A classic paper describes the mental model of American history used by a teacher of thirty-seven years’ experience. He sees many ways to organise and segment American history, but he believes the most effective structure tells “the struggle of Americans to get their ‘share of the American pie’ (Ibid., p.62).” Having chosen this structure, what teaching approaches and techniques can help students begin to grasp it? How can we promote deep learning by ensuring students “form larger and more powerful structures which organize smaller pieces of information (Ibid., p.68)”?
The first step to promoting deep learning is ensuring students have flexible knowledge, which they can access through a variety of cues. The next is identifying the organising structures, hierarchies and networks which make sense of that knowledge. The final step is teaching students to use those structures, make those links and make sense of what they know. This post tentatively suggests four ways to do so.
1. Place organising structures and links in the curriculum
My concern about deep learning is that we’re clear it’s a good thing, but less clear how to achieve it. It’s even harder if you’re a novice. The paper cited above describes how a novice sees his subject. He:
Does not even visualize the course of study as a whole… He can only visualize one unit at a time since he only attempts to come up with a story for one unit, usually the one that comes next. He does not always see the connections or development from one unit to another. He moves on to the next story with some vague ideas about what carries over (Ibid., p. 67).”
But we are all novices whenever we encounter a new syllabus, subject or year group. We grasp the structures and connections by teaching the topic a couple of times, and teaching the year above and the year below. What if we can’t wait that long to teach students structures? I think we can make promoting deep learning easier for novices by explicitly articulating the structure of the topic in two places:
Curricular documents
Structures and connections can be threaded throughout curricular documents. By curricular documents, I mean whatever teachers actually use: the topic overview, scheme of work, or powerpoint. As they plan, potential connections and structures should be made obvious to them. For example, I’ve suggested that planning for a lesson could be as simple as establishing the main content of the lesson, what we plan to foreshadow, to revisit, more distant connections we may make other topics, and potential misconceptions:
But it could just as well be a starred question on a powerpoint: the format doesn’t matter – what matters is that our curricular documents make the links and structures we want students to use explicit to teachers.
Student-facing summaries
We can also integrate the organising structures and connections into resources for learning and revision: knowledge organisers, revision mindmaps – whatever we’re offering. For example, Niki Kaiser has developed documents which encourage students to connect theoretical, macroscopic and symbolic representations of chemical processes.
It’s a handy resource – and any teacher using it will be encouraging students to make connections and understand the structure of the subject.
Key question: How do teachers and students know the links we’re trying to make?
Key idea: Plan when connections and links will be introduced; make these connections explicit to students and teachers.
2. Introduce the structures through concrete terms and analogies
Deep structures – the growth of democracy, the link between symbolic and macroscopic representations – are abstractions. We need to make them concrete for students, particularly when we first introduce them, connecting and integrating “abstract representations of a concept with concrete representations of the same concept (Pashler et al., p.15).” In introducing the interaction of religious and temporal power in medieval England, the ‘flogging’ of Henry II is an arresting image encapsulating the complex situation: it’s worth dealing with the event at length, then abstracting from it. My village may become less pleasant to live in due to flooding or a new road: this encapsulates the threshold concept that physical and human geography are linked. We may also use analogy: a pulsar emits radio waves just as a lighthouse flashes intermittently, for example. Provided we guard against the limitations of analogies, by explicitly highlighting similarities and differences between the analogy and the target concept, they may be useful concrete examples of abstract structures and links.
Key questions:
- How can we show students – unambiguously – the organising structures we want them to use?
Key idea: Make the most complicated idea(s) – the structures – the simplest and the most concrete.
3. Practise using the structures
As with any topic or skill, students need practice to master key ideas. Re-approaching the same idea multiple times with varying cues may help students develop flexible knowledge. Similarly, we can approach the same ideas using different organising structures. For example, across a series of lessons, we might ask:
- “We’ve identified many changes in the Industrial Revolution: what categories would you fit them into?” “What social changes can you remember from last lesson?” “How might social and economic changes have influenced Chartism?”
- “What chemical process is shown in this picture?” “Here’s the formula for a reaction: can you give me a concrete example of it?” “What does this diagram show?”
- “How would you solve this problem using algebra?” “How would you graph what you’ve written?”
A retrieval quiz is not just a way to reinforce underlying factual knowledge, as a fascinating recent study (Agarwal, 2019) highlights. It found that asking students factual retrieval questions led them to do better on subsequent factual questions; asking higher-order questions led them to do better on subsequent higher-order questions, but factual questions did not promote higher-order thinking and vice versa. If we want students to structure and connect their knowledge, they have to practise this from the outset.
We can ask students to generate the structures themselves. If they have a basis of factual knowledge, we can ask them to create categories and links: “What categories could we put these causes/factors/events into?” “What other topics does today’s lesson remind you of?” If I didn’t think it would cause a distraction, I might even be tempted to highlight how powerful a card sort can be in allowing grouping, categorising and structuring ideas and revising initial ideas.
Key question: How can we offer students more chances to practise using structures and making links?
Key idea: Every opportunity for retrieval is also an opportunity for structuring and connecting.
4. Leaving space for links
Finally – even when we haven’t planned to highlight structures and connections – we can always leave space for them. This can be as simple as a two-minute activity at the end of a lesson asking students “When have we studied a character in a similar situation?” “What other civilisation faced similar challenges?” “What other topics would help make sense of this dilemma?” Making links and structuring knowledge will rarely be the main focus of a lesson, but we can always leave space for it.
Key question: When and how can we make space for students to keep thinking about organisation and links?
Key idea: Leave 5-10% of our time (in a lesson, a unit or a term) for links and structures.
Conclusion
Every lesson is a chance to allude to, mention, review or enquire into structures. If we accept that having students think about the meaning of what they learn is “the core principle in learning” , having them think about the structure and connections between ideas, organising and linking for themselves should be a part of every lesson too. Students cannot organise what they do not know, but they will not learn what we don’t ask them to think about. Doing so may also begin to show students the usefulness of organising knowledge: that structures allow them to see novel problems as old friends, which their existing knowledge helps them solve.
I’m grateful to Niki Kaiser for allowing me to share her work.
If you found this interesting, you might appreciate
Detailed discussion and exemplification of various aspects of feedback in Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice, alongside discussion of five other endemic problems in teaching.
Part 1: Deep learning: planning for knowledge transfer
Part 2: Structuring and organising knowledge
References
Gudmundsdottir, S. and Shulman, L., 1987. Pedagogical content knowledge in social studies. Scandinavian Journal of Educationl Research, 31(2), pp.59-70.
Thank you for your work. I learn something every time I read and re-read your posts.