This post is one in a series of outcomes from my MA in Education work. It’s a brief discussion – and I welcome all thoughts & ideas from it! It’s highly tentative, and comes with disclaimers and context as described.

Context:

Teacher professional development is one of the key factors in generating the best outcomes for students (Sutton Trust, 2011) and has shown to be critical in retention of quality teachers (Worth & Van Den Brande, 2020) and well being and motivation (Howard, 2020). Creating the right culture for teachers to develop is known to be effective (Kraft & Papay, 2014; 2016), and there has been significant interest in this as an area for investigation. The rise in research-informed practice has been one of the methods by which UK schools have attempted to raise standards, though it has not been universally accepted.

For my MA, I used a remotely-gathered random sample of 320 teachers to explore the attitudes towards the relationship between teaching and learning cultures, and the use of research informed practice in the secondary sector, in a relatively under-studied area of existing literature. There are lots of limits to the nature and sample of my work, so I’m sharing these things only for interest – rather than making any claims about What It All Means more widely!

Overall, the study shows that teaching and learning cultures tend to be dominated by purpose: and the extrinsic motivations of OFSTED judgement and exam outcomes are uppermost in the factors which create the culture of a school. Exploring the responses by differentiating categories based on this data enables an insight into how research, wider factors and the cultures vary in response to different contextual needs. The implementation of these methods is key to how positively staff regard their culture: and an investigation into different types of school cultures shows further insight into the role of senior leadership, and structural mechanisms to build confidence and clarity of approach to research, teaching and learning, and unite around intrinsic purpose for their school. Further research is recommended into the implementation of the broad trends identified here, as it has potential to be useful for those looking to develop their teaching and learning culture, or their use of research informed practice alike.

In this post, I’m looking at what I found out about the nature and attitudes towards people’s descriptions of their teaching and learning cultures in schools.

Establishing the Nature of Teaching & Learning Cultures:

Respondents were asked to describe their school culture (focused on staff teaching and professional development; versus the student-focused culture that was being created) in three words, which were then codified and grouped by textual analysis. A large majority (69.2%) of responses were “positive” in nature:

“Aspirational, supportive, reflective”

“Consistent”, “Student-focused”

“Respectful, caring, student driven”

19% of responses were mostly negative, including some relatively critical comments (e.g. “distrustful, archaic, centralised”, “Behind. The. Times”, “sporadic, box-ticking, ignored”, and “limited: Ofsted-driven”).  11.8% of responses showed some mixed feelings: e.g. “inclusive and emerging” or “reasonable, but slow-moving”. Some of these responses seemed to hint at issues in terms of implementation or effectiveness, rather than the aspiration or ambition of the culture.

Distribution of School Culture, according to Ofsted Grading

Having explored attitudes to culture across the whole sample, they were then split according to the self-reported inspection grade of the school. This shows relatively consistent perceptions across the different categories. The biggest difference was between the outstanding/excellent category (75% positive) and the inadequate/unsatisfactory category at 57%, but this was perhaps not quite as significant as expected.

Staff were asked to explore the culture of development further, and were asked about participation ratios. The majority of responses suggested that the majority of staff participated in professional development cultures, but there was not a significant margin here. A substantial number of responses (21.5%) believed that less than a quarter of their staff were involved, while a further 16.25% believed that only 25-50% of the staff were involved. The link between participation in development and performance management was explored by direct question; with only 14.6% of respondents suggesting that there was no link at all. 32% of responses suggested there was a reasonable amount of correlation; and 21% of people believed that it was a major part of their performance management.

Distribution of Staff who Participate in Professional Development Culture

Distribution of the extent to which professional development was integrated in to performance management

Distribution of Drivers of Positive Engagement with Professional Culture

With unclear connections to formal performance management, the drivers of positive and negative engagement in culture were explored further. The responses were open-ended, and codified in to different blocks of response. By far, the most significant driver of positive engagement with was the culture of the school and staff, where it was valued and made to feel important and part of how the school operated. Further drivers suggested the importance and impact of their professional development on students, and reflected positively on where time had been created for them to develop.

