A recent twitter exchange around poor uses of evidence got me thinking about when "evidence" can actually do more harm than good. As can often be the case no matter the viewpoint, "evidence" can be found to support it (just type "learning styles" into google to find multiple sources still advocating its use in teaching). Sometimes we just have to change the goalposts. Or sometimes we conveniently ignore the caveats within the evidence. But more often than not, we want to make changes that we believe will improve our pupils' learning and so rush to put a new idea into place, sometimes without giving it due consideration. Looking past the headlines is crucial because these changes aren't without risk, and in some cases maintaining the status quo may have been better for our students than trying to crowbar in "the evidence".
Novice vs Experts
A critical difference between novices and experts is that they see things qualitatively differently: they are able to easily look beyond the surface features and see the underpinnings of problems and structures (demonstrated by this experiment from Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser). Novices are also not 'mini-experts', "not only do experts have more knowledge and can work faster than beginners, they also look at or tackle problems differently (i.e. what you know determines what you see)". Furthermore expertise and novice are not binary states, or mutually exclusive - you could easily be an expert in one area (e.g. a phase/subject specialism) and a novice in another (a different phase/subject); it's also likely that you may have been more expert in certain areas at one point than you are now (I'm definitely not as good at German now compared to when I sat my A-level exam for it!). Expertise can be thought of as a spectrum that will vary depending on the subject matter and the familiarity with it.
What this means for us as teachers is, when we're looking to add to our teaching toolbox and incorporate a new strategy into our practice, we will be more novice than expert. We may look to copy someone we have seen using it effectively, or who we know is proficient in its use and whilst this certainly isn't a bad idea, it's probably better seen as a starting point rather than something we can "pick up and drop" into our own practice. We'll likely be less adept at identifying when it is and isn't used effectively and therefore less likely to know when to use it effectively ourselves. In essence:
"When we define teaching by the visible practices we see, without attending to the role these practices have in the overall lesson, novices are likely to use their newly acquired practices at the wrong times, in the wrong places, or for the wrong reason" - Mary Kennedy, Parsing the Practice of Teaching
We must first build our background knowledge, so not just an understanding of what "the strategy" is, but also how it works, why it works, and crucially what its limitations are. One of my favourite quotes that I always come back to was from a former colleague who said, "the only thing worse than a bad idea, is a good idea badly used". Knowing the boundary conditions of strategies is a crucial facet of effective usage because the stakes are so high for teachers: get it wrong and we run the risk of ending up worse off than if we'd simply done nothing! Students may end up with more misconceptions/less new knowledge which can put us into a vicious cycle of students getting things wrong leading to demotivation, which means they're less likely to correct their knowledge and so get more things wrong...
Let's look at a common strategy that is being widely used at the moment.
Retrieval Practice
Retrieval practice is a well established technique that, when used appropriately, can be a major driver of improve pupil learning. A reason it can be so beneficial to long-term learning links to what we know about how memory works. Bjork and Bjork describe any item in memory as having two strengths: a retrieval strength (how easily accessibly a memory is) and a storage strength (how durable a memory is i.e. how long we could go without retrieving it and still be able to access it, something like the number plate of an old car). Each time we retrieve a memory, we increase both its retrieval strength and its storage strength, so we make it easier to retrieve in future and ensure that we'll retain it for longer.
However, if the retrieval strength of the memory is too low to be successfully retrieved (i.e. for all intents and purpose it has been forgotten) then it's likely that impact of retrieval won't be the case - we can't retrieve something if there's nothing to retrieve! So retrieval practice can only have an impact when there is a likelihood of successful retrieval. But let's say our students do retrieve something, but it's incorrect. If students have internalised the wrong information initially then all we're doing is increasing the retrieval and storage strengths of that information! So not only are they not remembering the right thing, they're now actively consolidating the wrong thing!
This means that when planning any sort of retrieval practice we need to consider questions like:
What will our students be able to recall?
What will we do if they can't recall it?
What will we do if they recall the wrong information?
So having looked at what can go wrong, we'll look at how it can go right by unpacking these questions in the next post.
Comments