In this conversation Sarah Cottinghatt, author of Meaningful Learning in Action and Research Lead at Steplab, explained how we can support students to engage with new material. In this webinar Sarah explained how we can help students learn meaningfully and build schema.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00]
Sarah: When one idea is like a tripwire for another idea, then we can build this understanding that we need to answer complex exam questions, but also to think with this knowledge on a day-to-day basis.
One of Ausubel’s key takeaways is that meaning occurs in the minds of our students and not in the words of the teacher. So students have to play their role in the meaningful learning process. They can’t just be passive recipients of information.
What Chalk can do is pull out the areas that are – I really like the way it pulled out the normal function versus disease cycle, for example, for helping students to be kind of clear on which bits of the concept map relate to what. So lots that you can do on Chalk to kind of do this really quickly and easily.
So we’re going to talk about making learning meaningful, which is Ausubel’s theory of meaningful learning, also called assimilation theory. So we’re going to talk about what that is and talk about some of the implications for teaching. Please put some questions in the chat if they come to you, because it’d be great if, Phil, you could just interrupt me and that won’t be rude at all. And we can just do some questions as we go to make sure I talk about the things that people want to learn about.
[00:01:25]
I want to start off by saying that this theory is by a guy called Ausubel, and everybody’s got a reason for doing the research that they’re doing. So as I was reading his work, I was like, “Why did he bother to come up with this theory?” And I was talking to a colleague at a previous job – a previous place that Helen and I used to work for, Ambition – and he said, “Look, Sarah, you have to appreciate this: whenever a researcher is doing some research, it’s because they’re kind of irritated by the current paradigm and they’re wanting to disturb it and move it on in some way.”
And we’re all human, and I think that brings a really nice human element to this research. And so I was digging into like, was Ausubel pissed off about when he decided to come up with this theory – or research this area, I should say?
And really what it was, was that the research on memory was being conducted in labs, and in order to control for people’s prior knowledge, they would be given nonsense word pairs to learn, or words that didn’t make sense – essentially materials that we don’t really use in classrooms. It’d be very rare for you to give kids a list of words that aren’t really words and get them to learn them. You probably wouldn’t be doing your job very well.
[00:02:45]
So Ausubel was saying, you know, “These experiments on memory, which are trying to tell teachers how to teach, they’re not really speaking to the actual stuff that teachers are trying to teach.” So he said, “These lab experiments don’t really translate into classroom practice.”
And he kind of felt that we need essentially to have research on the types of learning that we want for our students. So we need to have research on real materials and we need to think about the type of learning that we want. We don’t want them to learn these individual nonsense words or these weird word pairs. We want them to learn rich bodies of knowledge in the subjects that we’re teaching them. So he was like, “Well, if that’s the end goal, then that’s what we need to study.”
So let’s just take a little look at the end goal for a second. What does Ausubel think we should be aiming for? Well, I spoke to, again, another ex-colleague who is a history specialist. And I said, “For something that you taught your Year 7s, what would be quite a good answer that you would think was, you know, that they’ve learned this stuff quite well?”
So I’m going to give you a second just to read what he sent me.
[00:03:52]
Whether you know a lot about this topic of the Investiture Controversy or not – I know Phil will as a history specialist, because if you’re a history specialist you know about every period of history, obviously, as I do know every book that has ever been written – then it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand this, because I think the key to this is that it does kind of exemplify some of the aspects of meaningful learning, the end goal that Ausubel was going for.
And one of them is this idea of connected knowledge. So that knowledge shouldn’t sit in these different islands, it should be connected together. So I’ve underlined bits that show that this student has kind of got a sense of that connection. Just give you a second to have a look.
So these phrases in particular and sentences in particular suggest that that connection is there. But also, for memory to be good for the long term, we don’t just want connection, but we also want distinction. We want ideas to be preserved in their own right. And what this response also shows, and I’ve underlined this in green, is this distinction – how this student understands that this is different in some way. And that’s also important when we’re thinking about bodies of knowledge.
