Back to the Whiteboard | Evidence-based teaching practice. Why teaching skills without knowledge doesn’t work. In this second of three blogposts this week, I want to explain why unzipping knowledge and skills is so counterproductive. When we detach knowledge from skills, achievement suffers. In England, 17% of kids leave school at 16 functionally illiterate: unable to read a daily newspaper, according to research over sixty years by the University of Sheffield. England’s literacy ranking in the PISA international comparison has dropped from 4th to 22nd within a decade. Over 40% of pupils still fail to achieve at least 5Cs at GCSE. Not only does educational achievement suffer, but the attainment gap persists: over 60% of the poorest pupils fail to attain 5 Cs. The gap in GCSE attainment between pupils with parents on income below £16,000 and those with wealthier parents remains stubbornly high at 27%.
Back in the classroom, one of the reasons for all this was dimly becoming clear to me. An example of this approach failing is where entire units are given over to skills-based projects. Like this: Pedagoo.org. 2004-ozgungor-guthrie. Peer marking and how to make it work in your classroom - TES English - Blog - TES English. English and media teacher Ms Findlater explains the process of introducing peer marking to her pupils.
Effective marking is essential. So, too, are time-saving strategies. How can we juggle the two? We want it done well but we can't, and shouldn’t, undertake detailed marking on every piece of work a student produces. As a new teacher, I remember ‘doing’ peer marking with a year 9 class a few times. This would, indeed, have been the case at that time. Don't dumb it down Prior to the peer marking task being completed by the students, a copy of the success criteria/mark scheme is shared with them, the same one that I’m expected to use. Show me the skills Students highlight three key words at every level that helps them remember what they’re being asked to assess.
Moving on up The students underline the word that describes the level of difficulty within each grade description. Follow my lead I then ask students to look over past marking in their books from me. Over to them Take it all in. Explanations: Top Ten Teaching Tips. “There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.” Michel de Montaigne quotes (French Philosopher and Writer. 1533-1592) Very recently I responded to a question about great teaching by Joe Kirby (read this excellent blog post) with the answer that explanations, questioning and feedback were the holy trinity of teaching.
I have written about questioning and feedback at length, but I have never written about teacher explanations. I thought about why and I considered that part of the problem is that explanations are so integral to everything that we do that we quickly learn our style and then explain away on autopilot pretty much for the rest of our career. I would argue that we need to reflect upon whether we are maximising the effectiveness of our explanations. Top Ten Tips: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Further reading: Like this: