Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores Dr Anita Devi’s suggestion that a learning model can help you plan and teach adaptively.
I trained to teach in 1987-88 at the University of Sussex. Not once during our PGCE course did we consider how pupils learn.
It was at Huntington School in York, some 25 years later, that Alex Quigley began pushing me to think harder about how we taught and how pupils learnt. It was meeting Jonathan Sharples in 2012, when he was working at the University of York’s The Institute for Effective Education, that helped me understand further how I might begin to shape my teaching in a way that was most likely to result in my students learning what I had taught them. Before then – for a quarter of a century – I had developed my teaching practice by trial and error.
Until I met Jonathan (and, subsequently, Tom Sherrington, Rob Coe, Stuart Kime, Becky Allen, Becky Francis, Tom Bennett, Daisy Christodoulou, Mary Myatt and a host of other deep thinkers about education) my students had always done pretty well in their examinations. But once I started working hard on improving my teaching in an evidence-informed, deliberate way, my students began to make greater progress against every possible metric.
