One of my favourite books on education is Graham Nuthall’s The Hidden Lives of Learners. This book explores the worrying disconnect between what a teacher believes, or hopes, is happening in their classroom and what is actually taking place in the mind of their pupils. The learning that is, or is not taking place, the misconceptions being built and shared from pupil to pupil, all far from the awareness of the teacher who can only ever have imperfect knowledge of whether what has been taught has also been learned.
Even summative assessments only give an indication of whether something is learned. We don’t know for sure when a pupil gets a question right whether it was a lucky guess, and one where they would guess differently next time, and if they get a question wrong we can’t be sure whether they didn’t know the answer or simply misunderstood the question.
The Hidden Lives of Learners is a useful reminder that learning is an invisible process. This has led, over the years, to people reaching for proxies for learning: things that they can observe that, they believed, correlated well to learning.
In 2015, Professor Robert Coe punctured this belief in the powers of these proxies in a talk he gave on What Makes Great Teaching. In this talk, he identified several proxies of learning that people had been using and that he argued were poor proxies for learning. These included:
- Students being busy.
- Students being engaged, motivated or interested.
- Students getting attention, such as feedback.
- Calm classrooms.
- Coverage of the curriculum.
- Students supplying correct answers, when they might not have understood them or are repeating back something they had just heard.
Notice, Professor Coe doesn’t say that these things aren’t important, indeed many of them would reappear in the evidence review of the Great Teaching Toolkit that he led on. He is simply saying that, important or not, they don’t tell us if pupils are learning.
The reason that such a list mattered was that in 2015, the teaching profession was still in the grip of an observation culture that believed learning could be observed and lessons could be graded based on how much learning was taking place.
As a result, teachers were pressured into creating lessons that demonstrated not learning, which was invisible, but these proxies. Create a lesson where pupils were clearly “engaged” in an activity and your lesson was outstanding, regardless of what, if anything, was being learned. I remember geography lessons from this era where people would make informal settlements from cardboard boxes and learn little more than the fact that it was hard to get the glue to stick, or try to show the processes of wave erosion with cake and learn only that it was nice eating cake.
I think a subtle shift has occurred in teaching since 2015 with a move away from looking for proxies for learning and instead thinking about what pupils are learning and whether the conditions for learning are right.
We see the first in the discussions around curriculum intent. What do we want our pupils to learn and why? What has led to choices we are making in terms of the content of the curriculum, not on whether the method of delivery is “engaging” or leads to everything being “covered”.
The second shift, into the conditions for learning, we see in the interest in the research from the aforementioned Great Teaching Toolkit, Barak Rosenshine on Principles of Instructions or Mayer and Fiorella on Generative Learning. These don’t try to give ways to know if learning is taking place but instead discuss the underlying practices that make learning more likely.
We can’t see if learning is taking place, all we can do is teach a curriculum that is worth learning and create the conditions where pupils are most likely to learn. Then we hope.
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
