Research School Network: Literature Review on Best Practice in Education

Louise Wareing – Innovation Fellow – Resilience Project 2016 – 2018

Introduction and Context

In the process of my research into Resilience this year, I have become fascinated by the direction of educational best practice. I did not plan to delve into this wider arena but I became hooked by books such as ​‘The Gift of Failure’, ​‘Cleverlands’, A Level Mindset and ​‘What Every Teacher needs to know about Psychology’. All of these books spoke of the importance of resilience or perseverance or mental toughness, but they also highlighted the importance of other aspects of education such as embedding memory, perfecting practice, reinforcing knowledge and mastering skills.

The context for this literature review is to acknowledge the change in focus for education, perhaps borne out of a renewed rigour and a desire for research informed practice. I have been teaching for twenty years and for much of this time lessons have been judged on evidence of the students discovering for themselves, with the teacher facilitating learning, a ​‘guide on the side’ rather than a ​‘sage on the stage’ (King, 1993).Students are judged to have made progress, lesson by lesson, through problem solving or ​‘21^st century learning’. ​‘They had worked in groups to generate their own questions to pursue. Many of them had taken the time to form hypotheses and had planned and carried out their own practical work’. (Ofsted, Successful science (2007−2010) cited in Christodoulou, 2016) Textbooks and exercise books are not considered to be important in this type of learning. However, much current thinking in education seems to be shifting back to earlier styles of learning with a focus on teacher direction, increasing amounts of knowledge, repetition, textbooks and well-presented exercise books.

This literature review will examine the reasons behind this change and evaluate whether this is really the best direction for our students.

21^st Century Learning v Domain Specific Knowledge

For much of my teaching career since the late 1990s, there has been explicit reference to preparing students for the 21^st century, with an emphasis on generic skills such as problem solving, team work, emotional intelligence, ICT, critical thinking. The overriding idea is that skills are transferable and the content is interchangeable. Christodoulou (2014) collected evidence of 228 lessons praised by Ofsted between 2010 and 2012 for their generic-skill method of education. The rationale for this method of learning is that once pupils have acquired a generic set of skills they will be able to use them in later life for whatever problems they face.

In fact, research from the field of cognitive psychology shows that skills are specific and dependent upon large bodies of domain-specific knowledge, and they are not easily transferable to different domains (Christodoulou, 2016). In order for students to be able to write essays, evaluate texts or apply scientific formulae, they must first and foremost have a deep and comprehensive understanding of the subject content. Christodoulou has created quite a stir in education with her bold book about the ​‘Seven Myths of Education’ (2014), which is scathing of 21^st century learning and the teaching of transferable skills through problem solving lessons ​‘Britain’s brightest student taking aim at teaching’s sacred cows’ (Wilby, 2014). She argues that the best way to improve our students’ learning is through deliberate practice, and this practice may look very different to the final product of a complete essay or a perfect maths solution. Crehan (2016) came to a similar conclusion through her study of Canada’s education system, which showed a significant decline in PISA scores between 2003 and 2012 after the introduction of a more discovery-based mathematics curriculum.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Many books I read highlighted the importance of subject knowledge (Christodoulou, 2014, Didau and Rose, 2016, Crehan, 2016) and discussed the best way to impart this to students. A Sutton Trust report on ​‘What makes great teaching?’ defined this as ​‘pedagogical content knowledge’ and stated that ​‘the most effective teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach’ (2014). Added to this, teachers must understand how children think, anticipate their mistakes and misconceptions, and know the foundational schemas of their subject which will help students to learn new information. Schemas are the secure foundations of prior knowledge. Long term retention of knowledge requires students to successfully integrate the new information with their schema of prior knowledge.

Methods to help knowledge stick are crucial to good teaching. Suggested ways to help students are: to frame the introduction of new knowledge in the context of older, more embedded knowledge; to introduce it in the form of a story (humans are naturally predisposed to remembering stories); to make it as relevant as possible to students’ lives. ​‘It won’t stick unless you make it meaningful to their lives’ (cited in Crehan, 2016) Images are very helpful to students’ cognitive memory, as are the occasional mnemonic. Slides containing lots of text are not helpful, unless students are left to read them on their own. Our working memory is rather limited. Research shows that humans are only really capable of handling an average of four chunks of information at any one time. (Didau and Rose, 2016)

Embedding all of this relies on very well-planned curricula, teacher directed lessons, and the encouraged use of well-designed textbooks. Reviewing previous lessons, modelling good examples, and probing questioning are all recommended by Crehan (2016) after her travels in high scoring PISA countries around the world. 21^st century learning and problem solving does not work unless students have absorbed and retained a large bank of essential subject knowledge, because without this their working memory suffers from overload.