[00:05:10]
So to kind of draw a sort of shape of this in terms of what Ausubel was thinking when he was talking about bodies of knowledge: he’s talking about ideas being organized in the brain. Actually, research on memory from many different paradigms has shown that the way knowledge is organized is incredibly important for accessibility over time. Almost more important than the actual quality of that knowledge itself is how that knowledge is organized.
So if we take those last two passages that we looked at, this could be a very simple way of suggesting the organization. The student understands the importance of the church and monarchy. They understand that connection to the Investiture Controversy and then the more detailed situation of Thomas Becket and King Henry II. So the Investiture Controversy is something that comes up throughout history, and the more detailed instance that they’ve learned is this one of Thomas Becket and King Henry II. So that’s the kind of organization they might have in their minds of these really important historical concepts.
[00:06:20]
Another example of a body of knowledge might be in PE. Students might need this overall understanding that different games have different tactics and that we need to be tactical in our thinking. And that refers to both offense and defense. And then there are some more granular concepts around goals, aggression, and pressure that sit underneath them. So the idea that Ausubel is trying to get across here is that organized bodies of knowledge support learning.
So just to kind of sum up his view: whereas that isn’t very controversial for me to put on a slide right now, when Ausubel was doing his work in the 1960s, he was trying to shift the paradigm away from focusing on this memory research that was on materials that are not very useful to educators and towards this idea of the end goal being these stable bodies of knowledge. And in particular, he said that bodies of knowledge are really beneficial to students in four ways.
[00:07:24]
The more interconnected knowledge is, the more students can learn. And if you think about perhaps a student in a secondary school going through five, six subjects a day, every single day, they’re being asked to learn this vast quantity of knowledge. You can’t do that unless that knowledge is connected.
Connections also help people to develop understanding. When one idea is like a tripwire for another idea, then we can build this understanding that we need to answer complex exam questions, but also to think with this knowledge on a day-to-day basis.
Ausubel also mentioned how it helps students to learn for longer periods of time as well. Those connections, as Ausubel says, they anchor knowledge in our minds and that slows down the forgetting process.
And finally, bodies of knowledge help us achieve the Holy Grail for our teaching, which is called transfer. So transfer is when students are able to use an idea that you’ve taught them in another context. And teachers often feel very frustrated because students struggle with this transfer. We all struggle with transfer. When you taught them something last lesson and they come into your next lesson and you’re like, “It’s like that thing we talked about last lesson,” they can’t see the connection between them. So transfer is really important, and bodies of knowledge support that transfer.
[00:08:55]
So in many ways, Ausubel says, bodies of knowledge are that end goal. But what happens if those bodies of knowledge are not there? Well, let’s have a look at a response that my friend got from a student that clearly did not have this body of knowledge. So same question.
So what we can see from this is that there’s a very weak understanding of some of these concepts and they’re not really connected together in that rich way that enabled that answer we saw earlier. I’d describe this as students having islands of knowledge. It’s like they’ve gone to each of your lessons and they’ve taken one thing away from it, but they can’t connect it up. Ausubel likened it to textbooks. He felt that textbooks when he was writing were really poorly organized. So each chapter didn’t speak to the next one or the one before. And so it was really difficult for someone studying that textbook to understand the connections and links between the chapters.
So we want to avoid that poor textbook learning and we want to make sure that students form those connections. So Ausubel, after sort of railing against what he saw was research on memory that isn’t really helping students, said that really, only to form these bodies of knowledge, only one type of learning was really going to work, and that was meaningful learning. And that’s where we kind of start our journey with what is meaningful learning.
[00:10:30]
To put it really simply, meaningful learning – I think Phil’s going to come in with a question.
