engage more effectively.

I do not recognise as valid terms such as an engaging lesson nor an engaging teacher when I am thinking about the brain processes of engagement. I use engagement in a very specific way.

I think we also need to make sure that children can be attentive, not meant as trivially as looking at, but looking at and thinking about.

One of the issues with engagement as a teacher created process is that the teacher is offering some learning opportunity to a child and if the child does not know what to pay attention to, if the stimulus has a feature of attractiveness for the learner then we are at a loss to know what the child will attend to and engage in, in a sense of what they will think about and puzzle over.

That might be enough. Let’s see.

Should we share learning objectives?

Sharing learning objectives is a common feature of all lessons in the UK. It is one of the ubiquitous elements that most teachers think Ofsted expect and the expectation of sharing appears on most lesson observation tick sheets. As with many processes there is some truth in the idea but the implementation has, I believe, led to a dumbing down and a lowering of expectation in our classrooms.

Dylan Wiliam says something like, ‘Plan lessons from the end point’. Plan lessons for what you want the learning to be. So the construction of learning objectives, construction of the description of the learning, is a powerful thing. For me, it is not the creation of learning objectives that is the cause of the issue. I think the teacher must create high quality learning objectives. They must be very clear about the learning that are planning for.

Think about what the learning actually is and how you might describe it to a colleague. It would be quite complex. I am not thinking that you code the learning for your colleague. Not, ‘Learning about electric current today’, but that we describe the complete learning that we want to plan for. It might take a paragraph. It could not be done in a few words or even a couple of sentences and do justice to the detail and complexity involved. It would be couched in the complex language of learning and contain the description of the content. Quite a technical paragraph. Not one that your learners would be able to understand.

But that is what we expect teachers to do. To share this complexity and depth with learners. To rewrite the complex learning for the lesson in a short statement and share that with the learners. Not only that we also expect the learners to be able to understand the learning from the shared learning objectives. Not only that we also expect them to understand the learning BEFORE they have done the learning.

In a sense, what the above would do is make the sharing of learning objectives a pointless task for the teacher. It would just waste the teacher’s time. But that is not what creates, in my opinion, the dumbing down part.

Think about what actually happens. Teachers create the shared learning objectives before they plan the lesson content. They create the simplified, in language and detail, learning objective and the plan to meet these. They do this partly because that is how they think the lesson will be judged. Did you share the LOs? Did the lesson deliver the LOs?

I think you see what I mean.

What i do want is for teachers to properly plan the learning, as Dylan says. But not to have to share the LOs. I have a view about what they might share but it is not the LOs!

There are some constructions that don’t automatically dumb down.

We are learning about electricity SO THAT we can …

It is the so what that defines the learning and possibly the quality of the learning expected. I think I got this from Zoe Elder, @fullonlearning. if not then she is well worth checking out. Great structuring and simplification of some complex ideas.

A question that we can answer better as the lesson progresses. “How does a spring stretch as it is loaded?”

One can imagine asking the class, at various stages in the lesson, questions such as, “What do we now know about the answer to the question?” Hinge questions galore.

What I really like is to not have any learning objectives but to have a ‘road map’ of the lesson. These could be, get this, a list of the tasks the children will do in the lesson and then, critically, success criteria that define the quality measures for the work. The child will then be able to know what a good outcome looks like compared to a great outcome. This takes more work and my view is that one has to plan these well before the lesson planning. Plan these with the scheme of work when there is time to think about what is required. It is too much to do to plan, in a secondary setting, for five of these for the five lessons you will deliver the next day. I am not too keen on the process of detailed lesson planning the night before. But more of that in a future blog. Perhaps!

Relevant or relate to?

Harry Webb, one of the many on Twitter with brains the size of small planets has asked me to clarify what I mean by wanting to use the phrase 'relate to' rather than the more conventional 'relevant'.

When I was trained and started teaching there was a strong impetus to make the curriculum relevant. To make sure that we tied what was taught to the relevance in children's lives. At first this seemed utterly fine an sensible.

I began my teaching in a grammar school in Jersey. Idyllic or what! As a physics teacher having very able students was a real pleasure. Physics is difficult and mathematically challenging and bright kids did really well. But some bright children did not continue with physics past year 9. We used the Nuffield Physics syllabus which taught me so much more about physics than I had ever thought was possible. I loved teaching it. Discovery learning was its mantra and because the children I taught were bright it inevitably worked. I know it will not work with less bright and also the bright could have been even more advanced by a different teaching process. I did have some thoughts about those that chose not to continue with physics past year 9 as they, it seemed to me, had gained little from their three years of secondary level study of the subject.

