Learning takes time. According to Richard Mayer’s select-organise-integrate (SOI) model of generative learning, we learn by selecting information from a source (this could be a teacher’s explanation, a video or an experience) and then organising it into a new form before finally integrating it into the schema, which sits in our long-term memory.
The reason why learning can be time-consuming is that each one of these stages requires us to think hard. We have to carefully consider the material and decide which bits are relevant and which bits are not. We then have to do something with the information we have selected: turning text into diagrams or an explanation into a paragraph answering a question, for instance. The last step then involves us retrieving what we have already learned about this subject and working out how this new information assimilates with it.
If we skip any of these steps then we are less likely to generate learning and our time was probably spent in vain.
However, the SOI model is something that teachers rarely need to consider. It simply sits in the background and forms the bedrock of what we think of as “just good teaching”.
Giving pupils time to grapple with complex questions, retrieve prior learning and apply it is common sense. And yet this good, simple teaching is often squeezed out by a desperate bid to cover everything before we reach the end of the lesson. Tasks get truncated as the clock counts down; we quickly give pupils the correct answers to record and have no time for dialogue and we hurry them out of the door. This means that pupils haven’t “thought”, but rather have just “transferred” and, as a result, haven’t learned.
Taking a fresh look at the curriculum
It is an age-old problem. We want both breadth and depth but we want to achieve this in finite time. We have thousands of years of learning within our subjects that we want our pupils to have access to. Leaving something out feels like an act of barbarism, and so we try to cover it all. But coverage isn’t the same as learning.
At this point it is tempting to throw our hands up. Isn’t our overstuffed curriculum there because of the whims of exam boards and government diktat? Well, to an extent, yes. Certainly in some subjects and in some key stages. However, even at GCSE there are often ways to be creative with the curriculum, to pick and choose what to linger over and what to skim past.
In some subjects, such as my own (geography), there are also opportunities to merge topics, rather than working solidly through the specification as though it were a de facto curriculum.
And outside of key stage 4, we arguably have even more freedom to cut things out. As a senior leader of education, I have been fortunate to have spent the past few years working with dozens of primary and secondary schools.
Most of this time has been spent talking through curriculum plans, and the question I most often ask is, “Why are you teaching that?” The most common response is, “I don’t know - we have just always taught it.”
The national curriculum in England is, for most subjects, surprisingly light on content. It tends to point towards broad topics that should be covered, but not what should be taught within them or how much time should be dedicated to it. And yet there is still this odd assumption that anything listed on the national curriculum needs a term dedicated to covering it, regardless of what learning that leads to.
I think we need to take a fresh look at the curriculum that we teach and start asking some questions about what we teach and why we teach it. If our first reaction is “because we have to” then we need to pause and really check if that is true.
We have more control over this than we think we do. If we start with the purpose, the intent, of what we want to achieve, we can start cutting out everything that doesn’t serve that purpose.
Once that is done, we can concentrate on giving more time to the things that we have decided matter most and teaching them in a way that we know will lead to learning rather than coverage.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex. His book, Powerful Geography: a curriculum with purpose in practice, is out now. He tweets @EnserMark
