Blog « Let's Think

Sticking with it: how dialogic habits take time

By Michael Walsh, 17th January 2024

Cath Dawson from Bexley Grammar School shares her thoughts on how Let’s Think in English helps develop cognitive and dialogic habits over time. Early sessions of Let’s Think sessions can feel much more stilted and less satisfying than later sessions where the skills and practice have a deeper foundation… Having taught Let’s Think consistently […]

By Laurie Smith, 14th November 2023

At this time of conflict in Israel and Gaza, with terrible loss of life on both sides and the risk of more widespread war, I thought it might be helpful to recall that Cognitive Acceleration originated in Israel – that CA is an eventual outcome from a more hopeful period of Israel’s history. It feels […]

By David Bailey, 19th October 2023

Cognitive acceleration as a teacher When I trained to be a teacher in the mid 1990s, I trained in what was then a traditional route – a degree and a PGCE at a university. My choice of university would be one that led towards experiencing Cognitive Acceleration at a very early stage in my […]

By Leah Crawford, 27th September 2023

As long as I have worked in education, I have never really lived by the rhythm of the Julian calendar. The new year, with all its intimations of new horizons and fresh starts always feels like it starts for me in September, never January. Yet however positive one’s outlook, most teachers acknowledge feelings of enthusiasm […]

By Sarah Seleznyov, 30th August 2023

One of the things that makes Let’s Think special is that all tutors on the programme teach: unlike many professional development programmes where the facilitator provides an input and supports teachers to consider how they can implement this into their own practice, the Let’s Think Tutor will ask for a class to teach and show […]

By Leah Crawford, 29th November 2022

Confession. I’m an English graduate, an English teacher and a Let’s Think English Tutor. Whether by nature or nurture, it is the study of the humanities that has caught my interest and driven my learning. I have come to know that the discipline of geography straddles the divide of the sciences and humanities: to me […]

By Alex Black, 2nd June 2022

An interesting study was carried out about the effects of what researchers at the MINT Learning Centre in Zürich called cognitively activating instruction in secondary Physics teaching. They worked with a small group of experienced Physics teachers who were teaching in what is known as Gymnasia in German speaking countries. They are selective state schools […]

By Sarah Seleznyov, 12th May 2022

This blog is a tribute to Mundher Al-Adhami, who recently passed away and is a sad loss to the Let’s Think community. Mundher was one of the lead researchers who developed the Let’s Think (Cognitive Acceleration) in Maths approach and has supported the Let’s Think community tirelessly throughout the years. In this blog, those who […]

By David Bailey, 5th April 2022

If I had a pound for every time I’d heard the Cognitive Acceleration approaches described as a ‘skills based curriculum’, I could have retired long ago. It is probably something I have been guilty of saying myself over the years, perpetuating a rather limited description of the approach. The risk with any kind of descriptor […]

By Stuart Twiss, 9th March 2022

It’s a cold but sunny afternoon in February, I find myself standing in the school grounds of a Hampshire Junior school, pouring water on different surfaces and at different rates from a watering can. Listening and watching intently are a small group of teachers and the core team of a new Let’s Think project. Can […]

Israel 1950s The new State of Israel faced a particular educational problem in the 1950s and 60s. Under its ‘law of return’, Jews from any part of the world could become Israeli citizens and it was soon found that children of those from North Africa and the Middle East did much worse in school than those from Europe and North America. They were typically three years behind in their education and were subsequently much less successful as young adults competing for jobs. Israel was committed to educational equality for its immigrants and invested heavily in research on remediation. Reuven Feuerstein was appointed to lead a substantial team of clinical and educational psychologists, many with experience of treating children traumatised by the Holocaust, to tackle this problem. They decided to avoid school subjects as areas of past failure and devised a separate programme called Instrumental Enrichment (IE). This was designed to change, over a period of two or more years, the disadvantaged students’ idea of themselves as learners, their motivation and their ability to process information. The IE course was primarily designed for young adolescents. It consisted of thirteen sequences, each with 12 to 24 activities (instruments), intended to be taught for five hours per week over two years in parallel with the normal curriculum. An essential feature of the IE instruments is that they involve little use of language and therefore have the appearance of logic puzzles and non-verbal reasoning problems. The reason for this was that the students’ mother tongue was usually Arabic and they were simultaneously having to learn Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) as the language of their new country. The IE programme drew directly on Vygotsky’s work on how understanding is mediated by discussion and on Piaget’s work on how a child’s intelligence develops with age. Each activity involved discussion between teacher and students and between students to encourage them to think about strategies for solving the problem. As Philip Adey and Michael Shayer put it in Really Raising Standards, “IE aims to provide the necessary mental tools putting students in a position where they have to construct for themselves the higher-level thinking required” (page 46). The IE programme was rigorously evaluated with controlled trials and found to be very effective. Significantly, two or more years after the intervention the students entered compulsory military training in the Israeli Army. On a test of general intelligence for all recruits derived from the American Army Alpha test, the IE group performed better than many others. Although they had typically been three years behind when entering school in Israel, they were now equal with others, for example, in promotion prospects. An important feature of the programme was that, although it generally didn’t raise attainment immediately, evidently because of difficulties of accessing the mainstream curriculum while learning a new language, IE learners’ ability continued to develop after their participation in the programme had ended. Their ability continued to rise on all the tests they took, including Army Entrance and for further and higher education so that, as adults, they suffered no disadvantage compared with the general population (Rand et al 1981). There was naturally a good deal of interest in IE and it was used experimentally in the USA, UK and elsewhere with positive effects on attainment. But it hasn’t been adopted widely, chiefly because of its deliberate separation from school subjects. Schools have understandably been reluctant to devote lesson and staff time to a programme without direct relevance to the rest of the curriculum. England 1980s Michael Shayer was one of the leaders of the Concepts in Secondary Mathematics and Science project (1974 – 1980), a large-scale government-funded project on how to improve the teaching of these subjects across the whole ability range in comprehensive schools. With Frances Beasley, Michael investigated IE closely and used it with a class of 20 Year 8 students with special needs classed at the time as moderate learning difficulties, with significant results (Shayer and Beasley 1987). However, Michael, working now with Philip Adey, accepted that IE was inappropriate for mainstream schools with their curriculum pressures and developed a new programme to overcome IE’s limitations. Like IE, the new programme was based on research by Vygotsky and Piaget – it taught learners how to understand their own thinking processes and use them more effectively, and it assessed thinking in relation to Piaget’s stages of development. Unlike IE, it related directly to a school subject (Science) and, not being designed for immigrant children learning a new language, used open questions in English rather than diagrammatic problems. As we know, Michael and Philip called the programme Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE). It has several distinctive features – the use of Inhelder’s and Piaget’s cognitive schemas underlying scientific understanding as schemas for a programme of lessons, the design of each lesson on a consistent Vygotskyan basis and the requirement that staff are trained to deliver the lessons effectively. But Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment made a very great contribution to CASE, much greater than any of the other educational interventions of the time.