Distribution of Drivers of Negative Engagement with Professional Culture

By contrast, very few respondents cited financial incentives or career progression as a reason for engaging within professional development; though this is self-reported, and therefore potentially subject to perceptions and bias in the respondent’s self-image. However, the intrinsic motivations and wider school culture support the original analysis of Kraft & Papay (2014) in terms of creating the wider structures for engagement, rather than individual incentivisation.

A similar distribution of factors was found by specifically asking about what prevented people from participating in the culture of the school: the structural and systematic features of wider school culture and lack of time/workload dominated the responses. A number of responses spoke to the limited impact or poor quality of CPD they had experienced as a reason not to participate further; and very few (4) mentioned lack of financial support as a factor in the teaching and learning culture.

As part of the analysis of the use of education research in creating cultures, participants were asked to identify features of their teaching & learning culture.  

By some margin, the dominant responses to this were structural: 86.25% with specific INSET trg on T&L, 66.25% with named T&L roles in school, and 63% with support for staff wishing to attend external INSET. These stood out significantly more than the other responses, which varied in 25-50% response. The least common features included timetabled allocation (20.6%), journal/book clubs (19.6%) and financial support (17.8%).

Chart showing the frequency of key features of professional development cultures in responses

Similar judgements are made by respondents when asked to explore their perception of the usefulness of these components of creating culture, suggesting coherence between how often they appear, and the perceived utility of them. The structural features identified in previous figure are well represented here, but there is increasing importance for the use of subject networks, associations and professional organisations, together with coaching and mentoring to support staff development. Some structural features (work spaces, libraries, journal clubs and newsletters) appear relatively unimportant to creating cultures, and are reflected in the distributions of opinion.  It is interesting to identify how many of the ‘checklist’ of development features appear on this list, and to contrast the perception of their usefulness, with their utilisation as part of school’s teaching and learning cultures.

Distribution of Opinions on the Importance of Features of Teaching & Learning Culture

First, it is clear that there are a wide range of professional cultures being sampled here. The distribution of features, attitudes and descriptions of the culture all show significant variance in the day to day experience of teachers and their professional development. This is good for the study, though perhaps not the schools! While the literature shows consensus that professional development for teachers is critical, and may be starting to develop some coherence around what helps to generate good teaching, it is clear that the implementation on the ground is variable at best. It is interesting to see how the intrinsic cultural expectations of a school – as well as being important for their development in general (Kraft & Papay, 2014) – appears to be the dominant factor in how teachers engage (or not) with their own professional development. While workload and time, and to a lesser extent, poor experience with previous CPD, contribute to the disaffectation of staff, the teaching and learning culture is by far the most dominant feature of disengagement.

Second, the analysis shows that in the best teaching and learning cultures, there is clearly a lot to be positive about. Large numbers of staff are engaged, a range of provisions are being structurally and collegially implemented, and there are plenty of schools who appear to have a strong ethos of professional development. However, the difficult experience of a number of colleagues in this survey (even if a minority) show that this is not consistent across all schools. This has potential impact on teaching, learning and outcomes, together with retention (Worth & Van Den Brande, 2020) and the development of teachers themselves (Kraft & Papay, 2014). It will be important to try and work out the relationship between the drivers of these cultural differences, and potentially how that links to the use of education research in schools, particularly given that the external inspection judgement does not appear to be the key driver.

Finally, the results show an interesting mixture of structural and school-driven features (staff support for courses, named teaching and learning leads, specific training) and informal teacher-led factors (e.g. informal discussion groups, subject networks). The combination of extrinsic and intrinsic (to the teacher) attitudes will be an important parallel to draw when exploring the purpose and value of educational research.

This post is one in a series of outcomes from my MA in Education work. It’s a brief discussion – and I welcome all thoughts & ideas from it!

Context:

Teacher professional development is one of the key factors in generating the best outcomes for students (Sutton Trust, 2011) and has shown to be critical in retention of quality teachers (Worth & Van Den Brande, 2020) and well being and motivation (Howard, 2020). Creating the right culture for teachers to develop is known to be effective (Kraft & Papay, 2014; 2016), and there has been significant interest in this as an area for investigation. The rise in research-informed practice has been one of the methods by which UK schools have attempted to raise standards, though it has not been universally accepted.

