10 months ago I decided to subject myself to weekly squash coaching. This was not related to teaching in the slightest but because I was losing with incredible consistency. Nonetheless, it had an unanticipated impact on my approach to ‘the struggle zone” because frankly, I struggled. I had forgotten how hard it is to learn something from scratch – be it squash or exam technique – and what it feels like to get worse before you get better.
I knew, objectively, that I needed to do things like relay cognitive pathways so I could process what I was being asked to do, and do it instinctively all at once. I knew that there was a difference between theory and practise. I would listen to the coach and think ‘schemata’, ‘metacognition’, ‘modelling’, ‘feedback’, ‘reflection’, but actually improving so that I won a point (or a mark) was something different. I would recommend – providing you can find time – occasionally taking up something entirely new, if only because it is quite a humbling reminder of what it feels like to learn.
The whole experience tested my resilience and gave me a deeper understanding of those students who act up or refuse because they believe that they can’t do it; my lack of coordination was their equivalent of a vocabulary gap, for example. These are my top 3 takeaways and the few ideas I have for applying them to my teaching practise:
1: Move your feet
Every coach I have ever had – whatever the sport – could have printed this on a banner and saved their voice. You have to move your feet so that you are in the right position to return the ball, and you have to keep moving your feet so that you can anticipate the angle that the ball is going to come and adapt accordingly. My problem was that a) I’m very bad at angles, and b) I did not have enough knowledge of the game to be able to anticipate what was about to happen, be flexible, and approach it in different ways. It struck me that this was like encountering an exam question with a strange word that throws you off, or trying to answer a question when you revised something else. It comes back to performance predicated on secure knowledge. Luckily, I was reading Tom Sherrington’s interpretation of Rosenshine at that point (2019, p.12-13) and it gave me some ideas for revamping retrieval practise in order to make knowledge secure and malleable:
- Quick-fire targeted questioning as an AfL activity. To make this more substantial, students could work in small groups to test knowledge recall or their familiarity with exam requirements. They could score points for answering quickly or be deducted points for hesitation, thus giving an indication of how secure the knowledge is.
- Colour-coding cards when different questions are posed (rather than changing them around). It would then be easier to compare different sequences without having to re-sort and remember.
2: Keep your eye on the ball
Time and time again I learn the hard way that if my eye is not on the ball then I am going to miss it. Apparently, my one job was to focus on hitting the ball because if I was doing that, then any supplementary swings or body positions would become automatic. This was frustrating because nothing was automatic and I couldn’t even hit the squidgy little thing.
However, then I thought about learning to teach and how, as teachers, we hit multiple balls at once – we stop Katie (names changed, obviously) from drawing immaculate eyebrows on the corner of her book while we encourage Sam (who is shy and waiting for a diagnosis of dyslexia that we don’t know about) to participate in the lesson, while we stretch and challenge the group at the back of our overly large and mixed ability class. I couldn’t do this a year ago and sometimes I can’t do it now, but I’m getting better … and that’s because throughout the PGCE and my NQT year we’ve been encouraged to focus on certain standards and certain areas until we can eventually put it all together. The ball, therefore, is not the end goal, but the priority in that moment.
This is a long-winded way of saying that I am a huge fan of splitting skills or knowledge into small chunks, focusing on them in isolation, and then returning to the whole performance. Helpfully, Sherrington can assist here too (2019, p.15-17). He reinforces the importance of splitting new information into small steps with student practise after each. I have been consciously doing this for a while – we were taught that our activities should build on each other, after all – but I think I need to be more extreme in the splitting. Ideas:
- Teach key vocabulary in isolation and have activities dedicated to putting these words into practise, e.g. spelling tests for homework, starters that require constructing sentences, and then bonus points in assessments where these words have been successfully used.
- Teach elements of skills before putting them all together, such as practising what makes a good ‘point’, what makes good ‘evidence’, what makes a good ‘explanation’ and ‘development’. A sequence could focus on the component parts of a PEED paragraph, using modelling and improving each part as a class. Put this all back together, and you could, for example, write a 12 mark question – a model PEED could be given for paragraph 1, paragraph 2 could be a simple PEED (Level 1 or 2) that the students improve, and paragraph 3 one that they write from scratch (this might also help reduce an over-reliance on sentence starters, which I am presently guilty of).
3: Get back to the T
This was an analogy that my despairing PGCE mentor tried when my behaviour management was in need of development and I’m very fond of it. It’s flexible and can be applied to any situation. In squash, after any shot, best practise is to return to the middle of the court so that you have the best chance of returning the next shot. In the context of the learning process, I would interpret it to mean that at the end of any task or question you need to re-set and approach anything new sitting calmly in the middle of all your knowledge and skills, like you never pinballed around the court trying to beat a 16 mark question that you didn’t really understand, or a class of 30 Year 7 that you’d given the upper-hand. Now, I could get back to the T because I have long legs … but I really struggled with letting mistakes go and approaching the next shot positively.
This mostly relies on classroom culture and the environment for learning that individual teachers have fostered based on their own personalities and pedagogical approaches. I am going to try a very physical approach to this throughout the academic year by persuading students to have a small gesture that they do to ‘reset’, such as shaking their shoulders or rubbing their hands – something that won’t get them in trouble in the exam hall. Hopefully, this will trick their minds into resetting so that they might slide calmly back to the T and return whatever Edexcel/AQA etc. might serve at them.
Fingers crossed! @RidleyHistory
Tea & Learning 