Unfinished business As we know, CASE proved very successful in the 1980s to 2000s. It was taken up by a large number of secondary schools in England and abroad. Though delivered fortnightly in Years 7 and 8, the programme typically raised attainment in Science subjects three years later by 0.5 to 1 GCSE grades across the full ability range. This effect has been confirmed in more than 20 international trials. Another effect similar to Feuerstein’s IE soon became apparent – that delivering CASE in Years 7 and 8 raised attainment more widely. It had been repeatedly observed with IE that learners’ cognitive abilities continued to increase for several years after the IE lessons had ended. It was noted that students who were taught the CASE lessons achieved higher GCSE grades in Mathematics and English as well as in Science (Really Raising Standards, pages 99 - 106). In due course a trial was held involving over 2000 pupils in 11 schools whose teachers were trained to deliver CASE in 1994 to 1996. In 1999 the students’ GCSE results were compared with those of 16 comparable schools which had had no experience of CASE. It was found that students in the CASE schools achieved an average of 1.05 GCSE grade higher than the non-CASE schools in Science, 0.95 grade higher in Mathematics and 0.90 grade higher in English (Learning Intelligence, pages 9 – 11). This is a remarkable result which, if it had become widely known, might have been subjected to further research and, if confirmed, actively supported by Government, so that Cognitive Acceleration might well have become national policy in Britain and elsewhere. In the event, many schools in England discontinued CASE during the 2000s owing to Government policies which were incompatible with it, chiefly the National Strategies and Ofsted requiring evidence of detailed repeated assessment to track learners’ progress. Both these policies have now been abandoned as ineffective and others, such as knowledge-based curriculum and teacher-led instruction, have taken their place. If these also prove insufficiently effective, interest may return to Cognitive Acceleration and its remarkable results. If so, we should remember its origins in the outstanding pioneering work of Feuerstein and his co-workers in Israel’s early years. References Feuerstein, R, Rand, Y, Hoffman, M and Miller, M (1980) - Instrumental Enrichment: Intervention Programme for Cognitive Modifiability. Baltimore: University Park Press. Rand, Y, Mintzker, R, Hoffman, M B and Friedlander, Y (1981) – The Instrumental Enrichment programme: immediate and long-term effects. In Mittler, P (ed) Frontiers of Knowledge: Mental Retardation, Vol 1. Baltimore: University Park Press. Shayer, M and Beasley, F (1987) – Does instrumental enrichment work? British Educational Research Journal, 13, 2, 101-119. [post_title] => How Cognitive Acceleration originated in Israel [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => how-cognitive-acceleration-originated-in-israel [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-11-14 13:14:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-11-14 13:14:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1492 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1486 [post_author] => 2386 [post_date] => 2023-10-19 11:26:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-10-19 10:26:46 [post_content] => Cognitive acceleration as a teacher When I trained to be a teacher in the mid 1990s, I trained in what was then a traditional route – a degree and a PGCE at a university. My choice of university would be one that led towards experiencing Cognitive Acceleration at a very early stage in my career. My PGCE tutor at Durham University, Dr Marion Jones, had previously worked in Sunderland as an Adviser. She included some of the Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE) activities in the practical sessions that we experienced. We also have a visit from one of the teachers from Sunderland, Alan Edmiston, who talked about his experience of introducing CASE into his schools. It is one of the few sessions I can still remember quite clearly. In the session, Alan spoke with passion about the difference that CASE had made to his pupils and also to the way he taught. I was intrigued. My first job was in a school where CASE had been recently introduced. The Head of Department asked me if I would like to go on a CASE training course that the local authority was running. It was considered unusual for a very recently qualified teacher to participate in the training: normally teachers would have been teaching a few years first. The trainer said something along the lines of ‘You won’t know what normal teaching is like, and perhaps you never will”. He was right. Having a full timetable, CASE lessons were taught regularly. It wasn’t long before I had taught most of the early lessons many times over and had also started to work through some of the later lessons too. I had plenty of opportunity to practice. I also noticed some of the approaches I’d been using in CASE lessons making their way into other lessons, such as questioning, group discussions and taking advantage of surprising situations. These were things that help pupils both engage and think in my lessons. It really seemed to help shift some of the unhelpful preconceptions that children brought with them. It seemed to work. Cognitive Acceleration thinking in teacher training In 2005 I began delivering a few physics sessions a year to Initial Teacher Trainees at Durham University. Looking back now, there were elements of the professional development programme that you would recognise in CASE lessons, such as understanding where a participant was in terms of their development of a schema, a scenario where counter-intuitive thinking was required, peer group discussion and metacognitive thinking. This type of practice was deeply ingrained into the way I was working with adults. In 2012, I took up a role at the Science Learning Centre North East in Durham. Alongside this, I was working with Let’s Think on a science programme. This drew upon my teaching of CASE and enabled me to support others to embed this in their practice. I found that those same features from my CASE lessons were present in the work I was doing with adults even when I wasn’t working with CASE. What was interesting is that it was helping teachers think about their practice, and shifting preconceptions that you might argue were unhelpful. This is the same as what happens with pupils in CASE lessons.