Phil: I did have a quick question, which was just around – in terms of the kind of structured body of knowledge that each domain has. And I was just wondering, do you think that some domains or some subjects have more consensus over what the structure is? Say, is there more consensus over, let’s say, the structure of scientific knowledge compared to history, or is that a useful way of thinking about it, do you think?
Sarah: Yeah, I think it definitely is, and I know some people on the call will know a lot more about this than me. But I completely agree – different subjects have got different kinds of contingencies in that way of, like, you have to have taught this thing to then move on to this thing. Say maths, for example, it’s not always up for debate really about what you teach first. Sometimes there’s quite a clear route through. Whereas if you take English, for example, there’s often a lot of debate about which concepts are most important to showcase and highlight and feed with the detail.
[00:11:45]
So depending on the subject you teach, you will be thinking about it in a different way and it will have a different sequence to it depending on how knowledge is built. What do you think about history then, Phil?
Phil: Well, I guess I was just thinking because it’s hard to... If you’re teaching a subject like history, which I would say there’s less consensus over some of the minutiae of exactly how some aspects connect together, it means that the teacher has to do – it means the teacher has to basically judge them in a certain sense. So I suppose, you know, that’s quite hard really. But yeah, I’d say that from my experience as a history teacher, I would say that the structure of history, although there are aspects of history that are – so there is consensus of the structure, like, you know, in terms of the historical thinking concepts, there’s kind of rough consensus of that, but some of the details there’s less consensus over.
Sarah: Yeah, I think that’s – for the departments that have that challenge and for phase groups at primary, it’s an ongoing conversation and it will change. The concepts we spotlight are not fixed. And I think there’s a richness to that, even though it can be kind of annoying.
[00:13:00]
Right, so let’s have a look at what meaningful learning is. So to put it quite simply then: Ausubel says that meaningful learning happens when some relevant existing knowledge connects to the new information that you’re teaching and a new meaning is born.
Let’s try and make that a bit more concrete by giving some examples. Let’s think about if we are trying to explain to our students what population density is. So that’s the new idea, population density. We might try to hook that onto the idea of the playground and how when you come to school the playground is busy and full and lots of people are there, but when you leave after school, after your club, there’s barely anyone in the playground. So we’ve got this idea that we’ve got areas the same size that can be more or less densely populated. So the idea is that you would teach it by trying to hook onto something that they already know that’s relevant to the new information that will support a new meaning to be born.
[00:14:11]
Let’s have a look at another example. Let’s say a new thing we want to teach is that carbon dioxide exists as gas molecules, and we’ve taught them in a previous lesson that gases are these sparsely packed spheres. You might recall these boxes and blobs. I certainly was taught in that way. So we’re trying to hook on the idea that these blobs, these atoms can exist as molecules and that gases, they exist as these connected molecules. So we’re hooking something we taught before onto this new idea.
So we’ve seen two examples there of what prior knowledge can be. Prior knowledge can be their world knowledge. So you’ve seen in the playground how it’s busy and not busy. Or we’ve got a nicely sequenced curriculum where their prior knowledge comes from something I taught them in the past. So there’s different hooks we can have onto their curriculum knowledge or their just general world knowledge. And the idea is that the more that you’re connecting this knowledge up, the more likely you are to form those connections that lead to these bodies of knowledge.
[00:15:15]
So just to kind of sum it up, that’s the sort of argument that Ausubel was making, and he’s very famous for this particular quote: “If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.”
And what this means, it’s fairly obvious, but there’s lots of depth of meaning to this quote that I learned when I was reading his book. It means lots of different things for lots of different parts of the teaching and learning process. So in the book, I look at what it means for curriculum, for preparing students to learn meaningfully. And this is a really important point: students can enter our classrooms and we’re talking about something we think is inherently meaningful, but we haven’t prepared them cognitively for what they are about to listen to.