Neil Carberry, the Director for People and Skills at the CBI, corroborated this argument when commenting on another lacklustre performance by the UK in the 2016 PISA tests: ​“The most effective response to today’s findings is focusing on what works across mathematics, reading and science — high-quality leaders teaching an engaging curriculum which delivers strong basic skills, attitudes and behaviours that can equip young people to succeed.” (quoted by Warrell, 2016)

Psychology of Memory (and revision)

Many of the books I read considered how to help students remember their learning. Embedding in memory is very difficult and students need assistance in how to do this. The very latest research has shown that brains make two copies of information – one for short-term and one for long-term. (Science Journal April, 2017; reported by Gallagher, 2017) Short-term memories are easily lost but long term memories can be retrieved with much thought and encouragement. (Didau and Rose, 2016, Crehan, 2016) Schemes of learning should consolidate learning over a long period of time. Prior learning should be reviewed fairly regularly, after a gap of two or three weeks. Absolutely crucial facts such as times tables, number bonds, grammatical rules, historical dates, are best rote-learned, since this frees up space for working memory. ​‘Having this knowledge in their long-term memory helps them enormously with other academic tasks, such as comprehension and mathematical problem solving’ (Crehan, 2016)

Students need to remember what they have learnt in lessons in order to perform well in exams. However, trivial ​‘end of lesson’ summaries or ​‘exit tickets’ (Lemov, 2015) will not reliably show that students have learnt the material from that lesson. One lesson is a poor measure of progress. The information will certainly need repeating at a later date. Fortunately, although many students will forget most of their lessons within a day (as the parent who asks their child what they have learnt that day knows) they will relearn it quicker next time, and each time it is re-encountered they will retain it for longer and longer periods. (Didau and Rose, 2016).

Mastery = Deliberate practice + Effort + systems

The focus on domain specific knowledge and students remembering all these facts requires students to put in large amounts of effort. Learning to read or learning mathematics are not natural human activities since they are not related to biological primary knowledge (Geary, 2007). Learning requires considerable motivation because ​‘it’s hard and we don’t particularly enjoy it’ (Didau and Rose, 2016). In the classroom therefore, good learning habits and a good work ethic are essential; perhaps best established through routines suggested in Lemov (2015) or Smith (2010). As well as this, students need to be enticed through interest and curiosity. An analysis of classroom management techniques is not the purpose of this literature review, but suffice to say, students should come to lessons with the expectation that they will be worked hard and it will be challenging for their brain.

The chapter on the Confucian mindset in ​‘Cleverlands’ (Crehan, 2016), highlights the effort which East Asian students bring to their studies. Many other books make reference to the 10,000 hour rule (attributed to Ericsson, 1993) of achieving mastery. The A Level Mindset (Oakes and Griffin, 2016) neatly links purposeful practice to effort, as well as vision, attitude and systems or habits, in its VESPA model. Teachers should craft lots of smaller practice drills into lessons as preparation for the final assessment. Simply put, students cannot write an essay before knowing how to craft a sentence; they cannot solve a maths problem before knowing times tables and number bonds. The deliberate practice model focuses on building the specific knowledge and mental models required for high level skill, but they will not look like the final skill. Students need to know that effort and deliberate practice of the basics are a very important part of learning. ​‘Skill is developed not by practising performances or final tasks, but by practising much narrower and more specific tasks’ (Christodoulou, 2016) Teachers should have the confidence to use this model in the classroom, as it has been used in sports coaching for years, building the skills gradually to achieve mastery over time, rather than worrying about proving progress and high challenge every lesson.

