Progress Over Time- Part 4- Curriculum Design Implications

In this series of blog posts, I will share with you memos that I am issuing to all teaching staff at my school, to update them on a whole-school ‘Progress Over Time’ teaching & learning development initiative. The teachers at Wyvern are a talented, highly-committed and special group of people. I’m sure you will agree, the work they are producing in exploring how to effectively implement retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving is quite inspirational…

Earlier posts in this series:

Part 1 -Using Research- How Robust is the Effect

Part 2- Individual Practice Implications for Teachers

Part 3- Social and Motivational Factors Involved in Using Desirable Difficulties

Progress Over Time- Part 4- Curriculum Design Implications

What are the benefits of having high levels of fluency with certain knowledge and skills? I.e. having them retrievable ‘automatically’ and ‘without thinking’?

Another theme to emerge from the Curriculum Leader meetings so far is that the Retrieval, Spacing and Interleaving Effects are factors that have implications for the design of our subject curricula and schemes of work across the college. Furthermore, these conversations are timely as we are all navigating our way through incorporating the different and challenging exam specification requirements and writing our new schemes of learning for the 9-1 GCSEs.

In this memo, I want to share some fascinating discussions we have had so far, and in particular, a number of the ideas that I think may have relevance across subjects in specific areas. However, I want to be transparent and candid here- this is unchartered territory. To my knowledge, there is not a comprehensive literature base that looks at curriculum sequencing to take advantage of Desirable Difficulties within secondary school contexts. At best we have but a handful of individual papers. We must tread cautiously, think carefully and make sure we evaluate impact as we go.

Planning for distributed study

In 2015 Prof Doug Rohrer, University of South Florida completed a meta-study review of research into the effects of distributing practice over more extended time periods than is usually the case. He states, “In many academic courses, students encounter a particular fact or concept many times over a period of a few weeks and then do not see it again during the remainder of the course. Are these brief instructional periods sufficient, or should the same amount of instruction be distributed over longer periods of time?”

Doug found only nine papers in the literature which met the criteria of being experimentally sound and relevant to our context. The studies varied across subjects including foreign languages, history, science and trivia. In short, the answer is ‘yes’. These studies consistently found that if you take the same amount of instruction, but distribute it across longer periods of time, retention is significantly increased.

Above- Results from Bird (2010) study where English-learning students were learning three kinds of verb tenses. Both groups studied on five occasions, but the study was scheduled to occur over 2 and 8 weeks for the short and long groups respectively.

Thus, I think it is reasonable to say the work that has been done in this area, albeit limited, is suggestive that there may be benefits of trying to build spacing into our mid-and-long-term planning if our goal for doing this is to maximise progress over time.

Matt’s innovative and superb work to explore building distributed practice into the formative assessment cycle (discussed in part 2) came to mind when I read this meta-study. If you take that study>-space->essay->space->feedback->space->test approach which distributes the study of an individual topic over a more extended time period, it does require the teaching of a few topics simultaneously. This approach necessitates that in any one fortnight’s worth of lessons you could be switching between two or more topics each at different stages. Mid-term-planning has to be rigorous if that model is to be efficiently delivered, but that is well within the capabilities of any Wyvern-calibre teacher. I think Matt’s intuitions are spot on here and it will be fantastic to hear how this approach goes in practice as the year progresses.

Plan time to build fluency before starting higher-order skills

If you ever get a chance to see Bryan’s organisational skills in action, do take it; they are quite something to behold! The level of detail and thought put into the sequencing in the Music Department’s schemes of learning is remarkable. As Bryan and his team consider how to adapt these to match with the new Music GCSE specification, Alan, Bryan and I had a stimulating discussion about how Desirable Difficulties could help in specific areas.

Focusing on the Special Study (Haydn’s Clock Symphony and other works etc.) as discussed in a part 2, the following questioning path arose, ‘do you teach all the basic content of the Clock Symphony then go straight into the higher-order ‘apply-style’ questions on the same symphony, or do you need to spend time building the fluency of the basic content and thus move the apply-style lessons for Haydn’s symphony into Y11 towards the end of the course? Good question!

As different as our subjects are, there is a perpetual debate in the maths teaching world of whether you should teach problem-solving simultaneously with content or whether you focus on building fluency with the basics first then back-load your course so that students focus on problem-solving empowered by fluency with the knowledge they need to solve the problems. I have always been inclined to do the latter as I cannot see the benefits of being asked to solve problems that you do not have tools to solve. Some argue that you can acquire these skills by learning them simultaneously while problem-solving. That goes against all of my experience as a teacher of maths and what I know about Working Memory overload. However, I can see that in some subjects this would be entirely feasible.

It was a privilege to talk through with Bryan whether the same ideas are transferable to this new Special Study content in music and what Desirable Difficulties would tell us, in theory, would be optimal. Theory-optimal versus real-world optimal can sometimes be different things, and I look forward to hearing how this thinking develops and gets put into practice on the new 9-1 Music GCSE scheme of learning in due course.

Maybe these ideas will be of use in your subjects, maybe not…

Project-based learning

In our meetings with Katherine and Steve, it was clear how Art and Technology lend themselves as subjects to project-based learning approaches. Discussing to what extent Desirable Difficulties can enhance curriculum planning in these subjects certainly pushed me out of my comfort zone, which was fantastic (!), but I think there are a few points worthy of sharing from our conversations that may be of interest to other subjects.

