Tom Sherrington

The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it.

I see a lot of lessons – hundreds of them in multiple contexts – and I’m going to suggest that there is one very common challenge that teachers face that is often not addressed well enough, even by experienced teachers.  In my view, it’s the single biggest reason for lessons being ineffective or certainly less effective than they could be; it’s the main reason for learning not happening, for weaker students to fall behind and, over time, for gaps to widen.   The prevalence of this issue is the main reason I feel we do more to address the needs of disadvantaged students and under-achieving subgroups by trying to teach everyone better instead of chasing interventions (To address underachieving groups, teach everyone better.). There’s just so much mileage in this; so much slack to take up.

The problem is this:  In a class of multiple individuals, it is not straight-forward to find out how successfully each individual person is learning, identifying what their difficulties or gaps are and then to use that information to close their learning gaps with appropriate responses.  Compared to a 1:1 tutoring situation, the level of responsiveness to each individual student’s varying success rate is very low.

All too often,  faced with this ever-present difficulty, teachers cut corners and do not structure lessons so that they focus on flushing out difficulties, errors and gaps in recall and understanding.  They rely too heavily on collective responses and a generalised sense of student success rate without consciously and deliberately attending to each and every individual.  As a result, the least confident students can pass from lesson to lesson, going through the motions of lesson activities, being present, caught up in the general flow, without having their individual learning issues addressed; their learning gaps go undetected at the point of instruction and often remain.

Let me illustrate with six examples alongside some possible solutions: 

  1. Teacher mindset.
  2. Ineffective testing or checking protocols.
  3. Exposition without checking for understanding.
  4. Weak questioning or response techniques
  5. Excessive scaffolding
  6. Poor Vocabulary Development

Teacher mindset:

Sometimes I use the simplified idea that the ideal goal of a learning sequence is for ALL the students to learn ALL the material; for them ALL to achieve the learning goals.  It’s not enough to be happy that SOME students learned SOME of the material.  Sometimes the difference between these two positions is extreme – unnecessarily so.  It’s very very common for a teacher to be satisfied (even relieved and delighted) that at least one student knows an answer. (I’m using “answer” as code for “success” in any subject area). This is a world away from them focusing on whether anyone at all still does not know the answer.

Solution:  

For, me the biggest shift we need to make is to switch into the right mindset:

  • From “Does anyone know”? to “Does everyone know?”
  • From “Can anyone do it?” to “Can everyone do it?”
  • From “Well done to those getting it right” to “Let’s find out who still can’t get this right and help them out”.
  • From a dominant emphasis on seeking affirmation in correctness to familiar routines around seeking out residual errors and difficulties.

Ineffective testing or checking protocols. 

A teacher sets out the knowledge students should have and, later, sets a recall test. They go through answers one by one, asking ‘who knows the answer?’ and taking the one volunteered answer, praising and affirming the correctness.  This tells them nothing about who didn’t get it right.  Sometimes they don’t even ask.

  • A teacher asked the class to name five types of structure.  Instead of asking them all to list all five, checking all know all five, he asked if anyone knew each one. Five different people named one structure each!  Most students didn’t even attempt an answer because they weren’t asked to.
  • A class of 25 is set 10 questions.  That’s 250 possible right/wrong responses.  The teacher hears a correct response for each question (from student putting their hand up) purring with joy, affirming the correctness, oblivious to the other 240 responses (many of which were totally wrong).

This is way too common.  Teachers assume that students will hear the correct answers and self-edit accordingly.  But that doesn’t necessarily happen – especially for the weakest students.  Recently I’ve been in at least three of these situations where the student next to me got less than 50% on a recall test and, not only did the teacher not pick it up, their wrong answers were not sought out, discussed and explained and the students left none the wiser – beyond knowing that they had more stuff they did not understand!

Solution:  

  • Make ‘all knowing all’ the explicit goal. Set this expectation with students.
  • Use a good repertoire of retrieval practice techniques that involve all students: 10 Techniques for Retrieval Practice
  • Structure checking processes such that all students can check all the knowledge in hand, answering all the questions.  (eg if asked to name Henry VIIIs wives, check each person knows all six, not ask six people to name one each).
  • In discussion, focus on error at least as much as correctness.