For my MA, I used a remotely-gathered random sample of 320 teachers to explore the attitudes towards the relationship between teaching and learning cultures, and the use of research informed practice in the secondary sector, in a relatively under-studied area of existing literature. There are lots of limits to the nature and sample of my work, so I’m sharing these things only for interest – rather than making any claims about What It All Means more widely!

Overall, the study shows that teaching and learning cultures tend to be dominated by purpose: and the extrinsic motivations of OFSTED judgement and exam outcomes are uppermost in the factors which create the culture of a school. Exploring the responses by differentiating categories based on this data enables an insight into how research, wider factors and the cultures vary in response to different contextual needs. The implementation of these methods is key to how positively staff regard their culture: and an investigation into different types of school cultures shows further insight into the role of senior leadership, and structural mechanisms to build confidence and clarity of approach to research, teaching and learning, and unite around intrinsic purpose for their school. Further research is recommended into the implementation of the broad trends identified here, as it has potential to be useful for those looking to develop their teaching and learning culture, or their use of research informed practice alike.

In this post, I want to have a look at what I’ve found in the literature about research, and how & why schools might choose to use it.

What might motivate the adoption of research in schools?

Although academic research into philosophies and the nature of education have been long-established, the idea that teaching should be or become an evidence-based profession has only gradually become the consensus in a number of countries (Biesta, 2007). In the UK context, the Tooley Report was commissioned by OFSTED. It called for a transformation of educational research at academic and university level, so that educational practice could be transformed into an evidence-based practice. However, the structural practice of creating this evidence informed profession was not immediately implemented across the board. It took the appointment of a new UK Government to accept Goldacre (2013)’s influential argument for the incorporation of ‘evidence in education’ to align with the randomised control test methodology from medicine. Implementation mechanisms were required to disseminate the ideas from the research to practice.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) was founded in 2011 by a lead charity, The Sutton Trust, with a £125m grant from the Department for Education (Edovald and Nevill, 2020). In March 2013, the EEF and the Sutton Trust were jointly designated by the Government as the ‘What Works Centre (WWC) for Education’. This was one example of the new Government’s approach to policy implementation, based on the ‘what works’ movement from the USA.  It is founded on the principles of impact evaluations, randomised controlled trials, and the increased production of systematic reviews over the last 10 years (Edovald & Nevil, 2020). Within a short timescale, changes to initial teacher education have reinforced this message (Bennett, 2017) and made it clear that leaders should be critically involved (Greany, 2018; Greany and Brown, 2017) in supporting teacher autonomy through professional development (Lynch, 2016; Worth and van den Brande, 2020). These large-scale structural approaches have created a wider extrinsic contextual motivation, where policy and implementation take a particular ideological and philosophical approach to teacher design.

First, the publication of the Teaching White Paper in 2010 by the Department for Education set out a new set of approaches which would build on the interventions which provided the impetus for improvement in the highly successful London Challenge. The analysis highlighted the potential influence of the Teaching School concept (Kennedy, 1991) on improvement in schools (Department for Education, 2010). Schools worked with local authorities and Universities, including the SUPER project with Cambridge University,  partnerships with the Institute of Education through the Research Learning Communities; and the RISE Programme within the Research Schools Network (Burn et al., 2020). Similarly driven by the requirement of the Research Excellence Framework to account for their “impact”, Universities had been keen to work widely with school environments (Bernhard et al., 2020; Burn et al., 2020; Weston and Clay, 2018). Becoming a ‘teaching school’ was a way to maximise income for schools at a time when budgets were thin, and this extrinsic driver saw the creation of a large number of research or teaching hubs, many of whom also ran their own internal teacher training programmes (Burn et al., 2020).

