I recently watched Jo Facer’s ResearchED talk about
simplifying teaching, going through some of the mistakes she made in her early
teaching career and it caused me to dig out the absolute car crash of discovery-based
learning that was my first ever lesson and think about what went so wrong.
Let me take you back to September 2018. I have a group of
enthusiastic Year 12 pupils, ready for their first experience of A-Level
economics and I am going to explain the concept of scarcity and the
economicproblem. If you don’t know what these concepts mean or how they link
together than I’m afraid you are in trouble as I’ve certainly no intention of explaining
them to you in this lesson.
The Lesson
Firstly, pupils are going to look at a case study about a coffee
shop in Angel tube station (note the use of a local area to them to make this
lesson super cool and relevant).
At this point I’m not going to waste time and stifle pupil’s
creativity by explaining why we are talking about coffee shops, instead I am
going to pose some questions. Firstly, I ask ‘why is the coffee more expensive
than in nearby outlets?’
At this point, pupils are going to have an epiphany and understand
that many people want the coffee and yet there is only one supplier in the
train station, and this makes the coffee valuable. I will then state that even
though they did not know it that they have been discussing scarcity and this
mismatch of resources and needs creates value.
At this point, I would ask them
who makes the most profit from this venture. Soon they would realise that the scarce
resource is not the coffee but the location of the business and so it is the
landlord who receives the greatest return given high rents charged on this
prime piece of real estate.
Their jaws would drop to the floor in
amazement at how they had learned these pearls of economic wisdom without even
realising it. I imagine they would now stand on the desk proclaiming ‘oh
captain my captain’ with the headteacher waiting outside with a ‘teacher of the
year’ award.
For some inexplicable reason this did not happen. Instead unsurprisingly
pupils had no idea why the coffee was more expensive. After some discussion
some pupils guessed what I was thinking and stumbled on the right answer, but
most did not.
Unperturbed, I proceeded to the next part of my meticulously
planned lesson to show how scarcity leads to choices that lead to the economic problem.
Not that I wasted valuable discovery time explaining any of that. Instead, I
gave them a new worksheet where they could discover it themselves.
Pupils would work in groups and decide how much money each
stakeholder receives. During this discussion, it would suddenly dawn on them
that it was not possible to satisfy everyone’s demands and eureka! Scarcity means
choices must be made and pupils have just discovered the economic problem.
Unfortunately, pupils spent this time discussing their
favourite coffee.
What went wrong
The problem is that I am teaching novice learners and they
have no bank of knowledge (or information in their long-term memories) to draw
upon when making these discoveries. Newton spoke about standing on the
shoulders of giants, but my pupils had their feet firmly on the floor and I had
no intention of giving them a leg up.
When pupils don’t have anything in their long-term memory to
draw upon, then all they have is their working memory where they are processing
new information. The problem being that this working memory can only hold a
limited amount of information (somewhere between 4 and 7 depending on what
research you look at)
Now if a pupil knows nothing about the subject, then they
will have to rely on the processes of their working memory as their isn’t anything
in their long term memory to draw upon yet. However, whilst this intrinsic load
is inevitable, the reason my ‘lesson’ impeded learning was the extraneous load
(how the information was given to them)
Rather than devoting their limited working memory to thinking
about scarcity, they were thinking about how a coffee shop works, what coffee
is more expensive, thinking about what the differences are, what the coffee in
angel is like, if an employee deserves more money than a manager etc
Effectively, anything and everything apart from what I wanted
them to think about, what scarcity is and how it leads to the economic problem.
As Kirscher, Sweller and Clark have explained, when teaching a novice learner,
we can reduce this extraneous load and optimise their thinking on the actual
content by explicitly teaching what we want pupils to understand. This way,
they are devoting their processing ability only on what we want them to
understand.
Unsurprisingly, those pupils who already knew a bit about
scarcity just about understood what I was saying whilst the rest left my lesson
completely clueless. If the purpose of teaching is to effect a change in long
term memory, I had abjectly failed.
What I would do now.
I re-taught that lesson this year. This time, I started by using
a similar example of a coffee shop as a concrete example of scarcity but
crucially I then went from concrete to abstract to explicitly explain what
scarcity was, asking questions as I went to check for understanding.
Next pupils answered multiple questions on this to practice
and I circulated giving individual support and then feedback to the whole
class. When I was satisfied that we were ready to move on, I then explicitly
explained why scarcity leads to choices needing to be made (again using
concrete examples initially and then non-examples to highlight the limits of
the concept) Pupils would answer questions and then complete practice questions on this to ensure
they understand both the concept of the economic problem and the links between
this and scarcity.
In a future lesson (following some retrieval practice and
worked examples of how these links can be expressed in extended writing) pupils
would complete independent work, applying these concepts to a variety of
different situations.
Learning about cognitive load theory and the merits of
explicit teaching has transformed my teaching and more importantly, the impact
I can have on my pupils. I just wish I had read more from people like Jo and Paul
earlier!