More videos from Sarah Cottingham
Video transcript
right sarah that was fantastic okay what is your second tip you’ve got for us today okay so my second tip is probably the one i feel most passionate about which is um always build on what the learner knows and i feel like we all intuitively know what i mean by that like build on prior knowledge that seems like a really obvious thing um but through kind of my studying of educational neuroscience and through like reading and stuff like that i’ve realized i’ve come to realize that this is just under appreciated by myself and others that people will only learn stuff that connects to what they already know otherwise we’re kind of doing more kind of like rote learning and trying to sort of brand something onto their brains rather than kind of like stitch it into kind of like the tapestry of what they know so we want to always like pick up the thread of what they already know and link that in to the new material and and what we already know as people it just completely shapes what we learn we pay attention to stuff based on what we already know so we’re you know as a teacher we know this when you were first training and you were told to go into that expert teachers lesson and watch what they were doing and then come away and emulate it you’d go and you’d sit there and you’d go this just looks like magic like there’s no way i’m going to be able to teach like this because you don’t have a mental model that allows you to see what’s really happening um in that lesson so you often want to go in with somebody else who’s more experienced you can whisper in your ear and kind of tell them what you’re doing or you want to go and see someone who’s kind of just a notch above where you are and have some support with that but we don’t see stuff we miss stuff based on our prior knowledge our prior knowledge dictates what we actually see of the world and it also dictates therefore what we can learn so if we’ve got really good prior knowledge of something it acts like that kind of mental velcro and we’re able to learn stuff far more quickly if we don’t have a lot of prior knowledge we don’t and we need stuff like break broken down and really carefully linked in to what we know so i just think what blows my mind about about the stuff we already have in our in our brains in our mental models is that it fully dictates what we get out of any situation and what we can learn and i just think that’s yeah so important well okay we are we need to we need to dig into this this is this is brilliant i’m a bit obsessed with this as well and the other thing i kind of add to that as well if you agree it also our prior knowledge also kind of determines the things we pay attention to as well right like it’s it’s not just well and obviously what we pay attention to is what we learn you can get two to teachers of different experiences or to students of different prior knowledges and they will be looking at completely different things like i always think students if you give them a kind of contextual maths problem some kids will be focusing on one thing like a surface feature whereas the others will be looking at i was immediately notice the deep math and as you say to take your teacher example there you’ll get two teachers watching a lesson and they’ll pick completely different aspects out of it because of their prior knowledge and experience the attention part’s fascinating isn’t it it is absolutely fascinating you’re totally right and i think that’s that’s why i think this is one of the most important things that people can know and if i think another another important thing that was drawn to my attention by someone i’m speaking to yesterday who’s absolutely brilliant he was saying you know your knowledge ceremony you’re kind of seeing knowledge in quite a narrow way think about knowledge it depends on people’s cultures yeah if you’re teaching an re lesson you’re trying to build on um someone’s knowledge of christianity you know what is their knowledge of christianity it’s not just what you taught them last lesson or last half term it comes from their their background as well and actually you know how often do we kind of dig into how someone thinks about the knowledge that we’re teaching in that way and it might be more applicable in some subjects than other subjects but yes it’s it’s certainly absolutely fascinating this is interesting so okay it’s a couple of big questions here which again they may be bad questions and vague questions where do you see people go wrong with this and you could approach this from either kind of teachers trying to get better or teachers working with students where do people go wrong where do they how do they not do this if that makes sense so i think i think when you when you recognize just the fundamental importance of what somebody knows and then you also recognize that everybody knows different stuff even if they follow the same curriculum with you it’s it’s better if they have if they follow that curriculum and you know that you’ve inherited this class off um craig barton and you know that he would have taught them this stuff so you know you can kind of bank on that being in you know their prior knowledge that’s really helpful but even then everybody’s got this this different knowledge because everybody is different and that’s both simultaneously brilliant and really annoying as a teacher and so i think that where where it can kind of fall down is that people don’t appreciate quite how idiosyncratic everybody’s like prior knowledge is and so we might ask like one one hinge question with a misconception and think right gosh they’ve got it like let’s move on actually checks for understanding um does need to be quite like deeper than that and there’s a there’s a brilliant blog i read a little while ago that we’re not checking um we’re not checking that they understand we’re checking what they understand because they’re not going to understand exactly what you transmitted to them but what direction did they take that knowledge in did they take it in the misconception way did they take it in the you know understood it exactly as the teacher said it way or do they take it in some other way and how do we check for that understanding and i think we think we’re good at checking for understanding because we’ve got all of these techniques to do it now but if do we really under do we really appreciate kind of how different everybody’s knowledge is and how many directions we can take things in and are um checking for understanding is it robust enough i suppose is my is my annoying question uh there sarah i am frantically scribbling here i’ve got tons of everything you say i’m just ideas are flying here so i’ve got a few things to ask you anything could come out my mouth here just just so the first thing to say is anytime i think about this checking for