Inset (in-service training) days illicit a spectrum of reactions from teachers. Many colleagues love it when these days are turned over to department or personal time. I don’t have a problem with this. Purely selfishly, it allows me to get on top of work which would otherwise be done out of school hours in time which I’d be able to spend doing others things if I wished. I also a quite like a good CPD session. As long as it is good.
For our start of term staff day, we had a full day of training about Project Zero. Project Zero is a long-standing project based out of Harvard Graduate School of Education. One of the key themes of the project, which was the focus of our training, is ‘making thinking visible’. This links to a number of ideas which I’ve come across before, not least in Hendrick & Kirschner’s book How Learning Happens. By making a students’ thought process visible, it allows us to see what learning is taking place.
One of the strategies discussed for making thinking visible was ‘documentation’. This captures a host of practices which we already do in the classroom: written work, questioning, displays, etc. It also includes methods such as taking photographs, asking students to provide comments/feedback, recording students with audio or video, etc. Rather than the individual methods of documentation, the framing of the strategy is what stood out for me. Documentation involves an approach, a mindset, which acknowledges that we need to capture student thinking so that we can reflect on it, both independently as the teacher and in collaboration with the student. It also acknowledges that we need to be interested in the processes and not just the products of learning. I think that we sometimes view student work, which may be documentation, as a product, even when it is framed as formative as opposed to summative assessment. This doubtlessly influences the type of feedback we give and while that feedback may link to the thought-processes which students used to arrive at their work, the nature of the tasks/documents which we are providing feedback on means that we maybe don’t put the processes front and centre.
Storytelling
Another strand of the training which I was interested in was around storytelling. I’ve previously read about the power of stories and narratives in education. Willingham tells us that ‘the human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories’ (2009). So as educators we need to try and harness this cognitive capacity.
The techniques we looked at are maybe more relevant to some subjects than others, but I am particularly interested in how we could use stories to remember the complex (and vast) case study content needed in Geography. I am trialling a method where students work in pairs as storyteller and scribe. The storyteller gets to be creative but also has to embed the key facts from the case study. The scribe can only record what the storyteller says. As the pair work, they will inevitably redraft and improve the work. This is also a key step at the end of the story, as the scribe reads back what they’ve recorded and the storyteller has a chance to make changes. A challenge I often find is getting students to proof-read and redraft their work, so by making this a part of the process, especially where there is peer- as well as self-review, helps to form this habit.
I will try and let you know how I get on with this, but in the meantime here is a lovely quote on stories from the late actor Alan Rickman: ‘It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from and what might be possible.’
Learning and memory
I know that the Ofsted definition of learning as a change in long-term memory was somewhat controversial. This definition very much leans on cognitive science and is no doubt in part a hat-tip to Daniel Willingham’s assertion that ‘memory is the residue of thought’. That quote popped back into my mind when we had a quote from Project Zero co-founder David Perkins that ‘learning is a consequence of thinking’. Regardless of how you define learning, you cannot deny the connection between learning, thinking and inevitably memory.
One of the things I like about Project Zero is that it is very much not just a suite of pedagogical activities as an end in themselves, but rather as a toolkit for deepening thinking. The facilitator Jim Reese emphasised that we needed to know what we wanted students to think deeply about while doing the technique, rather than just doing the technique. I made the point to Jim that these strategies focusing on deep thinking seem to fit well with the knowledge-rich turn and focus on curriculum which the UK is undertaking. I don’t think these strategies go against direct or explicit instruction, but perhaps provide a good compliment to engage student thinking about the content which DI techniques have presented students with.
Going forward, I’d like to look at more Project Zero methods and think about how these can work within the framework of a knowledge-rich curriculum and also a greater awareness of cognitive science and the importance of memory. I don’t think there are clashes here. Rather, I think that an emphasis on thinking suits curriculum development and supports memory.
Watch this space.
Commonplace 