Recently I have been thinking about evidence… what we know about what works, what we think we know about what works, evidence that we collect every day and evidence over time. Our school has gone through transformational change over the past eight years. When you’re in it every day, it’s difficult to see little shifts in learning behaviours. And unless we were doing a qualitative study (and who has time for that when working full time?), how do we track the impact that change is having?
Take a look at this video about the 3 Myths of Education it’s time to bust.
It makes the following claims that deserve some critical thought and a bit of reflection:
Tests not only track what students know and don’t know; they are a way of embedding content into long term memory.
It promotes the use of low stakes quizzes to help make memories resistant to forgetting. They suggest students “brain dump” at the end of the lesson as a way of pushing knowledge into the long term memory. It reminded me of what we taught in Study Skills at uni: go back over key points after 1 hour, 1 day and 1 week.
Learning styles aren’t as real as we think they are
I remember using learning styles as a way of getting to know my class. We’d do a quiz like a personality test and voila! I would know how to cater for them.
But this video says there’s little evidence to show that learning in one preferred style actually works. Instead, Iit promotes that students learn best when there’s variety in the way learning is presented.
Easy things to learn are easy to remember
So your kids have been blitzing their time tables and most of them can rattle them all off. Over summer they return and half of them can’t remember their 4 times tables, let alone their 12s. Argh!
Easy things to learn are actually easy to forget.
This is where maintenance is the key. Have a cycle of returning back to topics you’ve covered before. And don’t just think about maths: punctuation, vocabulary, inference, what theme is! Just because they learnt it easily and quickly a while back, doesn’t mean they will have remembered it now.
I highly recommend keeping your eyes out on these myth buster videos. And then there’s always delving into John Hattie’s research: Visible Learning
Want to find ways to collect evidence. Here’s a few tools for tracking change over time which doesn’t take hours…
- Take a quick sample of student voice. Want a really cool website? Try Engagement Sliders or create a quick Google Form. Be careful with your questions. Are you trying to find out about engagement? Confidence with content? Mindset? Then repeat later in the year.
- Look back over assessment data. What changes are you seeing?
- Don’t undervalue anecdotal evidence! We are checking in with ourselves and our students constantly during the day. Write a quick reflection about the behaviours you’re seeing and keep it in a file.
- Video the students telling you what they love. See our Learner Agency video from a while back: easy to do and collate.