Second, following the creation of Multi-Academy Trusts, Greany et al. (2018) highlights the role of wider collaboration in building teacher quality. It became important, and valuable, to work together and align in approach. A range of Teaching School Alliances have developed since 2011. They are designated and funded further by Government, and are led by between one and three higher performing schools. By 2017, there were more than 800 Teaching Schools designated nationally, but with significant variation between them. Gu et al. (2015)’s evaluation highlights the range of organisational forms apparent across different teaching schools: showing significant variance in their voluntary status, regional disparities and their demographic context. The approach has been criticised for overly focusing on secondary schools, and schools in deprived areas (Finch et al., 2016; Gu et al., 2015), but I think that this is likely to be an extension of the “London Challenge philosophy”, or a reflection of the types of provider nd funding that are required. With the outsourcing of many of the functions of these original projects now in the hands of tutoring companies or charitable enterprises, the original motivation to adopt research as a lever to release more schools funding is perhaps less significant than before, but it is nonetheless a powerful extrinsic motivator for schools in recent memory.

The philosophical and ideological ripples have resonated through the Department for Education out towards regulatory inspectors OFSTED, who have recently produced a series of Subject Research Reviews. This creates a third extrinsic motivator: the adoption of a ‘research culture’ to satisfy the inspectors. In an insightful study on this theme, Bernhard et al. (2020) qualitatively explored the attitudes of headteachers of highly effective schools in London and the opportunity areas. They found that Heads consistently describe their institutions as “professional learning communities” (Bernhard et al., 2020). However, Bernhard et al. (2020) suggested that Heads identified the central focus of CPD as being on improving student engagement with “teaching and learning”, spreading the idea of collective responsibility for students’ learning and not admitting excuses. Their study suggests that research engagement is associated with the“highly effective schools”, while the headteachers that specialised in school turn-around did not use research to underpin their decisions. Bernhard et al. suggested this could be linked to the centralised policy of a Trust; or simply recognising that research engagement is a secondary priority to the core mission of “turning around a failing school” (Bernhard et al., 2020: 6) and focusing on examination results, or other measures of student outcome.

This apparent dichotomy between a research informed practice, and a focus on outcomes is explored by Malin et al. (2020), who review the use of evidence in a number of international contexts. They argue that the higher accountability context of the UK system creates a structural requirement to engage in research informed education: putting the responsibility to learn and improve on the schools and create quasi-market pressures balanced with regulation and control via OFSTED (Godfrey, 2016). It is argued that:

“this framework focuses the minds of – and places pressure on – school leaders to concentrate on specific forms of school improvement and research”

(Malin et al., 2020: 6).

Instead of being open to judgement externally, a school leader can adopt a deliberate process of researching and enquiring. This means not only the potential for Research School funding, but also a school can create its own criteria by which to judge success. It might be argued that schools compensate for the pressures of external accountability by becoming more ‘internally accountable’. Seen in this way, the drive to become a research engaged school is highly empowering not only to school leaders but staff, students, parents and other stakeholders (Godfrey, 2016; Malin et al., 2020).

This extrinsic motivation is critically important to understand at the heart of my second and third research questions: do school cultures adopt and implement educational research as a highly effective lever to improve student results, respond to external judgements and inspections, or as a psychological “best bets” defence mechanism against those extrinsic factors?

However, there is an increasing appetite for research informed practice from teachers themselves (Stefanini and Griffiths, 2020). There are three potential reasons why teachers might want to drive their own professional growth through the adoption of research-influenced practice. In part, this could be just a personal trait, but it also shows how teachers are finding a sense of professional value and satisfaction in their ability to have agency about some aspect of their work. As a school, therefore, the intrinsic motivation around adopting research-informed practice may be deeply connected to the wellbeing and retention of staff. Worth & Van Den Brande (2020) produced an analysis of the conditions of teachers in the UK context. They report that 38 per cent of teachers say that they have ‘a little’ or ‘no’ influence over their professional development goals, echoing wider concerns about their influence over other structures of their professional life:

Teachers also report relatively low autonomy over assessment and feedback, pupil data collection and curriculum content in their phase or subject. Teachers report relatively high autonomy in areas associated with classroom management and practice, such as classroom layout, teaching methods, planning and preparing lessons, use of classroom time and rules for behaviour.

