Top 5 Ways to Explain - badly...
There have been some fantastic blogs appearing recently on what seems a bafflingly marginalised topic in much teacher training and INSET: the techniques and strategies behind constructing clear, effective and memorable explanations. Having taught lower attaining English GCSE groups for the last five years, I've gained plenty of experience in the challenges of constructing effective explanations. Many of the students I've taught have not been well-equipped to independently resolve ambiguity in the explanations that they hear, so I've had to learn to move in the direction of clarity and focus, improving the quality of my explanations in various ways.
I don't feel I've got much to add to the increasing body of advice in this area, beyond promoting blogs like this from Andy Tharby on analogy, this and this from David Didau and Tom Sherrington on explanation generally, and this from Alex Quigley on the power of metaphor. What I do have, however, is some examples of some of the ways that I've managed to get explanations wrong; habits and tendencies I've displayed which have inadvertently impeded the quality of explanation that I have delivered. Here are 5 ways in which I feel that, on reflection, I've stuffed it up at various points over the last 14 years - I know that the 'deficit model' isn't the flavour of the month amongst edu-thinkers at present, but rest assured; the very moment at which I feel that my leadership of myself is becoming repressively negative and brutally destructive of my own morale, I'll put a stop to it and remind myself of how great I am really...
To get in the way of my ability to explain things to students, I have (in no particular order):
1 - Assumed knowledge that they didn't have.
I once spent fifteen minutes trying to get a class to draw inferences about the fact that Curley's wife in Of Mice and Men wears 'ostrich feathers' before realising that half of them weren't really sure what an ostrich was, never mind the number of ostrich-related factoids that it was necessary to have in order to make the sort of inferences I was after.
The same applies to procedural, skills-focused knowledge; I spent a few years trying to get students to write analytically about 'how a writer uses language for effect' before realising that a good number of the students fundamentally did not understand what that idea meant, to the extent that any explanation or modelling of how to do it made no difference to their performance whatsoever. I was PEE-ing in the wind, by assuming a level of conceptual understanding from the students that wasn't securely in place. My explanations used to be along the lines of 'so, this means, you know, when the writer uses alliteration and metaphors and things' - a perfect illustration of the ways that trying to explain concepts without models inevitably means drawing on other abstract concepts. This then doesn't help, as they may well not understand those either. These days, I try to be much slower and more careful, giving more time getting students to think about 'technique' in various contexts, such as sport, drawing, cooking etc, before then dwelling on how this might apply to writing.
2 - Tried to elicit knowledge from them that I already knew that they didn't know.
I once taught a lesson, for instance, on the topic of 'apartheid', in order to prepare for analysing a poem on that topic. Had you asked me before the lesson 'do you think these students know what apartheid is?' I would have said (I think) something along the lines of 'a couple might, but most of them no, probably not'. So - did I begin by explaining it to them, as clearly as possible, with models, stories and examples? No! I began with a Think-Pair-Share on 'what does apartheid mean?', essentially opening proceedings with a pointless, low-value, unachievable invitation for distraction which vacuum-sucked twenty minutes out of the lesson - time that I could have used getting them to learn about apartheid in the context of the poem once I'd finally got around to explaining to them what it was! A masterstroke of poor lesson design, starting by asking them to explain to each other and then to me material that I knew they didn't know, in retrospect, does not seem an especially efficient way to proceed. Even if it did have 'think time'...
3 - Explained concepts in the abstract without contextual modelling or exemplification.
This is problematic in English, where indicators of quality in writing, for example, are inevitably abstract and contestable. I recall trying to get students to write with greater 'precision', and using the analogy of a Thierry Henry free kick going right into the top corner. Looking back, I was at least partly motivated in this by the semi-subconscious hope that some of the boys might 'connect', both grasping the concept and, through realising that I was in fact a pretty cool guy who liked football and everything, become less inclined to disregard my desperate attempts to drag them towards a C grade at GCSE by actually doing some work now and then.
Thinking back on this with the benefit of having learnt a bit more about explanation, the problems seem twofold: the first is that a footballer kicking a ball into a goal is hopelessly out of context when really I wanted to teach them to write 'it was scorching' rather than 'it was hot' in whatever godforsaken, unloved past exam paper task I was failing to teach them to complete (on that, my favourite ever GCSE exam task was something like 'Write a letter to the parents of your friend, persuading them to let him / her come with you on an adventure holiday' - a literally incredible task, in that it managed to ask for something that had never been attempted or even remotely considered by any teenager, anywhere, ever, and never ever will be thought of again).
