6th Form Study Skills: Learning & Note Taking

"A man maie well bring a horse to the water, But he can not make him drinke without he will." wrote John Heywood in A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. It was true in the 12th Century, and it remains so today. We cannot always get our students to do what we know is best for them, despite telling them over and over.

However, we must continue try, and do it from multiple approaches. I am looking forward to leading some CPD for staff on key principles of 'learning science', I introduce students to the Learning Scientists , I build the principles into lessons through my planning, I write MCQs for our department website and so on. 

I also offered to lead some 6th form assemblies, as I have seen in my own classes that there is a great needed to help students with the demands on the new A Levels. As I made clear to students:

• You do not start with ‘easy’ material and work towards progressively harder material by the end of Year 13
• You begin with challenging material, and work with more and more challenging material.
• You will need to store a vast amount of knowledge in your Long Term Memory.
• Your Working Memory is relatively small (5 to 7 things), while your Long Term Memory is vast.
• You need to organise the information into schema in order to access or recall it.
• You need to adopt a systematic approach to learning, rather leaving it chance.

I then took them on a brief overview of what we know about learning, and how our brains work. I left them with some practical suggestions, including adopting the Cornell Note Taking system. I wished someone had suggested it to me at university or 6th form. It fits with all the other knowledge we have now about effective learning. Why would you not use it? 

Their half term task was to go away and read this... but I will email it to them again next week as a reminder. And I have emailed to all staff to refer to in their lessons. I am going to spend 10 minutes of my first lesson back with 6th form writing CUE at the top of every margin, and drawing a line 5cm above the bottom of their page for summaries. 

There are bits I simplified, this was a 10 minute assembly, not an hour long lecture. However the affirmation I got from a colleague is when he pointed out to the students that it took him 28 years of classroom teaching to work out these principles of effective learning, and now they are pretty much contained in a 6 slide, 10 minute assembly. 

I'm not sure our students realise how lucky they are with what we now know about learning and try to share with them. 

Big thanks to Kim aka The Hectic Teacher and Steve D'Arcy for their help with this presentation

#BLOGSYNC: Knowledge vs Skills [RE]

Image courtesy of Pixabay

"What do you view as the relative roles of knowledge and skills in education?”

Some may be thinking, this again? While others will never have even considered their view, or approach, on the great "Knowledge vs Skills" debate. 

Tom Bennett hit the nail on the head for me in a recent RE:Online interview:

I want an RE that is less about ‘how do you feel about this?’ and more about ‘what have people thought and why, and what do you think of their beliefs?’ Before we can do the ‘why’, first we have to make sure the ‘what’ is secure. [See <here>]

This is absolutely crucial. I absolutely believe that until you have sound knowledge you can't meaningfully begin to master any skills. Perhaps this is distinct in RE, but I suspect not. I can't have my students passing judgement, analysing or drawing conclusions without sufficient information to make those activities meaningful. 

It is absolutely wrong to undertake endless activity-based lessons (as OFSTED seemed to want at one stage, and SLT in some places still demand). There needs to be considerable input of knowledge and this will not be the 'fun' or 'all singing and dancing' lessons many produce for observations. I've been guilty of this in the past, but there should also be a great joy in a lesson where students successfully absorb and learn significant new knowledge. 

I am forced, painfully, to recall an OFSTED observation on a Year 7 lesson. It was not Outstanding, only Good, because I defined the term 'Messiah' for my students. This was a new topic, and there was no prior knowledge of this concept. None of my students speak Hebrew, however the one piece of advice to have achieved a Grade 1 was to have allowed students to have discussed in pairs and 'work out for themselves' what 'Messiah' meant to them [Read more <here>].

Additionally, when considering this debate while recently marking A-Level essays, it was brutally clear that the best essays were the ones where students have learnt the material, they had knowledge. This allowed them in turn to display understanding in the Part A and then analyse and evaluate in Part B [Edexcel RS]. These skills are impossible for the students who simply haven't learnt the material.

Recently, I have introduced some cognitive psychology to student to help them appreciate the value and importance of learning key information. It really is the fundamental part to everything else. Any meaningful skill is based upon having sound existing knowledge, even the ability 'to Google' needs a sound knowledge base to assess the validity and usefulness of knowledge found.

However, not for one minute am I suggesting that we spend our whole time rote learning. This is not education, this is not how I teach. Yet, I do reject the idea in RE that 'you can't be wrong'; I frequently correct parents on this on open evenings. There are some things that are absolutely wrong, and even a limited amount of knowledge should allow you to reach that conclusion. 

This creates a need for teachers to plan their time carefully. You need to provide sufficient knowledge, but then allow adequate time for young minds to develop the necessary skills. You need a clear vision of what you want your students to achieve... and then work back. If I want my A-Level students to produce a clear conclusion on the usefulness of the Ontological Argument, I need to carefully work back to work out what core knowledge they need in order to reach that conclusion, then unleash their brains on it in a carefully structured way.

Blooms, SOLO and pretty much every other taxonomy of learning suggests that learning (and remembering) knowledge is core to any further progress. Students that have a vast bank of knowledge are often able to develop the necessary skills far quicker and more efficiently; this is no coincidence. Any activities, based on skills, must be deepening and widening knowledge. After all, the oft-quoted Dan Willingham tells us "memory is the residue of thought"; it is easier to remember when we have done some deep thinking about the subject.

Yet, is this really a debate in the first place? Just like 'Science vs Religion', it is perhaps misleading. There can be few, if any teachers, who would for a minute suggest that it needs to be one or the other in the most absolute sense. My lessons feature both: one day you would come in and see me drilling some key words, or dates, or scholars; on another we'd be doing a silent debate, speed dating or cracking on writing an essay! To do one without the other would be absurd; you'd have a pretty poor debate or essay with no knowledge, and there would be little point in simply learning knowledge to no end.

For me, there is a real joy in a well-crafted A-Level philosophy essay. It features clear understanding of the complexities of  the topic, careful analysis of scholars contributions before a confident conclusion showing the evaluative skills of the writer. Knowledge AND skills, totally inseparable in the final piece of work.

Read more on the 'Knowldge vs Skills' blogsync <here>