(Worth & Van Den Brande, 2020)

The size of the autonomy gap between teachers and other professionals is a long-standing one, and is often linked to the size of school and the potential for them to be part of a Multi Academy Trust (Finch et al., 2016; Greany, 2018).

Together with autonomy, workload is consistently the most-cited reason ex-teachers give for why they left the profession (Lynch et al., 2016; Howard, 2020). Workload is often conceptualised simply as the number of hours teachers work, but “it is also about teachers feeling in control of their work” (DfE, 2019). Research by Sims (2017) found a relationship between the extent to which a teacher regards their workload as manageable and job satisfaction, but no relationship between working hours and job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is an important factor associated with teachers’ intentions and decisions to stay in the profession (Lynch et al., 2016; Worth et al., 2018). In direct contrast to the work of Kraft & Papay (2014), and Hobbiss et al (2020), it seems that while effectiveness may plateau, teachers who stay in the classroom after their first five years do not experience increased autonomy as their careers progress (Kraft & Papay, 2016). Howard (2020) shows that teachers perceived influence over their professional development (even if only moving from ‘some influence’ to ‘a lot of influence’) is associated with a nine‑percentage‑point increase in intention to stay in teaching. Lynch et al. (2016)’s NFER Analysis of Teacher retention found no evidence of any influence of a school’s proportion of free school meal pupils, academy status, or region on intent to leave the profession: but that there is a strong interaction between teacher engagement and retention, with 90% of engaged teachers intending to stay. As an intrinsic motivator (for a school culture), there is a significant opportunity to be embraced by a thoughtful leader (Strickland, 2020;  Tomsett & Uttley, 2020). Effective and well-targeted professional development cultures are likely to be associated with a positive work culture, which will lead to higher job satisfaction, and retention of quality teachers (Howard, 2020). 

If research can offer this, as part of a wider school culture, then it seems to be a high intrinsic motivation factor for adopting it. However, while there exists a wide range of studies in to the wellbeing and attitude of the profession in general, the interplay between the use of research, and attitudes and cultures does not appear to have been explored in depth at the time of writing.

We talk about misconceptions all the time in subject knowledge – as if they are failures of knowledge, or epistemic understanding issues.

However, I’m not quite so sure it’s as simple as that.

This is where I think misconceptions come from, which might potentially offer some insights in to where we might go to fix them…

Insecure Prior Knowledge

The easiest way to encounter misconceptions in subject knowledge is to make assumptions about what is already known. In a useful blog post, Tom Sherrington reminds us of the importance of a “check for understanding” to be all encompassing: often, teachers will make a check for understanding in to a compliance check “are you all ready?” “is everyone finished?” “has everyone got that?”, rather than a genuine diagnosis of what vocabulary, conceptual information, or factual information has been covered.

I think this is important to focus on in observations, and explore in conversations. Be explicit as possible about the assumptions and pre-requisite knowledge needed to access the lesson; link that in to your do now and starter activity to check for understanding of those things. Plan effectively – consolidate effectively, and hopefully, we can avoid foundations of sand.

It’s also possible that we have insecure knowledge of our own, as teachers. Geography is a big, broad discipline – and we might be teaching concepts at A Level that we have never studied before. Certainly, I can remember starting my teaching career with deserts, having never studied them at A Level or university (regrets about that, to this day – curses to Quaternary Science, I say!) – and only really getting it when I’d been teaching for a while, and then done some fieldwork in the Sahara. We might have big subject gaps and blindspots, which we only really expose in the cold light of an A Level lesson, when we run out of explanations to give…!

Ineffective Sequencing of Ideas:

Often, one of the challenges of misconceptions is that ideas have been put together in an order that doesn’t make sense. Taylor (2017) explores ideas of curriculum planning in terms of step-by-step sequential knowledge development, but it may well be that we see problems with ordering material and explanations within a lesson, as well as within the curriculum. Teachers might introduce words without checking for understanding of meaning, or assume prior knowledge/contextual knowledge without considering how and why that knowledge needs to be built upon.