[00:16:10]
So in the book, I talk about one of Ausubel’s key tools, which is called an advanced organizer, which is essentially about sorting out the organization of the knowledge in their brains so they’re receptive to the new ideas. And that was Ausubel’s tool that he tested through research to test this theory. So it’s an interesting one, that preparation aspect. Because what we want to avoid is the opposite of that, which is cognitive shock, which you might have experienced if, like me, at university, you showed up to a lecture that you were completely unprepared for, and it was like, “What on earth is this lecturer talking about?” That’s that kind of idea of cognitive shock. We’re not mentally prepared for the knowledge that’s coming at us.
We’re going to look today at this: So this idea of we can support meaningful learning through the way that we explain and through the tasks that we give students after we explain. So that’s meaningful processing. We can also check for meaning, which has a slightly different connotation to checking for understanding, which is a phrase we’re probably more familiar with. And we want to keep meaning alive, so stop the forgetting process going too far.
[00:17:24]
And finally, we want to motivate meaningful learning, because one of Ausubel’s key takeaways is that meaning occurs in the minds of our students and not in the words of the teacher. So students have to play their role in the meaningful learning process. They can’t just be passive recipients of information.
So we are going to focus on two particular areas today: explanation and meaningful processing. How do we make our explanations meaningful? Well, the short answer is we can’t be sure that our explanations are meaningful because meaning is happening, as I said, in the minds of our students, not in our words. But there are probably things we can do to best support meaningful learning. So let’s have a look at what they are.
We want to make explicit links. So this white puzzle piece is the thing that the teacher’s trying to teach. And this black puzzle piece is the prior knowledge that the student has. We’ve already touched on this before, but we want to make sure that we are explicitly linking the new idea to the student’s existing knowledge.
[00:18:35]
And what the research suggests, both in psychology and also in neuroscience, is that we want to activate the relevant prior knowledge in the moment and then link it in that moment to the new idea. So I stress that because you might feel like, “I talked about this relevant prior knowledge in the starter activity and then 10 minutes later I’m talking about the new idea. They’ll just make the connection.” That’s a bit of a risk. They possibly won’t. What we want to be doing is doing it in the moment.
Here’s an example. We want to talk about what this new concept “per capita” means. And so we get students to share out pencils and explain that it’s the amount that somebody has per person in a nation. And that’s the knowledge that we want them to form. So in the moment, we are activating prior knowledge and linking it to the new idea. A non-example would be just to say, “This is the definition of per capita.” So just a cold definition doesn’t activate that relevant prior knowledge in the moment.
[00:19:40]
Here’s another example, this time an English example. Imagine that we want to teach students what a metaphor is. We might start by saying, “You know, have you ever felt so angry that your stomach felt like it was bubbling up and ready to burst? And that’s kind of like a kettle boiling, right? So instead of saying, ‘I was really angry,’ a metaphor says, ‘I was a boiling kettle.’” So what you’re doing there is you’re kind of linking to their idea of “some things feel like other things.” And we can call this a metaphor. A metaphor is when we say something is something else to show that deeper meaning, but it’s not – I’m not literally a boiling kettle.
So we’ve got this idea that to make something meaningful, we’ve got to link it to relevant existing knowledge in the moment, not just hope that they will make a link from previously something that we’ve said. But another thing that’s really, really crucial about meaningful learning is that it matters what knowledge you link it to.
[00:20:40]
You can link something to someone’s relevant prior knowledge, but if that prior knowledge is a bit rubbish, then rubbish meaning will come out. So let me give you, I think, a really powerful example of this from the book, where one of the contributors, Ben Newmark, to the book gave me this really great example from his history teaching. Maybe, Phil, you will recognize something like this. I don’t know.
He said that he was teaching his students about the bubonic plague. And, you know, what could be more exciting than talking about the plague with your students? And he said that he would teach them about it by hooking it onto their knowledge of disease and, like, you know, grossness, snot, and all these horrible symptoms that people got during the plague. And they often really seem to enjoy learning about this because it’s disgusting and you can show lots of pictures and talk about it in quite a disgusting way.