The second flaw in my explanatory plan was that my attempts to appeal to their interests actually served as a massive distraction from thinking about the concept I wanted to explain, instead provoking a lively debate about the extent to which Thierry Henry could or could not be accurately described as an overrated tosser. Now - had I shown sufficient agility as a teacher I could possibly have used this discussion to furnish a sparky impromptu burst of teaching on the structure of writing to argue; sadly, as it played out in reality, I did not.
4 - Covered too much ground.
I think most teachers would agree with and welcome the end of the 'dark period' wherein teacher talk was viewed as an unwelcome and undesirable element of practice - all that 'guide on the side' stuff which never quite convinced. There seems to be a growing acceptance that the sharing of expertise and factual or procedural knowledge from the teacher is in fact of central importance in classrooms. However, if we accept brain science theories that working memory capacity is limited, this does mean that students have a finite capacity to think deeply about new material; in practice, this means that droning on about loads and loads of stuff for ages and ages doesn't work. I have never been much of one for going on and on - I get tired and need a sit down - but I do remember a few pretty dispiriting experiences near exam time, particularly when giving the dreaded after-school 'revision booster' sessions. I was driven by the hope that by telling the students as much as possible in 45 minutes I could take advantage of their newly-stretched, stress-fuelled attention spans to pump them full of what they needed. In reality, it often turned into just an exhausted teacher trawling through too many slides in front of exhausted kids. It was the verbal equivalent of those massive, in-house photocopied 'revision booklets' that schools provide in a panic about two weeks before the exam, and which are only looked at by about 8% of students - in fact, the 8% that you really aren't worried about anyway.
5 - Peppered my explanation with loads and loads of pointless, low value, socially-awkward 'guess what's in my head' questions - questioning for the sake of questioning.
Linked to number 2 above, this is just a bad habit, and one that I now tend to manage by consciously restricting the number of questions I ask or take from the floor. This helps, I think, as it reduces opportunities for distraction and retains focus. I once had an enlightening discussion with a student after a lesson, where we talked about how she had felt / what she'd thought during an unsuccessful bit of my pointless questioning, during a lesson revising features of quality writing prior to a mock. It had gone something like this:
Clearly, this hadn't gone as well as I'd hoped; the reality is that the exchange illustrates some of the perils of purposeless questioning - if I'd wanted to know how well she understood question 1, my best option was to get her to do a bit of writing and mark it. This isn't an argument for no questioning at all, ever; of course there are many occasions when verbal teacher questioning is essential for prompting thought and gauging understanding; for me though, excessive, habitual and 'scattergun' questioning has, at times, impeded the quality of teaching more than it's helped.
So - there we go - I feel I ought to conclude by restating that I've got better at this stuff and try to avoid making these sorts of errors these days (just in case there are any parents / colleagues / current or prospective employers reading). I've loved the experience of becoming much more technique-aware in relation to explanations and am grateful to those bloggers and writers who've helped my reflection here - there are so many genuinely helpful, inspiring and invigorating blogs out there these days so I'll end by thanking all those who've put their time into writing them, and please, keep them coming.
I don't feel I've got much to add to the increasing body of advice in this area, beyond promoting blogs like this from Andy Tharby on analogy, this and this from David Didau and Tom Sherrington on explanation generally, and this from Alex Quigley on the power of metaphor. What I do have, however, is some examples of some of the ways that I've managed to get explanations wrong; habits and tendencies I've displayed which have inadvertently impeded the quality of explanation that I have delivered. Here are 5 ways in which I feel that, on reflection, I've stuffed it up at various points over the last 14 years - I know that the 'deficit model' isn't the flavour of the month amongst edu-thinkers at present, but rest assured; the very moment at which I feel that my leadership of myself is becoming repressively negative and brutally destructive of my own morale, I'll put a stop to it and remind myself of how great I am really...
To get in the way of my ability to explain things to students, I have (in no particular order):
1 - Assumed knowledge that they didn't have.
I once spent fifteen minutes trying to get a class to draw inferences about the fact that Curley's wife in Of Mice and Men wears 'ostrich feathers' before realising that half of them weren't really sure what an ostrich was, never mind the number of ostrich-related factoids that it was necessary to have in order to make the sort of inferences I was after.
The same applies to procedural, skills-focused knowledge; I spent a few years trying to get students to write analytically about 'how a writer uses language for effect' before realising that a good number of the students fundamentally did not understand what that idea meant, to the extent that any explanation or modelling of how to do it made no difference to their performance whatsoever. I was PEE-ing in the wind, by assuming a level of conceptual understanding from the students that wasn't securely in place. My explanations used to be along the lines of 'so, this means, you know, when the writer uses alliteration and metaphors and things' - a perfect illustration of the ways that trying to explain concepts without models inevitably means drawing on other abstract concepts. This then doesn't help, as they may well not understand those either. These days, I try to be much slower and more careful, giving more time getting students to think about 'technique' in various contexts, such as sport, drawing, cooking etc, before then dwelling on how this might apply to writing.