Cognitive Acceleration thinking embedded into school improvement Additional school improvement roles meant I moved from in-school leadership, to working with leaders outside of my own setting. During this time, I found myself working with a range of different schools, some of which needed significant support. Having watched the approaches of the schools over time, it became obvious that many of the approaches that they were using seemed very sensible, however often these were counterproductive. One example is that teachers who were struggling were often observed and monitored regularly. Over time this had the effect of reducing their confidence, decision making ability and agency. When this ‘support’ didn’t lead to pupils doing better (which happened far too often) leaders tended to increase the frequency or intensity of observations, thinking that they hadn’t done enough and that more of the same was required. Cognitive dissonance had set in. I quickly realised that established leaders had developed ideas of what leadership should look like, yet this wasn’t leading to the improvements they had hoped for. Their thinking was being reinforced at the time by a system-wide push for individual accountability and higher pupil progress. Supporting schools in this situation meant moving their thinking. Fortunately, by this point, I had practised this over and over with thousands of children over the previous 15 or so years. I had also practised this with adults and recognised that shift was possible, even in experienced colleagues. This meant that working in this way was like second nature. I found myself using the same ‘active ingredients’ of CASE:

metacognition;
scenarios that highlighted the issue that might be commonly understood;
cognitive conflict – using the scenario to discuss with leaders;
an understanding of where the (adult) learners were in terms of their stage of development and their schema development;
consideration of the (adult) learners Zone of Proximal Development and the role of social construction in supporting them;
supporting the idea that it was okay to change your mind and consider counter-intuitive practice;
using evidence to support the changing of thinking and keeping it that way.

This really helped leaders both leaders and teachers change their minds, even when previous practices had been deeply ingrained.

Conclusions

CASE lessons are really helpful in changing the way pupils think about the world around them and about science.
The ‘active ingredients of CASE’ can transfer to other elements of your thinking and practice.
Once these approaches are embedded into other areas of your work, it is difficult to imagine working in a different way.
Once you have been taught Cognitive Acceleration approaches, your new thinking is likely to leave an indelible mark on your practice.

And finally… From time to time, I come across leaders and teachers I worked with years ago. There are plenty of examples of those where they have made changes that have lasted the test of time. The schools that they are working in or leading have sustained improvements in pupil outcomes. Not only were these lasting changes, but the changes also that teachers and leaders have made to their practice has made a positive and lasting difference to the many pupils that have been in their care. [post_title] => ‘An indelible mark’: Cognitive Acceleration teaches us lessons that stick [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => an-indelible-mark-cognitive-acceleration-teaches-us-lessons-that-stick [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-10-19 11:26:46 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-10-19 10:26:46 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1486 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1478 [post_author] => 2386 [post_date] => 2023-09-27 14:18:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-09-27 13:18:53 [post_content] => As long as I have worked in education, I have never really lived by the rhythm of the Julian calendar. The new year, with all its intimations of new horizons and fresh starts always feels like it starts for me in September, never January. Yet however positive one’s outlook, most teachers acknowledge feelings of enthusiasm mixed with trepidation about the shared learning journeys that lie ahead with new classes. Each classroom is such a complex social organism. Students’ personal and learning histories and cultures, their language capacities, their self-concept, their propensity to contribute or withdraw is all simmering away in the melting pot that becomes the culture of your new September classroom. And if you teach Cognitive Acceleration, with its roots in Vygotskian notions of socialised intelligence, then this diverse and complex social context for learning more than matters: an interconnected social group is the answer, not the problem. Harnessing the potential energy of a diverse group of students to think harder because they are together is a key challenge and joy for the CA teacher. The quality of dialogue and relationships – let’s call it the discourse culture of the classroom - is the very foundation we use to develop cognition. Let’s be honest. Students don’t think better and do better in school just because they sit and talk in groups. The effort and strategy needed to realise this potential is rooted in teachers’ belief in the power of social construction and - crucially for the subject of this blog - the belief and skills that teachers build with their classes that connecting with others and building ideas together helps us to develop new ways of thinking. Some ‘norms’ in a classroom discourse culture are established quickly: norms like ‘Don’t speak without first raising your hand’ or ‘Don’t talk while someone else is talking,’ are common and often overtly shared and insisted upon, particularly with new classes. If you were to walk around your school for a day, what other talk norms would you observe?

Teachers asking a question and taking answers from the same few children who first raise their hands.
Children working in a group in which one child dominates and others are passive or disgruntled.
Children who, when asked to contribute say ‘I don’t know’ and so another child is cued in to rescue the moment.
Children who remain silent in all classroom talk and yet their written or other outcomes reveal fascinating insights.

In many of the classrooms we as tutors have visited over the years, norms like these have been allowed to develop that are not conducive to the development of positive social, emotional and educational outcomes. Indeed, learners are likely to enter your class with different propensities to contribute, disrupt, talk at length or have confidence in their ideas: yet all of these psycho-social behaviours are, like intelligence itself, malleable and open to change given the right context and intervention. In my own teaching and tutoring of Let’s Think in English, I have found it helpful to think about these three approaches to shifting the existing discourse culture inertia:

Making some very tangible, structural and physical changes in class to signal a cultural shift: a different way of working together
Adopting some key teacher-talk behaviours conducive to equitable, inclusive and exploratory talk
Engaging in some overt negotiation and evaluation of goals for small group talk alongside learners

Let’s explore those first two territories a little before we focus mainly on the third. These first two are the strands most commonly explored in CA Professional Development and so less of a focus here.

Signal a tangible cultural shift

By this, we mean:

the arrangement of pupils, of furniture and the sharing of resources to facilitate small group to whole group talk
the careful construction of small groups, mindful of diversity, current attainment and additional needs.
The initial signalling of basic guidelines for how small groups will think well together e.g.
- include everyone,
- listen well,
- try to arrive at and share a group answer.
- You will be cued in by name to share your group answer

Teacher modelling of talk behaviours

As teacher, the tone and tenor of your talk moves are perhaps the most powerful intervention tool in the classroom to reset the discourse culture. Our key tenet in the CA classroom is to encourage pupils to share their initial thoughts however uncertain, unhampered by needing to compete or be ‘right’. Talk that signals modality in thought and mood powerfully resets the purpose of talk to explore not assert: ‘Take time to explore this question with your group...’ ‘Karim – what has your group been thinking?’ ‘Are there other possible ideas in the room?’ ‘Let’s pause for a moment: what ideas do we have so far?’ Crucially in CA, teacher talk moves need to encourage pupils to elaborate, explore and deepen, moving from thinking to reasoning as described by Patricia Alexander. The most powerful feedback response to a pupil’s answer, is not to evaluate it but for our feedback to prompt further thinking. The 4 types of prompt below correlate strongly with improved pupil efficacy, improved quality of responses, and improved academic outcomes over time in studies by Noreen Webb, Mercer and Howe and Michaels and O’Connor

Prompts to clarify e.g. ‘What do you mean by...?’
Prompts to elaborate e.g. ‘Could you say more about...?’
Prompts to explain/evidence e.g. ‘What led your group to think...?’
Prompts that encourage pupils to respond to each other’s thinking e.g. ‘What do you think of what Karim’s group have just shared?’