[00:21:36]
So he linked the idea of the plague and all the stuff he was teaching to all these symptoms, and this is, I suppose, roughly the body of knowledge that he created. This idea of illness and distress linking it to the plague and focusing on the nasty symptoms. And then guess what? He gave them their end-of-topic test and they all wrote about how gross the plague is and how disgusting everybody was. And even some of the answers were really quite disrespectful. You know, this is a nation of people of which many of them were scared and, you know, in London lots of people died, et cetera. And he had these responses that were not very thoughtful and were almost comical about the plague.
Because if you think about the meaning that students made, it was not really very useful. It didn’t show much historical analysis. And Ben was just a bit disappointed. But he did this year after year for a little while, until he read a book which kind of reframed this part of history for him and got him to think about teaching it in a different way.
[00:22:40]
So let’s have a look at what Ben did. He kind of frames this as thinking very carefully about the connections that he made. So instead of focusing on building this body of knowledge, instead, he decided to kind of change the links that he was doing. He talked about a population of people who were powerless in the face of disease, how scared they were, linking into people’s – to students’ prior knowledge of things that were out of their control, yeah, things that haunt them, that they don’t seem to be able to get a grip on, linking into that kind of fear and that kind of prior knowledge and that idea of powerlessness instead, and then linking that idea of the plague to that sensation and that feeling.
It’s not difficult to do that for students who’ve obviously experienced the pandemic as well. There’s lots of world knowledge that they now unfortunately can bring to that. Then he talked about how the plague impacted people’s belief systems and they looked at how for some people it strengthened their belief in God and for others who could see clergymen dying, it actually shook their belief in God as well.
[00:23:45]
And how the plague, even though it didn’t push things forward in a massive way, did kind of push people’s scientific and medical beliefs. For example, about bloodletting, which didn’t seem to help with the plague. So he ended up with a much richer body of knowledge. And I think you can see how that would produce a much better historical analysis, much more respectful answers from the students.
So the lesson that Ben learned and that we can all learn from this is that not any old knowledge will do. Yes, it needs to be relevant knowledge, but it needs to relate to the body of knowledge you actually want students to create. And this is why when I’ve worked with schools, we think about that end goal. We think about that body of knowledge they actually want to create, those answers that they want from students, and we work backwards. The current areas that you’re stressing, the connections that you’re making – are they going to lead to those answers and that analysis that you want?
[00:24:50]
So, we want to make the links, we want to make sure they’re relevant, we want to do them in the moment, and we want to make sure they are links to the best knowledge that students could have.
Having a think then about your own work, you might want to take away these questions: With a topic that you’re teaching, what existing knowledge are you tapping into to teach it? What are you seeing as evidence of children’s learning? And are there any better ideas that you could link to to support them to make better quality meaning that you actually want? So these are questions that we work through with middle leaders to kind of think about and evaluate their existing curricula.
The second thing we’re going to look at is: once we’ve done our explanations, I’ve said it now three times, this is one of Ausubel’s big points – meaning is made in the minds of the students and not the words of the teacher. If you’ve ever said something to 30 students and got 15 different responses, some of which were nothing like what you said, then you will appreciate what Ausubel said here.
[00:26:00]
The implication of this, that meaning is made in the minds of the learner, not the words of the teacher, is that once you’ve done your explanation, you aren’t finished. You’re going to have to give them something, give students something to meaningfully process what you have said or what they have read or what they have watched, whatever the stimulus was. They need to make the links themselves, as this slide says.
So a really good way of doing this that’s well evidenced is from – it’s not Dunlosky himself who’s done these studies, I don’t think, but he has it in his toolbox of tools that are really helpful for teachers – this idea of self-explanation. So getting children to explain new information and how it relates to existing knowledge. So putting things in their own words is really important, linking things explicitly to either world knowledge and/or stuff you’ve taught them in the curriculum. They need to explicitly link it.