In the examples above, ask all students all the questions and give answers all at once for students to self-assess and, for sure, discuss them.  But then, take as much time as you can to find out where the errors lie. You could ask who got 3/5  or 8/10 on the quiz and then ask which answers they got wrong.  They’ll be reasonably confident and happy enough to say. This gives you the opportunity to talk about errors and problems that many others are likely to have and it opens the door to other similar questions.  A post-test process should be about finding out where the errors lie – that should feel like the whole point.  I am testing you to find out what you still need help with.

Picture 1
Which messages are you receiving? 

Exposition without stopping to check for understanding. 

Sometimes teachers make a big assumption that learning will be happening just because they are speaking.  I’ve explained it; I’ve said it out loud; I’ve told my engaging story; I’ve given my expert exposition; I’ve regaled the class with my witty engaging anecdote in my normal charismatic style that they love and that makes me so popular.…. so they must have understood and learned what I was talking about.

Nope!

It’s just so common for students to be left with all manner of confusion despite a teacher’s expert, engaging exposition – and the teacher does not stop to check if this has happened.  Even very experienced, very charismatic teachers can fall into this trap – the delusion that they inspired everyone into deep understanding through sheer charisma.

Solution:  

  • Making checking for understanding a solid, integrated part of any learning sequence. Doubt yourself.  Am I getting this across to everyone? Give explanations in short enough chunks that allow you to stop to see if people are with you. This isn’t a case of looking into your students’ eyes for warm approval… you don’t ask ‘is everyone with me?’ You check:  Let’s check you’ve understood so far: Simone, could you summarise the story so far; Michael, could you explain the process for us.. 

Of course you don’t have time to check that every student has understood every word at every point but if you routinely stop to check, sampling the class, you get some idea and this makes you think about whether to re-explain, re-teach, re-focus.  The sampling concept is key.

Weak questioning or response techniques

Echoing the issues with testing procedures,  weak questioning allows lessons to be driven  exclusively by the students who know, rather than the students who don’t. I’ve seen many many lessons where 2 or 3 students answer all the questions and the teacher has used their responses as the gauge for the level of understanding in the room.  ‘Hands up’ or ‘call out’  questioning is widespread as the default mode of questioning.   It is possible to sit in far too many lessons as a low-confidence or shy learner and never be asked to contribute, never be asked to explore your ideas or understanding – because other, more confident students  chip in and dominate and this is just how things are all the time.  I feel quite strongly that this kind of practice really has to change.

Solution

  • View the purpose of questioning as providing feedback to you:  have I explained this well?  Do we have enough understanding across the class to justify moving on? Sample enough students to get a reasonable picture.
  • Use a good repertoire of questioning!  Great Teaching: The Power of Questioning
  • Cold Call and Pair-Share should be absolutely routine.  I really feel that if more pair discussion, tightly focused and time managed,  was built into lessons, involving all students, a lot more practice would be happening and more misconceptions and difficulties would emerge.  If you listen in discreetly as all students air their ideas – it gives a powerful insight. There is great power in giving students space to rehearse their thinking; to hear their own thoughts.

Excessive scaffolding

As I’ve explored in this post From “I’ve done it” to “I’ve learned it”. Terminate the tyranny of the task.  lessons can be excessively task-focused with all manner of supports and scaffolds giving students a feeling of doing things without identifying whether they are learning things.  As ever, it is the weakest students that suffer the most here.  They might have a neat book, a completed table and a paragraph of some kind, but, take the supports away – do they understand the ideas?  Often they don’t, despite having completed a task, because they could do it without thinking very hard or needing to explore their own schema.

Solution

  • Switch the emphasis from task completion to learning.  Instead of ‘have you done it, are you ready, have you finished?’, make the dominant query “now, have you learned and understood it?” and check.
  • Use guided individual practice extensively and intensively.  Circulate looking for success with specific details in the tasks and be ready to re-teach key points.   (Some teachers rescue weak questioning with much more effective supervision of guided practice sometimes neither of these is effective enough).
  • Introduce the routine use of ‘books closed and check’ as independent practice so that students learn to process their knowledge at a deeper generative level.  If it is an anticipated routine that, when doing a task, they will have to do it unsupported in the end, it builds confidence in the long run.  If the only time students are truly made to work independently and unsupported is in an exam room, it is a disaster.