One of the most obvious ways this manifests is in presenting lesson content: perhaps the teacher shows a completed diagram, but the order in which they explain the stages to the students is not quite right, or leads to problems? They might try to teach evaluation, but without a coherent meta-structure to help students understand how to connect the ideas up. Structured thinking and lesson planning is key here: how do we model and reflect on what happens when you move this part of the lesson there and why that works, or doesn’t. You may want to refer back to Allison & Tharby (2015)’s modelling of lesson sequence to help colleagues identify issues, if helpful.

Misconception of Place:

In the high tempo of a Geography curriculum under time pressure, it is difficult for nuance to be thoughtfully incorporated in to the classroom. It’s easy for us to resort to quick articles, snapshots, and surface level understanding of case studies and illustrated points (Morris, 2021) – perhaps even chosen for pragmatic reasons about resources and available DVDs, rather than good Geography (Preece, 2021). At best, we end up with a slightly less optimal conception of place – perhaps a little date graphics, or a less high resolution video quality than we’d like to show.

At worst, we end up with out of date place knowledge; that risks the danger of a “single story” (Biddulph, 2011), and tells only a skewed version of the world (you may want to see this TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the way that can be presented), and risks generating significant misconceptions in student learning about different places around the world.  

The Geography has moved on:

There is an increasing increasing separation of university and school experience (Butt & Collins, 2018), and Enser (2021) reviews the changing academic leadership of the Geographical Association as an example of this in microcosm. During the 20^th century, the GA was led by multiple academic Geographers, but since 1973, no academic Geographer has held the role. The last post-holder – Professor Andrew Goudie – wrote of an increasing ‘chasm between schools and universities’ (Goudie, 1993), as teachers were increasingly responsible as curriculum makers (Brooks, 2013).

This may well mean that the subject content that you arrive with is contemporary, changed and modern – while the specifications, and textbooks that we are teaching with in the classroom reflect the pedagogical understanding of perhaps ten years ago. This can be significantly disconcerting for trainees, and new colleagues, and cause obvious discomfort and cognitive dissonance – you’ll hear them plaintively ask why they are teaching something that’s wrong?

There are often two different experiences in here:

• Changing Concepts: some elements of our Geography content is unchanging and relatively confirmed through time. Our knowledge of rivers and the Bradshaw Model is not likely to be subject to a paradigmatic understanding of the way that water now works, for example. Other parts of the discipline are still being explored and emerging, and perhaps one of the best areas to illustrate this is in plate tectonics. Let’s not forget, Einstein wrote his theory of General Relativity in 1917, while the theory of plate tectonics only emerged with the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis in 1963. Since then, there has been significant change in the way we understand the mechanisms of plate movement, particularly as we apply seismic techniques to ‘scan’ inside the Earth. A trainee fresh out of a Geosciences degree will have a *very* different understanding of the way that the Earth moves, and the driving mechanics of convection currents in the mantle, of ridge push versus slab pull, and a number of more complex debates, than your typical A Level textbook. And here we face a challenge: do they teach what’s “right” and “new”, with the risk of it not being marked right in an exam? Or do they teach what’s specified by the exam board, knowing that it’s not quite up to date? There is no right answer to this – but it’s easy to see how students might generate misconceptions and potentially inaccurate answers when being taught by someone whose knowledge now post-dates the specification and textbook!

• Changing Utility of Concepts: in Teaching Geography there have been a recent series of articles about the changing use of the Burgess model in teaching urban morphology (Rawding, 2019; Puttick, 2020). While the model itself – originally developed based on 1920s Chicago – has not changed, the debate illustrates the way in which our pedagogical utility of the model has moved on. Some teachers argue that it should be taught, provided that you explain how and why thinking has developed; while others argue that it is out of date and leads to misconceptions when applied to the modern world. Unlike in our previous example, where the Geography and the science itself has changed, there is no new knowledge in the Burgess Model. Instead, Enser (2021) argues that this is an example of how concepts are being implemented in the classroom: can you still teach Burgess, but explain how the discipline has changed how we employ urban models?

