There are so many aspects of teaching that are time- and labour-intensive: it comes with the job. And when we’re told that these aspects are “good practice” that will lead to progress, it seems reasonable to invest hours and effort into them, no matter what.
The danger, however, is that term “good practice”. Just because something was deemed “good” five, 10 or 15 years ago, when we were doing our teacher training, it doesn’t mean the research behind this practice is still relevant today. And yet, these practices continue to consume a large fraction of workload, adding unnecessarily to an already high-pressured role.
More on education research:
Here are four examples of teaching strategies that are still enforced across schools despite more recent research contradicting their efficacy.
Teaching practices debunked by research
1. Catering to different learning styles
VAK learning styles (Barbe, 1979) claimed that students would learn more efficiently if teaching methods were catered to their individual learning styles: visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. This meant teachers were expected to cater to all these styles within their lessons, inevitably making resourcing the lesson an incredibly time-consuming process.
This, however, has been widely disputed due to “limited evidence” (Education Endowment Foundation, 2021) and a study into the theory (Rogowsky et al, 2015) found no correlation between a learner’s preferred style and their ability or performance.
2. Demonstrable progress during lessons
Six-part lessons, mini-plenaries and Assessment for Learning (AfL) as we know it have all been geared towards being able to assess student knowledge and gaps in learning. This is a vital part of teaching, and gauging students’ understanding underpins most of today’s teaching ideologies. However, the issue is when all this is fixated on individual lessons, and judgements on the effectiveness of those lessons are based on whether the students have demonstrated progress and learning within that small window.
It is now widely accepted that learning is not a short-term process. Research from 2015 said: “Checking what students know at the end of a lesson risks conflating learning and performance: learning is a permanent change in behaviour or knowledge, performance is a temporary fluctuation in behaviour or knowledge which can be observed and measured during and immediately after acquisition.” (Soderstrom and Bjork, 2015)
So while it may be useful to know what students have understood during the learning process, what they have learned in that time does not equate to the progress they have made.
3. Marking frequency and quantity
Marking and assessment vary from school to school and even differ between departments of the same institutions. It has been established that meaningful feedback boosts progress but many marking policies require marking every piece of work and homework, widely known as the “Tick and Flick” concrete routines in which marking must be done or strategies to record/prove marking has been done altogether.
This is an incredibly time-consuming process for teachers, and studies have shown that extensive feedback doesn’t always equate to meaningful or useful feedback.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s A Marked Improvement (2016) found that not only was there very little evidence on the frequency of marking and the impact that has but that “some forms of marking, including acknowledgement marking, are unlikely to enhance pupil progress.”
The EEF’s more recent study Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning (2021) suggests that the foundations for feedback should be laid before feedback in high-quality instruction, that marking should be done in a timely manner according to the context of what is taught and the learners in question (as opposed to strict marking deadlines), and that “careful thought should be given to how pupils receive [that] feedback.”
4. Differentiation
Under the Every Child Matters era in the early 2000s, the need for differentiation was heavily stressed: each child should be able to access the learning. Strategies like “All, Most, Some” different coloured worksheets individualised according to ability ranges, and, in some cases, different lessons and vastly different outcomes for students within the same classroom.
While the ideology still stands that education should be accessible to all those learning, the implementation of the concept has come under criticism “for lowering standards by watering down the curriculum, and negatively impacting on children’s life chances by reducing expectations and students’ exposure to academic content” (Gibb, 2016).
While there was sound reasoning for these strategies at one point, insisting that they be continued despite evidence pointing in the other direction is only going to result in burnout, resentment and fruitless work. We need to assess what we’re doing and the impact it actually has, not continue doing it because it’s “what we know”.
Bhamika Bhudia is a teacher of English and lead teacher at a secondary school in North-West London. She tweets as @MissMika_Eng
