When I started work as an adult in further education, I realised a very simple idea which gets to the core of what Daisy is saying here - when I was writing university essays, the more I understood the subject, the more knowledge I had - the 'easier' it was to write a decent essay. In other words, the benefit was the work I had done to commit ideas and concepts into my long term memory.
yes, I also have the same experience. I am from Nepal by the way and my mother tongue is Nepali. Most boarding schools even Government schools try to teach english without connecting its meaning into the mother tongue and they think if students use the english language long enough they will magically turn into native speakers. As you have said I have observed that language dictates the way we think. The more lungistic knowledge and use more developed our thoughts are hence mother tongues are easier to understand than second languages. Using only English to teach has led the students to be unable to think in their own terms and they were forced to be failures in creative thinking. What I am getting at is that if students are able to know and understand the meaning of knowledge they gain they will be able to better utilize them and store them in the long term memory and also easily call them into their short term memory else they will have it only for a short time and forget it completely until the knowledge recieves meaning in the future , they might be recalled.
Thank you for your stimulating discussion Daisy. I largely agree with the general thrust of your account of AFL's failure but, unlike you, see the issue less in terms of a tax on short term memory (an intra-organism perspective) and more in terms of a failure to learn the semiotic codes of the various discourses that are valued in school (an inter-organism perspective). To me this is a very important difference because consideration of the latter opens the door to recognizing more precisely the cause of much educational failure and iniquity in the school system: namely, failure on the part of the teaching profession to sufficiently attend to understanding the languages of schooling or academic discourses and developing the pedagogical possibilities that follow from this. Since academic discourses operate with distinct "grammars" it is possible to describe these and design pedagogies where this is made explicit and productively available to the novices who don't know the semiotic codes, or have the requisite experience to draw upon the appropriate semiotic resources (rather like the expert chess players who are familiar with possibilities). Learning an academic field has a lot of parallels to learning a new language and not least because there are "languages" of uncommon-sense registers to master. I don't believe this angle has been adequately exploited in the education of teachers despite the obvious phenomenon of so many children being alienated from the academic aspect of the school experience. But thankfully there has been a lot of research inspired by work in applied sociolinguistics (e.g what Americans call "The Sydney School") and a tradition within the sociology of knowledge ("Legitimation Code Theory", Karl Maton) which together have developed the metalingustic/metasociological tools not only to better describe what's at stake here but also to support lesson-design principles compatible with the "deliberate practice" principle that you endorse. Still, I would have to add that this latter idea is not enough by itself. We need to understand what to be deliberate about in our pedagogical designing. (In your terminology, you talk about a "mental model") For example, students still need to master the meaning making principles of a field if they are ever to be seriously productive in it and that means, amongst other things, learning certain academic genres like evaluations, explanations, reports, and arguments. These are not just any old genres - their rhetorical functions correlate with the imperative of the fields that use them (and I'm simplifying here - for each field really has its own takes on the three genres I mentioned). Teachers could benefit students enormously by showing how to deconstruct these important genres. But, to really pull this off requires knowing something about the grammar or codes of a field and a sophisticated and uncommon way of thinking about grammar which would be at the heart of a metalanguage. Nevertheless, the social-semiotic nature of learning should never be forgotten. Perhaps it is time certain psychologists joined up with these linguists and sociologists! By the way, if I'm understanding you correctly, I'm not entirely swayed by your description/explanation distinction: I'm a big believer in accurate description for unlike poor description, it seems to me it is intimately connected to explanation - e.g. music theory not only describes certain musical phenomenon it's based on a systemic and therefore explanatory view of the phenomenon (of course that's not to suggest it exhaustively explains it). Not surprisingly, a metalanguage like music theory (which consists of accurate descriptions) has been found to be very useful for teaching music.Finally a quick note about deconstruction. For me, deconstruction is less an exercise in atomism - breaking up something into bits or "smaller chunks" as you put it - and more a matter of grasping how things are related systemically and stratally - and that's a whole other discussion but perhaps the major difference between the way we're thinking about what might go into an effective lesson design that takes feedback (I would call it joint constructing and scaffolding). All the best and thank you again! I hope we can get a dialogue going in this very important area. JEd
This is excellent. Perfect example of why teachers need to pay attention to research and ignore embedded practice. In a sense, as teacher training doesn't do this (deliberate practice), practices gets stuck, don't improve and gets fossilised. So the summative essay becomes a fossil that gets embedded and other forms of feedback are backwardly engineered (summative in disguise) or ignored. Ericsson, Bjork etc - standard stuff but largely ignored in practice. Tragically, so much teaching and learning is, therefore, the illusion of mastery. Sadly the reaction is often toblame the 'man' or 'Government' rather than sort it out within the profession.