I then moved back to the mainland and taught in Surrey. Bright kids again but in a comprehensive. Lots more who could not really cope or did not want to continue with physics. I thought about the relevance to some of those children who did not continue with the subject I loved teaching. Was it that the content was not relevant to them? Was the content relevant to those who continued with the subject? How much of my degree content was still relevant to me even in my job as a physics teacher?

Relevant just did not seem to do it. How could the oil drop experiment or colliding trolleys be relevant for more than a tiny number of children? And for those who went into a science job so much of what they had been taught was going to be irrelevant. We could not predict which bits were relevant and which bits were not.

Then, as part of my work with an examination board, we were looking at paring down the physics curriculum. One of the teachers suggested we remove the section on waves. I and another teacher on the panel almost exploded in his face. Waves were THE critical feature of physics. It would not be physics without the study of waves. Waves stayed in but the comments from teacher who wanted waves removed remained with me. He was no fool and his argument was that for the majority of children who would be taking the exam further study of physics was unlikely. He argued that we should be catering for the majority, many of whom did not and would not see the purpose, or relevance, of studying waves as part of their physics course. He was arguing that subject related relevance was not the only feature that would decide a programme of study.

I then re-thought how it was that children were engaged by the subject content. It was not by the relevance of the material. It could not be as they would not see the relevance of waves until they went further with the subject, possibly not until they were at first degree level. That was a very tiny fraction of the number that had started physics in year 7.

While one does need subject purity to allow for further study it would be possible to catch up on any content that was missed from study up to GCSE at A level or beyond. So how was relevance the feature that decided what the curriculum contained?

I then started to realise that it was how children could relate to the content that mattered. How well they found the content affected them now rather than how it might affect them in the future. The content was better defined by how it could be adapted to allow learners to engage with the material than for some vague future relevance. There is loads of physics that we do not study at GCSE. Why do we choose some rather that other? Quite a compromise!

Because we cannot know what will be relevant for a particular child relevance does not seem to me to be a the best way to decide what to teach. Relate is not much better as we don't really know what all children will relate to but, for me, the other element is the ability of the teacher to choose the particular exemplars which can enthuse a child. For example if I teach speed using dynamics trolleys, and many physics teachers will, then the further examples I can choose will be chosen, by me, on the basis of what I think children will relate to. I can use elephants on roller skates, cars, billiard balls, a baby push chair and a myriad of other contexts. Variety so that each has a chance to relate.

Just for Harry - Relevant is nothing like relate to. Relevance means that learning must be relevant to the learner's current social and class background. So if relevance was driving the lesson planning then one would not study 19th century novels as the truths they contain would not be relevant to a working class child.

Relate to is my invention which just says we should create learning activities that a child can latch onto. Enjoy is a bit off the beam for this but can do and will be willing to do is closer, but not exactly.

Dumbing down, an Echo Chamber inspired blog.

Having just read two blogs from Twitter links I am again driven to blog. Hopefully a short missive this time and my own assertions as usual. Read on if you will.

The first blog related to misbehaviour and the fact that this was not being dealt with in any effective manner in many schools. First, I would be somewhat cautious about the cry that it is an issue in many schools. I don't deny that there will be issues in some and I don't know how to quantify many. But some is too many for me. In each secondary school roughly a thousand students are at risk of having their education damaged by misbehaviour from themselves or other students. John Hattie says the presence of just one disruptive student in a class negates the performance of nearly all the rest of the students. Damaging indeed.

I have a simple response to this and that is that it is, in my experience, relatively easy, though not without some degree of determination and fortitude, to sort out misbehaviour. The way to do this does depend on the detail and will be tactically different in different schools but in essence, if the problem is one student across many different teachers then the issue is one which SLT have to deal with by acting on that child. I am not at all apologetic about the use of the word 'on' in these situations. Acting on includes low level interactions which might just be talking to the student to influence the behaviour but will end in permanent exclusion if the child will simply not behave in an appropriate manner. Let me repeat the key phrase of this section, 'across several teachers'. We just cannot allow one child to continually disrupt 30 others each time they enter a lesson. We can not!

The second is when the issue is one child and one teacher. This is dealt with in a number of different ways which might mean moving the child to another teacher in that subject. I don't believe in finding a difficult solution when a simple one will do. If the move sorts it, then fine. If this does not resolve the matter then the child is making inappropriate decisions which he/she does not have the right to make.

One teacher and several children is a more difficult issue as one probably can't just move a few into other classes.