Poor Vocabulary Development

The final example is also extremely common.  New words are introduced by the teacher in their explanations, board-work, texts, powerpoint slides – often repeated and used by the teacher multiple times – on the assumption that this is sufficient for the students to absorb them into their vocabulary.   It is just so incredibly common for key terms not be given explicit rehearsal time during lessons so that the weakest students do not even get to say them once.   Recently I saw a lesson where the term ‘erosion’ was introduced to explain a process in geography.  The boy next to me could not say it and even struggled to read it from the text, despite the teacher having said ‘erosion’ himself, many times.  The boy resorted to ‘the water destroys the rocks’ because ‘erosion’ had eluded him and the grammar of erosion/erodes hadn’t been explored at all.  I’d suggest that the cumulative effect of poor vocabulary development strategies is significant.

Solution

  • Design curriculum deliberately with vocabulary and reading embedded in the planning so that target words are known by all students and teachers.
  • Ensure that all new words that are introduced are included in routine the process of deliberate vocabulary development:  Engineer activities that ensure ALL students say the words, practise using the words, put the words into sentences, read the words in context and, later recall the words.  Do this, systematically, deliberately and routinely.
  • See Building Word Confidence: Everyone read, say, understand, use, practise.

Final word:

If you read this and think  ‘well of course – any good teacher does this already’ and take umbrage, let me suggest that in at least 50% of lessons I observe, one or more of these issues arises; sometimes it is marginal, sometimes it’s a chronic situation.   All too often the culture in the classroom motivates students to hide their errors and mask their lack of understanding instead of making it feel safe and normal to volunteer it.  All too often the teacher is oblivious to the extent of understanding or lack of it and presses on with a trail of misunderstandings and half-learned knowledge bits in their wake.   Our learning safety-nets are full of holes and children are falling through them every day.  Sometimes every lesson.  And that’s where gaps widen.  Turning it around, if we address these issues, it is also how the gaps can be closed.

Video Summary 

Here’s an infographic by Oliver Caviglioli summarising the key ideas in the post.

number-one-problem-v3-1Download

52 comments

  1. Thanks Tom, another excellent post. particularly like the subtle re-phrasing of

    From “Does anyone know”? to “Does everyone know?”
    From “Can anyone do it?” to “Can everyone do it?”

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  2. Firstly, let me thank you for writing such a practical, clear, and incisive post!

    As a teacher of some 20-years experience, I’ve read innumerable articles of this kind, but at the risk of sounding preposterously sychophantic, let me say this is literally the best one I’ve ever encountered…

    I have to admit it made me uncomfortable at times, but it has also inspired me to take a fresh look at my classes this week. In particular, I need to make sure a couple of ‘key students’ don’t monopolise the feedback, and it’s time I bought some individual white-boards, so every student’s response can be seen, and acknowledged.

    Thanks for taking the time to post this. I can assure you I usually try to avoid such writings, and dismiss them as ‘gimmicky’ or impractical. In this instance, however, I’ve emailed it to my school account, in order to re-read it again at work this week, and also to pass it on to my colleagues.

    I may even break the habit of a lifetime, and offer to give a CPD on this (making sure I give you FULL credit, of course…)

    The most amazing thing of all, is that I’ve read and commented on a Saturday morning – my most sacred ‘school-free’ moment in the whole week.

    You sir, deserve HUGE credit…

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  4. As a Learning and Support Teacher, I work with smaller groups (5-10) and feel I can and do follow this approach to teaching. However, I am in a privileged position. Sadly, the regular classroom teacher has up to 30 children, with a jam-packed curriculum and several children with untreated learning difficulties such as ADHD, SPD, etc. as well as those who are GaT. We need to de-clutter the curriculum or reduce class sizes to allow teachers to offer children their best practice.

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  6. I think all this is true. But I’d argue that if you slogged away and did these things in every lesson you’d never finish the course and you’d have some very bored high/middle achievers because everything would end up being done at the pace of the weakest. This is why I favour some kind of ability grouping whenever possible to minimise the effect of the drag and maximise the time available for help for the weak.

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  13. You seem to start from the – false – assumption that learning English as an L2 is a predominantly a matter of explicit learning about the language. Yet the evidence from research into instructed SLA gives massive support to the claim that concentrating on activities which help implicit knowledge (by developing the learners’ ability to make meaning in the L2, through exposure to comprehensible input, participation in discourse, and implicit or explicit feedback) leads to far greater gains in interlanguage development than concentrating on explicit learning.

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    • Does it seem like that to you? To me, it seemed to start from the observation that teachers often don’t aquire enough evidence that their students have understood taught concepts. It lead on to suggest that unless teachers actively search out points of confusion and misconception, then they are unable to address their learners’ needs. I didn’t see any reference to language aquisition, ‘explicit learning’ or interlanguage development.

