Routines can be powerful tools for learning. However, they take time and effort to establish, and typically come with an initial dip in performance. During this phase, it can be tempting to give up. Let's break it down:
At their best, routines can:
Increase time and attention for learning
Reduce the behaviour management burden
Increase student motivation, confidence, and safety
Free up of teacher cognitive capacity to monitor learning and be more responsive
However, these benefits only emerge when routines become automated. The amount of time it takes for a routine to automate depends on its complexity and how frequently we run it. Simple routines can take 20 repetitions. More complex sequences can take up to 200. It can be weeks or months before a teaching routine becomes automatic.
"Habits appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold."
James Clear
During this automation phase, several things happen:
We have to invest additional attention and effort to support the change, especially in contrast to our existing habit stack.
Initially, we lack skill in new techniques, and so they can often feel clumsy and unnatural.
A new approach for us also usually means a new experience for our students, with an associated lack of familiarity and fluency.
When combined, these things can lead to a feeling (and quite possibly a reality) of reduced performance. During this phase, routines can feel like a waste of effort. And we can be tempted to give up. (especially if we are a new teacher or find ourselves in a stressful situation)
However, this effort is not being wasted. It is merely being stored
If you play the long game and stick with it, you will eventually reach a tipping point (automation) where the benefits will begin to outweigh the investment. From then on, your routine will pay back handsomely. You'll have crossed what James Clear calls the 'Valley of Potential', and you'll be unleashing all that stored effort.
But to get there, you'll need to ready yourself for a period of increased effort, discomfort, and reduced performance. You'll need to manage your own expectations.
Caveat → Automating a rubbish routine is never going to deliver value for learning. It's also important to know when to give up. Just make sure you've given your routine a chance to shine before you bin it.
So, the next time you find yourself trying to establish a new routine or habit, check your expectations and hold the line—the wins are there for the taking.
Summary • Routines can support learning but their benefits are only realised once things have been automated. • During the automation phase, routines often feel effortful, unnatural, and unfamiliar. • If we don't manage our expectation, we risk giving up prematurely.
Thursday, 2 February 2023
Big Idea
Routines enable our students to learn more with less. How so? Let's dive in:
First up, a routine (aka habit) is essentially a chain of actions that gets executed on a cue (or prompt), all of which happens with minimal cognitive effort or conscious control. They achieve this cognitive efficiency by stripping out decision costs, reducing the amount of novel information that needs to be processed, and exploiting our ability to think less about the things we repeatedly do.
When your alarm goes off in the morning, you get up, shower, dress and have breakfast—all without really thinking about it. The cognitive efficiency of this flow is insane...
Routines are particularly powerful because human attention is so heavily limited—we can really only attend to one thing at a time. As a result, when a routine is in place, students end up needing to think less about the process of their learning, and so can think more about the content of their learning—the substance of our teaching.
In short, routines redeploy attention.
This is important, because what our students attend to is what they end up thinking about. And what they think about is ultimately what they end up learning. Routines hack the attention economy of the classroom to help our students learn more with less.
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them."
Alfred Whitehead
Fine, so what can we do about it? Well, routines fall into 2 broad camps:
Instructional routines
Behavioural routines
Instructional routines involve activities such as whole-class discussion or independent practice. These make the most of the time we have available for learning. Behavioural routines involve activities such as classroom entry or resource management. These enable us to free up even more time and space for learning. It's worth investing in both.
Now, routines are often painted as boredom-brokers and creativity-killers, but I'm not sure this is quite accurate. Effective routines can secure success and so act as an antidote to boredom. Also, they tend to increase confidence and feelings of safety for students (particularly those with SEND). And they free up the precious mental capacity needed for creativity to flourish. In general, routines are net positive for students. And they can also help us teachers, by:
Reducing the behaviour management burden.
Freeing up teacher cognitive capacity to monitor learning and be more responsive.
In short, routines are powerful tools for learning and teaching.
