1. Teachers must ‘make learning fun’
Learning is hard. It requires focused effort over time, and teachers need to design learning activities that match the content they are teaching (the activities used to teach swimming will differ from those used to teach fractions etc…) – that is what matters most in teaching. Enjoyment in school learning should mostly come from the learning itself – from the sense of accomplishment in learning what is being taught – and teachers should not feel under pressure to ‘gamify’ their teaching – teaching is hard enough without the added requirement to make everything a game or to ‘make it fun’. Of course, teachers who have a sense of humour and can have a bit of fun with their class may well enjoy their teaching more; they may also enjoy better relationships with their students, who often appreciate a bit of humour and certainly benefit from good relationships with their teachers.
2. It’s fine to ‘multi-task’ whilst learning
‘Multi-tasking’ involves doing two or more things simultaneously or within a single timeframe (a single timeframe means, for example, watching an episode of ‘Vikings’ whilst doing a homework).
When it comes to learning things, multi-tasking always hampers learning. Yes, we can write an essay whilst listening to music or half-watching a film on Netflix, but to the extent that we pay any attention at all to the music or the film, this will draw our attention from our school-work. In any case, we are almost never multi-tasking in the sense of doing two things at exactly the same time; what we are doing is mentally switching between the tasks, possibly very rapidly – mental switching always comes at a cost for learning. The extent to which it harms learning will depend on the level of attention given to each activity – if I have music playing in the background that I am largely ignoring while I am working, the harm may be small, whereas if it’s Meatloaf belting out ‘Bat out of Hell’ and I’m joining in, the cost may be very high indeed. We can’t multi-task without a mental cost, so we are much better off focusing on the learning when we are trying to learn.
3. Discovery learning’ is a highly effective way to learn new things at school
In the ‘real world’, for example when we are out and about in a forest, it is great fun to go and ‘discover’ things. Children do a lot of this kind of thing; they discover new things every day. And when people are pushing the boundaries of learning, for example in science and technology, this often involves defining a problem or a question and then seeking a solution or an answer where none already exists – this is how innovations and new inventions often come about. But, for the most part, school learning is not ‘discovery learning’ – the answers are already known to the teacher. Yes, a teacher can reasonably ask a class of 8 year-olds what they already know about how electricity works as they begin a new module of work on electricity, but it would be a misuse of precious learning time if the teacher allocated six lessons to students working in groups to try to discover for themselves, with minimal input, how electricity works. In general, direct instruction by teachers is far more effective for the kind of learning that happens in school than discovery learning. We teach a thing; we get students doing guided practice of the thing; then independent practice; we ask questions and do quizzes and tests and we find out what they know/remember, and we help them fill in their learning gaps; and then we provide plenty of opportunities for retrieval practice over time – that’s effective teaching, in a nutshell, and there’s very little room in it for discovery learning.
4. Everyone learns differently, so teachers need to tailor their teaching to learners’ ‘preferred learning style’
Everyone doesn’t learn differently; everyone learns very similarly. And while some people express a preference for doing certain kinds of things to learn, there is no evidence that they actually do learn better by doing those things. Teachers should select activities for students to do based on the content they want them to learn, not based on whether they are so-called visual or auditory or kinaesthetic learners – or any of the plethora of other ‘learning styles’ you can easily read about on the internet. As John Hattie and Gregory Yates say in ‘Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn’ (2014), ‘…it is nonsense to hold the idea that some of your students can be classified as visual learners whereas others, within the same class, are auditory learners. There simply is no known validity to making any such classifications on the basis of either neurology or genuine behavioural performance.’
5. Today’s ‘digital natives’ should be mostly taught using online tools
There is no question that people born since, say, the 1990s, have grown up using far more technology than my generation (born in 1964). But learning is learning is learning. Whatever tools we use to learn – whether they be books, or other people, or online programmes – the learning process barely changes: we process information in our short term memory and if we focus on it, think about it and do something with it and then retrieve it over time, at least some of it will make the journey into our long term memory – where ‘information’ becomes ‘learning’. Online tools can certainly help us learn well; so can many other activities. The Golden Rule – already mentioned above – is to match the learning activity to the content being delivered.
