Establishing Pedagogical purposes

Pedagogy should at its best be about what teachers do that not only helps students to learn but actively strengthens their capacity to learn David Hargreaves, Learning for life, 2004.

This in a sentence is what pedagogical purposes are all about. The benefits are clear, greater teacher clarity, improved student teacher relationships and improved metacognitive thinking by students. These feature prominently on Hattie's table of effect sizes in positions eighth, eleventh and thirteenth respectively. The following quote from Ruth Deakin Crick bears this out and eloquently highlights the benefit with having a clear learning agenda and the sharing of pedagogical purposes.

there is evidence that the key themes which form the necessary conditions for building learning power in classrooms include the quality of the relationships between teaches and learners, the quality of dialogue in which listening to the ‘other’ is central to questioning and debate, the development of a locally owned language for naming these processes, student choice and voice, and resequencing the content of the curriculum, which involves problematizing’ and ‘contextualizing’ the content so as to create  challenge and meaningfulness  Deakin- Crick et al 2002.

 For me there are three ways of quickly establishing a culture of sharing pedagogical purposes in our classrooms. I think the enquiry based and Project based learning may be a more comprehensive way of doing this. However, the three strategies can be categorised as,

1. Using specific tasks to stimulate a discussion around the act of learning.
2. Stating and debriefing the pedagogical purpose of each "task"
3. Increasing the number of metacognitive strategies used.

A splendid example of a task being used to stimulate discussion is the PEEL projects "Dirty trick" strategy (a full description of the strategy can be found on their website). Whereby students are asked to copy a set of notes, which are filled with errors and general nonsense.I like to distract them form this by titling them "Everything you need to know about..." and the like. Here's an example with living rocks that they never notice!

An example of Dirty Trick

Responses can be quite emotive- so use sparingly

I only use this sparingly as students could feel cheated, I love this example as it shows this student cares about what they learn. . If like me you spend a long time building up trusting relationships you wouldn't want to use it inappropriately, so a brief task of no more than 5 minutes is best. However, it does open up discussion about active and passive learning and responsibility. The students tend check and question information before they make notes and some even start to challenge the information I present. I always throw in a few silly ideas into the following lesson to check that they are questioning the information.


Increasingly, my lesson plans that I write that others use  highlight the strategy being used and how to debrief it. This helps turn a complete this task/ worksheet style of approach to developing student knowledge of possible strategies they could choose to use when working on a project or in a more independent way. The debrief of each of these tasks is vital. I normally ask the following questions.

1. How did you go about using this tool?
2. What was difficult about using it?
3. What does it allow you to do? or Why would you use it again?
4. Where would you use it again?

Question 3 and 4 are obviously there to facilitate transfer of the tool or way of thinking.

This AudioBoo highlights how readily students take to this, I love how they try to persuade doubters to the value, and is a chance for them to show how much they enjoy and care for learning. These students had just used a Whole Part Map for the first time. I think it also shows how it is necessary for the teaching of learning strategies to have a content/ real learning basis.



I always find this table useful in analysing the tools I use during my teaching.


Developed by Jill Flack.(PEEL)

 The final way of establishing pedagogical purpose with students is to increase metacognition. This can be inextricably linked to the debrief above. Although, I find that specific tasks as render positive results too. A favourite are the metacognitive wrapper tasks asked at the start of a session to prime the kind of thinking wanted (including content) and at the end to see how that metacognition had changed or improved their thinking. Again spending a small quantity of time discussing these often brings out generic strategies that some students use, allowing others to mimic their style of working.

A lot of these strategies can be framed through the use of SOLO taxonomy. It has a clear pedagogical purpose, to highlight what high quality learning woudl look like and providing structure and guidance to get there. The shared language mentioned in the quaote from Ruth Deakin Crick, is clear and unambiguous and readily picked up by students. And, through the clever linking of specific tools to the levels will add another dimension to the student debrief on the tool by asking "Where on SOLO taxonomy does this tool help you think at?".

So why should we share pedagogical purposes with students? This is succinctly summarised in the closing quotation.

‘Effective teaching … should aim to help individuals and groups to develop the
intellectual, personal and social resources that will enable them to … flourish … in a
diverse and changing world.’ ESRC TLRP Evidence-informed principles for teaching
and learning: No 1, March 2006

Critiquing culture takes off!