‘Mastery means giving the students the opportunity to get good at something: the chance to experience ​‘hard-won’ success through the application of effort’ (Didau and Rose, 2016). One way for teachers to help students work towards mastery in different subjects over time would be for them to be absolutely clear about the skills necessary for students to do well in their subject. Retaining the knowledge would be a given prerequisite, but using the assessment objectives from exam boards should enable staff to create a list of at most seven skills for success. This allows the students (and staff) to identify weaknesses and ensure that the students work on these to achieve mastery. (Oakes and Griffin, 2016). See Appendix 1 for history specific skills. It would be expected that the development of all these skills would take several years, would not be linear, and would not all be achieved in a few lessons. ​‘One barrier to developing this orientation in schools is the culture of seeing learning as a series of short term-performances. Better to think of learning over the long-term and seek ​‘sustained’ progress over time.’ (Didau and Rose, 2016)

Assessment and Feedback

This is perhaps the most difficult section to summarise since it is such a huge topic and the stakes for schools (and pupils) are so high. However, it links intrinsically with achieving mastery. Christodoulou has devoted a whole book to new approaches to assessment (Making Good Progress? 2016) and it is also covered significantly by Crehan (2016) and Didau and Rose (2016). Much of the original work on assessment was done by Wiliam and Black (1998) and this work was implemented in schools very quickly. I believe that I have been using assessment for learning for the vast majority of my career and the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) concluded that ​‘in comparison to other countries teachers in England give a lot of oral and written feedback to pupils’ (cited in Christodoulou, 2016). However, more recent reflection on the value of AfL is that it has been disappointing in its results: ​‘During the fifteen years of this intensive promotion to use AfL, despite its near universal adoption and strong research evidence of substantial impact on attainment, there has been no (or at best limited) effect on learning outcomes nationally’. (Coe, 2013, cited in Christodoulou, 2016).

The reasons for this are examined by Christodoulou throughout her book but are best summed up by the question: What do we want our pupils to have achieved by the end of their education? Most people would agree that the aim of education should be to produce pupils who are able to write essays, perform successful science experiments, discuss characters in a Shakespeare play, work out the standard deviation of a set of data. All of this will be tested summatively at the end of their school years. It will be the outcome of their learning and will demonstrate their mastery of different subjects. This is assessment of their learning and the aims of education, assessed summatively, are not in dispute.

What is debated are the methods we use to get the students there. ​‘Formative assessment is about methods’ (Christodoulou, 2016). Christodoulou argues that assessment for learning became excessively focused on exam tasks (tasks which should have been preserved solely for assessment of learning) due partly to the pressures of accountability, but also because the dominant theory of how we acquire skill (practising a complex skill leads one to become better at it) suggested that was the best thing to do. Formative assessment looked exactly like summative assessment. Wiliam agrees, ​‘the problem is that government told schools that it was all about monitoring pupils’ progress; it wasn’t about pupils becoming owners of their own learning’ (Quoted in Stewart, 2012).

A very brief summary of how AfL can be improved and made more true to its original form, from books by Didau and Rose (2016), Christodoulou (2016) and Crehan (2106) is through tying it more closely to subject specific knowledge and deliberate practice of smaller drills. Tests should be regular, repetitive and low stakes to help retention of knowledge. Multiple-choice questions can be very helpful at pinpointing problems of understanding. Specific and precise questions allow teachers to easily identify next steps. If textbooks exist which help teachers to put together the curriculum and assessment, they should be used. With regular, clear and purposeful feedback to students, they should make progress towards mastery.

Executive Functioning

My reading has highlighted other significant considerations for teachers. One of these is the importance of executive functioning in allowing our students to succeed in their learning. (Didau and Rose, 2016, Peters, 2012, Lahey, 2016)Unfortunately, executive function skills are not fully developed in all pre-teen students, because their brains are not fully developed (in fact latest research has stated that the brain is not fully functioning until the age of 30: Chimp Management Training, 2017). Not all students are mentally equipped for the tasks that we expect them to be able to carry out at high school. Executive functioning includes all of the following: self-control, mental flexibility, working memory, self-awareness, starting and completing tasks, organisation. Students will struggle to achieve mastery of their subjects without developing these, and it is certainly our job to try and help them, through having high standards and reprimanding them for not achieving our expected standards. Nevertheless, we should be patient with them and understand that it is not necessarily all their own fault. Lahey advises, ​‘Let them fail. Let them get upset when they make mistakes, and when they do, don’t save them. Every consequence experienced will hasten (their) acquisition of these skills.’ (Lahey, 2016)

Other key suggestions

To complete my review of best practice in education there are two final themes. One is the suggestion that streaming and setting of pupils, within schools or in different schools, leads to greater inequality in progress, with results more heavily determined by parental background (Crehan, 2016). The other is the suggestion that teachers should be given time to develop and share their pedagogical content knowledge, child development and cognitive psychology within their school timetable (Crehan, 2016), ideally through the medium of coaching. The highest scoring PISA countries which Crehan visited did just that.

