Integrating evidence-informed teaching into my practise.

When I started teaching career in the late naughties there was too much pseudoscientific rubbish floating around for me to take any of the training or CPD seriously. From the ludicrous VARK to the purely commercial Brain Gym nonsense it left a massive swathe of teachers completely disillusioned with all CPD and pedigogical theories. Thankfully over the past decade evidence has finally crept into the profession. My first introduction to Professor Daniel Willingham was in 2010 in his YouTube video explaining why VARK was already known to be wrong outside the educational echo chamber of the time. Now Willingham's book, 'Why Do Students Hate School' is becoming increasingly popular amongst teachers and it can only be a good thing that teachers are starting to be more open to established neuroscience.

Evidence-based practise is a welcome breath of fresh air after too many years of the cult-like religiosity of dangerous and damaging preachers peddling easy fixes and simple answers to complex questions. The reality is that teaching well is hard. Incorporating spaced repetition, the testing effect, active recall, relationship and trust building into the classroom is not a trivial endeavour, at least for me. I am currently, as per my last evaluation, judged by my HOD as a good/outstanding teacher. However I feel that this (thankfully) doesn't completely reflect reality as I know there are many ways I could improve.

The purpose of this blog is to keep a record of my reading and attempts to improve my practise. Luckily I currently teach amazing students who require little in the way of instruction in a school without any serious behavioural issues. The worst problem facing the institution is a massive divide between the students and staff and a growing belief amongst the students that they can achieve excellent results independently. Which is most definitely the case for a sizeable proportion of the student body, and many are relying on external tutors more than their own teachers.

Unfortunately this seems to be a problem in many high achieving institutions - students lack the confidence in their own abilities and more importantly the ability of their teachers to get them through their exams. Especially in a high achieving cohort, many students may start to feel that they need extra help keeping up with their peers due to the high academic expectations. Once started, in an international context in Asia, local tutors seem to provide the safe familiarity of memorising over understanding. Drilling rote memorisation over understanding.

Many highly able and motivated students love to dive into more advanced topics without a full understanding of the basics. I've seen this in their responses to questions where they repeat a phrase, or a collection of concepts but are unable to take these ideas in combination and move forward with them. I understand this desire as when I was a student I loved to read about more advanced (interesting) physics in preference to the more basic, but fundamental, contents of the course.

I think the first thing I will work on is increasing student engagement within my lessons with a focus on forcing the most able students to spend more time focusing on the simple concepts as, to quote Willingham, "Memory is the residue of thought". I've experienced countless timeshighly able students, able to coast through the early fundamental principles with little thought, to hit a brick wall when they need to combine simple concepts in more advanced questions. Because the early steps required so little thought and were completed on autopilot, the foundation of memory and understanding simply wasn't present to built anything solid on.

I've likened this, rightly or wrongly, to the idea of chaos theory, where a seemingly simple equation or set of equations or principles can generate incredible complexity.

The Mandelbrot Set

This blog will be a series of barely coherent and random thoughts and opinions as I work to improve my teaching practise. Consistency is not my strong point but ritalin helps.