I find the dichotomising of models such a tired problem. "Struggle doesn't lead to learning; instead, we must memorise processes." Same claim is made about baseball and basketball players, etc. "Don't play games with broad practice; instead focus on improving minute weaknesses." But how do we find a weakness? By playing the game and seeing where we struggle. Drills are very valuable, but we have to know what to drill. A standardised curriculum just places items in order and drills them one by one. A more effective approach is to put learners in a contextual environment, observe their performance, identify weaknesses then implement drills and other practices to improve their performance. I hope this sounds like I'm stating the obvious!
Fantastic presentation of the problem. I would definitely subscribe to the speaker's thinking. I always say theta there are elements that need to be remembered. I am always worried ( I have seen this happen) that PBL can result in very poor, superficial, biased results But, as an experienced teacher, I am also worried that this could finally result in discrete item teaching and testing without a clear relationship - as has been happening in my field for many years. I think the challenge will be to connect both: deliberate practice without losing sight of the final objectives.
Well, I think we just found the spokesperson for private computer corporations who want to sell learning software - break complex learning into smaller skills that can be practiced over and over. Daisy does a good job with identifying why AfL struggles - it's not the problem; it's our implementation of AfL that is the problem. But she seems to think that her proposed way of teaching is better and different than AfL, when in reality, breaking complex learning into smaller pieces, is just good teaching. Four years experience as a teacher is hardly enough classroom time to understand all learners - repeated tasks, disconnected from the authentic world - does not cause learning. That's compliant learning to get a reward.
Much as I like Daisy and her ideas - I have to agree: AfL is not the problem - the problem is how it ends up getting done. The idea behind it at the very least seems rational and I'm aware that it has implementation difficulties (because students get hooked on grades rather than actual feedback on how well they're actually learning!) - but the straight-off-the-bat assumption that AfL has failed ... that seems, based on some of the resaerch I've found about it, to be assuming facts not in evidence. "... repeated tasks, disconnected from the authentic world - does not cause learning. That's compliant learning to get a reward." Exactly ... and a dependence on grades cannot bring about actual learning. Only well-constructed feedback can do that.
With respect to the chess example, instead think of people being asked to memorize lists of letters. If the list of letters is given as words, the letters will be easier to recall compared to lists of randomly distributed strings of letters. The Grand-masters don't store thousands of chess positions, what they do is "read" the position, whereby the different positions of pieces spell different words, that is, a meaning is conveyed. When I have a word for something the individual letters that spell that word are no longer seen as independent entities, my mind prioritizes the "meaning' over individual letters. That's what the master chess players are really doing.
Very well described, @DVASHUNZ. Worth also pointing out that in her own description, the speaker suggests that the players would have "memorised" these positions through playing thousands of games, which sounds a lot like the thing she is arguing against...
Formative assessment is a simple concept. It involves three steps: eliciting evidence of student learning; interpreting that evidence; and using that evidence to move the learning forward. Better to call this the ‘ regulation of learning’ which is something that Black and William would have done in their 1998 papers had they paid more attention to the French speaking research on regulation which had been in full swing since the 1970s. The reason formative assessment ‘hasn’t worked’ is simply because the whole process is so simple that it is simply good teaching. I recommend that anyone watching this video read the work of Philippe Perrenoud who responded beautifully (and slightly patronisingly) to Black and William’s papers from 1998. His best stuff only seems available in French, however. Bonne chance!
There's a lot here. Some great, some not so great. But I question the claim made early on that Skills based learning (a curriculum organised by skills instead of academic subjects) is the dominant model in education... Can somebody show me a school in the UK (since that's where the speaker is based) where this is the case? I have yet to see a formal, mainstream school that doesn't send kids to Maths class and English class and Science class and PE, etc. Seems to me she's describing the traditional, standard model that probably 90% of schools around the whole world use, and then pretending it is a fringe concept.
But you *can* do problem solving after you have mastered "enough" to get you started. And it can involve deep thinking that changes cognition if it generates enough interest to want to persist. If learning is always dissconected (from the learner's point of view), how can it get synthesised as the end product when most have turned off "before the game".
