Curriculum products
Well hello there and welcome to update #059!
There is a joke about two men in a bar. One says to his friend, ‘I’ve taught my dog to speak French.’ ‘Really?’ says his mate, ‘let’s hear him then.’ ‘I said I taught him, I didn’t say he’d learnt it’ comes the response.
There is something important in this anecdote and it is this: the fact that I have taught something does not mean that my pupils have ‘got’ it. And they are unlikely to have really learnt something unless they produce something worthwhile with the material they are studying.
Tim Oates talks about curriculum ‘products’ when assessing whether our pupils have learnt what we have taught them. When he talks about products he means the things which pupils write, say or draw, the low stakes tests they complete or the things they make. All these provide insights for the teacher into the extent to which pupils know, understand and can do something on their own terms.
First, let’s consider writing. In many parts of the sector, there is a temptation to get through the writing as fast as possible.
Yet an extended piece of written work often requires considerable background knowledge, discussion of that knowledge and rehearsal in order for it to come together.
Too often, pupils are set off on a writing task without sufficient ‘food’. By food, I mean the stimulus, exposure to and discussion of vocabulary, use of spelling, punctuation and grammar to support meaning and the modelling by the teacher. English teacher Matthew Pinkett has put it graphically:
Showing kids a pre-prepared model answer and asking them to write a paragraph off the back of it is no different from showing them a picture of duck a l’orange and sending ‘em to the kitchen to knock one up. Teachers must get in the habit of live modelling whenever it is required.
Writing is slow and it is difficult. But when pupils are supported and guided through the writing process carefully, the product of writing is likely to reflect what they really understand.
So we need to move away from the temptation for children to complete work which might not be original to them, such as completing closed questions on a worksheet, for example, and to conclude that they have understood, just because they have completed it. Completion of a task and understanding are not the same thing, but they are often confused. So a child is praised for having finished, before it has been checked whether they have understood it or not.
Next, let’s move on to what children say. It is the responses pupils give which provide insight into whether they have understood something. If we are going to find this out, we have to spend time during the lessons asking questions and listening carefully to pupils’ answers.
Yet under the pressure of time, it is tempting to either take the first correct answer from one or two children and assume that everyone has ‘got’ it; or to complete some of the answers if they are struggling; or to take incomplete or partial answers and assume that they know the rest. What quite often happens is that children are praised for an incomplete answer and then the lesson moves on.
There are a handful of problems with this. First, the teacher’s information is incomplete - in the rush to move on to the next part of the lesson, the brief incomplete response is taken to have more significance than it should; it is nothing more than an incomplete response and there is not enough information to judge whether to move on or not.
The second reason there might be a problem is because we often need to rehearse and say our thoughts out loud before committing them to paper. As James Britton argued in Language and Learning: ‘writing floats on a sea of talk.’ The danger is that by shortcutting the responses we not only have incomplete information about the security of pupils’ learning, we are also denying them the chance to practise articulating their thoughts.
The third reason why it is not good enough is because pupils have the right to have their ideas heard by others. By moving on too swiftly, we are cutting down their ability to refine their language and to deepen their understanding.
The importance of speaking is emphasised in the National Curriculum for English. We are doing our children a disservice if we do not both provide them with opportunities and also expect them to articulate their ideas. Many children come from backgrounds which are language poor. If we either expect partial answers, or don't ask them to speak out loud in full sentences, using subject specific vocabulary, then we are denying them the opportunity both to engage deeply with the material and also to perform well in the subject when it comes to exams.
Until next time
Mary
Also to let you know that we’ve got some great new courses about to start on The Huh Academy.
NEW: Leading the Diverse Curriculum: you can watch the introductory webinar with Hannah Wilson, Bennie Kara and me. The course starts in Jan 2024.
New: Building Teams with Lekha Sharma and Sam Crome: And we’ve got an introductory webinar on Tues 9 Jan 24 19.30-20.00 where I’ll be talking with Sam and Lekha about how they believe their work will be helpful for leaders.
I feel like I’m getting a lot of this in my maths teaching - able to complete a very niche task the way it’s presented in that lesson but it doesn’t deepen their understanding. When they’re tested at the end of a unit, most of it’s gone as well.