In a 2011 Ofsted report entitled ‘Excellence in English: what we can learn from 12 outstanding schools’ a subject leader described her view of English as ‘getting out the plasticine and paint’ (quoted in ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers’, 2016). Next time our students have to answer a challenging essay question on Hamlet, I am sure our English teachers will not be getting out the plasticine and paint.
In recent years, the importance of promoting knowledge has been recognised by many educationalists, after a long period when the promotion of skills dominated and knowledge was seen, certainly by some people, as incidental or as only as a means to a ‘higher’ end: skills. In his book ‘Making Kids Cleverer’, David Didau says: ‘Knowledge trumps all else … Everything is knowledge. No one can think about something they don’t know’. For Didau, prioritising skills over knowledge is wrong, because whilst both matter, knowledge comes first. I agree. Saying that skills are more important than knowledge is like saying that the cake is more important than its ingredients. Without the ingredients, there’s no cake.
People who doubt this should ask themselves the question: What are skills? Before reading on, try to answer it for yourself – pause for a moment and define the word ‘skills’ in a sentence.
The most concise definition of skills I’ve seen is: Skills = knowledge plus practice. In other words, without knowledge, there is nothing to practice; without practice, of course, there is no skill – but first, you need knowledge. This is true, too, when it comes to applying knowledge in school subjects: the application of knowledge is crucial, particularly at the higher levels, but you have to have the knowledge in the first place, in order to apply it.
The point about the makeup of skills is easy to exemplify. Let’s take the skill of driving: when we start learning, we sit in the driver’s seat and we learn the basics, usually by being coached: ‘To start the car, put the key in here and turn it …. to turn right, move this lever here … when you want to stop, put your foot on this pedal here … just squeeze it, don’t stamp’… and so on. This is all factual knowledge; like all other skills, driving consists of layers of factual knowledge made into a process through practice – that’s it. There’s nothing mystical about skills, they’re just knowledge and enough practice to result in a greater or lesser degree of automaticity.
Being able to write functionally well is also knowledge plus practice: we learn early on that these squiggles are letters; we are shown how to make them on paper and we have a go; a lot later, we learn what a full stop is and how to use it; we learn about ‘doing words’, too, and main clauses and subordinate clauses and connectives and so on; and over years we learn to write reasonably well, through lots of practice. Although writing is much more complex than driving, it’s still lots of individual units of knowledge, practised and practised. Michael Fordham puts it very nicely in his blog, ‘Knowledge as the currency of teaching’: ‘To be taught, skill must be converted into knowledge, which is the currency of teaching, and then it must be converted back at the other end, via practice’.
The key point here is that to be taught skills have to be broken down into teachable parts, and those teachable parts are individual units of knowledge. When we actually come to analyse skill development, this is self-evident, but what clouds our thinking is that once a skill has developed – through practice – it’s easy for us to forget how we got there. We probably don’t remember actually learning to read, we just remember being able to do it.
There should be no tension between knowledge and skills because both matter a lot, but knowledge is both useful in its own right – I know what erosion is, I know the steps of the design process, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge… and it is also essential for the development of skills. David Didau is right: we need lots of knowledge to be ‘smart’, we need lots of knowledge to be skilful – knowledge is the key.
For me, this matters because schools have a duty, in Michael Young’s words, to ‘enable young people to acquire the knowledge that, for most of them, cannot be acquired at home or in the community’ (‘What are schools for?’, 2011). This focus on teaching powerful knowledge involves, first, a commitment to its importance and second, careful planning for the systematic teaching of lots and lots of it. Schemes of work that specify the knowledge to be taught, in a carefully sequenced way, create a spiral curriculum (‘spiral’ meaning that we plan to loop back repeatedly to the key knowledge as we move upwards through the curriculum), that should lead to daily, weekly, monthly and yearly retrieval practice. Without systematic knowledge retrieval, learning just doesn’t stick. That has to be our mindset in school.
One further point to make about skills: they are tied to specific domains and they only transfer uneasily between those domains, if they transfer at all. Creativity, for example, is domain-based. Picasso was a very creative artist but it is very unlikely that he would have been able to successfully apply the creativity so evident in his art to, say, quantum physics or rice farming. Analysis, too, is largely domain-specific: world-class Chess players can in seconds analyse the position of the pieces on the board with a view to future moves with extraordinary efficiency, because of the plethora of Chess schemas they have stored in long-term memory. But would this well-honed ability to analyse in Chess help them to analyse a Chaucer poem? No, it would not.
Here is Daniel Willingham, in his article ‘21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead (Teaching for the 21st Century, September 2009): ‘We know we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it. For example, a student might have learned that thinking scientifically requires understanding the importance of anomalous results in an experiment. If you’re surprised by the results of an experiment, that suggests that your hypothesis was wrong and the data are telling you something interesting. But to be surprised, you must make a prediction in the first place – and you can only generate a prediction if you understand the domain in which you are working. Thus, without content knowledge we often cannot use thinking skills properly and effectively’.
Take-aways
- We need to prioritise students acquiring lots of knowledge, from Day 1, in school
- This requires curriculum planning that specifies in detail the knowledge students should gain from the work they will do (good textbooks help with this, of course)
- We need both knowledge and skills in order to thrive; the skills depend on knowledge – without lots of knowledge, there is no skill
- Knowledge sticks, and grows, through retrieval practice. After the presentation of new content, retrieval practice is the single most important activity for students to do – without it, knowledge won’t stick
- Like knowledge, skills are domain-specific
Knowing things makes us smart; the more we know, the smarter we are.
Kind regards,
Mark Patterson
Principal
Hinchingbrooke School
Brampton Road
Huntingdon
Cambs PE29 3BN
Part of the ACES Academies Trust
