Freeze-dried teaching and how to avoid it

I imagine one of the worst things that the recently returned crew of the International Space Station had to endure on board was the food. I’ve tried that dessert which some marketing whizz called ‘astronaut ice-cream’ and it tastes more like soggy biscuit.

Sadly, freeze-dried substitutes have become part of teachers’ diets too. You may be forced to live off PowerPoint instruction, with a bit of cold calling on the side. In another marketing triumph, it’s been sold as ‘Evidence based Practice’.

Lists of evidence-based practices, like the EEF toolkit, suffer from the same problem as astronaut food: dehydration. The original research may have described great teaching, but tossing it into a meta-analysis machine along with dozens of other studies, evaporates most of the context and nuance that made it great. And then the dehydration process is repeated, because each item in the EEF toolkit is actually a meta-meta-analysis.

In other words, it’s what works for everyone, a bit. While in theory, implementing all the strategies in the toolkit could give your students two years’ worth of learning for every year of teaching. In practice, it’s more likely that their lessons will just feel twice as long.

What can you do to avoid losing the benefits of effective strategies? Let’s take as an example ‘metacognition’, which promises an extra-ordinary +7 months of extra learning.

Following the EEF’s subject guidance won’t cut it. All their ‘improving secondary science’ report offers are generic statements like “explicitly teach pupils how to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning”. Unfortunately, as the original metacognition studies often concluded, telling students what they should do doesn’t mean they will do it.

A better solution is to put metacognition at the heart of learning a science concept. One particularly well researched approach is ‘model-building enquiry’, which is the the backbone of the latest ‘NGSS’ science curriculum in the US. Just in case mention of the word enquiry makes you panic, rest assured this is the teacher guided, knowledge orientated kind.

Here is a model-building enquiry taken from our Proper Science Year 8 course. At the beginning of the topic ‘Aerobic and Anaerobic respiration’, students take the role of a sports trainer who is helping a runner with her training pace. The lesson is split into stages, and for each one the activities are designed around answerng a metacognitive question. The first is: ‘how do cells respire at different running speeds’?

This leads to: ‘what do we know already’ and a pre-assessment activity to expose knowledge gaps and then fill them. The main part of the lesson is an exploration into the question: ‘What science will solve the problem?’ and a theoretical explanation that builds on students’ concrete experience.

What does this example show? That it’s possible to find research-informed approaches that won’t dry out the richness of investigative science and real problem-solving. Unlike astronauts, we can have our cake and eat it too.

Still, if someone does ask you to justify not using evidence-based practice X, you can always reply: My metacognition teaching will give students +7 months extra progress. And yours?

PS. The resource materials for the topic ‘Aerobic and Anaerobic’ are available to download as a free sample of the Proper Science Y8 course. Click here.