When the Old Becomes Startlingly New

At Last, Some Sense in Education

Every so often a piece is published which is like a ray of common-sense amidst a dark night of foolishness.  And so it came to pass on October 31st, 2014.  The Sutton Trust published some research conducted by Professor Robert Coe of Durham University and colleagues. The website blurb on the Sutton Trust reads as follows:

The Sutton Trust was founded in 1997 by Sir Peter Lampl to improve social mobility through education.  As well as being a think-tank, the Sutton Trust is a ‘do-tank,’ having funded over 200 programmes, commissioned over 140 research studies and influenced Government education policy by pushing social mobility to the top of the political agenda.

The title of the research is, What Makes Great Teaching? Review of the Underpinning Research.   The Sutton Trust, a co-sponsor of the work, provided an executive summary of what has become evident to the researchers:

This report reviews over 200 pieces of research to identify the elements of teaching with the strongest evidence of improving attainment. It finds some common practices can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research. Specific practices which are supported by good evidence of their effectiveness are also examined and six key factors that contribute to great teaching are identified. The report also analyses different methods of evaluating teaching including: using ‘value-added’ results from student test scores; observing classroom teaching; and getting students to rate the quality of their teaching.

To improve pupil attainment there are two key factors which must be at work:

• teachers’ content knowledge, including their ability to understand how students think about a subject and identify common misconceptions


• quality of instruction, which includes using strategies like effective questioning and the use of assessment

So, right away we know we are not talking about rocket science.  But with all the mumbo-jumbo and superstitious pettifoggery swirling around education and pedagogy these days, such obvious--even trite--conclusions resemble the explosion of a nuclear device in a very dark night.  So, let's restate this: in order to teach effectively, teachers must have a good knowledge of their subject--where "good" means a comprehensive understanding.  Secondly, they need to have a good knowledge of how their students think about the subject and what their misunderstandings are likely to be.

Secondly, high quality instruction involves effective questioning (the good, ages-old, time-tested Socratic method) and assessments.

In addition, there are some "nice-to-haves" if pupils are going to attain.  These amount to techniques which increase the student's engagement with the subject and the teacher.  They are listed as:

• challenging students to identify the reason why an activity is taking place in the lesson


• asking a large number of questions and checking the responses of all students


• spacing-out study or practice on a given topic, with gaps in between for forgetting


• making students take tests or generate answers, even before they have been taught the material

It takes one or more years to teach an aspiring teacher how to teach.  May we humbly suggest that these additional, supplementary techniques could be taught in a couple of months to any with a modicum of aptitude.  Once again, not rocket science.

But the Coe Report does something else.  It identifies pedagogical practice which is worthless, if not harmful.  Lo and behold--what is listed represents the Holy Grail of modern perfidious pedagogy.

• using praise lavishly


• allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves


• grouping students by ability


• presenting information to students based on their “preferred learning style”

The teaching of teachers in our modern world has become little more than quackery and witchcraft.  The quackery involves an tortuous emphasis upon what is false.  The witchcraft involves successive incantations of atheistic secularist mumbo-jumbo--a veritable witches' cauldron of Marxist ideology, post-modernism, evolutionism, and pragmatism.  We are not at all surprised by the unintended outcomes in today's secularist government schools.

The Guardian carried the following summary of the research:

Schools need to put more effort into evaluating what makes effective teaching, and ensure that discredited practices are rooted out from classrooms, according to a new study published by the Sutton Trust and Durham University.

The study suggests that some schools and teachers continue using methods that cause little or no improvement in student progress, and instead rely on anecdotal evidence to back fashionable techniques such as “discovery learning,” where pupils are meant to uncover key ideas for themselves, or “learning styles,” which claims children can be divided into those who learn best through sight, sound or movement.  Instead, more traditional styles that reward effort, use class time efficiently and insist on clear rules to manage pupil behaviour, are more likely to succeed, according to the report – touching on a raw nerve within the British teaching profession, which has seen vigorous debates between “progressive” and “traditional” best practice. . . .

The evidence collected by [Professor] Coe also rejects the use of streaming or setting, where pupils are grouped by ability within classes or year-groups. It remains popular in many schools despite being supported by little evidence that it improves achievement. Ability groups can result in teachers “going too fast with the high-ability groups and too slow with the low,” according to the research, and so cancels the advantages of tailoring lessons to the different sets of pupils.

Instead, the best research suggests that teachers with a command of their subject, allied with high-quality instruction techniques such as effective questioning and assessment, are the most likely to impart the best learning to their pupils.