It may be that the teacher does need to alter their own behaviour but to make that decision I would watch the teacher's lessons with the child present. I would expect to know the typical 'style' and 'triggers' that the teacher had, from previous visits to the lesson.

I visited every lesson in my own school on at least 3 days each week. The question was. "How's it going, Sir/Miss?" Any misbehaving child would be removed and dealt with. Perhaps returned immediately but it may be that I would remove the child to spend some time in our Time-Out room. My heads of year and other SLT members would also be following the same procedures, though HoYs would generally only visit their own year group for these lesson visits. These sanctions were applied intelligently and were more frequent and sometimes more confrontational at the start of the behaviour management programme.

There is a lot more to tell but as this is meant to be a 'short' blog, perhaps another blog is needed.

Actually I will deal with the second blog at another time.

I have worked with a number of schools, some in some degree of disarray, and the only time I was not able to make a very significant difference to behaviour was where the head teacher was opposed to my methods and worked from a very student centred, restorative justice direction. That school is still in some degree of trouble.

If I were to summarise my approach in one statement it would be that we cannot accept poor behaviour that disrupts the learning of others.

Hattie's summary of Willingham.

We can summarise the Willingham thesis in the following six ideas: 

(a) your mind is not naturally well-suited for thinking, 

(b) as an activity involving the brain, thinking is slow, effortful, and has uncertain outcomes, 

(c) deliberate or conscious thinking does not guide most people's behaviour in the real world in which they have to interact and survive, 

(d) instead, our brains rely on memory, and follow paths that we have taken before, or seen others undertake, 

(e) although we are curious creatures, our interests are restricted to areas in which we have some prior knowledge coupled with confidence in our ability to learn, and finally 

(f) we are unwilling to invest any serious level of effort in thinking activities until we can perceive the link between immediate effort expenditure and likely success.

S.A.M.E Simple, Accurate, Memorable, Engaging

Using Video Evidence in a classroom to review learning.

Actually the video will help review what the teacher is doing. It is difficult to observe learning using a fixed video camera. It is difficult to video the children working to be able to understand their learning with a camera that is trained on children. Also sound is never easy to capture without having to mic up all those taking part.

But the best we can do with some quite simple apparatus and techniques is described below.

Flip cameras, there are alternatives available, can be placed on a shelf, reasonable high up, and aimed at the teacher. The camera is fixed and will capture video and sound quite well. It will not filter out extraneous noises so a teacher talking over a noisy class will not be heard too well. It may be that seeing the futility of one's efforts to talk over a noisy class is enough in itself to get us to reconsider the conditions needed to give effective instructions to a class!

One can set the camera running and teacher the lesson. Typically around 30 minutes can be captured. The camera is very simple to use. Just press the go button and it does what it says on the tin.

The video can be simply downloaded onto a computer and viewed.

The best set up for the process of analysis is to work in triads, groups of three teachers of similar status who are seeking to understand the impact of their teaching and to improve. It is a very different process of judging a lesson using Ofsted criteria. If that was the intention then a live observer is needed.

The teacher who has delivered the lesson would write down, preferably before the lesson, in as much detail as possible what the learning intended was to be. You will be writing this for other teachers and the detail needs to reflect his. The language will probably be considerably more complex that the kind of things you may write as learning objectives/outcomes which you share with children. The detail needs to be such that the viewers of the video can see if the delivery meets the following four elements:

S  - Simple. Is there any thing that could be taken away from the teacher's expositions or is there anything that should have been added to improve the chances of quality learning?

A - Accurate. Was the subject knowledge correct? And was the learning brief met? The learning brief is contained in the notes on the intended learning the teacher has written.

M - Memorable. What techniques were used to make the learning memorable? How effective did they seem to be?

E - Engaging. What evidence is there that the children were engaged with the learning? Not just compliant an 'on-task', but actually learning? This is hard to judge from a video which is aimed at the teacher. But it is worth making some attempt to do so. It is this factor that will determine, eventually, how good the lesson was.

After viewing and discussing the video evidence it would be valuable to sample the written work achieved by the students. The normally ephemeral evidence from student answers and student questions will have been captured on the video and provides some feedback to the teacher. The written material when analysed against the stated learning intentions is powerful.

Then it is just the 'simple' matter of the teacher working out how to improve given the, often, quite stark video evidence. One has to be very sensitive as video evidence is very powerful and will not always show you in the wonderful light you hold yourself. Use with care.

Why does progressive education not work?