6. Teachers need to ‘personalise’ learning to the individual needs of their students
In an ideal world, teachers would provide all students with a generous amount of one to one tuition, because one to one tuition can be tailored to the individual characteristics and circumstances of individual students – such as, what the student already knows about x. But the world we live in includes typical classes of 20 to 30 students, and one to one teacher attention is a very scarce resource. It is just not possible for teachers to tailor their lessons to the individual needs of every student in the class, because every student is unique; how would a teacher typically do it? Fortunately, learners share many characteristics – the key one being how learning happens in our brains – and this makes the teaching of groups and classes feasible. Some ‘personalisation’ is clearly possible, such as when a teacher provides verbal or written feedback on an individual student’s work, or when the teacher directs a specific question at a specific student – but this is small-scale in comparison with the bulk of teaching and learning time, when teachers need to devise good-quality activities for students to do and do their best to support and extend them.
7. Hands up’ is an effective way to do whole-class questioning
In a typical class of thirty, there will be a number of students who put up their hand frequently, others who will sometimes put up their hand (typically, when they are confident they know the ‘answer’), and still others who will rarely put up their hand. I remember well teaching one student French who put up his hand to answer every question I asked, irrespective – it soon turned out – of whether he knew the answer. When I asked him why he did it, he said it was ‘because you want us to, Sir’. He was right. I certainly did want them to, in 1995. The problem with typically using hands-up in whole-class questioning is that in the main it only benefits those who put up their hand. Questioning is one of the most common teaching techniques in the world (which is a good thing) but teachers have a duty to ALL of their students – not just the ‘smart’ ones and the keen ones and the confident ones – so their questioning needs to oblige everyone to think. Teachers who typically ask questions of everyone, obliging everyone to think and be ready to answer, are doing a better job for all their students than those who typically allow hands-up.
8. Homework should be mostly about doing extended projects and other independent learning activities
I am not saying there is no place for students to do independent work at home. Particularly for senior students, such as those studying for GCSEs and A levels/Level 3 BTECs, there will be a need to do independent work at home, including some extended work (Art is a good example of this: lots of Portfolio work). But for the majority of students, and for almost all of the time with younger students, there are better things to do with homework. Homework should be mostly about doing activities that consolidate the ‘learning’ done at school. Consolidation work has three key benefits: first, it’s reasonable to assume that what teachers are teaching at school are the most important things the students need to know – so, consolidating what is being taught at school should logically be the most important thing students can typically do at home; second, learning typically requires regular retrieval practice, and homework as retrieval practice is pure consolidation work; and third, it’s hard for students to get stuck doing retrieval practice as consolidation work – we don’t want students to get stuck doing homework because they may not be able to get unstuck (if a student is stuck in class, they may have to wait for help but they can probably get it). All three of these benefits of consolidating learning are present in the self-quizzing homework we promote at HBK.
9. Testing is mostly about finding out what students have learned by the end of a topic/module/year
Testing used to be almost exclusively used to assess what students had learned by the end of a module/topic/year; students would take their test and get their marks and feel good or bad and then move on to the next thing. I still remember well the last-minute cramming I would always do the night before the end-of-year exams when I was at secondary school – alas, this was the only time I ever did any revision. The word ‘Testing’ still conjures up negative feelings in many people’s minds, even though we now know that testing and quizzing should be used as some of our most powerful learning techniques. For me, there are two key decisions for teachers to make, once they have decided what to teach (the curriculum): the first is how they will present new information – how exactly will I teach that thing? What activities will students do in order to practise? etc…; the second is how they will get students to do regular retrieval practice of the newly-acquired knowledge – testing, in the form of self-quizzing, quizzes and tests, is the pre-eminent form of retrieval practice.
10. We don’t need to store information in our brain because it’s all available to us on the internet
If we have nothing in our brain, we have nothing to think with. If we have nothing in our brain, we have nothing to think about. When we learn something new, usually this involves the new information sticking to something we already know. For example, I already know that the seat of UK Government is in Westminster; I know what the Houses of Parliament look like; I know that MPs go to the House of Commons to debate issues and pass laws and so on. If I visit Parliament and go on a tour and find out some new things, this new information adheres to my UK-Parliament-schema that is already in my head – knowledge sticks to knowledge. This is probably a simplification of what happens, but we do have interconnected webs of knowledge in our heads that new knowledge adheres to – which is why the more we know, the more we can learn.
If I have very little in my head, and instead am happy to look things up anytime I want to know something, I won’t be very ‘smart’. Intelligence is no doubt a complex area but in simple terms it’s partly about our capacity to process new things, and mostly about the quantity and quality of what we know. To a very great extent, we are what we know. Have you ever met a professor who knew very little about their field but who could certainly do a fabulous job of looking things up?
