For some, ‘independent learning’ is the holy grail of education. Teaching students how to learn by themselves, without the need for teachers, is what they believe schools should be aiming to do. In writing them, it is usually useful to include the terms ‘ know’, ‘ understand’ or ‘ be able to’, which helps communicate that the learning will relate to knowledge, understanding or skills, respectively. Success criteria relate to the evidence you are looking for to determine if students have learned what you intended. A useful acronym is WILF: ‘WhatIamLookingFor’.

The Teaching A 5-Minute Guide to: Cognitive Load Theory – The Teaching

Taken from The Teaching Delusion 3: Power Up Your Pedagogyby Bruce Robertson, published by John Catt Educational. Misunderstandings about the relationship between knowledge and skills typically leads to an over-emphasis on skills in the curriculum. This is what we see in schools that claim to have ‘skills-based’ curricula. It can be useful to revisit learning intentions during lessons, reminding students of the learning focus. By the end of the lesson, something should have changed: students should know something that they didn’t before, they should be able to do something that they couldn’t before, or they should have improved at something. Every lesson should impact on learning; every lesson should count. Success Criteria

Activities that allow the teacher to find out what students know or can do already (in relation to what is being taught in this lesson); It is important that learning intentions are clearly communicated with students. Good practice is to do this both verbally and visually. However, saying this is very different from saying that students need to copy downthe learning intentions (and success criteria) for lessons. Some schools insist that teachers get students to do that, but students learn nothing from doing so and it just wastes valuable learning time. Revisiting learning intentions Secondly, differentiating in this way creates learning gaps. If students learn different things, a gap between what one student knows compared to another automatically appears. If students are taught in different ways, some will learn in the best ways, and some won’t. Common sense tells us this will also lead to gaps. Activities that require students to recall knowledge from previous lessons, which may or may not be relevant to this lesson, but which needs to be learned as part of the course; I am a maths teacher looking to share good ideas for use in the classroom, with a current interest in integrating educational research into my practice. Categories

The Teaching Delusion - Some Reflections - Interactive Maths The Teaching Delusion - Some Reflections - Interactive Maths

In theory, the principle that teachers should take steps to cater for natural differences between students is a sensible and equitable one. However, this does notmean that different students in a class should be taught:

In a personalised approach to learning, all students willlearn to some extent. However, this extent will differ from student to student, depending on what they are being taught and how. The gap between students who know and can do the most and students who know and can do the least will never be closed. Sadly, this is often misunderstood. In a misguided attempt to ‘personalise’ the curriculum according to interest and preference, some schools advocate approaches designed to do exactly this. They are making a big mistake. Principally, there are two reasons why. Consuming time and learning gaps Although I have suggested that it is ‘good load’, as is often the case, we can have too much of a good thing. Too much intrinsic load will lead to cognitive overload. Hence, we are trying to optimiseit.

The Teaching Delusion: Why teaching in our classrooms and

Any debate about whether skills are more important than knowledge – or vice versa – is a false one. Both are equally important. With this in mind, it doesn’t make sense to be arguing for a ‘skills-based curriculum’ or against a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’. Allcurricula are knowledge-based, skills-orientated. Even if the sixteen-year-old is more motivatedto learn (which isn’t guaranteed) or has developed better study skills(that many haven’t), they will be as novice in the particular knowledge domain they are learning as the equivalent for the eight-year-old. Accordingly, both age groups will benefit significantly and equally from Specific Teaching approaches with a teacher. The teacher will help students to learn fasterand betterthan they could have on their own.And now to what I found to be the most interesting and useful part of the whole book: the Lesson Evaluation Toolkit. Robertson sells this as a key part to developing a culture of improving teaching, as it can be used in many ways: