Seductive Pedagogy v Bullshit Teaching

Why Impact Matters

Regular readers will know that I’m mildly obsessed with impact. So much of what I see in schools and in blogs looks to me as though it will have little or no impact.

But, I trust none of my judgements. So, I then go looking for impact. Am I right or am I simply biased?

In a school, it is easy. You look at the subject Progress 8 over time. You do the same for teachers, and compare them over time with colleagues in their department. And then finally, compare those students they taught, finding their Progress 8 in all their other subjects. I’ve ‘saved’ a few teachers this way, whose classroom practice offended leaders in different ways.

The MET project shows that progress data of more than one year should form 50% of our judgement about a teacher’s impact, lesson observations (if they are frequent enough and done in pairs) 25%, and student voice 25%.

That said, if I just want to predict the progress of a teacher next year, this composite judgement is not the best measure.

Instead, I should simply use the Progress 8 score.

“Simply put, indicators of state value added are the best predictors of a teacher’s impact on state test scores, classroom observation scores are the best predictors of a teacher’s classroom practice, and student surveys are the best predictors of student perceptions of the teacher.”

I frequently teach colleagues how to use the school Performance Tables to unpick the performance of schools and MATs in a whole range of ways. And then, to double check, compare schools to the 50 other most similar schools in the country, using FFT’s Schools Like Yours.

Progress 8 of 0.5 looks awesome, but then you find it is a girls’ school with 30% EAL, 40% enter as high achievers, only 15% are pupil premium. Compare it to 50 schools like that. Suddenly they are ranked at 45 out of 51. (I’ve made these figures up by the way, but you get the idea).

This could be an area of bias - so obviously, I go to check the data.

For example, I put in Didcot Girls’ School and find their Progress 8 of +0.97 places them 4th in the list of their 51 schools. The school closest to 0.5 has 0.49 Progress 8. Their ranking is 30th. They probably think they are the bees knees.

Seductive Pedagogy

Anything you read that codifies, describes, explains and names an aspect of teaching is likely to be kosher. Naming stuff really helps everyone understand what it is and to apply it.

But these names, and their codification into a system are problematic. Teachers and leaders have a really poor track record of making them scalable.

We love these names and systems. Teach Like a Champion has over 60. The Writing Revolution has God knows how many. Tom Sherrington has 160+ walkthroughs! In the smallest school, access to these will cost you only £1,340.

It’s very difficult to use these effectively.

One of the major problems is that teachers and leaders focus on the ‘thing’ they’ve named, and don’t focus on learning.

This is how I am defining learning:

Students think hard, work hard and remember more.

You know students are not doing these three when you look at progress in the ways I’ve outlined. And it happens all the time.

Bullshit Teaching

Bullshit teaching is what happens when we get obsessed by the codified names, the systems, the books, the courses.

If I train any teacher on any technique, I know they might apply it in all sorts of ineffective ways.

The only way I have found to make it work is to get them to answer this question:

In this activity, how till the students think hard, work hard or remember more?

The named ‘thing’, whatever technique you are using, or whatever activity the students are doing to be ‘engaged’ in the lesson is only secondary. Learning is what matters.

Once teachers ask themselves this question about everything they do, they constantly improve. It is the compound interest of teaching.

Case Study of 1

I can be pretty sure my daughter doesn’t bother reading this because we talk about teaching a couple of times a month.

She’s is just starting her fifth year. In her first two years, she taught health and social care GCSE and A level, and her students made better progress than her head of department’s classes.

In her second two years she was head of psychology, and her A level and AS level results were the best her very high achieving school had ever had.

Now she is teaching English in New Zealand, and is already having similar impact on the students’ external assessments after only 6 weeks. In their end of year exams, her students scored highest in the school. (30 English teachers, 3400 students). She has also been promoted.

I’ve never seen her teach.

When we talk about teaching, we only talk about this:

How till the students think hard, work hard or remember more?

She isn’t brilliant because of all the fantastic techniques I have taught her. She is brilliant because of this one technique (and obviously all the other qualities she has).

How do I know she is brilliant? Impact. Multiple subjects, multiple schools, same results.

Case Studies of 1000s

I’m writing this post because I read a David Didau blog about teaching techniques.

It is brilliantly reasoned, as always. He put himself on the line, teaching a group of students on stage for 30 minutes. He chose to teach them about An Inspector Calls. This is what he says about the students:

These were all students I hadn’t met previously and the only thing I knew about them was that they had all studied An Inspector Calls. Before we went on stage, I checked that all the students had been taught about capitalism and socialism.

These are the named ‘things’, the teaching techniques he demonstrated. The pedagogy:

Attention

• Students were asked to display answers they had written on MWBs

• Students were cold called

• I circulated the ‘room’ to see that students were doing what was expected

• Students were asked to repeat what I and their their peers had said

Making meaning

• Students were asked to write ideas on MWBs in response to prompts

• Students were asked to turn and talk to exchange ideas

• Students were asked to rephrase ideas in their own words

• I asked students to explain their partners’ ideas

Consolidation

• Students were asked to improve answers on their MWBs using new vocabulary and academic language which had been rehearsed during the lesson

• Students were asked to reframe what other students had said

• Students were given multiple opportunities to practise using new vocabulary

In 30 minutes!

That is genuinely impressive.

But is it Bullshit Teaching?

Well, to answer that, we have to ask the universal question about learning.

In this activity, how till the students think hard, work hard or remember more?

This is what David says the students learned:

We ended up with something like, ‘Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls in order to criticise capitalism and promote socialism.’ I went through a process of getting students to repeat the answer with it both visible and concealed until I was fairly sure everyone had it down pat.

We spent the final few moments exploring the extent to which students agreed or disagreed with the statement, And that was about all we had time for in 30 minutes.

It is entirely possible that no student learned anything they did not know already.

The best case scenario - that everyone learned this 13 word thesis statement still fails all 3 parts of my definition of learning.

You could use the time very differently to get the students to learn so much more. So could David. I’m sure that if he had decided to demonstrate what students can learn in 30 minutes, instead of how you can teach with lots of techniques, his students would have learned a lot, lot more.

His problem is that he has been seduced by the techniques. We are all seduced by these. But, seductive pedagogy = bullshit teaching.

But, is this bias? How would I know?

David Didau has been overseeing the English curriculum at Ormiston Academies for 3 years. There are 29 schools. Only 6 of them have a positive English Progress 8, and their mean is -0.28. This compares to the mean P8 for the schools as a whole of -0.29.

Impact matters.

If you want to make fantastic progress with your students in English teaching (without bullshit teaching) you’ll definitely enjoy my book, The Full English. You can find it here.