Conclusion

Through my research into both resilience and educational practice this year, I have been captivated by the opportunities available to us in teaching. We are at a turning point in educational methods, with more and more evidence emerging suggesting a future dominated by domain specific knowledge, alongside deliberate practice of subject skills. This will be tested regularly in order to embed it in the long-term memory, and it will result in students being able to solve problems, pose questions and critically evaluate once they have gained mastery in their subjects. I would argue that this renewed focus on knowledge acquisition should not be seen as a return to earlier educational eras, but more as a forward thinking way to ensure that our students are able to access the 21^st century skills which have been esteemed for so long. Better use of AfL, with truly responsive feedback based on students’ mastery of the basics, will enable students to succeed in their final summative assessments. Students will still be expected to develop the transferable skills of self-reflection, creativity, problem solving and project management, but the grounding they will have in subject knowledge and skills will enable them to approach such challenges without floundering and giving up. To use Crehan’s analogy, ​‘discovery learning’ can be like making a cake, without a recipe, ingredients or tools; ​‘that is why it is helpful to stock up your shelves with the kinds of ingredients that are used in the kind of baking that you do’ (Crehan, 2016).

Louise Wareing – Innovation Fellow – Resilience Project 2016 – 2018

Bibliography (Best Practice in Education)

Books

• Boardman, C. (2016),’ Triumphs and Turbulence’ (Ebury Press)
• Birbalsingh, K. (2016) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (Woodbridge, John Catt Educational Ltd)
• Bowman, B. (2016) The Golden Rules, (Piatkus)
• Campbell, A. (2016) Winners (Pegasus)
• Christodolou, D. (2014) Seven Myths of Education (London, Routledge)
• Christodolou, D. (2016) Making Good Progress? (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
• Clarkson, S. (2015) DayDreaming, (Preston: Think Works)
• Claxton, G. (1998) Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases when you think less (Fourth Estate)
• Clough, P. & and Strycharczyk, D. (2014) Developing Mental Toughness in Young People (London: Karnac Books)
• Coyle, D. (2009), The Talent Code: Greatness isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How (New York: Bantam)
• Crehan, L. (2016) Cleverlands, (London: Unbound)
• Didau, D. & Rose, N. (2016) ​‘What every teacher needs to know about Psychology’(Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd)
• Duckworth, A. (2016) Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York, Vermilion)
• Duggan, L. & Solomons, M. (2015) Building Resilience – The 7 Steps to Creating Highly Successful Lives (Developing Potential Ltd)
• Dweck, C. (2007) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York, Ballantine Books)
• Dweck, C. (2000) Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (Psychology Press)
• Ennis, J. (2013) Unbelievable – From My Childhood Dreams To Winning Olympic Gold (Hodder)
• Epstein, D.(2014), The Sports Gene: Talent, Practice and the Truth about Success (New York, Yellow Jersey)
• Foot, T. (2007) Surviving your workload! Essential Study Habits for Sixth Formers (Tim Foot Publications)
• Froome, C. (2015), The Climb (London, Penguin)
• Geary, D.C. (2007), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual Foundations for an Evolutionary Educational Psychology’ in Carlson, J.S. and Levin, J.R. (eds.) Educating the Evolved Mind (Greenwich, CT: Information Age)
• Gladwell, M. (2009), Outliers: The Story of Success (New York, Penguin)
• Heyne, A. (2015) Master the Day: Eat, Move and Live Better With The Power of Daily Habits (Alexander Heyne)
• Hymer, B. & Gershon, M. (2014), Growth Mindset Pocketbook (Teachers’ Pocketbooks)
• Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, Penguin)
• Lahey, J. (2015) The Gift of Failure (New York: HarperCollins)
• Maxwell, J. (2012) Failing Forwards: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishing)
• Lemov, D. (2015) Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College (Jossey Bass)
• Namka, L. (2014) Teaching resilience to children (Arizona: Talk, Trust and Feel Therapeutics)
• Oakes, S. & Griffin, M. (2016) The A Level Mindset (Carmarthen, Wales: Crown House Publishing)
• Peters, S. (2012) The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness (London: Random House)
• Smith, J (2010) The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook: How your students learn more when you teach less (Crown House Publishing)
• Syed, M. (2011), Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice (London, Fourth Estate)
• Syed, M. (2016), Black Box Thinking (London, John Murray)
• Whitmore, J. (2009) Coaching for Performance, GROWing Human Potential and Purpose: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership (London: Nicholas Brealey)
• Wiggins, B. (2014) My Time (Yellow Jersey)
• Wiking, M. (2016) The Little Book of Hygge, The Danish way to live well, (Penguin Life)

