geoffPETTY Teaching outside the box


Geoff Petty argues that students really get to grips with a subject when they’re not learning just what’s on the syllabus. Geoff is the author of Teaching Today and Evidence Based Training


TEACHING CONTENT AND LEARNING SKILLS AT THE SAME TIME In my first year of teaching I waited outside an examination room for my A level physics students to emerge from their final exam, more nervous than they were. Tom handed me the paper and asked how to do question five. I explained it could easily be solved with a momentum approach. “Damn,” he said, “I tried conservation of energy on that for 15 minutes and got nowhere.” My other students had done the same. It took me 20 years to discover what


I was doing wrong: teaching topics in silos, then foolishly expecting students to know which topic related to which question. It


was just not obvious how to approach some questions. So I gave students hard-to-


classify questions on cards and asked them to put the questions into piles, depending on which physics principle they would use to answer them. Group discussion then enabled them to develop the skill of ‘question typing’, which was not on the syllabus, but required by the exam.


Our schemes of work 30 ISSUE 31 • SPRING 2018 INTUITION


carefully identify all the content we must teach, but often ignore learning skills. We need both. Let’s look at a case study where more obvious skills were taught systematically. A teacher, Jo, looks carefully at the subject-


specific skills identified by the syllabus, by assessments, examiner’s reports, and by experienced teachers in her subject. She notices that marks are awarded for the following: a. succinctly and accurately stating relevant knowledge and understanding


b. evaluation and critical thinking.


TEACHING EVALUATIVE THINKING Jo goes through her scheme of work and identifies topics where content could be taught by using critical thinking skills. For example, when she teaches ‘care plans’, she decides to ask students to evaluate care plans. This creates a ‘double decker lesson’ as shown in the diagram (opposite, top right), which teaches skills and content at the same time. In the first double


decker lesson she teaches students about care plans. Then she teaches what ‘evaluation’ means and how to do it, and gets them to practise this skill on some care plans. At the end of this lesson she reviews care plans, but she also reviews how to evaluate.


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