Should we really try to picture students as if they are brains?
It is clear from much contemporary literature about teaching and learning that we lack an adequate model with which to theorise these practices.
The most popular model at present is the one offered to us by cognitive science. In very simple terms, this posits the existence of a working memory, which processes information, and a long-term memory, which stores information in structures called schemata.
Many education theorists draw upon this model when explaining aspects of good practice or offering advice on how to improve teaching and learning. This is reasonable, provided the limitations of the model are made clear.
Problems arise when aspects of education that cannot be adequately explained by the cognitive model are framed as if they can be. This leads to confusion regarding the purpose of certain classroom practices and risks emphasis being placed upon the wrong things.
Rosenshine’s short review and Lemov’s Do Now
For example, Barak Rosenshine tells us we should start each lesson with a short review of previous learning. This is because, “review can help us strengthen the connections among the material we have learned,” which, he argues, allows us to develop automaticity in key concepts and skills, thus freeing up working memory capacity in later tasks.
Contrast this with the advice of Doug Lemov, who advocates beginning each lesson with a Do Now activity. According to Lemov, a Do Now ensures students are busy “with scholarly work that prepares them to succeed.”
Alongside the Do Now, Lemov encourages teachers to use the Threshold technique, whereby the teacher stands by the door and greets students as they enter the classroom. This tells students “what you expect of them (excellence, scholarship, and effort).” His Strong Start technique “sets the tone for everything that comes after” and “builds momentum [and] socializes students to work with discipline, urgency and efficiency as soon as they walk through the door.”
Rosenshine’s advice is expressed in neutral terms, lending it an air of objectivity reminiscent of the cognitive science it draws upon. Lemov’s, on the other hand, freely uses normative language (scholarly, excellence, setting the tone, discipline, urgency, and so on). It is sound, practical advice, but can make no claims of scientific objectivity.
Clarity of focus
In the classroom, Lemov’s Do Now activity is often used by teachers as an opportunity to carry out Rosenshine’s short review. This is fine, provided teachers maintain the clear distinction between these two aspects of the task in their thinking.
One purpose of starting the lesson with a short quiz is to help strengthen connections in students’ long term memories. This goes hand in hand with the concept of retrieval practice, also borrowed from cognitive psychology.
Another purpose is to establish a certain atmosphere in the classroom, one which is conducive to students focusing sufficiently to achieve success. This depends upon teacher and students having agreed upon a shared set of goals and norms of behaviour prior to the lesson.
For some classes, the focus may be more on one aspect than the other. For example, an A Level politics class may not require a quiz at the beginning of the lesson for the sake of socialising the students. One would hope they already work with discipline, urgency and efficiency.
For them, the Do Now is a chance to review previous learning in order to prepare them for their exams and the lesson ahead. Questions are likely to cover a range of topics, be varied in terms of the length of expected response, and contain little in the way of support.
The purpose of asking a low prior attaining Year 8 geography group to start the lesson with a quiz, on the other hand, may be primarily to establish a culture in which learning becomes possible.
If retrieval is not the focus, it makes little sense to ask students questions from a wide range of topics. Questions are likely to be shorter, and often supported (gap fills, sentence starters, multiple choice, etc) to ensure students have a chance to achieve success.
Students or brains?
These simple examples illustrate that there is more going on in a typical classroom than can be adequately explained by the cognitive model of learning. If cognitive science is to be applied meaningfully to a classroom scenario, our language must be purged of any subjectivity or normativity.
Yet, as every teacher knows, a classroom is a deeply normative environment. It is impossible to conceive of a classroom without qualitative judgments being made and expectations being established and upheld.
This is not to say the cognitive model is useless in understanding what goes on in classrooms. There are some aspects of education that it gives a clear and helpful description of: how students can memorise information when revising for exams; how teachers can better design tasks to ensure students aren’t overwhelmed; how parents can support their children at home via quizzing and other forms of retrieval practice.
The danger lies in teachers overlooking the normative aspects of education by relying too heavily on the cognitive model to help them understand what’s happening in the classroom. Thus, when Tom Sherrington writes:
“I find it instructive to imagine a classroom of students as a room full of hidden schema-forming brains, each doing things we cannot see, each processing information differently depending on what they already know, on the level of attention they are giving to the new knowledge and on their capacity to self-regulate and to organise information successfully,”
his advice should come with a health warning. In very specific circumstances, it may be instructive to imagine students as ‘schema-forming brains’, but most of the time this is actually a very bad description of the complex human beings that make up a teacher’s class.
It may be argued that I am nitpicking here, that obviously teachers don’t look at their students and try to imagine them as pulsing lumps of fluid and tissue. This may well be true (I hope so), but it is also true that the cognitive model has become so commonplace in discussion that its status as a model often seems to have been forgotten.
My aim in this and upcoming blogs is to offer a critique of this picture. I hope to draw attention first to its theoretical flaws and then to the pitfalls of translating it into classroom practice. Finally, I hope to offer an alternative model that can help teachers better understand what is going on in their classroom.
