Can Teaching Be Made Simple?

Since I started teaching, circa 2012, I’ve been constantly wondering if it as complex as I think it is and whether it could be broken down and made simple. Just for the record, it is anything but simple. However, I do like to break things down and tackle things one step at a time. Could I do this to my teaching practice?

In Making Every Geography Lesson Count, Mark Enser shares that he also thinks that teaching can be made simple:

“Teaching, at its heart, is quite simple. We pick something we want students to learn, we talk to them about it and we give them some activities to do. Then we see how much they have learnt and give them some feedback on it.”

Enser goes on to note that teaching is far more nuanced and complex than he suggests in his opening paragraph. In the past year alone I’ve read books on cognitive science, psychology, social science and much more besides. Interestingly, this has brought me to distil my own practice down into a few key elements amongst all of the complexity and nuance within the craft of teaching.

Furthermore, through my podcast I have spoken to many inspiring teachers who are also trying to do the same. My conversation with Jo Facer sticks out strongly as she has done a lot of work to make teaching simple for herself and others (I’d highly recommend her book Simplicity Rules and listening to our conversation).

Armed with the knowledge I’ve built up over time I have focussed on improving my practice in 5 key areas: Instruction, Questioning, Practice, Feedback and Recall. These areas individually only enhance my practice with a series of marginal gains but when we put them together it could be argued that they form the basic idea of teaching. Consider it like this:

Instruction — Questioning — Practice — Feedback — Recall — Repeat

This may be a simple model to teaching but if we think about a series of lessons where the students will work towards a number of learning milestones that contribute towards an overall learning goal, then this process will be repeated a number of times.

With each learning milestone the teacher will provide a period of Instruction coupled with a lot of Questioning to both check for understanding and deepen the learning. Afterwards the teacher may design a series of drill questions or provide worked examples for the students or set any other appropriate task which will require the students to Practice Deliberately. This period of Practice will, of course, be filled with a lot of meaningful Feedback intended to drive the students learning forward.

After this period of teaching, the teacher will then consider the Teaching-Learning Gap. To close this we need to make the invisible visible in terms of what our students are learning. The best way to do this is to task the students to regularly Recall their learning. We know from the work of Robert & Elizabeth Bjork, the more we retrieve the information stored in our long-term memory the stronger that memory becomes.

So, for long term retention of the Instruction and Practice we give our students we should be tasking them to Recall regularly. Once we have achieved success with each learning goal we would move onto the next and the cycle would then Repeat as we embark on our next series of Instruction.

With each area of this cycle I have spent some time practicing deliberately in my own classroom and have sought feedback on each of these area in some guise. This has allowed me to focus my professional development through reading, watching and listening to relevant articles, videos and podcasts or audiobooks.

Giving me a strong focus for my professional development has, I feel, enhanced my practice as a teacher. Perhaps I’ve made teaching too simple but breaking things down to strategically develop each area is something I’d like to look into more as I begin to lead the learning of teachers.

Teaching is inherently complex and nuanced beyond belief but the practice of teaching can be made simple through a common vernacular. This is not by any means a definitive outline of how I see teaching but it is a lens that I have begun to see the practice of teaching through. I’d love to chat more about this as a model (I’ve probably adapted it or stole it from elsewhere while completely unaware I was doing so) and create a dialogue around this so that we can get to the bottom of what excellent teaching practice looks like so that we can head towards High Impact Teaching so that we improve the outcomes for ALL young people.