Pupils negotiating their own goals for group talk

From Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam’s ‘Inside the Black Box’ and more specifically, Neil Mercer’s work on Exploratory Talk and Michaels and O’Connor’s Accountable Talk, we have evidence of the deep benefits of clarifying and negotiating learning behaviours and intentions with learners. If we believe that we are designed to learn better together, we can go even further together if pupils are conscious of, talk about and reflect on productive group talk behaviours in order to improve them. Yet balancing talking about talk and talking about the unfolding subject of a lesson can be difficult. The cycle in the graphic below is offered as a helpful guide to introducing and maintaining cycles of metacognitive reflection about talk with teaching groups. It is not intended to be used every lesson: this would not only be a distraction from the time and space to think, but also learners need time to embed new behaviours until they begin to become more of a norm.

Tool 1: Group Guidelines for Exploratory Talk The setting of ground rules emerged as a key tenet of Mercer and Dawes’ original Thinking Together project which has grown into the wider work of Oracy Cambridge at Hughes Hall – a key collaborator with the education consultancy and charity Voice 21. Starting with a prewritten list of rules, like the one below, is a fruitful starting point. To improve our thinking together in class we...

make sure everyone contributes
listen actively
respect each other’s ideas
explain our ideas
try to come to a shared agreement

What is vital is that pupils explore the why and the how and feel able to adapt and adjust these guidelines over time. Does the group agree that these are useful guidelines? Which of these if any are secure already in the group – and which do we most need to improve on? There is easily enough matter here to provide a year’s worth of development for any group, if these goals are really explored and broken down into tangible behaviours. Equitable contributions alone can take time and a concerted strategy to develop. One Year 7 group I worked with were asked why this was important:

It’s only fair that we all get a turn
We can have more ideas together
We could miss a brilliant idea from someone

The steps they agreed to achieve this goal were:

Take turns to speak first in the group
Cue in quieter group members with ‘What do you think?’
Take turns to feed back the group’s idea

It is well worth searching the web for the Voice 21 Listening Ladder for another example of the way that manageable, granular steps can be set over time. Tool 2 Progression in talk taxonomies These tools can be used either beyond or instead of initial group guidelines, depending on your confidence as a teacher and the abilities and reflective capacity of your teaching group. They are perhaps more aligned to the educational purpose of Let’s Think in that interpersonal skills are only a starting point – with improved socialised intelligence as the core goal. Learning behaviours for thinking: Where are we? Where next?

Which step 1-4 best describes the current behaviours of our group?
Which behaviours are we best at?
Which behaviours need developing?
How will we meet these goals? What will we see happening?

4 dimensions of dialogue: talk that improves thinking This tool was devised from a research paper by Hoffman and Ruthven (2018) which reviewed existing literature on dialogic talk norms and filtered them into four dimensions which move in a similar way from the interpersonal foundations of thinking together to the ways that authentic exchange can give rise to new levels of understanding.

Some teachers have found it useful to reveal the dimensions in stages to render goal setting manageable. The green dimensions form the interpersonal foundations for socially situated thinking and the purple move into behaviours needed for ideational exchange and development. If questions or professional development needs arise as a result of reading this blog, do feel free to get in touch. Bringing the power of Vygotskian theory alive with new classes in September is no easy feat – but setting sail with your eyes on the horizon, a well-held tiller and crucially – your pupils as co-pilots - is a great way to start. Leah Crawford Education Consultant and Let’s Think in English Tutor [email protected] @think_talk_org [post_title] => New Year, New start, New talk culture [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => new-year-new-start-new-talk-culture [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-09-27 14:18:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-09-27 13:18:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1478 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1466 [post_author] => 2386 [post_date] => 2023-08-30 11:21:06 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-08-30 10:21:06 [post_content] => One of the things that makes Let’s Think special is that all tutors on the programme teach: unlike many professional development programmes where the facilitator provides an input and supports teachers to consider how they can implement this into their own practice, the Let’s Think Tutor will ask for a class to teach and show teachers what the lessons look like in practice, when taught by an experienced teacher. Why is this so important? We recognise that Let’s Think is a tricky approach to take on board. There is a lot going on: the schema you are teaching, the exemplar lesson and its carefully structured flow, the pedagogies of concrete preparation, cognitive conflict, social construction and metacognition. It’s much easier to see, hear and feel what Let’s Think looks like, than to hear someone explain it. And I always ask teachers watching a Let’s Think lesson for the first time to critique what they saw: challenge me on what I did and ask me why I did it. Sometimes, I will acknowledge that a decision I took may have been the wrong one – this is part and parcel of the messy business of classroom teaching and it’s important to be honest about our mistakes. Doing this is also modelling the behaviours we will need from teachers as they join the professional development programme – we need them to be willing to take a risk, have a go, make a mistake and learn from it. All Let’s Think Tutors agree that all teachers start as novices, acknowledging that we were also in this position when we first started on our own Let’s Think learning journeys. It’s really hard to relearn teaching, it’s a bit like going on a diet – habits are hard to change! That’s why the live teaching we ask teachers to engage in is so crucial to their learning. On every Let’s Think Maths professional development day, we introduce some lessons to the teachers in the morning and they then work in collaborative groups to plan to teach these lessons, spending time thinking carefully about the language they will use for key questions and instructions, what they will record on the board, and trying to anticipate pupil responses. In the afternoon, they then team teach these lessons to classes they don’t know, some of them teaching and some observing pupil learning. They then meet to reflect on the extent to which their planning was lived out in the live lesson. This is scary! We have spent decades using lesson observation as a tool to judge and punish teachers in the UK, meaning teachers usually frame lesson observation as a means of performance and judgement, instead of learning and improving, as this diagram from Chris Watkins so neatly captures: But if we want teachers to make radical changes to their practice, we need them to overcome this anxiety, to recognise:

That live teaching practice gives you the opportunity to get to know the lesson and how pupils respond, meaning that when you go back to your own class, you will teach the lesson with much greater confidence;
That the live teaching is a learning experience and not a judgement of their teaching expertise;
That when we change our practice, things will go wrong before they go right;
That this is a collaborative lesson and not one they have personally designed – if anything goes wrong, all are accountable;
That mistakes are the best way to learn (for pupils and for teachers) and that taking a risk is therefore vital to practise development.