I sat down recently to mark some Year 8 practical write ups, which had been critiqued by students in pairs, during a teacher led session. So I expected to see some peer feedback and a second draft.  At first it didn't register that this student had done something different. I did notice that she had done three drafts but the significance didn't register. I was just impressed, by the work ethic and by how the drafting culture had quickly been accepted as the norm by the majority of this class. I did notice that one draft had been highlighted with different colours and thought "Great they have been thorough". But something didn't sit right. I looked again at the student work and saw draft one, followed by a critique followed by draft two which had also been critiqued and finally draft three. It then dawned. They have done an extra critique, but when did they do this? I then realised that the second draft had been critiqued independently of me! These students had not previously critiqued work, but have instantly seen the value and invested in it. The culture of critique and draft had taken off! I love the quote from this student after draft one. 

I am well aware that this is only two students who have completely taken to this, but I now have exemplar critiquing and drafted work to inspire and cajole others. Let the archiving commence. I must confess that I was slightly taken a back by the quality of the critiquing by the students on the second draft. It was so much better than what they had done when I had led the session. It was kind, helpful and specific, and contain real learning conversations and lots of subject content references.  I am becoming increasingly convinced that critiques are the best opportunity for teaching that we have, with ready made context and personal investment. What bothered me was how much better they were without me! In reality they had used the same success criteria we had established and had applied the feedback norms that were shared. But, the important thing is that they have made these there own, they can do it at anytime and with any topic or task and with great skill.  I have annotated the slides below showing the student work, but it really isn't necessary when you look at the work and comments. Drafting example

View more presentations from DKMead.

Obviously intrigued by the motivation to go to such lengths, I asked the two students involved. They had critiqued each others work and both had made huge improvements. I will photograph the other piece of work and add it to this blog post. The thing that strikes me about this AudioBoo is how matter of fact, they are about critiquing, drafting and hard work! They see it as part of learning, they see it as worthwhile, they see it as normal. Thank you Josie and Emily.

Hidden Lives of Learners - A must Read Book

Grahams Nuthalls posthumously published book “The Secret Lives of Learners” is the culmination of a lifetimes work as an educational researcher. Nuthall is rarity an academic who has passion, clarity and his finger on the pulse of learning. This book although based on his research is very much from the hip and as a result you get a challenge, passion and candour in equal measure. The title alludes to the three co-existing (although not necessarily interacting) worlds a learner experiences within a classroom. Firstly the teachers classroom we are all know, secondly the world of the peer, where teachers/ adults seldom gain access and finally their own world that exists in all our individual heads. In here lies the richness of Nuthalls’ writing, as an educator he is imploring you to look closely and widely at your student’s interaction, actions and thinking. Illustrating that metacognitive thinking is a vital part of learning. This book requires several readings to winkle out the implications to classroom practice.

The difficulty for a teacher to see learning is another explicit challenge, with Nuthall making clear those teachers (and I would suggest the wider education community) misconstrue good behaviour as good learning behaviour. How might technology allow teachers to see learning that is taking place rather than just “on taskness”?

An insight into this can be gleamed from the methods Nuthall used assessed prior learning, wired each student and teacher for sound, used classroom observers to note interactions and available resources, assessed again, interviewed learners about their learning experiences and finally correlated learning with this data.  Even the methodology employed has a useful message for teachers, we must listen and look out for the learning that is taking place, and this could be the role technology will play in a modern classroom, through blogs, message boards and wiki’s and the like the process and the interactions necessary for learning to take place are they for all to see and reflect upon.

The book is filled with extracts of the dialogue from the classroom and the interviews between researchers and students. These act exegetically of the main findings of his work rather than mere anecdotes. The biggest of these being that for something to be learned a learner must interact with the information in three or four different ways during a learning episode. The implication being that teaching alone does not suffice, and that teachers and students need to be able to work and think in different ways. Therefore the need for pedagogical structures such as a basic accelerated learning cycle is imperative

Few statistical devices appear in the book one that does is again based around individuals rather than Educational Technology could however revolutionise the next finding.. Nuthall demonstrates that students arrive with a lot of prior knowledge- around 40% of the items to be learned were already known. This is shown to be dependent on ability with the more able or should I say the students who perform better in test, having greater prior knowledge. It is shocking to note that there is no difference in the quantity learned between these students, although how it’s learned and how much teacher support does vary, with the more able requiring less teacher support.

The quantity of previously known information is one of the big “hiddens” within the classroom. This is why assessment for learning works, especially the use of pre-assessments to determine a more personalised route through a scheme of learning. But, this requires training of students that the assessment is helpful and will inform them of their next steps, and not a judgement and it also requires a lot of effort on the part of the teacher. This is a big opportunity for genuine Educational technology, making this rich information readily available to students and teachers. Although marrying this with another finding of the astonishing individuality of learning with up to 80% of the items learned done so by one or a single other student. This is the challenge. The uniqueness of learning needs to be looked for by teachers and curriculum designers.


I have just remembered that this exists of this old presentation form  a Teachmeet.