Putting the 'Less' into 'Lessons'...
Schools are complex organisations, and the job of a teacher is far from simple. There is, frankly, a lot to do, and significant good judgement and skill is required to perform the constant decision-making, management of interactions and relationships, time management, lesson organisation and so on which make up the daily life of teacher.
The systems and processes in which we work don't always seem to help; often, those responsible for devising said systems seem to me to get it the wrong way round. There are measures in place to simplify things which are in fact highly complex and should be recognised as such - accountability measures and judgements for individual schools for example. At the same time, there is a trend to over-complicate those things which could be made simple, or at least considerably simpler: the twenty strands which the APP materials suggest are a pre-requisite in order to understand a child's capacity in English, the complexity and abstractions of the various mark schemes, the way that, in some schools, filling all the AFL / VAK / Learning Styles / Differentiation / SEN / Literacy / Numeracy etc etc boxes required on the lesson planning form represents a feat significantly more challenging and even time-consuming than teaching the actual lesson itself...
My own view is that approaching our work with an emphasis on simplifying as many aspects as we can may be a considerable step forward. I've been influenced by being lent Simplicity Parenting - Using the Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier and More Secure Kids , which argues for simplification and 'de-cluttering' of the lives of children in the home. One technique to achieve that (which I have to admit caused some raised toddler-eyebrows, not to say massive screaming tantrums, when we 'launched the initiative' in our own home) is to reduce the number of toys that kids have access to. The average number of toys in UK homes per child was estimated at something like 150 (can't remember exactly - but a lot), and the book recommends bringing this down, on the basis that children are more likely to find depth and enjoyment in what they have through a greater restriction of choice, whilst access to too many possible outlets or activities can lead to shallow play which is repeatedly abandoned in favour of the promise of novelty and the new.
So how might this apply to schools or teachers? I may be wrong here, but having been in a lot of lessons over the past five years or so, if asked to make one suggestion for how lessons could be improved, I would offer this: simplify the structure of lessons by including fewer activities, but then put more time and thought into setting them up. On average, I'd guess lessons contain about 4 or 5 activities that kids are asked to complete. Seems reasonable, but these kids are in 5 lessons per day; if the pattern is repeated, this means up to 25 different activities every day. From that perspective, is it any wonder that we worry about engagement, about too many students drifting through their schooling, listlessly attempting at all these different things they have to do? And practically, setting up any single activity so that it contains the potential for depth and challenge for each student is hard to do - it requires time and emphasis in the lesson, students need to be made clear about the purpose and the criteria for success; tasks need modelling and discussion, and that's even before considering the need for significant time and space for feedback on how they've got on and opportunities to improve. Trying to do this with even two activities in a lesson is hard enough - more than this and we are in serious danger of providing a succession of hastily set, low-value tasks which students engage with superficially. We leave them safe in the knowledge that the lesson will inevitably move on soon anyway, that they are unlikely to be immediately held to account for the quality of what they've produced, or expected to think and reflect carefully on what they are doing and why.
I do this myself, of course - it's a difficult one to get right. In a recent observed lesson, I snatched what could have been a pretty good lesson on 'deepening explanations' from the very jaws of success by trying to fit in a quick starter about intonation. In my mind, it was to take but a few minutes (it's actually quite good - give the students the line 'Do you want ice and lemon with that?' from a barman, and they experiment with how they can influence the meaning of the line by putting emphasis on different individual words). What actually happened, inevitably, was that they didn't get it; twenty minutes in, I was still trying to get them to understand what intonation was before being forced to bring the whole activity to a sorry and rushed close, in order to even begin to get going on what I really needed them to learn in the lesson. And that required me, in just that portion of the lesson where ideally the students would be settling down to some proper, focused work, to be again teaching from the front, introducing new ideas, setting up the main activity etc, with the difficulty that their capacity at this point to continue to concentrate and think about new content was reduced. The over-complication of the lesson meant that I was asking them to jump around mentally between thinking about distinctly different skills and ideas, overloading their working memories; as a result, engagement with each part of the lesson was more superficial and the students weren't really enabled to think deeply enough about the learning.
So what do we learn from that? Well - simplify. Stop working so hard when planning - the real tragedy of this one is that it's failure stemming from diligence and commitment, from teachers thinking too much and putting too much in with the very best of intentions, anxious to make sure that the students are engaged, interested and stimulated by the variety and range of what they are asked to do. Arguably, attending lessons in five different disciplines each day builds plenty of variety in to their school lives already; if planning from the principle of simplicity means that we get kids working harder and teachers working smarter (and less), that seems like an aim well worth pursuing.