The thing I see is that we have two different sets of mental tools the wholistic part and the detailed part, i.e. the left and right hemisphere of the brain. You might say that this theory of brain hemisphere has been debunked but when we look at the working pattern of our mind we can infer to some degree that we have two distinct kinds of mind. The wholistic mind keeps track of the bigger picture and the detailed mind tackles the problem solving by breaking it apart. You might have noticed it is easier to solve a problem by breaking them into parts.But solving the problems will not lead to their long term storage or forming a whole unless you actively try to connect them using visualization or any mental method. For this you need to use your mind calmly and practicing without taking this into account is very inefficient. Also I do agree with you on the fact that learning should be based on learners prospective. Teacher should only help with getting the basic starting gears and let the students collect what they require on the way .
The analogy to Football is a perfect demonstration of why the education system is flawed. Claim: If we want our players to be good at football, we should delay their access to playing football matches. This takes the concept of a sport, engaged in with passion and for enjoyment, and turns it into a mechanical system to be optimised. It's quite likely that exclusively running drills and delaying matches could lead to heightened skill, but this ignores what people enjoy about playing the sport... Back to education: we've ignore the possibility of learners engaging with learning out of interest and focus instead on optimising their performance for testing scenarios.
This is not quite what was said though, about football: she said that the football matches for young players were not the full 11-a-side games, that they practised in a different context that was not the same as the end goal (11-a-side). She did talk about skills practice too, but she was not recommending a complete absence of playing matches.
Of course, plenty of research on AfL, but currently there's something called AsL (Assessment as learning), where children are partners with the teacher in assessment.
Try’The seven myths of education” which fully referenced, and “Making good progress” also extensively researched. This woman has done her homework. This is not airy-fairy conjuncture or personal opinion. She knows her onions for sure
Such an expert and yet you only taught for two years. I suppose this is why you rely so heavily on other people's research in Seven Myths of Education. It's a great book but your delivery is dreadful.
When I started work as an adult in further education, I realised a very simple idea which gets to the core of what Daisy is saying here - when I was writing university essays, the more I understood the subject, the more knowledge I had - the 'easier' it was to write a decent essay.
In other words, the benefit was the work I had done to commit ideas and concepts into my long term memory.
yes, I also have the same experience. I am from Nepal by the way and my mother tongue is Nepali. Most boarding schools even Government schools try to teach english without connecting its meaning into the mother tongue and they think if students use the english language long enough they will magically turn into native speakers. As you have said I have observed that language dictates the way we think. The more lungistic knowledge and use more developed our thoughts are hence mother tongues are easier to understand than second languages. Using only English to teach has led the students to be unable to think in their own terms and they were forced to be failures in creative thinking.
What I am getting at is that if students are able to know and understand the meaning of knowledge they gain they will be able to better utilize them and store them in the long term memory and also easily call them into their short term memory else they will have it only for a short time and forget it completely until the knowledge recieves meaning in the future , they might be recalled.
Thank you for your stimulating discussion Daisy. I largely agree with the general thrust of your account of AFL's failure but, unlike you, see the issue less in terms of a tax on short term memory (an intra-organism perspective) and more in terms of a failure to learn the semiotic codes of the various discourses that are valued in school (an inter-organism perspective). To me this is a very important difference because consideration of the latter opens the door to recognizing more precisely the cause of much educational failure and iniquity in the school system: namely, failure on the part of the teaching profession to sufficiently attend to understanding the languages of schooling or academic discourses and developing the pedagogical possibilities that follow from this. Since academic discourses operate with distinct "grammars" it is possible to describe these and design pedagogies where this is made explicit and productively available to the novices who don't know the semiotic codes, or have the requisite experience to draw upon the appropriate semiotic resources (rather like the expert chess players who are familiar with possibilities). Learning an academic field has a lot of parallels to learning a new language and not least because there are "languages" of uncommon-sense registers to master. I don't believe this angle has been adequately exploited in the education of teachers despite the obvious phenomenon of so many children being alienated from the academic aspect of the school experience. But thankfully there has been a lot of research inspired by work in applied sociolinguistics (e.g what Americans call "The Sydney School") and a tradition within the sociology of knowledge ("Legitimation Code Theory", Karl Maton) which together have developed the metalingustic/metasociological tools