Articles and Reports

• Banerjee, Weare and Farr (2013) Working with Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (British Educational Research Journal)
• Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998), Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment (London, King’s College)
• Carter, B. (2014) Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert? (BBC News Magazine, accessed 10/4/17)
• Devon, N. (2017)​‘Is teaching ​“resilience” just accepting that the world will inevitably be heartless?‘ (Guardian online, accessed 6/2/17)
• DFE, (2015) Futures in Mind (co.uk)
• Elliott, I. (2016) Poverty and Mental Health: A review to inform the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Anti-Poverty Strategy (London: Mental Health Foundation).
• Ericsson, A (1993) The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance (Psychological Review, 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363 – 406)
• Gallagher, J. (2017) Rules of memory’ beautifully’ rewritten, BBC News Website, accessed 12/4/17
• Hart, A. and Heaver, B. (2015) Resilience Approaches to Supporting Young People’s Mental Health: Appraising the Evidence Base for Schools and Communities (Brighton, University of Brighton/​Boingboing)
• Hart, A. and Williams, L (2015) Academic Resilience Approach (www.youngminds.org.uk/training_services/academic_resilience)
• Headstart Blackpool (2016) Whole School Resilience Conversation and Action Plan
• King, A (1993) From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side(College Teaching, Volume 41, no. 1, Winter 1993)
• Lahey, J. (2013) Why parents need to let their children fail(www.theatlantic.com, accessed 14/11/16)
• Lancashire County Council (2015) Lancashire Children & Young People’s Mental Health, Emotional Wellbeing and Resilience Transformation Plan 2015 – 2020 (Lancashire.gov.uk)
• Lloyd-Rose, M. (2016) While You Were Teaching: How to build students’ confidence, independence and resilience within your day to day practice.(teachfirst.co.uk)
• Price-Mitchell, M. (2015) Resilience: The Capacity to Rebuild and Grow from Adversity (TESonline, accessed 2/12/16)
• Public Health England (2014) The link between pupil health and wellbeing and attainment
• SSAT – Schools for Human Flourishing (2016) What should our schools be? (Church of England)
• Stewart, W (2012) Think you’ve implemented Assessment for Learning? (tes.com, accessed 4/4/2017)
• The Sutton Trust (2014) What Makes great Teaching? (www.sutton.trust.com)
• Walters, S. (2015) Growth Mindsets, a Literature Review(Temescal Associates)
• Warrell, H. (2016) Ambitious education reforms fail to lift UK Pisa school rankings (ft.com, 6 Dec 2016, accessed 25/4/17)
• Wilby, P. (2014) Britain’s brightest student’ taking aim at teaching’s sacred cows (Guardian online, accessed 6/2/17)

Websites

• youngminds.org.uk
• chimpmanagement.com
• howtothrive.com
• alevelmindset.com
• lancashire.gov.uk
• gov.uk
• pshe-association.org.uk
• bbc.news/health

Other sources of information

• PSHE Association
• Penn Resilience Programme
• Healthy Minds in Schools Programme
• The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues – University of Birmingham
• Cuddy, A. (2012).Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are (video) TED .com
• Duckworth, A. (2013). The Key to Success? Grit (video) TED.com

Training/​CPD

• Visit to LRGS to discuss their ​‘Values Programme’ with James Hallsworth, Assistant Headteacher
• Chimp Management Training – Tim Buckle (former GB Cyclist) and Laura Fishenden
• Research training with CUREE and Right to Succeed
• MTQ48 Coaching training with AQR
• Discussions with SEC/​teachers/​counsellors/​parents/​anyone who will listen!!

Author Louise Wareing