Sorry, Phil.
Phil: Sorry, I was just going to quickly ask on this one because I think this is really interesting. Do you think that students also – does it engage their curiosity or do you think it increases their curiosity thinking about not just the nodes of knowledge, but the connections between them?
[00:27:20]
One of the reasons I was asking this is that I read a book recently by a neuroscientist and philosopher, kind of duo, who basically argue that curiosity comes from the connections between information rather than the nodes of information themselves, which I found really interesting. And they also argued there were three different types of ways people make connections. But yeah, I was just wondering, is there evidence for that? And what do you think of that aspect of it? It kind of like encouraging curiosity.
Sarah: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. It’s definitely something we would love to be able to have – these hungry learners who would want more knowledge. That’s kind of the dream, isn’t it? That we’d have a class that are really feeling that way about what we’re teaching. I wrote a blog on this a little while ago from a neuroscience perspective, and I need to read the book, Phil, that you’ve read because it sounds really interesting.
Essentially, levels of curiosity are related to learning and recall. Curiosity was called in the paper I was reading “the wick in the candle of learning,” which I thought was a nice way of putting it, because it can drive learning. I think the key is students need to have enough knowledge to be able to ask good questions and be curious. It’s like curiosity goes in a bit of an inverted U.
[00:28:40]
If you’ve got almost no knowledge of something, you’re not very curious. If you’ve got too much knowledge about something, you’re also not very curious. You need to believe you have a bit of knowledge, enough knowledge to ask the right questions and be interested in stuff. And then that puts you in quite a receptive state for knowledge, not just about the thing you were curious about, but research suggests that anything that comes your way when you’re in that curious state can be better learned. So I think curiosity is worth thinking about and worth fostering, and connections, it sounds like from your book, Phil, can certainly foster that curiosity. So yeah, I think it sounds very possible.
Phil: Yeah, it’s really interesting because I personally, in terms of my own knowledge diet, I use Anki quite heavily, but I think one of the mistakes I’ve made is that the flashcards aren’t actually connected to one another very well. So, yeah, I think that’s something in my own personal learning I actually need to improve.
Sarah: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s like the islands of knowledge type thing, I guess, isn’t it? And how do we use really powerful techniques that can be really powerful, like flashcards, without accidentally creating that sense of islands of knowledge? It could be in the grouping of them. It could be. Yeah, I’m not sure. I’d like to pick your brains on that.
[00:30:00]
So let’s have a look at some meaningful processing activities that teachers I’ve worked with have been working on. So one of them in early years, they were teaching Sharing a Shell, which if you haven’t read it is an absolute cracker. If you’ve got a young child, they will love it and it teaches them to share, which is no bad thing. So here was kind of what we were seeing teachers doing, but a truncated version, and it’s a bit of a non-example of this meaningful processing. Teacher reading the story and then summing up the book at the end. It was a bit more to it than that, but that was the general structure of what we were seeing.
Working with teachers, we were thinking about how to make, how to do this meaningful processing throughout the book. And so it changed to something like this. So we kind of summed this up as: teachers who activate relevant prior knowledge, continually link to it throughout their teaching, and provide questions or tasks that get students to meaningfully process at the end. So this kind of cycle, this sequence of activating, continual links, and meaningful processing.
[00:31:10]
And whilst I don’t have any data on whether this did support learning, I have anecdotal data that it was a useful process to kind of go through. That’s at early years level. And then thinking about at primary level, how we might teach the difference between poems and stories. Well, Ausubel talks about how if there’s two things that students might get confused about, we really want to make sure that they distinguish their similarities and differences.
So just simply appreciating the relationship between the two things that you’re teaching requires some kind of parsing apart and looking at the differences and getting students to meaningfully process by doing that. It can also be something very simple. Just by asking students, “What does this remind you of?” It’s quite a free recall activity that helps them to link to their existing knowledge. Which part of your existing knowledge does this chime with? Does this resonate with? Does this remind you of? It’s quite a low-stakes way to see what connections they make. Also to see if they’re making the right connections.
