At my previous school I used to run trips to Parliament. I have a vivid memory of one workshop in which one of the presenters said ‘ideas are like currency around here’. Remembering that quote got me thinking about today’s post…
Ideas are stimulating. They challenge us and make life interesting. Good ideas help us through our lives, not least at work. Education is probably not all that different from other professional spheres in terms of being flooded with ideas, often competing and contradictory. It is also probably not all that different in terms of how professionals engage ideas, or don’t engage with ideas, for a mixture of valid and not so valid reasons. Often, when confronted by a sea of ideas, it is tempting to stay on the beach you know rather than risk venturing into the water.
While I don’t claim to be a bold adventurer in that ocean of educational ideas, I do like to engage with research and see which elements may benefit my practice. Here are a few of the ideas which I’ve come across in recent years which have influenced my practice:
- Emphasis manipulation: this framework allows you to think about how you plan for progress in skill development without, working on small elements of a task while still completing the full activity. For example, working on the grip of the racquet while the student is still playing a full game of tennis. Practicing the single element would be repetitive, boring, difficult, etc. Trying to work on all elements of playing tennis at once would be impossible. Allowing the student to still play a game maintains the fun and the sense of direction – where you’re heading to – while making the teaching and the learning manageable. This isn’t limited to practical tasks though. In writing, the temptation might be to get students writing sentence-length activities all the time, however with emphasis manipulation you can still have students complete longer, more varied tasks, but the guidance and feedback only focuses on one aspect of writing at a time. Like many frameworks, many teachers may feel they already do many elements of this, but the framework may just offer a bit of structure to tighten up planning.
- Cognitive apprenticeship: another framework, this approach encourages teachers to externalise their thought processes, making them explicit and helping students to develop their disciplinary thought process – their ability to think like a geographer, a scientist or an artist. When using techniques which we might already deploy such as modelling, questioning or guided reading with a visualiser, we make sure that we don’t just share ideas, we also explain our thought processes which generate those ideas. So if we are deconstructing a text by reading along with students, we don’t just pick out quotes so that students have an annotated text, we also explain our thoughts about how we are critically reading and analysing the text.
Emphasis manipulation was introduced to me in How Learning Happens, which is a wonderful book that includes many, many ideas for teachers. I came across cognitive apprenticeship in a blog post by John Tomsett and it also featured in How Learning Happens. There is also an excellent book on cognitive apprenticeship from John Tomsett and his former colleagues at Huntington High School.
As well as ideas being intellectual currency, providing some of the stimulation which helps make work interesting, we can also think about our currency in terms of political capital. I don’t use the word political in a limited sense here: any human interaction where you’re trying to influence other people can broadly be defined as a political act.
In trying to influence people, we only have a certain amount of currency. We spend this currency with people. Depending on what, who, how and why will determine how much currency the transaction will cost us. We also need to consider how we accumulate currency – the actions, skills, ideas and qualities which give us influence.
Like any monetary currency, the ‘exchange rate’ will vary from person to person and situation and situation. The cost to influence one person to complete an action may be different to the cost of influencing another person to do the same action.
It is often helpful to think about our ability to influence people through this framework. It reminds us that our influence is not infinite. We have to pick our battles and prioritise. While it may be possible to speculate to accumulate – to win future influence off the back of a success, normally you need to accumulate first. It is essential to build goodwill, respect, reputation, etc which will give us the currency we need for the future.
Commonplace 