Caveat → I'm not saying that lessons should be formulaic. Instead, it's probably more useful to think about having a strong 'repertoire of routines' to draw upon. This ensures that teaching can be both efficient and responsive, in meeting the diverse needs of our students and curricula.
So there you have it. A brief tour of the mechanics of routines and how they link with learning. What routines do you lean most heavily in your teaching? Are there any aspects of your work which might benefit from being 'routinised' further?
Summary • A routine is a chain of actions that gets executed on a cue, with minimal cognitive effort or conscious control • When a routine is established, students think less about the how of their learning, and so can think more about the what of your teaching • This is powerful because human attention is limited, and attention leads to learning
DfE study finds Research finds fewer than one in ten schools are 'digitally mature'
Schools have “some distance to go” to make the best use of available technology, a new government research report has found.
The Department for Education (DfE) has today published ‘Exploring digital maturity in schools’, which found fewer than one in ten schools were classified as “digitally mature”.
However, the study found no “clear evidence” of a relationship between a school’s level of digital maturity and pupil attainment.
The research found that those with the highest digital capabilities tended to be schools in urban areas and secondary academies. While rural, primary and local authority maintained schools lagged behind.
Are schools digitally mature?
Researchers aimed to establish a hierarchy of technology use in schools to develop a metric to measure their “digital maturity”.
The study is based on over 650 responses to last year’s Education Technology Survey, and judged schools on three pillars which contributed to digital maturity – technology, capability and strategy.
According to that metric, just nine per cent of schools were classified as being digitally mature.
Almost a third of schools, 31 per cent, had put “a few fundamentals in place”, but were classed as having a “low digital maturity”.
The majority of schools – 60 per cent – were found to be “somewhere in the middle”.
“This indicates that there is some distance to go before schools are making the best use of technology available.”
Further analysis found that “low digitally mature schools were more likely to be in rural areas, primary phase, local authority-maintained schools or with a ‘good’ Ofsted rating”.
In contrast, schools with high digital maturity were “more likely to be in urban areas, or secondary academies”.
While the metric was said to be a useful tool in assessing schools’ progress in using and implementing technology, the report acknowledged “methodological limitations” and warned further research was needed to construct a measure that is “both valid and reliable”.
Low digitally mature schools flagged budgets and funding as a challenge when investing in new technology – with a few stating they believe their staff lacked the confidence to drive technology use in school.
Where schools were deciding to invest in technology this was mainly due to a need to upgrade current infrastructure, enhance learning practices or in response to the support remote education due to Covid.
No link between digital maturity and attainment
Researchers also attempted to investigate the relationship between a school’s ‘digital maturity’ and its pupil attainment.
At key stage 4 there was no correlation between any of the maturity pillars and attainment measures. This is likely due to the analysis being based on just 146 secondary schools, the report said.
Similarly, at key stage 2, the research found that none of the correlations were large enough to provide “robust insights into the relationship between digital maturity and attainment”.
The report explained that variables such as pupil characteristics were likely to have a “stronger association with pupil attainment than the digital maturity pillars within the metric”.
In general, schools did not measure the impact of technology use and “found it difficult to differentiate any impacts from other practices and approaches in school”.
Wednesday, 9 March 2022
What can we expect from edtech in 2022?
After almost two years of edtech development in response to the pandemic, Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith looks at what 2022 has in store for us
This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Headteacher Update
The digital divide is no longer just about access to devices and connectivity; as increasingly argued by many worldwide, the digital divide is more and more about choices made in the classroom. If these new forms of digital divide are left unaddressed, the gap between the under-connected and the hyper-digitalised will widen, aggravating existing inequalities.If we are not able to provide meaningful digital engagement within teaching and learning then are we – perhaps inadvertently – perpetuating or even amplifying the digital divide?
The availability of technology is a necessary part of removing the inequalities of living in a digital world, but access alone will not make a sufficient difference to the lives of those using it. For learning to be successful there need to be meaningful, two-way, interactions between students and teachers.
How do we assess?