[00:32:15]
And then for the book, I worked with a science teacher to look at the idea of concept mapping. So she gets students with support – she’s trained them to concept map – and over time, they build concept maps of quite complex topics. She’s a secondary biology teacher, quite complex topics that they are learning. So for example, heart disease. And over time they would build a concept map.
Now, concept mapping is a big area – there’s lots of research on concept mapping – and it seems to be that a very powerful way to concept map is to have arrows with arrowheads showing cause and effect or what leads to what, and labeling of those arrows as well. And you can imagine this biology teacher getting students to add to their concept maps and what a good formative assessment that is to check if they’re using the right labels on the lines, if they’re getting the concepts right, if they’ve missed any arrows, if any arrows go in the wrong direction, et cetera. So there’s lots that you can see from a formative assessment perspective too.
[00:33:20]
I also worked with Phil, who produced me a wonderful one of these on Chalk. And this is something that as teachers, you can produce very quickly and very easily on Chalk that can be used to explain quite challenging topics. And I really liked the way Phil did this because what Chalk can do is pull out the areas that are – I really like the way it pulled out the normal function versus disease cycle, for example, for helping students to be kind of clear on which bits of the concept map relate to what. So lots that you can do on Chalk to kind of do this really quickly and easily.
There is skill, pedagogical skill in using concept mapping with students. And so I would encourage you to read up on concept mapping and how to introduce it to students and how to use it so that it’s not overloading for them and you can provide the useful scaffolds.
[00:34:15]
So we’ve looked at a couple of these areas today. And there’s lots that we haven’t covered because we haven’t had time. But hopefully it was useful to focus on meaningful learning through explanation and through this idea of meaningful processing, which can be done, hopefully you can see, at any age from early years all the way up to harder concepts in secondary as well.
So yeah, if you’d like to get in contact then please do chat to me about meaningful learning or anything else really. I also have a blog which I was talking about – that curiosity blog if you want to access that, that’s on overpracticed.com. And yeah, I would really encourage you to use Chalk. I don’t get paid by Chalk, I just like to chat to Phil every week about Chalk because it’s interesting and a very useful tool. So I would encourage you to use Chalk to do things like concept mapping and all the different visual things that you can do at the appropriate times in your teaching. He also has lots of useful professional development on there so that you can upskill yourself in how to use these visual techniques for your teaching too.
[00:35:30]
Phil: Amazing. Thank you so much, Sarah. That was absolutely class. If you have a question, please put it in the chat. But I just had two quick questions, Sarah. And by the way, I love the phrase that concepts can be kind of a tripwire for other, or a piece of knowledge can be a tripwire for other pieces of knowledge. I thought that was really nice. But I was wondering – that was just one quote that really stuck with me.
But one question I had was, because you were talking about supporting middle leaders to create curricula that enable teachers to clearly spell out the links between pieces of knowledge. And I was wondering, what’s a good way of representing those links? As in, do departments often just have a document where they write down what the links are, or do lots of departments use, say, concept maps to actually quickly show teachers and students the links in their curricula?
[00:36:40]
Sarah: My experience – it’d be interesting to find out people on the call what their experience from their schools are – but my experience from working with some schools on this has been that things are not depicted visually in a way that might be quite useful. I think it would often be quite useful to think about them. So visually mapping out your curriculum and the links between ideas and being very explicit about which – in some subjects we spoke about earlier – which concepts are being prioritized is really powerful because a lot of these curriculum documents are these linear text documents which you may well need at some level, but at the kind of greater level of abstraction is this rich linked body of knowledge that as an expert you have in your head.