A pragmatic and academic conversation is required with a colleague experiencing this dissonance. What is “right” versus “what is needed” is a difficult idealistic bridge to cross, and many Departments will want to explore this debate as part of mentor meetings and discussions over time. It can often be worth exploring Examiners’ Reports with them, looking specifically for the evidence and analysis of case study and detail!

The world has moved on:

Many of us have an outdated and inaccurate view of the world in terms of data and situations. If you don’t believe me, take a few moments to try this quiz. How did you do?

According to the Rosling Foundation, the successful team behind Gapminder, many of us have a statistical perception bias based on information that is no longer true. You can see them explain it in this TED talk, and read the mechanisms and causes in their superb book on Factfulness. But it leads to misconceptions in the classroom – students using outdated terminology (like “Third World”), and not sure how that’s going to happen unless teachers reinforce it through their own teaching! Be alive to it in your lessons: consider what sources you’re using for information, and challenge the use of outdated information, case studies and terminology with your colleagues if it occurs.

In this section, we also have outdated ideas about colonial curriculum, and the way that it’s been structurally embedded in to our teaching. A number of excellent writers have explored specific issues on this theme – far better, and with more authentic understanding than I can hope to achieve – including this excellent article on why we should remove the word ‘slum’ from classrooms.  

The Curse of the Expert

Experts, by their definition, have a different mental map (schema) of their discipline of knowledge than novices. Connections, terminology and sequences which are embedded in to their schema, and are therefore “obvious” to them can sometimes be impossible to ‘unsee’ and unpick, and they will presume much about others’ ability in their audience. For teachers, this curse of knowledge (Dawn Cox) is difficult to move past; and can sometimes lead to “gaps” in the explanations and student misconceptions. They may see it reflected in marking, or in student explanations of their work – the part where the expertise explains something, or makes a connection will be absent from the lesson, as it was implicit not explicitly and directly said.

You can help colleagues address this by asking good coaching questions, and perhaps even co-planning with them. How do they script their explanations? What sequence do they assume, what prior knowledge do students have, how do they check for understanding of that – at heart, this is where the Rosenshine reminders are helpful for trainees and early career teachers!

Separation between threshold (core) and hinterland knowledge

Meyer & Land (2003) identified a conceptual variance between ‘core’ (threshold) and ‘hinterland’ concepts in education and pedagogy. The threshold knowledge is the core content of our subject – transformative, irreversible and the way we move our understanding forwards. However, the hinterland knowledge is the way in which we enable students to access that world. It may be through stories, videos, or examples that introduce salient points, critiques or places – but we need to be mindful of the potential for novice learners to confuse the core and the hinterland knowledge, and privilege the wrong bit! Many of my students will remember Mike Needleigh, the pig farmer, and his amazing jumpers. Fewer will be able to articulate the aspect of the Holderness case study example that his argument illustrated.

Telling too many stories, getting distracted in to anecdotes – or worse, getting students deliberately taking lessons off track by asking questions? Help colleagues to clarify the core knowledge, and the right sequence, and to carefully choose the hinterland they explore! Balancing ‘relationships’ in a classroom is critical!

The need for false balance

The intention of neutrality in topics, sometimes driven by the need to “evaluate” in specifications by presenting arguments for and against can occasionally lead to misconceptions driven by false narratives. For example, in the climate change debate, the science is now “unequivocal” about the causes – which equates to greater than 99% certainty. To present a “for and against” in this debate – as if there are equal weightings for e.g. human vs. physical causes of climate change; or that there are equal weightings of “yes it exists” vs. “no it doesn’t” is to introduce a significant misconception to students. Be wary of false balances – they happen more often than perhaps we might like to think!

Can you think of others? Have I missed some?

Having considered how and where misconceptions may arise, I think it becomes increasingly important to reflect on how “planning” or “better subject knowledge” address these challenges. I don’t think it’s just as simple as “plan better” – it’s a critical evaluation and engagement with the academic literature, the data and the changing world versus our perceptions of it, and this is a constantly evolving journey.