So that you can decide to stop reading this, probably, short piece I am going to tell you that this will not be supportive of progressive education methods. I am also only going to define progressive education very loosely, as one that does not place the limitations of working memory as the prime driver in how learning should be organised for children. So thanks for looking and bye if you have your coat on and are leaving now.

If you have stayed then thanks to you.

A reminder about working memory. I have a longer piece here if you have never come across the concept before.

Essentially the theory says that humans can only store in working memory 4 to 9 items. Items are chunks of stuff to be learned, or chunks of stuff already learned and in long term memory. But some of that very limited space is needed to manipulate the chunks; to link them to other, already known stuff etc.

There items in working memory will only remain there for a minute, or so. We can refresh the items by repeating them. For example, if someone tells you a telephone number you can keep repeating it until you find a pencil and paper to record it. If you don’t do the repeating then you will, most likely, forget the number or only partly remember it.

As far as we know, learning can only happen through working memory. Physical learning, not what the progressives mean by kinesthetic learning, muscle memory as it is sometimes called, an incorrect term as muscles do not have memory, may use a different route to the brain but that kind of learning is only useful to remember and habituate physical actions.

Working memory has two input streams. One is visual and the other is auditory. And, please remember, the space for the new stuff is strictly limited.

Another effect that matters is that of distraction. Imagine that you are repeating the telephone number until you find some place to record it.Imagine someone asks you to calculate 17 times 8. If you try to do this you will most certainly not be able to retain the telephone number in working memory. Distractions, if we pay attention to them, cause us to replace the items in working memory with those items we attend to from the distraction. We might not want to attend to the distraction but distractions are distractions because they gain our attention.

So why does progressive education not work?

Some features of progressive education are:

Discovery learning: The child will work out what is going on and learn by exploring a system. Picture a science experiment where a child is asked to see what they can observe. Boiling a beaker of water. They will see stuff. But what will they see? A scientist who knows what is to be expected will see lots. And what the scientist sees will be important things to see within the realm of science. Children without the knowledge base a scientist has will not know which things to attend to. They will be distracted by some things that matter and some things that don’t matter as much. Yes, there will be a tiny chance that they discover some radical new thing about boiling water in a beaker that is new to science but - well if you believe that then there is no hope. It just does not happen like that! At all! The child cannot keep all the new things they see in working memory and will not have the working memory capacity to process what they see, unless, of course, they already have a great deal of prior knowledge.

They might well enjoy the process. But enjoyment is not learning and it is not a proxy for learning. What happens, usually, is in the above example the children observe and the teacher prompts and will then collate and make sense of the observations. Pointing out what matters and getting rid of the observations that are not relevant. In this way the teacher guides the discovery. This is a very inefficient way of learning. Lots of distractions. Lots of opportunities for mislearning. Lots of fun, perhaps. Children ‘active’ and doing experiments. But a much more effective way is for the teacher to do the last bit first. To explain to the children what happens and why and then let them do the experiment. In that way the teacher controls the amount and quality of the information that goes into working memory. Minimises the effect of so much distracting information. And children approach the observation process with a knowledge set which means that can truly ‘see’ what there is to be seen.

Group work: Seems like a good idea. Get children into groups to discuss. Teacher has to only visit four or five places rather than work with a large number of individuals. Children explain to each other in language that they get rather than the more formal teacher language. But there will be a great deal of distraction in such groups. Are all children paying attention to that which matters or are they negotiating the social norms of groups? What about the time spent discussing a silly idea from one of the group members? How many f a group of four are actually working? The evidence suggests that in any group only 15% of the time spent working s productive learning. The rest is, well, not productive learning. You can argue all you like for the positive effects of group working but you cannot argue it as a beneficial process for learning the content you are delivering as a teacher.

So if the above stops learning being effective why do teachers continue with these methods? Well, because to some extent they do work. It's just that they work poorly. Teachers, like our progressive science teacher will eventually tell children what they need to know. Bright children are bright, almost certainly, because they have larger working memories that less bright children. They know more at any stage and can retain more, are less impacted on by distractions. Possibly they are taught in classroom with less distraction. They will catch more correct ideas. They might be tutored outside school where they will be told rather than left to discover. But these children will learn less through progressive methods. Less bright children will fall farther behind because they are more susceptible to any disruption or lack of clarity.

So teaching that does not work within the constraints of working memory does not fail totally. Rather these methods do provide the conditions for optimal learning. So we could do better. We could close the gap. We could do a lot more. We could make learning so much more enjoyable as children would be so much more successful. And that success means they would know more and so would learn even more effectively.

This has got too long already. Any other matters you would like me to explore using the lens of working memory theory? Be pleased to.