England built an official pedagogy to fill the knowledge deficit and plug the attainment gap. But it missed the bit about how children learn outside school.
One problem seems to be the use of two word names for an approach that then get extrapolated to mean the entire approach is limited to the two words.
Separately there is a massive difference between being aware of the curiosity information gap and using it to keep people interested and saying you must start with a problem the students must consider themselves.
It’s possible that simply stating the problem that the teacher will explain is sufficient to motivate interest and more effective than time spent in failure to grapple with it by the students.
Again to use an extreme case children can be extremely interested in a story they passively listen to.
Thanks Stan – yes, part of the problem is how we use the terms. ‘Child-centred’ has been used to mean many different things, which is something I want to examine in the post.
Agree that the information gap doesn’t require a problem-based approach; productive failure is one way, but certainly not the only one that might spark curiosity, and you could certainly begin with explicit teaching – it’s something I’ve been experimenting with in class. Stories involve an information gap – ‘what will happen?’ – and are a good example.
My point was that the English teacher training framework strongly encourages a single approach with small steps and keeping the scaffolds in place until knowledge embedded. Not necessarily bad advice, but could be harmful to curiosity if it’s always followed to the letter and never varied.
The tension you illustrate on is the sharp one. The knowledge-rich approach set out to help the disadvantaged most, and the gap it aimed at has barely moved. We measure the product and ignore the mechanism, which is also why so much of the gap reopens through secondary.
Thanks for this and the restack, Andrew. The instinct to close the gap was the right one, but we’ve had a decade and a half of concerted effort (albeit punctuated by the pandemic) and made little progress. The fact that so much of it opens during secondary is a real concern.
Education must be evidence-based, but we look at the knowledge gap without always asking how children may or may not have acquired that knowledge – which is where I think we need to bring curiosity in.
One problem seems to be the use of two word names for an approach that then get extrapolated to mean the entire approach is limited to the two words.
Separately there is a massive difference between being aware of the curiosity information gap and using it to keep people interested and saying you must start with a problem the students must consider themselves.
It’s possible that simply stating the problem that the teacher will explain is sufficient to motivate interest and more effective than time spent in failure to grapple with it by the students.
Again to use an extreme case children can be extremely interested in a story they passively listen to.
Thanks Stan – yes, part of the problem is how we use the terms. ‘Child-centred’ has been used to mean many different things, which is something I want to examine in the post.
Agree that the information gap doesn’t require a problem-based approach; productive failure is one way, but certainly not the only one that might spark curiosity, and you could certainly begin with explicit teaching – it’s something I’ve been experimenting with in class. Stories involve an information gap – ‘what will happen?’ – and are a good example.
My point was that the English teacher training framework strongly encourages a single approach with small steps and keeping the scaffolds in place until knowledge embedded. Not necessarily bad advice, but could be harmful to curiosity if it’s always followed to the letter and never varied.
The tension you illustrate on is the sharp one. The knowledge-rich approach set out to help the disadvantaged most, and the gap it aimed at has barely moved. We measure the product and ignore the mechanism, which is also why so much of the gap reopens through secondary.
Thanks for this and the restack, Andrew. The instinct to close the gap was the right one, but we’ve had a decade and a half of concerted effort (albeit punctuated by the pandemic) and made little progress. The fact that so much of it opens during secondary is a real concern.
Education must be evidence-based, but we look at the knowledge gap without always asking how children may or may not have acquired that knowledge – which is where I think we need to bring curiosity in.