Teach Like a Champion 2 describes ‘Ratio’ as a teaching technique that involves the teacher weaning students off their guidance over time, so that the students are doing more of the cognitive ‘heavy lifting’ in lessons.
Adam Boxer’s article on ‘Ratio’ for his blogsite, ‘A Chemical Orthodoxy’, invites us to think about ratio in a different way: to imagine two axes. along one of which students move from not thinking at all through thinking a bit, to (eventually) thinking hard consistently in lessons. The other axis is about the proportion of students in the class who are consistently thinking hard: from none, to a few students, to many, to all etc… Obviously, the quadrant to have everyone in is the one in which all students are thinking hard for a lot of the time. Adam Boxer reminds us why this matters: learning comes from thinking hard, so we need to maximise students’ thinking hard time.
Thinking is clearly a key priority in teaching: getting students to do as much of the cognitive heavy lifting as possible, because learning only happens in our brains – it doesn’t happen on a whiteboard or in a device or in a book or in the teacher’s head – so what the students typically think hard about is crucial. And learning is hard – hence the need for teachers to use high-quality teaching techniques, including regular retrieval practice, to help make the learning stick.
Which brings me to my main point: data from the observation of teaching and from learning walks often shows that the teachers are doing the lion’s share of the work in lessons and the students are doing too little – they are too often the apparently passive recipients of teacher talk. If our aim is student learning, and if we accept that learning comes from thinking hard, we need to flip this around so that the students are doing the lion’s share of the work in lessons.
Adam Boxer’s main suggestions for getting more of the students thinking hard, for more of the time are:
1. Asking all students the question first, and waiting so they all have some time to think
2. Using ‘call and response’ a lot
3. Making sure all students are accountable and feel accountable: ‘What was the question I just asked, Amar?’ ‘What did Emma just say, Rufus?’…
4. Making sure the level of challenge is right, to encourage all students to think
5. Independent practice – lots of it
I am NOT against teacher talk – it’s an essential part of teaching. I do remember it falling out of fashion in the 2000s and 2010s, and there were strong calls from some to move students wholesale into ‘self-directed learning’; teacher talk was seen by some as the enemy of learning. I didn’t, and I don’t, subscribe to that view. John Hattie et al have made the point very well that it is absolutely possible to learn well by listening: listening hard, thinking hard while listening etc. Absolutely! Because learning is mostly about what we are doing with our brain when we encounter information.
It’s the ratios that matter. Questions like these focus our minds on the ratios:
1. How well are the specific teaching techniques I am using resulting in all students thinking hard?
2. How can I increase the proportion of my students typically thinking hard in lessons?
3. For how much of my lessons are students doing activities where they are required to think hard?
4. How can I increase the amount of time that students spend thinking hard, e.g. doing guided and independent practice in my lessons?
Too many teachers are doing the work in class, and only a small proportion of the students are working as hard. Fixing this is a priority.