So, in this process, the Let’s Think Tutors take a risk, as do the teachers – and when we take Let’s Think into the classroom, we are asking pupils to do the same. This replication of process acknowledges the importance of risk taking for learning: staying safe isn’t an option unless we want our learning to stagnate. [post_title] => The power of live teaching for professional learning [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-power-of-live-teaching-for-professional-learning [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-08-31 13:35:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-08-31 12:35:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1466 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1455 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2022-11-29 21:58:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-11-29 21:58:22 [post_content] => Confession. I’m an English graduate, an English teacher and a Let’s Think English Tutor. Whether by nature or nurture, it is the study of the humanities that has caught my interest and driven my learning. I have come to know that the discipline of geography straddles the divide of the sciences and humanities: to me a powerful relative unknown. We hear that interdisciplinary synthesis is what we will need to solve the complex problems we face in the world like climate change, then I find myself invited onto a project team developing the first small suite of Let’s Think through Primary Geography lessons for Year 5 and 6 pupils. Before the team of Let’s Think tutors, teachers and geography specialists met, I was invited to read through some early drafts of lessons on maps and scale. A human story had been used to invite children into the journey, scaffold their understanding and their manipulation of variables. Michael Walsh has written with clear insight here on the importance of story to focus and scaffold learning here. But, I have to admit, my mind would not be persuaded that these problems helped me to better understand the human condition. The questions about scale and distance still seemed like maths in disguise. The question of run-off and relevance Some of you may have read Stuart Twiss’s blog documenting the birth of our small but perfectly formed Let’s Think through Primary Geography project. I was there for those ‘run-off’ experiments with a watering can: 6 foot plus of Stuart, like the Big Friendly Giant, simulating light, intense and intermittent rain on compacted, aerated and vegetated surfaces; on flat and sloping ground. He asked us to use the same expert language back to him – establishing a shared language code for the model that we would then ask children to think about. Once these concrete variables were established, so enters the weasel question of cognitive conflict: “How much run off will there be?” “Well, it depends...” “On what...?” And so pupils began to share their awareness and socially construct their understanding of the interplay of variables and complex relationship of rainfall frequency, intensity, gradients and the compaction and saturation of the earth. See – not easy. This was more than fun with a watering can. The cognitive stretch was tangible in the ensuing reach for connectives, ‘and’, ‘also’, ‘as well as’, ‘if’ and ‘when’. Let’s Think programmes endeavour to be relevant to the curriculum and to pupils, whilst they stimulate that sweet spot of progress in reasoning that we believe as their teachers will be of wider, general benefit to them in life, not only in geography. Reasoning about the variables leading to run-off is an important step towards understanding what contributes to flood risk and eventually abstract modelling of reduction of those risks. So we knew it mattered to our educational purpose – did it matter to the pupils? It seems it did. Our observers fed back that in a lesson busy with activity, small group discussion and props, every single pupil was focused on the task and on their small group dialogue. In a socially and cognitively ‘noisy’ task like this, pupils’ attention could easily drift but it did not. In the bridging discussion at the end of the lesson, when asked if they could think of a situation when there had been too much run-off, the groups did not find it difficult to generalise to incidents of flooding locally and nationally. When pupils then moved to smaller scale models with trays, sponges and jugs of water in class – there was still a clear sense that slowing or reducing the run-off mattered. Moreover, teachers were asked ‘When can we have another Let’s Think Geography lesson? And told ‘That’s the best geography lesson we’ve ever had.’

From collaborative reasoning to action We had been rigorous in checking relevance not only to the current National Curriculum Programme of Study for Geography but just as/more importantly (select your preferred determiner) the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in particular how they have been translated into the SDG Learning Objectives guide for educators developed by UNESCO. UNESCOs objectives for each SDG have three domains: cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural. Cause and effect reasoning with manipulation of an increased number of variables was clearly cognitive. The Vygotskian social constructivist engine ticking in all Let’s Think lessons to an extent helped us to meet the socio-emotional domains in that learners would collaborate and develop understanding with others. Our Piagetian progression spine would encourage gear shifts over time from a personal, to a group, a local even a global perspective. We did seriously wonder whether this progression would be possible for our age 9-11 year group within just a few lesson episodes. And finally, the behavioural domain. The UNESCO objectives set the challenge that education in each SDG should promote not just thinking, but action. Action in favour of those who are most threatened by climate change. Action through the promotion of climate friendly activity, choices, even policy. Achieving improved collaborative reasoning, applied to increasingly wider frames of reference with a sense that increased agency would lead to informed action really was demanding more from us as Let’s Think teachers and tutors than before.

Then came the T-shirts. Supported by the experience and insight of Dr Verity Jones, Associate Professor of Education at the University of the West of England, our next cycle of lessons started with a pile of second-hand t-shirts. We moved from:

selecting and classifying what makes a ‘good’ T-shirt from the pile (it’s a nice colour, we like the logo, it’s softer);
to understanding and representing the waste (in energy and materials) in a linear fashion economy;
to effortfully envisaging how circular processes could be introduced into the t-shirt industry as they have been for paper.

After two intense hours of socially situated mental activity, we asked: ‘What now makes a good T-shirt?’

