5. Do we need to worry about pedagogy at all?
In my second school, I saw first hand the limitations of an approach to education that was too focused on pedagogy and didn’t spend enough time thinking about curriculum. I described the pedagogical device of project-based learning, in one case making mini golf courses. I found that letting students immerse themselves in physics ended in them learning little in the way of physics at all.
In this piece I will look at the opposite end of the spectrum: one which focuses on curriculum and pays little attention to pedagogy. Advocates of this approach tend to redraw the parameters of the knowledge-skills debate.
Isn’t it all just knowledge?
Curriculum-focused teachers tend to say that skills are just another aspect of knowledge. They argue that the distinction is in fact between categories of knowledge like knowing how and knowing that; procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge; substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge.
In each case, there is an information component to the knowledge, and a component which provides some means of using or applying that information in concrete situations.
Christine Counsell provides further clarity on the matter by making the distinction between subject-specific skills and generic skills. ‘If … then …’ sentences are subject-specific skills: they can be used to explain scientific phenomena from the structure of the alveoli to the trends in the periodic table. They would not be much use, however, in the analysis of a Shakespeare play or the causes of the First World War. Counsell has acutely critiqued the wish to find models (in the thought structure sense) that are applicable across the subjects; in short, she argues, they don’t exist.
We may accept that there are two components of knowledge, information and subject-specific skills, but this still doesn’t tell us how to teach. In fact, by making such distinctions, curriculum-focused teachers often arrive at a mistaken conclusion. They see teaching as a matter of making students memorise the information component, before explicitly practising the skills component.
This is mistaken because in reality the two are inseparable; to reason in a subject-specific way is to display both components of knowledge simultaneously.
Building a pedagogy-free curriculum
I once tried explicitly to separate knowledge and skills in my own practice. In my last school, I reacted to the experience of not having a clearly defined curriculum by trying to build one that specified everything. The topic was electricity and magnetism at GCSE, an area of physics students find notoriously difficult to grasp.
First, following advice I’d read on Joe Kirby’s blog (formerly of Michaela, now of Jane Austen College, part of the Inspiration Trust), I tried to think up every single question a student could possibly be asked. If they could answer all of them, I reasoned, they’d have a pretty solid grasp of electricity.
Next, I sequenced these questions into what felt like a logical order, and split them across a range of lessons. I worked out where I would need to do modelling and which tasks needed to be assessed. I prepared quizzes for the start of each lesson and multiple choice hinge questions for the middle or end.
During the planning phase, I didn’t think about pedagogy at all. My fellow physics teacher commented that the slides looked a bit sparse. “It doesn’t matter!” I said to him. “What matters is the knowledge.”
What I didn’t understand at the time was that my conception of knowledge was itself sadly lacking.
Can knowledge and skills be separated?
I found myself drawing the same diagram — a schematic view of the internal structure of a metal — again and again. Unfortunately, the flicker of recognition and understanding on the part of the students scarcely strengthened over time. I asked certain core recall questions again and again too, but was surprised week after week that many students had failed to memorise the information.
In hindsight, I’d fallen into the trap of thinking teaching is the two stage process described above: memorisation followed by application. Yet as Professor Jan Derry at UCL has argued, information is never isolated and abstract. We must always fit it into a broader scheme.
It is only through the application of an idea that we get a feel for how it sits in relation to everything else. This understanding of the relations between concepts makes for a firmer structure within our memory. Application and memorisation therefore happen simultaneously.
Problems with the two stage model
Many of the theoreticians of the ‘knowledge-rich’ movement admit that “you cannot unscramble an egg”, i.e. separate the information part and the skills part of knowledge. Yet the view that teaching is a two stage process remains pervasive in much ‘knowledge-rich’ practice. There are schools which insist on students memorising large banks of definitions at KS3, regardless of whether they mean anything to the student.
A Year 8 might be able to tell me that an angle measures ‘the amount of turn’, or that hubris means ‘excessive pride’, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about geometry or the human condition.
Once students have memorised these arbitrary definitions, they are likely to be taught that solving problems involves memorising a procedure, or that every piece of extended writing may be reduced to its meeting certain subject-specific success criteria.
In my experience, this leads to students writing mechanically, following models to the letter, and never seeking to think beyond the bare minimum needed to tick the boxes. Worse, it leads to them being successful performers of procedures without having understood what they’re actually trying to learn.
Is performing the same as knowing?
I once saw this happen in a maths lesson. The teacher gave the students a problem: what is ⅙ divided by 5? The students had been taught a procedure: take the reciprocal of the second fraction and multiply the two fractions together. They were practising this procedure on mini-whiteboards.
Some students had got confused and taken the reciprocal of the first fraction. They wrote an answer of 30/1 onto their whiteboards. The teacher gave them the feedback that they’d taken the reciprocal of the wrong fraction.
This was to miss a broader point, however. The students were starting with a fraction, a whole divided into five. They were then further dividing this fraction by six: splitting a slice of the cake into six smaller, identical parts.
Any answer of 30/1 — i.e. thirty cakes, not one cake divided into thirty pieces — showed a complete lack of understanding of what the symbols and operations they were working with actually meant. The teacher’s feedback, focused solely on procedure, entirely failed to address this fundamental misconception.
Such problems arise when we confuse abstractions from the performances of knowledgeable persons with the knowledge they are displaying. A numerate person may well follow the procedure outlined above, but this would be underpinned by a sound understanding of the concept of fractions and divisions.
Likewise, someone well-versed in the scientific discipline would of course score highly on quizzes, which test solely the information component of knowledge. They would also perform well at problem solving, writing essays, doing exam papers, or anything else that requires them to display subject-specific skills.
It’s natural that we want our students to be successful in these tasks too. We must remember however that these are abstractions from the practices of knowledgeable persons. The knowledge itself is not separable in such simple terms.
Something we have or something we are?
A major flaw in the teaching practices I’ve described above is that they conceive of knowledge as something we have. Each piece of information, skill or procedure can be formulated in advance; ready to be packaged and delivered by the teacher, practised and stored by the student.
Yet it seems to me that much of what is required to be successful in a discipline is manifested in unpredictable, spontaneous action: making links between unlikely concepts or domains; visualising a problem in a unique manner; capturing an idea or feeling with a new metaphor.
In the next article, I will argue instead that knowledge is something we are. It frames every aspect of our thought, speech and action, thus shaping our very identity. We should not think of a knowledgeable person primarily as having lots of information and subject-specific skills. Instead, we should think of them as being knowledgeable, and work from there.
This alternative conception of knowledge offers a new light under which to examine the role of pedagogy and the teacher, along with new possibilities for enriching the curriculum. I will explore this idea in more detail next time.
This is part of a series on Developing a Science Curriculum at Bobby Moore Academy.
Previous articles:
1. What’s going wrong with our Year 11s?
2. Isn’t there already a curriculum?