understanding i always go back i go back to dylan william just just generally in life anyway he’s always got a quote for summit but i really like well he has his classic thing of we need to start where the student is not where we think i want the student to be i i always like that one but i also like what he says and i’ve fallen into this trap where i’ve said to kids come on you’re in year nine surely you know this and dylan’s point is well the way you get into year nine is you’re in year eight and you have a summer holiday and then you’re in year nine like there’s no you know it’s not like you have to pass an exam or anything to move up a year so yeah but i so that was the first thing i wanted to say the same thing i love this check what they understand that’s really that feels really powerful to me so i’m a big big user of diagnostic questions to um to check for check for prior knowledge particularly prerequisite knowledge i really like using them for that but the the kind of advantage of diagnostic questions is they’re really quick to ask and collect responses in but of course the downside is well first it’s multiple choice you could guess but if but also it’s a very kind of you’re assessing a very specific thing certainly with maths like if i ask a diagnostic question on equivalent fractions it’s a very specific thing i’m assessing their understanding of but if i really want to know what they know about it that one question is probably not going to cut it so either i need to ask more questions or i need to ask them to explain their responses that sometimes works quite well or generate their own examples it’s it’s taking it above and beyond isn’t it to go and this idea of depth in terms of check for understanding i think we often think in terms of depth of kind of new learning and learning something new going deeper but a deeper check for understanding checking what they understand that feels really good again just just a ramble there sarah no so important and i i need to credit um johnny grand on twitter who who said the check check what understanding which is just an absolute light bulb moment for me and brilliant blogger um and um i think like what you just said there really hits to the heart of something which is but what does it mean to understand in your subject like we can say that i you know we know that i’ve taught it they learned it is is false um but like what does it mean that learning isn’t banking information learning is developing the mental model so what does it look at like at different stages of that development of mental modelling in maths in history whatever it is and therefore what do we use to check that different those different levels of understanding and so for example like your diagnostic questions brilliant and then it’s like so can you explain to me why the answer isn’t c yeah and you you will do all of that stuff that stuff craig but it just gets you to that level of of check that’s like that’s that’s actually like it’s it’s appreciating that understanding develops over time and then it’s not something that just happens flipping egg right well i do i’ve got one kind of comment and then one um question so feel free to comment on the on my comment or feel free just to kind of nod on or share your edit because that’s nonsense so the um the thing i often get when i say to teachers okay right we’re going to do a pre uh it’s a good idea to do a pre-requisite knowledge i’m going to need to dig a bit deeper and so on and so forth they’ll say well i haven’t got time i don’t have the time the curriculum so jam-packed my time has got to be spent teaching the kids the new stuff because we’ll never get to the end of the scheme of work or whatever it is and my response is always well if you don’t do the prior knowledge check and that knowledge isn’t there they’re going to come unstuck later on and it’s just going to cost you more time as things go through would that be kind of do you hear this and it would that be kind of your response as well or is there anything else we can say yeah i think that it’s it’s a great it’s a great response but it’s a great question like that time is so so precious and if we’re going to ask teachers to do something we have to be sure don’t we that it’s something that um is worth their time um and i think um your your answer is is great there craig like yeah you almost don’t have time not to do this yes that’s because absolutely um because if we appreciate that they’re only gonna make things meaningful and that’s going to so forgetting happens doesn’t it we know but forgetting is way more likely to happen faster if uh we’ve tried to kind of brand it onto their their memories rather than like linked it in and we can only link it in if we understand what they know so it’s worth in my opinion worth the time uh time investment as you say i love it final question on this and this is something i had a discussion with joe morgan and a math teacher who was on the show and she said and when she said this i thought you know you’re absolutely right here she said a lot of emphasis goes on training teachers and supporting teachers to get better at this checking for understanding whether it’s mini whiteboards diagnostic questions whatever it may be but if we then don’t put equal emphasis on how you then respond to that information then it’s a waste of time and i see this in lessons it’s unbelievable like you’ll get a teacher who does a prerequisite knowledge check after kids don’t have a flipping clue what’s going on with it and teacher just cracks on or the teacher just says okay well you do it this way and then moves on assuming that that one sentence explanation is going to magically do it and do you see this that actually the respond part of responsive teaching sometimes gets kind of overshadowed by the actual mechanisms of collecting in those responses if that makes sense oh 100 and i think i think it links into what we were saying in the in tip number one um which is is about that we need to understand learning and the mental model that sits behind these techniques if we understand that we’re supposed to be checking for understanding and here’s a technique to check for understanding then it we fall short because you know we just think that that’s the job done the check for understanding but if we realize that the check for understanding and that’s an inbuilt part of our schema that we need to check for understanding in order to then um change our teaching because learning only happens when we link to what they know now we know they know something different and then then we realize that it’s this process and this well what what ollie cav talks about as a loop you know we’ve checked for understanding and then we’ve responded and checked for once and then we’ve responded so it’s like it becomes part of a loop rather than like done the technique tick move on