It should be recyclable

It should be made of better material so it can last longer

It should cost more so that those who make it get paid properly

It should be made closer to where it is sold

It needs to be made with different kinds of bleaches and dyes

And finally: ‘To whom does the choice of a t-shirt matter?’ It matters to us and it matters to the planet. Why does Let’s Think Geography matter? Throughout this project, we have known that we are standing on the shoulders of the Cognitive Acceleration Pedagogy giant, here. Let’s Think lessons so often do matter to children because they feel safe, they are included: they contribute and are heard. As a group, there is a feeling of connectivity, even when exploring difference and difficulty, because the group (is supported to...) steer through challenge, towards ideas that are gaining traction and are well-reasoned. The creation of new ideas and insights is tangible and builds efficacy. Indeed, new insights from interdisciplinary research institutes (CANDLE and The Social Brain Institute) – combining neuroscience and social science - are confirming that effective processing in the brain cannot be separated from our social and emotional context. Learners who feel they are socially connected, who are engaged in frequent feedback loops, who feel they have autonomy and who are working with a desirable level of challenge, crucially on matters that are of importance to them, have increased levels of energy fed to the brain. Learning, of a safe, collaborative, dialogic, rigorous well-pitched and affective nature is literally brain sugar. We are daring to think that our most successful Let’s Think Geography lessons have mattered to pupils because of these very dimensions. At a deep ‘scientific’ layer of the learning river, we have been deepening pupils’ reasoning around complex systems, causal relationships and with the T-shirts lessons, the dimension of moral justice. Just as deep has run the layer of learning about ourselves and our relationship to the world that is both home and resource. Pupils’ frames of reference have moved from themselves, to the group, to society and the wider world. They have begun to construct age-appropriate and hopeful ways in which they can have choice and agency in the face of complex problems. Finally, they have begun to understand how the responsibility for change sits with industry, innovation and legislation, as well as but not only with themselves. The humanity and science demanded by the vision of the SDGs has been a powerful influence on our existing understanding of CA pedagogy and the extent to which children will think hard together and be moved to act differently, when learning matters. [post_title] => Finding the humanity in the science: Or the sweet spot of Let’s Think through Primary Geography [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => finding-the-humanity-in-the-science-or-the-sweet-spot-of-lets-think-through-primary-geography [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-11-29 21:58:22 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-11-29 21:58:22 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1455 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [6] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1450 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2022-06-02 09:09:28 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-06-02 08:09:28 [post_content] => An interesting study was carried out about the effects of what researchers at the MINT Learning Centre in Zürich called cognitively activating instruction in secondary Physics teaching. They worked with a small group of experienced Physics teachers who were teaching in what is known as Gymnasia in German speaking countries. They are selective state schools which are sometimes referred to in English as grammar schools. A feature of these schools is that all students must attend classes in Biology, Chemistry and Physics that contribute over four years to their school leaving certificate (Matura) at approximately 18 years of age. The Matura is conceived as a broad academic basis for University study that allows a lot of choice in subject specialism. However, despite the fact that Physics is compulsory, the gender outcomes mean that many Swiss University Physical Science courses are male dominated. These researchers wished to show the ecological validity and effectiveness of their pedagogical concept. “In a quasi-experimental study, we wanted to determine whether regular in-service teachers are able to implement cognitively activating instructional methods under realistic classroom conditions to the benefit of their students’ conceptual understanding, without hampering their quantitative problem-solving performance.” The design of our own professional development could well be informed by some of their concerns about how to enhance one thing without minimising some other desirable objective. They also were concerned with the underachievement of female students and how the nature of Physics traditionally conceived as a highly mathematical problem solving discipline played a role in this. “The unsatisfactory situation in physics education also becomes obvious in the huge and persisting achievement differences between male and female students, to the disadvantage of the latter….. ongoing difficulties in understanding the concepts of mechanics have been demonstrated …….With our study, we also address the question of whether classroom instruction that focuses more on qualitative conceptual understanding than on quantitative problem solving is especially beneficial for female students.” The paper also carries out an interesting review of the literature on the idea that successful learning in science is best understood in terms of conceptual change from naive conception to, hopefully, robust understanding. “In past decades, science educators and psychologists have made good progress in understanding how to foster this type of conceptual change in the classroom: students must become aware of the limits of their everyday concepts and become convinced by the explanations offered during the instruction. This approach requires a classroom culture in which questioning and respect for initially diverse beliefs prevail ...” I found it particularly interesting that the Zürich researchers developed five key ingredients that they stressed were absolutely essential in their teacher development process. “generating solutions to novel problems, inventing with contrasting cases, comparing and contrasting, self-explanation prompts, and metacognitive questions.” I have been wondering how complementary these principles are to the Let's Think Five Pillars (Concrete Preparation, Cognitive Conflict, Social Construction, Metacognition and Bridging) and what we can learn from this study in the ongoing development of bridging lessons from the CASE, CAME and LT English lessons. A very important methodological point was made in this study about how research must not always be envisaged as large scale RCT type studies. “With our quasi-experimental study, we wanted to bridge the gap between well-controlled but narrow learning experiments and the implementation of scientifically approved means of instruction by in-service teachers in real classroom contexts.” By making use of parallel classes, we could control for teacher effects and therefore run a controlled intervention study with a relatively small number of classrooms. Although access to parallel classes may not always be as easy as it is in the Swiss system, it should be feasible in other countries as well. Such quasi-experimental intervention studies can be considered an intermediate step between laboratory experiments and large-scale studies. References Hofer, S. I., Schumacher, R., Rubin, H., & Stern, E. (2018, March 15). Enhancing Physics Learning With Cognitively Activating Instruction: A Quasi-Experimental Classroom Intervention Study. Journal of Educational Psychology. [post_title] => Physics and German Schools [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => physics-and-german-schools [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-06-02 09:09:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-06-02 08:09:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1450 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [7] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1444 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2022-05-12 19:28:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-05-12 18:28:36 [post_content] => This blog is a tribute to Mundher Al-Adhami, who recently passed away and is a sad loss to the Let’s Think community. Mundher was one of the lead researchers who developed the Let’s Think (Cognitive Acceleration) in Maths approach and has supported the Let’s Think community tirelessly throughout the years. In this blog, those who knew him share their memories of his life and friendship. You can read more about Mundher’s life in maths and in Iraqi politics in the Guardian obituary and you might also be interested in reading this tribute issue of Equals magazine, which he founded.

