Fifteen years of teaching - alongside years of reflecting, talking to teachers and reading about teaching - has led to me to a startling conclusion: teaching is pretty simple.
Whenever you are trying to teach someone something you start by recapping what they already know about this thing and make sure they bring it to mind.
Then you tell them or show them something new.
You get them to practise this thing.
Then you check how it is going and give them some feedback.
How to make an apple crumble, drive a car or the finer details of the role of geology in a river catchment? It doesn’t matter. Recap, input, application and test.
Complex application
However, doing these simple things well is complex. There are many ways to recap things and help pupils to retrieve information from their long-term memories and have it available to use. We can explain things well, or we can explain them badly. We can set tasks that allow pupils to think about the thing they are learning about or we can set tasks that confuse. We can test in ways that allow us to infer what they know in a quick and easy way, or we can try and work it out through poring over their books and trying to gleam clues within.
There are more - and less - effective ways of doing these things.
The problem is that, as a profession, we are rarely given the space, and support, to work on doing these simple things really well. We are rarely left alone to do what is efficient as well as effective. Instead we spend our time jumping through hoops and trying to please observers. They add in extra complications to the simple business of teaching our subjects.
A room of one’s own?
I started teaching at a time when teacher explanation and instruction was demonised as “chalk and talk”. Instead of working on how to explain things well, I was timed by observers holding a stopwatch to ensure that I didn’t talk for longer than a prescribed amount. This led to me looking for ever more convoluted activities that encourage pupils to cope in a lesson with minimal instruction from me. This was neither effective in terms of their learning or efficient in terms of my workload. But it ticked lots of boxes and met with approval from those outside the classroom.
This is where I think being well informed about educational research can come to our aid.
When I talk to my colleagues about the work of Rosenshine the most common comment I hear is “but this is just common sense!”. Indeed it is. But common sense has been driven out of too many classrooms and been replaced with endless complications that force us to focus on demonstrating things for those watching us, rather than with us getting on with the business of just teaching.
A reading of the work of Kirschner, Sweller and Clark can help us to see why good-quality teacher instruction has always been at the heart of the classroom. It helps us to challenge learning myths like the Learning Pyramid (complete with its compelling round numbers and user friendly design beloved by CPD coordinators the world over) discussed here by Willingham.
Instinctive practice
It can also help us to work on those things that we instinctively know make a difference to simple teaching, like this report on the use of retrieval practice by Agarwal et al. Not only does the research help us to simplify teaching, simplifying teaching then gives us the time to read the research. It’s an endless virtuous circle.
Having access to the research allows us not only to refine our practice and work on the complexities, to make what we do even more effective, but it also allows us to argue our corner and make the case that we are professionals who can be trusted to run our classrooms as we see fit. It allows us to dodge the complications and teach like nobody’s watching. It allows us to simply teach.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex. His first book, Making Every Geography Lesson Count is out soon with Crown House. He tweets @EnserMark.
