I have been doing quite a few observations of teachers within my school over the last couple of weeks and I got thinking about some of the language that we use around lessons. A common phrase that has been used for many years is when you hear teachers talking about the delivery of lessons.
I suppose this goes back many years when the lesson plan for every lesson involved that classic ‘chalk and talk’ technique that we all grew up with . . . and still exists across some classrooms today. In the ‘good old days’ of teaching – a lesson was something you delivered (like discipline too), it was an inert, stand-alone container of knowledge that students could either engage with (and succeed) or ignore (and fail). Lessons were sequential and lacked a lot of variety – as the learning techniques usually involved the teacher talking and the learner listening and/or writing down the words of exposition from the teacher. Lessons were largely not very interactive, and teachers could go for long amounts of time without needing to know the names of their students.
Hopefully, things have changed – though bizarrely we still talk about delivering a lesson (in fact in the most recent learning cycle for the school that I currently work) still has a whole section called ‘Delivery’. When observing lessons, we might talk about ‘good delivery’ or even ‘bad delivery’. Maybe this is some sort of unconscious reference to the idea that knowledge can be delivered but sometimes is not processed correctly or understood. Tom Sherrington noted some of this in a blog post about questioning. When teachers use questioning in a lesson there are a variety of reasons why we might use the questioning process but it is the check for understanding that is sometimes seen as being the most value as it allows teachers to evaluate how much of the sent message is actually received (and understood) by learners.
Source: Tom Sherrington (2018) https://teacherhead.com/2018/08/24/great-teaching-the-power-of-questioning/
Lessons today need to be a lot more agile and pacey that lessons 30 years ago. Maybe it’s because learners don’t have the same attention span or maybe its to do with the vast array of differently stimulus that can push a thinker off-track. But, we need lessons to move quickly and to jump from one activity to the next to ensure that learning is embedded and practiced before we move on. Lessons are not the standalone entities – they start with a look towards the Big Picture and seek out the prior knowledge of the learner (as the foundation upon which what happens next can be build). Teachers then try to ‘deliver’ the new stuff, the new subject content that is different to what might have been learnt previously. The reality though is that these sections of the lesson are rarely achieved through teacher talk but use a video range of video, presentations, demonstration and activity to try and get the key learning point across. It is increasingly rare for the chalk and talk style of teaching to be used effectively within the classroom setting.
Cognitive science of learning teaches us that it is only when we use our memory that it is strengthened. Passively listening to a teacher explain key concepts is not going to help create memories amongst the vast majority of students. Active learners will participate in the learning, they will practice, write out and develop answers, they will work on their power to retrieve and recall information. This requires a deep level of questioning and guided activities that will build up the confidence of the learner in the concepts that they are studying.
Source: Tom Sherrington (2020) https://teacherhead.com/2020/03/10/a-model-for-the-learning-process-and-why-it-helps-to-have-one/