Alan Edmiston I first met Mundher in 1996 and soon came to view him as a dear friend and trusted mentor. Mundher was the most interesting person I knew, an exiled Iraqi who moved to Russia to study for his PhD before coming to the UK. Initially Mundher spent time at Durham University before working as a maths subject lead in London. He was part of the team led by Margaret Brown that produced the GAIM (Graded Assessment in Mathematics) materials. Following that he paired up with Michael Shayer to work on the CAME (Cognitive Acceleration through Maths) project. This collaboration saw him reside at King’s College for many years resulting in several books, numerous publications and latterly the Let’s Think Maths series of activities. It was just prior to the publication of the CAME or Thinking Maths lessons that I was first introduced to him by Michael Shayer. Little did I know that meeting Mundher would change the course of my career and see me move in a relatively short time from teaching science to someone who would spend most of his time teaching mathematics across all Key Stages and working with maths teachers. One time with Mundher clearly stands out for me. In 1998 he was kind enough to visit the North of England to spend time with some maths teachers from Sunderland as part of their CAME training. It was a pleasure to host him over that weekend and I clearly remember his joy at visiting Durham Cathedral and his delight as we had tea (Mundher was a great tea drinker) and wandered round the Botanic gardens. At his request we were able to visit his first home in a former coal mining village and Van Mildert College. I distinctly remember him telling me how safe he felt in his university room after fleeing Iraq knowing he would not be arrested and how amazing it was to live without the scrutiny that comes under oppressive regimes. With Lynda Maple we set up a company called Cognitive Acceleration Associates (CAA) to carry on the CAME CPD when Mundher left King’s College. Early in its history, and soon after the fall of Sadam Hussain, he returned home to Iraq. Mindful of the risks involved in such a journey he left me a gift, which I still have in my possession, of two cheques for £10,000 to be cashed in the event of his getting into trouble so I could carry on the work of CAA. Thinking back to that gesture brings Mundher’s wisdom into focus for he knew what in life what held true value. Material possessions meant very little to him in comparison to the investment of developing and supporting people to reach their potential. To the frustration of his colleagues he would give resources away including his own time and money. It was lovely to see him carefully and respectfully listen to, and value others without making them feel nervous. He encouraged them to express their anxieties and warmly supported their efforts. Mundher possessed an intuitive grasp of progression within mathematics and was brilliant at devising activities that enabled children to move towards higher, abstract, levels of thinking within a conceptual strand. For me the lessons he devised stand the test of time and teaching them is a honor to this day. I do not possess the words to fully pay tribute to him and to highlight the impact he had upon my life. It was a pleasure to know him and to spend time in his home and with his family. Those who knew him will miss his warmth, compassion and love deeply. Sally Howard I first met Mundher many moons ago when CASE was first branching out from just being a secondary science thing! Mundher’s devotion to quality maths education and helping learners learn and teachers teach more effectively was incredible. Attending any CASE/ CAME sessions he was involved in always bought laughter and great insight into why learners of any age might struggle with maths. It hadn’t crossed my mind that children across the primary age might still not recognise the need to measure from the zero mark rather than the start of the measuring stick, until I took part in one of his early CAME ideas for young children. Only then did the penny drop! Encounters with Mundher as his ideas were always invigorating - keeping up with his pace of thinking, talking and passion for practical experience with cognitive conflict was always an energised affair. He and his ideas will be greatly missed, not just by his family but by all who knew him. Rest in peace dear man. Shirley Simon My memory of Mundher goes back to the EARLI conference in Padua Italy in 2003. I had of course already met him at Kings at the end of the 1990s when we started CASE@KS1, but CASE was always quite separate from CAME at that time. I bumped into him in a street in Padua and we had a long conversation ranging from academic stuff to religion and then to his adventures with Michael Shayer in Italy visiting lots of art and culture. He persuaded me to take a day off and visit Venice and it was the best thing I did. That (is a memory) that has stayed in my mind all these years. We will miss him for his kind good humour and his wide range of interests. Sarah Seleznyov Mundher was my maths hero and a father figure for me in terms of my professional learning. There was nothing he didn’t know about the development of children’s mathematical thinking and he always had time to answer my questions. Doing CAME training twenty years ago radically changed my practice and my beliefs about mathematical teaching and learning. I felt as if everything I had learned so far in my teaching career needed to be torn up, reassembled and rethought - it was scary, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I went straight from doing CAME training, to attending a lesson design programme led by Mundher, a replication of the original CAME training for teachers. We wrote a set of lessons which are still used by Year 4 pupils and which were used for a large funded project in London, which achieved effects akin to the original research and were published in a journal article. I then moved straight on to becoming a Let’s Think Tutor, all with the encouragement, support and guidance of Mundher. He always saw potential in me, and always pushed me to do more. Firstly to read more, advice which led me to get a job at UCL Institute of Education. Then to write more, initially for Equals magazine, but then moving into a Master’s study which became a journal article. I wouldn’t be where I am today - a headteacher, PhD student and published author several times over - without his encouragement and guidance. We spoke regularly, right up until he passed away. He helped me develop a mathematics progression document for my Reception class, and was working on one for my new Year 1 class. He liked to pick my brains about his latest thinking and projects, and was latterly working on what we affectionately called his ‘world domination’ project with Ian McLaghlan in South Africa. Mundher never stopped fighting for pupils’ rights to a high quality, enjoyable mathematics education. I will miss him terribly: his grand plans, his eternal optimism, his generosity, and his humour (especially jokes about the Tunisian neighbours). His legacy will live on as we continue to help teachers using the resources and the professional development model he helped us design, and to fight for pupils to have the best mathematics education teachers can provide. Sue Johnston-Wilder I remember Mundher as warm, encouraging and fizzing with ideas. He was ageless - there was a time we were worried about him but he got better and came back to work. He seemed to love working with teachers, and building their confidence. He was thoughtful, generous and inclusive. Lynda Maple I worked with Mundher for many years; in the main, as joint tutors on Let’s Think maths courses. We trained hundreds of teachers as part of an initiative with the Education Action Zone in North Islington. Although that was over twenty years ago, his enthusiasm and kindness lives on in the schools and the work they do in mathematics. Mundher was always positive in his dealings with the teachers he met. He was humble and generous and had a way of helping everyone to take on the challenges they faced when introduced to the CA approach. I will miss him very much and he will always be one of the highlights in my career in education. Martina Lecky From the first time I met Mundher at King’s College as part of the CA tutor group that Philip Adey organised in the 1990s, I knew I was in the presence of an ‘intellectual giant’. Every time he spoke, I was struck by his passion for the discourse on students’ cognitive development. My friendship grew with Mundher when I became a member of the Let’s Think Forum (LTF) shortly after Philip’s death. Mundher asked me to be a trustee with him and Michael Shayer in 2014 and some of my fondest memories are sitting in Michael’s garden discussing numerous topics from LTF business to educational pedagogy. Mundher was a bright light in all our lives, leaving an indelible mark on the field of cognitive psychology and mathematics education. We will miss our debates with him and his legacy, cognitive acceleration, will continue to change students’ learning and teachers’ classroom practice. Mark Dawes I was extremely fortunate to be part of a secondary CAME training cohort about 20 years ago. Mundher was an extraordinary character, and someone I enjoyed working with over the subsequent years. I didn’t just benefit from his professional wisdom during the course days, but was, as many others have mentioned, mentored by him over a long period of time. Mundher continued to be an enormous influence on my teaching and my professional development in ways that I am consciously aware of, and, undoubtedly, in ways that I do not realise. One of my abiding memories of Mundher is the way, after listening intently to those of us with vastly less experience and wisdom, he would connect our half-formed ideas to research, to data he had collected, to things that he and others had written, and to lessons he had observed. For me, those discussions were transformative in my thinking about mathematics and about education. His work, and his personality, will continue to influence me and my students in the years to come.

