More videos from Sarah Cottingham
Video transcript
okay sarah what is tip number three please so uh tip number three um is uh one that’s quite close to my heart i think because it’s uh i think we all do it all the time um so tip number three is beware of the curse of knowledge so um lots of people know what the curse of knowledge is and but for those who don’t and the the curse of knowledge is that when you gain knowledge in an area and you are you’ve kind of built up um your mental model or what some people call a collection of schemas which are kind of your networks of knowledge so as you get more expert you kind of built those networks of knowledge and and you’ve streamlined your thinking on something it’s therefore very difficult for you to think like a novice again because you’ve kind of built up this schema and teachers are probably much better than most people at this because they also have schemas about how to teach their subject which has caused them to have to sort of think about how to break it down and things like that but we can never really go back to being the novice uh the novice learner so we’re always teaching in a way that overestimates what the learners in front of us are going to take from what we say we’re always thinking you know we’ve been clear enough there surely they you know i can assume they know that because these things are quite implicit but we are kind of always making those assumptions and obviously you can see what the downside of that would be and it would mean that we end up kind of pitching things too high leaving gaps and then our learners are kind of getting lost um is that okay craig if i tell you about the study that sort of linked to this because i’d be disappointed [Laughter] i really loved i really loved this study um so it was a study by elizabeth newton and what she did was she got a group of people in pairs and each pair had a tapper and a listener and the tapper was told to pick a kind of well-known song like happy birthday and they were going to like tap the song for their listener partner and um they were going to see how many of those listener partners were able to guess correctly the song from the tapping and what was really interesting was that um they said to the tappers they said you know how many of your you know listeners do you think are actually going to get this right and they predicted about 50 in real life uh it was only about 2.5 percent of people who who got it right and so it’s that idea that we’ve got this tune in our heads and i like it as a metaphor like we’ve got this tune ahead we’ve got this knowledge that we know and we’re we’re tapping it out we’re saying it to the class and we’re assuming that they’re kind of keeping up with it but actually [Laughter] maybe not that low but like yeah no not that many are wow so um i guess the obvious question is is how do we overcome this uh this this curse of knowledge as teachers is it simple as just improving our check for understanding so i think i think that’s definitely that’s definitely part of it um is like is there anything more important than a good check for understanding i’m not sure but yeah and that’s definitely part of it i think it comes in the planning stage as well and i’ve been in uh wonderful planning meetings with with uh departments where they the way they think about what they’re communicating and they how they plan to communicate and they share the examples that seem to work for their pupils with the rest of the department and they share their concrete examples they share their analogies and they share those things that really kind of um get allow their learners to understand you know at the level that their learners are at the the knowledge that they’re trying to convey so like really good really good kind of sharing of good concrete examples good analogies and sometimes even listing out the knowledge that it takes to understand a particular concept can really be eye-opening because then if you sit down you you force yourself to say like do they have these prerequisites do i know how do i know then you start to realize just how much they need to know in order to access what it is that you’re saying can i just ask you a bonus question sarah i don’t get to speak to many english english teachers or former english teachers i’m all in maths maths bubble occasionally i’m not a science teacher in there but it’s mainly math what are some of your check for understanding techniques what works well in english so i have to hold my hands up craig and say i was a terrible english teacher when i was in teacher i now feel like if i went i want i will one day go back into the classroom and hopefully be better but and it’s a bit like your book how i wish i’d taught that how i wish i taught english so i can’t say that i was particularly good at it i used to use um whiteboards for like quick and easy things that i could see and um i used to there used to be a lot of like think pair share kind of stuff that i would do i thought think pair share was particularly useful just after you had um delivered some new materials and i now realize that the reason i was finding it useful was because of that idea of what we say hits the interface of the pupils mind and changes and i think what happens when you do think per share is that you’ve allowed them that time to process like what you’ve said and link to kind of what you what they already know and you can go around and go wow that is not what i said yes yes that is not what i said at all or wow okay that’s really landed and i think it gives you that quite immediate um check uh that they’ve sort of it’s kind of hit hit the right note i suppose that’s really nice and one final thing on cursive knowledge so what about this for a twist so i didn’t see this coming right so you you’ve made the point i think it’s completely valid that perhaps teachers we are slightly better at avoiding the curse of knowledge than perhaps other other non-teachers because we’ve experienced and we’ve also yeah we think about how to teach things to novices that’s that’s the essence of the job but what about this for a twist right so i was in a school last week and it was a school where they um they set in maths and they also have parallel sets so a quite year rate to be split you’ve got two top sets and two second sets and so on and so forth just because of timetabling issues so i was working with a teacher of a bottom set year eight on one side but also the teacher of the equivalent bottom set on the other side if that makes sense the teacher one of the teachers was very experienced i think i think she’d been teaching for maybe like let’s say seven or eight years something like that the other was an rqt in her first year what was fascinating was that the experienced teacher when she was planning a lesson had much lower aspirations for where the kids were going to get to because she was saying well they’re a bottom set so she’s obviously taught lots of kids in the past or the bottom said they’re not going to get that blah blah blah so she’d set the bar fairly low the rqt didn’t have a flipping clue so she’s asking all these hard questions left right center um below and behold what happens the kids made far more progress if whatever we define progress as but they were answering more complex questions in the rqt’s lesson than in the experience teachers lessons so i just wonder whether sometimes more experience as a teacher obviously it’s a good thing but if it’s sometimes we kind of you know don’t realize that every class is different and all you know and i have these check for understanding things in there there’s a bit of a danger that that kind of curse of knowledge might actually be yeah you know what i’m trying to say in that mumble i just thought it was a fascinating kind of scenario i’ve never seen that before yeah yeah that’s that’s really interesting and it just goes to show like the expectation seems to trump most of what we’re saying here and and yeah and that knowledge could be is knowledge in different domains like knowledge of what you think um the pupils are able to achieve as well and so yeah you know i think that’s a really important one with all of these kind of tips that we’ve we’ve got is that in teaching teaching is mad isn’t it like there’s so much stuff going on everything is kind of intersecting so whereas this this this kind of tip in isolation sounds good what you’ve just said has kind of thrown that a little bit uh in a different direction which is brilliant um but yeah it’s i think i think expectations um yeah drives everything really doesn’t it they certainly do