The systems and processes in which we work don't always seem to help; often, those responsible for devising said systems seem to me to get it the wrong way round. There are measures in place to simplify things which are in fact highly complex and should be recognised as such - accountability measures and judgements for individual schools for example. At the same time, there is a trend to over-complicate those things which could be made simple, or at least considerably simpler: the twenty strands which the APP materials suggest are a pre-requisite in order to understand a child's capacity in English, the complexity and abstractions of the various mark schemes, the way that, in some schools, filling all the AFL / VAK / Learning Styles / Differentiation / SEN / Literacy / Numeracy etc etc boxes required on the lesson planning form represents a feat significantly more challenging and even time-consuming than teaching the actual lesson itself...My own view is that approaching our work with an emphasis on simplifying as many aspects as we can may be a considerable step forward. I've been influenced by being lent Simplicity Parenting - Using the Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier and More Secure Kids , which argues for simplification and 'de-cluttering' of the lives of children in the home. One technique to achieve that (which I have to admit caused some raised toddler-eyebrows, not to say massive screaming tantrums, when we 'launched the initiative' in our own home) is to reduce the number of toys that kids have access to. The average number of toys in UK homes per child was estimated at something like 150 (can't remember exactly - but a lot), and the book recommends bringing this down, on the basis that children are more likely to find depth and enjoyment in what they have through a greater restriction of choice, whilst access to too many possible outlets or activities can lead to shallow play which is repeatedly abandoned in favour of the promise of novelty and the new.
So how might this apply to schools or teachers? I may be wrong here, but having been in a lot of lessons over the past five years or so, if asked to make one suggestion for how lessons could be improved, I would offer this: simplify the structure of lessons by including fewer activities, but then put more time and thought into setting them up. On average, I'd guess lessons contain about 4 or 5 activities that kids are asked to complete. Seems reasonable, but these kids are in 5 lessons per day; if the pattern is repeated, this means up to 25 different activities every day. From that perspective, is it any wonder that we worry about engagement, about too many students drifting through their schooling, listlessly attempting at all these different things they have to do? And practically, setting up any single activity so that it contains the potential for depth and challenge for each student is hard to do - it requires time and emphasis in the lesson, students need to be made clear about the purpose and the criteria for success; tasks need modelling and discussion, and that's even before considering the need for significant time and space for feedback on how they've got on and opportunities to improve. Trying to do this with even two activities in a lesson is hard enough - more than this and we are in serious danger of providing a succession of hastily set, low-value tasks which students engage with superficially. We leave them safe in the knowledge that the lesson will inevitably move on soon anyway, that they are unlikely to be immediately held to account for the quality of what they've produced, or expected to think and reflect carefully on what they are doing and why.
I do this myself, of course - it's a difficult one to get right. In a recent observed lesson, I snatched what could have been a pretty good lesson on 'deepening explanations' from the very jaws of success by trying to fit in a quick starter about intonation. In my mind, it was to take but a few minutes (it's actually quite good - give the students the line 'Do you want ice and lemon with that?' from a barman, and they experiment with how they can influence the meaning of the line by putting emphasis on different individual words). What actually happened, inevitably, was that they didn't get it; twenty minutes in, I was still trying to get them to understand what intonation was before being forced to bring the whole activity to a sorry and rushed close, in order to even begin to get going on what I really needed them to learn in the lesson. And that required me, in just that portion of the lesson where ideally the students would be settling down to some proper, focused work, to be again teaching from the front, introducing new ideas, setting up the main activity etc, with the difficulty that their capacity at this point to continue to concentrate and think about new content was reduced. The over-complication of the lesson meant that I was asking them to jump around mentally between thinking about distinctly different skills and ideas, overloading their working memories; as a result, engagement with each part of the lesson was more superficial and the students weren't really enabled to think deeply enough about the learning.
So what do we learn from that? Well - simplify. Stop working so hard when planning - the real tragedy of this one is that it's failure stemming from diligence and commitment, from teachers thinking too much and putting too much in with the very best of intentions, anxious to make sure that the students are engaged, interested and stimulated by the variety and range of what they are asked to do. Arguably, attending lessons in five different disciplines each day builds plenty of variety in to their school lives already; if planning from the principle of simplicity means that we get kids working harder and teachers working smarter (and less), that seems like an aim well worth pursuing.
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