2 - Tried to elicit knowledge from them that I already knew that they didn't know.
I once taught a lesson, for instance, on the topic of 'apartheid', in order to prepare for analysing a poem on that topic. Had you asked me before the lesson 'do you think these students know what apartheid is?' I would have said (I think) something along the lines of 'a couple might, but most of them no, probably not'. So - did I begin by explaining it to them, as clearly as possible, with models, stories and examples? No! I began with a Think-Pair-Share on 'what does apartheid mean?', essentially opening proceedings with a pointless, low-value, unachievable invitation for distraction which vacuum-sucked twenty minutes out of the lesson - time that I could have used getting them to learn about apartheid in the context of the poem once I'd finally got around to explaining to them what it was! A masterstroke of poor lesson design, starting by asking them to explain to each other and then to me material that I knew they didn't know, in retrospect, does not seem an especially efficient way to proceed. Even if it did have 'think time'...
3 - Explained concepts in the abstract without contextual modelling or exemplification.
This is problematic in English, where indicators of quality in writing, for example, are inevitably abstract and contestable. I recall trying to get students to write with greater 'precision', and using the analogy of a Thierry Henry free kick going right into the top corner. Looking back, I was at least partly motivated in this by the semi-subconscious hope that some of the boys might 'connect', both grasping the concept and, through realising that I was in fact a pretty cool guy who liked football and everything, become less inclined to disregard my desperate attempts to drag them towards a C grade at GCSE by actually doing some work now and then.
Thinking back on this with the benefit of having learnt a bit more about explanation, the problems seem twofold: the first is that a footballer kicking a ball into a goal is hopelessly out of context when really I wanted to teach them to write 'it was scorching' rather than 'it was hot' in whatever godforsaken, unloved past exam paper task I was failing to teach them to complete (on that, my favourite ever GCSE exam task was something like 'Write a letter to the parents of your friend, persuading them to let him / her come with you on an adventure holiday' - a literally incredible task, in that it managed to ask for something that had never been attempted or even remotely considered by any teenager, anywhere, ever, and never ever will be thought of again).
The second flaw in my explanatory plan was that my attempts to appeal to their interests actually served as a massive distraction from thinking about the concept I wanted to explain, instead provoking a lively debate about the extent to which Thierry Henry could or could not be accurately described as an overrated tosser. Now - had I shown sufficient agility as a teacher I could possibly have used this discussion to furnish a sparky impromptu burst of teaching on the structure of writing to argue; sadly, as it played out in reality, I did not.
4 - Covered too much ground.
I think most teachers would agree with and welcome the end of the 'dark period' wherein teacher talk was viewed as an unwelcome and undesirable element of practice - all that 'guide on the side' stuff which never quite convinced. There seems to be a growing acceptance that the sharing of expertise and factual or procedural knowledge from the teacher is in fact of central importance in classrooms. However, if we accept brain science theories that working memory capacity is limited, this does mean that students have a finite capacity to think deeply about new material; in practice, this means that droning on about loads and loads of stuff for ages and ages doesn't work. I have never been much of one for going on and on - I get tired and need a sit down - but I do remember a few pretty dispiriting experiences near exam time, particularly when giving the dreaded after-school 'revision booster' sessions. I was driven by the hope that by telling the students as much as possible in 45 minutes I could take advantage of their newly-stretched, stress-fuelled attention spans to pump them full of what they needed. In reality, it often turned into just an exhausted teacher trawling through too many slides in front of exhausted kids. It was the verbal equivalent of those massive, in-house photocopied 'revision booklets' that schools provide in a panic about two weeks before the exam, and which are only looked at by about 8% of students - in fact, the 8% that you really aren't worried about anyway.
5 - Peppered my explanation with loads and loads of pointless, low value, socially-awkward 'guess what's in my head' questions - questioning for the sake of questioning.
Linked to number 2 above, this is just a bad habit, and one that I now tend to manage by consciously restricting the number of questions I ask or take from the floor. This helps, I think, as it reduces opportunities for distraction and retains focus. I once had an enlightening discussion with a student after a lesson, where we talked about how she had felt / what she'd thought during an unsuccessful bit of my pointless questioning, during a lesson revising features of quality writing prior to a mock. It had gone something like this:
So - there we go - I feel I ought to conclude by restating that I've got better at this stuff and try to avoid making these sorts of errors these days (just in case there are any parents / colleagues / current or prospective employers reading). I've loved the experience of becoming much more technique-aware in relation to explanations and am grateful to those bloggers and writers who've helped my reflection here - there are so many genuinely helpful, inspiring and invigorating blogs out there these days so I'll end by thanking all those who've put their time into writing them, and please, keep them coming.
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