not only to better describe what's at stake here but also to support lesson-design principles compatible with the "deliberate practice" principle that you endorse. Still, I would have to add that this latter idea is not enough by itself. We need to understand what to be deliberate about in our pedagogical designing. (In your terminology, you talk about a "mental model") For example, students still need to master the meaning making principles of a field if they are ever to be seriously productive in it and that means, amongst other things, learning certain academic genres like evaluations, explanations, reports, and arguments. These are not just any old genres - their rhetorical functions correlate with the imperative of the fields that use them (and I'm simplifying here - for each field really has its own takes on the three genres I mentioned). Teachers could benefit students enormously by showing how to deconstruct these important genres. But, to really pull this off requires knowing something about the grammar or codes of a field and a sophisticated and uncommon way of thinking about grammar which would be at the heart of a metalanguage. Nevertheless, the social-semiotic nature of learning should never be forgotten. Perhaps it is time certain psychologists joined up with these linguists and sociologists! By the way, if I'm understanding you correctly, I'm not entirely swayed by your description/explanation distinction: I'm a big believer in accurate description for unlike poor description, it seems to me it is intimately connected to explanation - e.g. music theory not only describes certain musical phenomenon it's based on a systemic and therefore explanatory view of the phenomenon (of course that's not to suggest it exhaustively explains it). Not surprisingly, a metalanguage like music theory (which consists of accurate descriptions) has been found to be very useful for teaching music.Finally a quick note about deconstruction. For me, deconstruction is less an exercise in atomism - breaking up something into bits or "smaller chunks" as you put it - and more a matter of grasping how things are related systemically and stratally - and that's a whole other discussion but perhaps the major difference between the way we're thinking about what might go into an effective lesson design that takes feedback (I would call it joint constructing and scaffolding). All the best and thank you again! I hope we can get a dialogue going in this very important area. JEd
This is excellent. Perfect example of why teachers need to pay attention to research and ignore embedded practice. In a sense, as teacher training doesn't do this (deliberate practice), practices gets stuck, don't improve and gets fossilised. So the summative essay becomes a fossil that gets embedded and other forms of feedback are backwardly engineered (summative in disguise) or ignored. Ericsson, Bjork etc - standard stuff but largely ignored in practice. Tragically, so much teaching and learning is, therefore, the illusion of mastery. Sadly the reaction is often toblame the 'man' or 'Government' rather than sort it out within the profession.
I find the dichotomising of models such a tired problem. "Struggle doesn't lead to learning; instead, we must memorise processes." Same claim is made about baseball and basketball players, etc. "Don't play games with broad practice; instead focus on improving minute weaknesses."
But how do we find a weakness? By playing the game and seeing where we struggle. Drills are very valuable, but we have to know what to drill.
A standardised curriculum just places items in order and drills them one by one. A more effective approach is to put learners in a contextual environment, observe their performance, identify weaknesses then implement drills and other practices to improve their performance. I hope this sounds like I'm stating the obvious!
Fantastic presentation of the problem. I would definitely subscribe to the speaker's thinking. I always say theta there are elements that need to be remembered. I am always worried ( I have seen this happen) that PBL can result in very poor, superficial, biased results But, as an experienced teacher, I am also worried that this could finally result in discrete item teaching and testing without a clear relationship - as has been happening in my field for many years. I think the challenge will be to connect both: deliberate practice without losing sight of the final objectives.
Well, I think we just found the spokesperson for private computer corporations who want to sell learning software - break complex learning into smaller skills that can be practiced over and over.
Daisy does a good job with identifying why AfL struggles - it's not the problem; it's our implementation of AfL that is the problem. But she seems to think that her proposed way of teaching is better and different than AfL, when in reality, breaking complex learning into smaller pieces, is just good teaching.
Four years experience as a teacher is hardly enough classroom time to understand all learners - repeated tasks, disconnected from the authentic world - does not cause learning. That's compliant learning to get a reward.
Much as I like Daisy and her ideas - I have to agree: AfL is not the problem - the problem is how it ends up getting done. The idea behind it at the very least seems rational and I'm aware that it has implementation difficulties (because students get hooked on grades rather than actual feedback on how well they're actually learning!) - but the straight-off-the-bat assumption that AfL has failed ... that seems, based on some of the resaerch I've found about it, to be assuming facts not in evidence.
"... repeated tasks, disconnected from the authentic world - does not cause learning. That's compliant learning to get a reward."
Exactly ... and a dependence on grades cannot bring about actual learning. Only well-constructed feedback can do that.