Firstly in Art, as a subject, it has significant creative and expressive elements. The criteria against which students are assessed are deliberately very generalised and open to interpretation to allow them to reach the pinnacle of GCSE-level artistic skill in many different ways. The majority of work is portfolio and iterative-based, allowing students to improve previous works incrementally. The GCSE Art exhibition is always a highlight in the calendar year at Wyvern which showcases not only students’ skill, but also the skills of Katherine and her team in nurturing and developing their students to such a high degree of competency.

The project-based approach is undoubtedly highly effective for Art, and Katherine talks about how as students work on projects, for example drawing a personal item in Year 7, they are taught shading skills which they are then expected to transfer to future projects. Katherine talks about generally seeing this transfer and retention from project-to-project which again demonstrates project-based learning approaches work so well for Art. From a Desirable Difficulties perspective, I have been considering how these apply using project-based methods and I think they certainly do. I think Katherine and her team are in fact already utilising them.

Consider the Year 7 project to sketch a personal item. Students will typically work on this project over a period of a few weeks, first drawing the object without prior instruction. They then get feedback and instruction regarding shading techniques before repeating the exercise applying their newly studied techniques. Subsequent projects then expect the application of these techniques in new contexts. Project-based learning done this way can certainly fit well within the framework of distributed practice discussed at the start of this memo. Their training and retrieval on shading techniques, for example, will be spread over more extended time periods precisely because they will be required on subsequent projects.

Steve in Technology is keen to reinforce a culture with students that while they may be building, for example, a fire alarm, they entirely understand what this project is the vehicle for regarding transferable knowledge and skills. He has many great ideas for how to get this message across to students so that their first thought when starting a new project is to think of previously acquired transferable knowledge and skills.

It has taken me a few weeks of deliberation to understand why the project-based approach is so successful in Art and Technology, yet I have never seen a successful implementation of it within Maths. I think I know this now and hopefully, through sharing the ideas involved you can think about how they may or may not apply to your subject.

Firstly, finding projects in a maths context which pull from right across the curriculum content is at best difficult, if at all possible. It is hard enough to find a real-life setting for algebraic completing the square, let alone to design subsequent projects which will provide sufficient distributed opportunities to retrieve it. Whichever projects you selected for a maths curriculum and however ‘rich’ they are in terms of content, you can’t get sufficient coverage to ensure enough distributed retrieval opportunities across a series of projects to build retention. For example, if we ran a personal finance project on loans and mortgages, students could learn and use many percentages skills, but they would not learn many algebraic or shape skills which would need to be visited in a subsequent project. In a later project, say designing a garden, students could learn many shape and arithmetic skills, but the project would not lend itself to revisiting the previous project’s percentage skills unless you did it in a very contrived manner.

For project-based learning to be effective, a couple of factors seem to be that the projects provide sufficient curriculum coverage, and also they provide distributed practice opportunities to build retention with previously studied skills. Art and Technology are subjects in which with careful and skilful planning from colleagues of Katherine and Steve’s calibre, this is absolutely possible and desirable.

An interesting thought to come from our meetings with Katherine and Steve was the notion that rather than trying to ‘atomise’ a curriculum and design it from ‘bottom-up’ with planned spacing and interleaving, there is an equally-valid and alternative approach. Instead, if you use a project-based approach, but specifically monitor whether students are transferring skills and knowledge from one project to the next, then you can infer from that if they are getting sufficient distributed practice to build retention and transfer. Monitor that the learning is being retained and transferred from project-to-project and if it is not then tweaking your schemes of work. If the transfer is not happening, perhaps there is a need to adjust the scheduling of the projects or to put in some specific retrieval practice activities. If it is happening, great, press on!

One final issue I needed to get to the bottom of was, ‘why are students so limited by Working Memory overload in Maths, but this seems less of an issue in some other subjects?’ I think the reason is down to the notion that during assessment in maths there is a ‘threshold’ over which students either can or cannot cross. 3 X 8 equals 24. They do not get half marks for saying 12. To solve a problem in maths requires significant cognitive resource and lack of automaticity with the prerequisite skills required to solve the problem consume this resource and prevents them getting over the threshold to progressing with the problem. In other subjects, a lack of automaticity with prerequisite skills does not prevent them from scoring marks. They still produce something of assessment value, even if it could be improved. Because the nature of some subjects’ assessment criteria is more subjective and continuous, there are no ‘thresholds’ to get over (or not), there is instead a continuous scale of relative success. In this case, students regulate themselves from going into Working Memory overload, i.e. their ‘best effort’ produces something that scores marks- there is no threshold over which they need a definitive level of fluency with prior skills to pass.

Apologies for making these last few paragraphs so Maths-centric, but I firmly believe articulating professional learning and ideas within our contexts then passing over to colleagues to process within their subject domains is the respectful, civilised approach for which we should adopt in schools. From hearing how I have reflected on the ideas regarding similarities and differences between other subjects and my own, I hope you feel able to consider how they may or may not be relevant in your subjects.

Could I finish this update on our Progress Over Time work by sincerely thanking you all for your efforts and professionalism in engaging with this college thrust. There is already a wealth of inspiring and impactful work going on across the college towards this thrust. We have many gifted and highly committed teachers and CLs in the college, and it has been a real privilege to work with you and showcase your T&L developmental work with Progress Over Time thus far. I look forward to the upcoming meetings with other CLs and also the next phases of professional learning and putting this into practice with everyone.

What are the benefits of having high levels of fluency with certain knowledge and skills? I.e. having them retrievable ‘automatically’ and ‘without thinking’?

It makes it easier to complete ‘higher-order’ and ‘challenging’ tasks by preventing Working Memory going into overload

first seen http://www.greatmathsteachingideas.com