And that you want other teachers to gain access to and essentially to be built in the minds of students. So I think there’s a lot of power in depicting your curriculum in a more visual way to show what’s being prioritized and how it’s linking. This has not only exposed for people I’ve worked with – usefully exposed gaps or things they thought they were prioritizing but aren’t really through the topics. So it shows you the coherence of your curriculum as well.
[00:38:00]
So my advice would be to think about doing it visually. I’d say that in a slightly flippant way though because I don’t think it’s particularly easy to do that. So books like Oli Caviglioli’s Organized Ideas, or just basically anything that Oli Cav says, it’s quite useful for thinking about depicting things visually in a meaningful way. So you’re not just going, “Everything’s a concept map,” or “Everything’s a fishbone diagram,” whatever it is. So just thinking about when things are most appropriate, depending on the relationships that you’re trying to depict.
Phil: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Something that Oli said in one of the Chalk Talks previously was the idea that teachers have a non-linear schema in their mind. And then, well, sometimes they will then present it linearly to students, but expect them to then develop a non-linear schema in their mind, which was an interesting way of thinking about it.
[00:39:00]
One other question I had was around the shape of subjects or the structure of subjects. Do you think it’s useful to think about the shape of subjects? One reason I was wondering this is that the book I was describing previously by Zurn and Bassett – I think they’re actually siblings and one’s a philosopher and one’s a neuroscientist, but anyway, basically it’s called Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. And they basically argue that they think about subjects as shapes and they talk about learners as moving through those structures in different ways.
So they say there are dancers who move through it in a kind of – they kind of leap through the subject space. And then there are hunters who kind of tunnel down into real specifics on one issue. And then there are busybodies who kind of just try to get everything. But yeah, I guess, do you think it’s a useful way for teachers to think about their subject as being shaped in some way? And also should we be thinking about the way in which we’re encouraging students to move through that shape?
[00:40:10]
Sarah: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting way of putting it, because subjects as having shapes – yeah, again, I need to read that because it sounds really interesting about the different learners doing different things. I think shape and structure is really powerful because it illuminates relationships between ideas. And I think that’s what I’m interested in. I don’t think it’s just interesting to think about a shape of a subject, but what relationships does knowledge have to each other? And I think that comes back to the disciplinary nature of subjects as well, like how is knowledge formed in those subjects? That kind of informs the shape and the relationships between stuff as well. And it kind of is an argument for why subjects are subjects and they have the boundaries that they have. And when we try to collapse those boundaries, it can be slightly problematic. Well, quite problematic.
So yeah, I think in essence, think, yeah, really cool. I need to read a bit more about that, Phil, about the shapes of subjects. I think it could give people ideas about their curriculum and about the relationships between the knowledge that they need to impart on students.
[00:41:20]
Going back to Oli Cav’s point, and I think Daniel Willingham’s made this point as well, we are walking around with a hierarchy of knowledge in our heads and relationships in our heads that clicking through PowerPoint slides, ironically like I just did, suggests this linear structure to things, where actually there are relationships. How are we getting across what those relationships are?
Phil: Absolutely. Yeah, because sometimes I think that history, for example, you could say it has to some degree a spiral shape in the sense that things don’t really repeat, but there are some patterns. But then there’s also to an extent it would probably be a sort of tree diagram that spiraled, if you see what I mean, because there’s also – there is also some hierarchical structure in history, history of X, I think.
But yeah, but no, Sarah, that was absolutely amazing. I loved the way you think about meaningful learning. It’s really influenced how I think about it. I don’t think there are any questions. Rachel had a comment that this is really interesting and thought-provoking and it can help us make careful choices of links to build a richer body of knowledge. So thank you so much, Sarah. It’s been absolutely great to speak.
[00:42:40]
Sarah: It’s nice to speak to you, Phil. And yeah, great to have so many people join us as well. So it’s lovely. Thank you.
Phil: Awesome. Have a really great evening, everyone. And good to see you all. Thank you, Sarah again.
Sarah: Thank you.