My Diminishing Returns

When I first started learning about CLT, I started to consider how to chunk knowledge and break up instruction so pupils would practice after small pieces of instruction to reduce pressure on working memory. I tried to implement what I had read about specifying exactly what knowledge pupils needed to know. One problem initially was that pupils started to look at different topics as entirely separate and could not see the links between topics. Every topic in economics is linked. When looking at a factor like increased government spending, pupils need to understand how this impacts inflation, output, the balance of payments and how these all interrelate and impact different economic agents. It is impossible to understand one topic by itself. This was partly solved by explicitly teaching the links between topics and considering questions I ask pupils, so they must think hard about links between topics. But there was still something missing. Pupils could start to see links between topi...

The best piece of feedback I ever received from a lesson was in relation to one of the least commented of Rosenshine’s principles of instruction: ensuring a high success rate. I was giving some whole class feedback and pupils were giving some generic analysis of the impact of a subsidy on a market rather than making it specific to the industry in question. After going through some examples, I gave pupils an example answer and asked them to improve it by making it more relevant to a particular industry. As pupils were completing work, it was clear that they had slightly misunderstood what they were to do and believed that they needed to include quotations from an extract (which was one example I had used) rather than the more challenging work of making their analysis relevant to the extract. The fundamental problem was that I was using the activity and the feedback from it to determine if pupils understood how to improve rather than ensuring a high success rate before they started...

The recent discussion around schools ditching some optional subjects (for a minority of pupils) to focus on core subjects and looking at the more extensive Oak National curriculum which still does not include Business has got me thinking about the reputation of Business as a subject in education. In the past 2 years teaching both Economics and Business, I have been struck by how different each subject is regarded even though they tend to be in the same department and taught by the same teachers. I think business is often seen as ‘the easy option’ not only amongst pupils but also amongst some in school leadership, with an idea that with vocational qualifications in particular that anybody can pass. There are several reasons for this, some valid and some I think based on outdated stereotypes tinged with a little snobbery. The specification is too easy Last year 65% of pupils sitting the new Business GCSE’s got a 4 or above, which is around the same as the percentage for all subj...