With respect to the chess example, instead think of people being asked to memorize lists of letters. If the list of letters is given as words, the letters will be easier to recall compared to lists of randomly distributed strings of letters. The Grand-masters don't store thousands of chess positions, what they do is "read" the position, whereby the different positions of pieces spell different words, that is, a meaning is conveyed. When I have a word for something the individual letters that spell that word are no longer seen as independent entities, my mind prioritizes the "meaning' over individual letters. That's what the master chess players are really doing.
True, but time is still required to remember these "position-words".
Very well described, @DVASHUNZ. Worth also pointing out that in her own description, the speaker suggests that the players would have "memorised" these positions through playing thousands of games, which sounds a lot like the thing she is arguing against...
Formative assessment is a simple concept. It involves three steps: eliciting evidence of student learning; interpreting that evidence; and using that evidence to move the learning forward. Better to call this the ‘ regulation of learning’ which is something that Black and William would have done in their 1998 papers had they paid more attention to the French speaking research on regulation which had been in full swing since the 1970s. The reason formative assessment ‘hasn’t worked’ is simply because the whole process is so simple that it is simply good teaching. I recommend that anyone watching this video read the work of Philippe Perrenoud who responded beautifully (and slightly patronisingly) to Black and William’s papers from 1998. His best stuff only seems available in French, however. Bonne chance!
Very interesting and engaging content! Thank you.
There's a lot here. Some great, some not so great. But I question the claim made early on that Skills based learning (a curriculum organised by skills instead of academic subjects) is the dominant model in education... Can somebody show me a school in the UK (since that's where the speaker is based) where this is the case? I have yet to see a formal, mainstream school that doesn't send kids to Maths class and English class and Science class and PE, etc.
Seems to me she's describing the traditional, standard model that probably 90% of schools around the whole world use, and then pretending it is a fringe concept.
But you *can* do problem solving after you have mastered "enough" to get you started. And it can involve deep thinking that changes cognition if it generates enough interest to want to persist. If learning is always dissconected (from the learner's point of view), how can it get synthesised as the end product when most have turned off "before the game".
The thing I see is that we have two different sets of mental tools the wholistic part and the detailed part, i.e. the left and right hemisphere of the brain. You might say that this theory of brain hemisphere has been debunked but when we look at the working pattern of our mind we can infer to some degree that we have two distinct kinds of mind.
The wholistic mind keeps track of the bigger picture and the detailed mind tackles the problem solving by breaking it apart. You might have noticed it is easier to solve a problem by breaking them into parts.But solving the problems will not lead to their long term storage or forming a whole unless you actively try to connect them using visualization or any mental method. For this you need to use your mind calmly and practicing without taking this into account is very inefficient.
Also I do agree with you on the fact that learning should be based on learners prospective. Teacher should only help with getting the basic starting gears and let the students collect what they require on the way .
The analogy to Football is a perfect demonstration of why the education system is flawed.
Claim: If we want our players to be good at football, we should delay their access to playing football matches.
This takes the concept of a sport, engaged in with passion and for enjoyment, and turns it into a mechanical system to be optimised.
It's quite likely that exclusively running drills and delaying matches could lead to heightened skill, but this ignores what people enjoy about playing the sport...
Back to education: we've ignore the possibility of learners engaging with learning out of interest and focus instead on optimising their performance for testing scenarios.
This is not quite what was said though, about football: she said that the football matches for young players were not the full 11-a-side games, that they practised in a different context that was not the same as the end goal (11-a-side). She did talk about skills practice too, but she was not recommending a complete absence of playing matches.
Really useful talk - thank you.
Excellent.
Very interesting topic the teachers should think about
Very interesting topic to deal with
Is there a list of sources for her claims?
Try the book: "What if everything you know about education is wrong"
Of course, plenty of research on AfL, but currently there's something called AsL (Assessment as learning), where children are partners with the teacher in assessment.
Try’The seven myths of education” which fully referenced, and “Making good progress” also extensively researched. This woman has done her homework. This is not airy-fairy conjuncture or personal opinion. She knows her onions for sure
How anybody who says "off of" can ever have been employed to teach English is beyond me!!
She is actually making good points, but her thuggy accent isn't helping. You have to go beyond her manner.
Such an expert and yet you only taught for two years. I suppose this is why you rely so heavily on other people's research in Seven Myths of Education. It's a great book but your delivery is dreadful.