Teachers know that retrieval practice works for learning, so, Mark Enser asks, why is there hesitation around revisiting the same concepts in teacher development?
The following scene plays out in classroom after classroom, day after day.
The pupils troop into the room and glance at the board, “We’ve done this!”, they cry.
“Yes,” their teacher responds. “We are looking at it again in a new way, refreshing our memory of it, applying it and using it. That is how we learn.”
Of course, their teacher is right. We all know that we don’t learn by encountering something once. We usually need to see the information a number of times, and in a number of different ways, before it sticks: we become more skilled by doing something properly time and time again.
Tennis players won’t roll their eyes when it comes to practising their serve again. A learner driver accepts when a driving instructor reminds them, again, to check their mirrors before pulling out.
As teachers, we know how learning works and why it fails. And yet, do we really practise what we preach when it comes to teacher development?
I have certainly found myself falling into the “but we’ve done this!” trap over the years. I’ve been in morning briefings that have highlighted a CPD session that afternoon on formative assessment, audibly groaned, and muttered “not again” to my colleague. I’ve watched presentations with titles like “Dialogic Teaching: The New Way to Learn!”, slumped into my seat and waited for it all to be over.
We can see this playing out with the new Early Careers Framework (ECF). Many have raised concerns that it simply repeats too much from Initial Teacher Training (ITT). In the first couple of years of teaching, the argument goes, early career teachers (ECTs) are simply re-encountering the same ideas that were presented to them on their PGCEs. This is even being raised in regards to the new National Professional Qualifications (NPQs), with some educators complaining that too much is drawn from the ECF and repeated for experienced teachers.
But isn’t this exactly how we build a curriculum for learning? We take ideas that people have encountered before and we look at them again in light of new information and experience that they have gained.
We might have had a session on effective questioning during ITT, but we should look at it again as part of the ECF, this time in light of the experience of the first few months of teaching.
There also seems little problem with looking at questioning again as experienced teachers. Study after study shows that experienced teachers may know features of effective questioning but they don’t tend to change their practice based on that knowledge.
Part of the problem is that too much teacher development lacks reflection and planning time. Teachers are busy teaching, then there is a delivery of some information and then they go back to teaching. When we return to old ideas, as we should, we need to factor in plenty of time to actually change our practice.
We shouldn’t simply redo but we should certainly renew. And we definitely need to stop rolling our eyes and muttering, “but we did this”.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College. His latest book, The CPD Curriculum, is out now. He tweets @EnserMark
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