Part of this is about improving how we listen to students – listening to what they want to tell us and using that information to identify not just what they know, but why and how they know it.
As TED prize winner Professor Sugata Mitra has said, “In a world where a child can learn anything using the smartphone in their pocket, we should not be testing them on their ability to recall information but on their ability to find something out, comprehend and communicate their findings.”
Prof Mitra champions the case for PhD, viva-style, approaches to assessment for children and young people – asking probing questions and listening not just to what students tell us but how they tell us. He is not alone in championing this cause.
One of the many consequences of pandemic lockdowns has been to accelerate the existing debate about the nature of assessment for children and young people. Much has been made about the widespread implications of cancelling national assessments and exams. These decisions have forced debates about the purpose of such assessments, the format they take, their relevance in today’s world and the ripples that summative assessment processes create for wider issues such as mental health, workload, consistency and workplace relevance.
In a world where recommendations, ratings and peer review inform our decision-making as much as any quality-assurance process, Professor Peter Twining has been leading the way in thinking about how such metrics could enable us to assess the things that matter. “We’re now at a stage where it’s far easier to evidence – and thus value – what young people can do, not just what they ‘know’,” he says. “This means that we are closer than ever to being able to use digital technology to enable non-standardised assessment, within a standardised system, in ways that are robust, practical and credible enough to become accepted in everyday practice.”
Parental engagement
One relationship that has changed significantly during the pandemic has been the one between parents and teachers. Where once parents were provided with updates and information, now a seemingly growing number expect insightful and real-time data about their child’s progress, curriculum, attainment and interactions so that they are able to have more meaningful conversations with their child.
The pandemic created a window into the realities of classroom life which no other generation of parents has been privy to. This has been a catalyst for all kinds of conversations about the many and varied needs of students across the world and the relevance of classroom activities to the ‘real world’ outside of school – for example, raising discussions about what equality looks like when considering technology in teaching and learning.
This is something which Ken Shelton, who often uses the term ‘techquity’, passionately champions. “This is about creating an inclusive culture within your learning environment, recognising that different students need different tools, different experiences and different forms of support. Intelligently used technology can open up opportunities or break down barriers that have previously defined the parameters of learning.”
A surprising finding
Achieving effective digital engagement may have very little to do with the technology itself. As research by OECD and others has consistently shown, once a minimal level of technology infrastructure is in place, the presence of the technology itself makes insignificant difference to the frequency and nature of use within teaching.
This minimal standard of infrastructure is below what the majority of UK schools have, and international TALIS data shows us that, even in schools with a comprehensive IT infrastructure, there can often be very low levels of meaningful digital engagement. Digital learning pioneer Dr Sonny Magana addresses this issue by challenging schools to think about moving from consumption to social entrepreneurship. “Technology itself can be disruptive, forcing us to move from automated processes and consumption of content, through the production of new knowledge and ideas towards meaningful, inquiry-centred, learning design and social entrepreneurship.”
Hopes for 2022
We need to think more precisely, more forensically, about what it is that we are trying to do – whether that be teaching or learning. This is why we need to change the narrative around technology. When we talk about edtech we create a false impression that we are focusing on teaching and learning, yet edtech remains stubbornly focused on technology – the systems, the processes, the data – rather than the individual human beings using it.
We need to shift that narrative in order to shift our thinking. In 2022 we should start talking instead about “PedTech” – focusing on human purposes and behaviours, the role of language, the nature of relationships, the enacted curricula and pedagogies. That’s where we will see meaningful and lasting change.
With the weight of responsibility still on the shoulders of our teaching profession to address the lessons of the pandemic, positive and negative, we are also under huge pressure to respond to new kinds of expectations – from leaders, parents, society, employers and students themselves.
The experts are telling us to ask probing questions and listen carefully to what students and societal trends tell us before responding diligently. Creating a personally meaningful learning experience for every individual learner should not mean an exponential workload increase; it just means utilising what technology offers.
In 2022 the role of technology is fundamentally about social justice and our responsibility to facilitate meaningful equality for all children.