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  20. Thank you. I found this really useful and plan to share it with staff on Monday as part of some quality first teaching training. Do you think all of your points apply to primary age children also? (I’m a primary senco) We provide a lot of scaffolding for younger pupils but perhaps need to check more what they know when the scaffolding is taken away although this is harder with younger pupils who don’t necessarily have the verbal skills to explain their understanding.

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  24. Hi Tom, your blog was recommended by a fellow teacher, I’ve got some reading to catch up on!

    I agree that some teachers will take umbrage, but for those who don’t and are wondering how to implement some of this advice in the classroom here are three simple ideas that I use in maths classes that don’t require high levels of expertise and can be implemented quickly and cheaply:
    1) “My favourite mistake”. One question in each set of practice questions is selected for students to complete on a post-it. The post-its are collected and the teacher looks through them to find his/her favourite mistake. After re-writing it on to the white/smart-board the class should discuss what the student (who is anonymous to the class but known to the teacher) has done well and what bit is the teacher’s favourite mistake. This re-frames mistakes as things to use as learning tools and gives the teacher an opportunity to tease out and address common misconceptions or quickly identify individuals or groups that need support.
    2) “BECAUSE”. I have this word in large laminated letters on the walls at the front and back of the classroom. (It’s at the back to remind me to use it). When toddlers first learn to speak they almost incessantly ask “why?”, they are natural learners. With each answer provided by a student I ask “why?”. The student’s explanation is started with “because” and at each stage of their explanation I can interject with another “why?”. After the first explanation I will also ask “who has a different explanation or for a challenge can anyone use the word “XXX” in their explanation”, with XXX being some key terminology or academic vocabulary. This inculcates in students the idea that the reasoning is as important as the answer, develops their vocabulary and models a structure for asking and answering questions.
    3) “ABCD cards” Multiple choice questions with ABCD laminated cards can be used to check whole class understanding at key points during the lesson. The answers on the multiple choice question are designed to tease out key misconceptions. Students all put their cards up at the same time to minimise copying each other. Time is taken to explain not just why the right answer is right, but also why the wrong answers are wrong (this can be by the teacher if there are low levels of student understanding, or by students if the levels of understanding are high).

    Anyway, if this even helps one teacher improve their practice it’ll be worth it, right? After all, aren’t we all learning too?

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  25. […] If I had one overall conclusion, I’d say it’s that the most common weakness I see is where a teacher finds it hard to engage every student in learning the curriculum they’ve designed.  This is true even when the blueprint curriculum seems excellent.  At some level, it’s hard for everyone!  See The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it. […]

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  27. Oh dear! I recognised myself described here! Thank you for such helpful and relevant constructive criticism. I will be catching up on further blogs.
    Cheers

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  30. Tom
    Love your column and your Rainforest book. I’m currently writing a book on live feedback and you get several quotes from the blog and the book. Getting instant ‘real time’ feedback from everyone and being able to see who has made a mistake, what the misconception is and how many have made the same error is happening with Learning by Questions (LbQ), (Bett Best Innovator 2019). All marking is done as well, electronically and kids get live feedback on each question. 80,000 questions in English, maths and science KS1 -GCSE, all based on mastery, so planning also reduced in terms of workload. With the new Covid-19 guidelines in secondary teachers can check understanding of all students from their desks and can pause lesson for re-teaching where the feedback indicates an understanding problem. Your quote from earlier “In a class of multiple individuals, it is not straight-forward to find out how successfully each individual person is learning, identifying what their difficulties or gaps are and then to use that information to close their learning gaps with appropriate responses.” needs to be qualified with LbQ in mind. I have watched over 50 hours of LbQ lessons and the impact is stunning. http://www.lbq.org

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  37. […] Whether those 32 students have all learnt what you intended them to learn is pretty difficult to discern. Indeed, Tom Sherrington claims that, “in a class of multiple individuals, it is not straight-forward to find out how successfully each individual person is learning, identifying what their difficulties or gaps are and then to use that information to close their learning gaps with appropriate responses.” He calls this, “The #1 problem/weakness in teaching”. […]

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  42. […] I would suggest that the most common challenges or flaws in the lessons I observe fall into the area where some students are doing fine but not everyone is… and the lessons allow this to happen or to go unnoticed. I feel a focus in teacher thinking and CPD that can yield significant gains to focus on this explicitly. (It’s a theme I return to over and over – see The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it. […]

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