Rosemary Hafeez

I worked very closely with Mundher when he and Michael Shayer were developing Primary CAME. Some years later, I remember him coming to Kingston and teaching a model lesson in one of our tricky boys' schools. He was amazing: able to hold the boys attention, engage and adapt to suit their differing needs, whilst challenging and extending their thinking. He was a great person in the world of mathematics.

[post_title] => A tribute to Mundher Al-Adhami [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-tribute-to-mundher-al-adhami [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-07-14 15:32:22 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-07-14 14:32:22 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1444 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [8] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1437 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2022-04-05 08:15:21 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-04-05 07:15:21 [post_content] => If I had a pound for every time I’d heard the Cognitive Acceleration approaches described as a ‘skills based curriculum’, I could have retired long ago. It is probably something I have been guilty of saying myself over the years, perpetuating a rather limited description of the approach. The risk with any kind of descriptor for anything is it that it oversimplifies the approach to a point that the subtlety and nuance is lost. In this blog, I aim to write a better description that clarifies this point. The reason for articulating this comes from a conscious educational drive in the UK to consider knowledge. This is exemplified by a speech from 2021 from the Rt Hon Nick Gibb MP, Minister for Education, in which he draws on the work of Professor E. D. Hirsch, articulating that those furthest behind have larger gaps in their knowledge and so over time, the gap tends to grow (the Matthew Effect). He stresses the importance of trying to fill those gaps in all pupils.

This isn’t the only place you might see this referred to. The work of Prof Hirsch as also been referred to in other Department for Education documents. The same thinking about knowledge and the importance of retaining it also appeared in the 2019 Ofsted Inspection Framework and is retained in the most recent (and current) update of the framework. The high stakes around Ofsted inspections for UK schools means that this is something that many schools are considering in their curriculum design. In discussions that I have with school and curriculum leaders, this topic has come up again and again. The focus of their work is (almost) inevitably designing a well sequenced curriculum that helps build a bank of 'sticky knowledge', along with the favoured techniques of ‘spaced practice’ (spreading the learning out) and ‘retrieval’ (pulling the learning back from the memory of pupils). So where do the Cognitive Acceleration approaches fit in to this? If you take Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) for example, it can appear that it is a series of topics that although connected to each other through the CASE schema, are not designed to be connected to the rest of the curriculum. Does that therefore mess up the curriculum sequence? Also, CASE seems to be very focused on enabling students to become good scientific investigators, rather than learning the important sticky knowledge that is required in science like cells, particles and forces.

I’ve had a few discussions with teachers and leaders that raise these points over the years and here are some of the things I would now say in response. In science, the curriculum knowledge that is required includes ‘Working Scientifically’ as a key component. You don’t need to take my word for this, this was very much the response of the Department for Education when working with them to establish a school improvement project in 2019. An analysis of the lessons and curriculum at the time indicated that the 30 CASE lessons cover approximately 18% of the UK National Curriculum for Science for Key Stage 3. A typical student will have over 300 science lessons in years 7 to 9 and so CASE would only need to cover around 10% to be ‘pulling its weight’ from a curriculum content perspective. Therefore, CASE teaches important knowledge in an efficient way. Schools can sometimes struggle to identify a sequence that helps to teach ‘working scientifically’ well. It often presents more of a challenge that the more recognised content of biology, chemistry and physics. CASE is a well-sequenced curriculum for teaching this ‘working scientifically’ and associated knowledge.

CASE lessons are designed to be spread out, with lessons consciously spaced out with perhaps a couple of weeks between them. It also incorporates recapping and retrieval of ideas from previous lessons, as well as the encouragement to apply these ideas outside of lessons. CASE was designed around the principles of ‘spaced learning’ and ‘retrieval practice’ to help embed important knowledge. The learning processes that take place in CASE lessons help teachers assess the learning that pupils have recalled. Knowledge is tested as students apply existing knowledge to novel contexts during CASE lessons. The focus on metacognition helps also assess the security of this knowledge and identify and resolve unhelpful preconceptions (misconceptions). CASE helps teachers and pupils work diagnostically to identify and fill knowledge gaps. The lessons learnt from CASE seem particularly ‘sticky’. The idea is that the ‘active ingredient’ of cognitive conflict and the associated techniques of social construction (students building their own mental models) and metacognition (discussions around the process of learning) can help students test a previous unhelpful schema (mental model) to its limits and rebuild a better and more useful mental model. CASE helps teachers and pupils fill those gaps with the correct knowledge, and connect that knowledge in a useful way.

As teachers practice their techniques with classes, both teachers and students become more expert at using them in lessons. They are also likely to begin to transfer this thinking to their other lessons. This can help both teachers apply these approaches with their other lessons on biology, chemistry and physics content and the students with their other subjects, which can increase the chances of them learning more knowledge over time. CASE can help learners get better at retaining more useful knowledge beyond that which is taught in CASE lessons. The reason I have introduced so many schools to CASE lessons is that time and time again, it has been a key component of school improvement in science, helping pupils attain better outcomes in ways as detailed above. CASE is not simply a skills based curriculum, it is very much a knowledge focused curriculum, using techniques which make sure important knowledge sticks over time and help learners become better at keeping a whole range of knowledge in their heads. [post_title] => Isn’t Cognitive Acceleration all about skills? Isn’t sticky knowledge more important? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => isnt-cognitive-acceleration-all-about-skills-isnt-sticky-knowledge-more-important [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-04-05 08:15:21 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-04-05 07:15:21 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1437 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [9] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1434 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2022-03-09 16:12:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-09 16:12:39 [post_content] => It’s a cold but sunny afternoon in February, I find myself standing in the school grounds of a Hampshire Junior school, pouring water on different surfaces and at different rates from a watering can. Listening and watching intently are a small group of teachers and the core team of a new Let’s Think project. Can small experiments with a watering can lead eventually to the reasoning pupils will need to inhabit our planet in a sustainable way?