Thinking about...what we can learn from John Wooden

 John Wooden led his basketball teams to ten national championships in twelve years and is regarded as one of the greatest sport coaches in History. However, it is not his success and achievements that make Wooden so popular, it is the way he lived his life. His integrity, class and humility have inspired people from all walks of life and I believe the that teachers, schools and the education system can learn a lot from him.  

The road is better than the end

After Wooden had retired he was asked if he missed it [coaching basketball]. He explained that he missed the practices and working with the young people under his supervision but that he did not miss the games and the tournaments. Wooden expressed that the importance is in the preparation and not the outcome. He felt that ensuring his players were prepared to perform at their potential would have a greater influence on the result than constantly stressing over the outcome. Does your school focus on the road or on the end?  In education, like basketball, an outcome is inevitable; we can’t avoid the examinations that our pupils will sit at the end of their five years of schooling. We can, however, focus more on how they might grown as an individual throughout their five-year journey. We can make sure that our young people are defined by their character and not by their exam results.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation

Wooden disregarded reputation because it was something that he had no control over. He felt that his teams couldn’t necessarily control if they win or lose but they could control how they played the game.  Wooden believed that success is what you consistently do and that you cannot be defined by a single moment, game or tournament. He would watch how his team played to determine if they were successful or not. Wooden would often say that ‘there were games when we scored more than the opposition but we had lost and vice versa’. In education, do we care how well young people play the game or are we only concerned with their results? Some schools become so focused on their reputation, on their results and on their Ofsted grading that they lose focus of what matters. The children!  

John Wooden was asked, after one outstanding season, if this was his best job and he replied that he wouldn’t know for twenty years. He explained that it is what your youngsters do after they have left your supervision that really determines whether or not you have done a good job. What good are a school’s results, or its reputation, if its pupils fail to make a positive contribution to and succeed within society?

Never mention winning

Ironically, those schools that become overly focused on winning (results and Ofsted grades) are more likely to fail (by their own standards). Wooden himself has experienced this. When discussing the 16 years prior to his first championship title he explained, ashamedly, that there were times when he wanted to win so much that he hurt his team’s chances by overworking his players or trying to give them too much. In education we are currently facing a workload crisis; a number of teachers are reportedly leaving the profession due to being over worked and over stressed. Perhaps, as Wooden suggested, we are hurting our chances of being successful as we are focused too much on winning. We are focused too much on what Ofsted want. If we want to succeed; take a step back, let teachers do their job and stop putting the emphasis on winning.

Real happiness and success comes from the things that cannot be taken away from you

Perhaps we need to revisit our moral purpose, the reason we got involved in the profession and what it actually means to be an educator. When reflecting on his life, Wooden stated, that true success can only be measured by the lasting things in life, those things that cannot be taken away.  He explained that he always tried to live his life by the motto: ‘you can’t have a perfect day without doing something for another without any thought of return’. How many perfect days have you had recently? In education are we fulfilling our moral purpose and allowing our pupils to fulfil their potential? Or are we teaching in return for good results or an Ofsted grade? John Wooden will not be remembered as being a winner but for being successful. It is not the ten national championships that gravitate people towards him but rather the influence and inspiration he had on his players and those who he worked with. Perhaps our education system can learn the difference between winning and success from John Wooden and focus a little more on character and less on reputation.  

Thinking about... T&L to meet the demands of the GCSE reforms.

Recently, I have been thinking about how to prepare my pupils to meet the increased demands of the GCSE reforms. The changes will result in pupils sitting more linear examinations not to mention: increased content with more complex topics to master.

There are two strategies that I have worked on and used within my own practice. They are both highly effective and easy to implement. I regularly test pupils to help them acquire the extensive amount of knowledge they require. I also develop my pupils’ ability to think like experts in order to help them become more effective at applying their knowledge during examinations. 

Increase testing

Generally, tests are considered for assessment purposes only. Teachers, in the main, have a negative perception of testing due to the significant increases in the number of tests that pupils now have to take and the pressures associated with those tests; when in actuality, testing is proven to be one of the most effective tools to optimise learning!

Testing has to be thought of as in a pedagogical sense. Testing, when used to aid learning, engages pupils in the practice of recalling information learnt and is often referred to as ‘retrieval practice’. Retrieval practice helps consolidate the memory by strengthening and multiplying the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved more readily. Research proves that retrieval practice makes learning stick far better than re-exposure.

This does not mean that pupils should be sitting test papers every week! However, gains in learning can be achieved if they are engaged in quizzing and low stakes testing. To achieve this I often present pupils with a ‘do now’ task when they arrive to a lesson. This is simply a short activity that requires them to recall previously learnt material. There are a variety of activities that can be used to achieve this, including:

  ü  Daily, weekly, monthly review of content via quizzing.

  ü  Cooperative learning structures (quiz-quiz-trade, rally coach, inside-outside circle etc).

  ü  Key word games.

  ü  Cue card activities.

  ü  Various questioning-strategies.

  ü  The use of ICT (e.g. Kahoot)

  ü  Interleaving and spacing out practice to increase effort required to retrieve learned content.

Teaching pupils to think like experts

‘Pupils are poor at transferring knowledge learned in one context to another without explicit instruction and advice’  (David Didau)

As teachers we focus on delivering the content of our subject and when we do focus on answering exam questions we continue to prompt pupils until we get the correct answer. But how often do we focus on how to tackle the question?

We have probably all taught a topic where pupils have successfully answered a question to a proficient level in class only for them to struggle with a very similar question in a test because the question is phrased slightly differently.

Pupils have poor metacognition; they see the surface of examination questions (what it is about) rather than recognising its deep structure (what it is asking). We are experts in our subjects. When presented with an exam question we analyse it to determine what it is about, what it is asking, the level of detail required in the response and exactly what is needed to gain full marks. Our pupils do not naturally possess this ability; they often rush to the answer without carefully considering what it is asking. To enable pupils to think like experts we need to develop their metacognitive skills.

Metacognition is about how we go about preparing pupils to deal with the problems that they face. Basically, as the quote above suggests, it is ‘thinking about thinking’. Pupils with well-developed metacognitive skills can think through a problem or approach a task, select appropriate strategies and resolve the problem more successfully. 

Teachers need to provide scaffolds to help pupils develop their metacognitive skills by making the frameworks for meta-cognition explicit. Deliberately building this type of framework into teaching can help pupils develop thought processes that enable them to effectively answer questions/address the problems that they are faced with.

I used ‘cover it in custard’ as a meta-cognitive scaffold (see image above) with my pupils to help them deconstruct exam questions and improve their examination performance. As a result of this strategy I have observed:

ü  Reductions in the number of silly mistakes pupils have been making.

ü  More clear and concise answers and less waffle,

ü  Answers have a more logical structure.

ü  An increase in confidence – pupils feel they are now in control of the paper.

ü  Less time wasted.

It was not easy to convince all pupils to adopt this strategy initially. I have found that some pupils felt it was too much effort or too time consuming, but it is important to understand that ‘thinking like an expert’ does not come naturally. As David Didau suggested in his post about metacognition; pupils not only need meta-cognition they also need to know that they need it – and they need to be to be told this. I had to ensure that pupils repeatedly engaged with and practiced using the CUSTARD scaffold and, over time, this way of thinking became habitual. 

If we want our pupils to adopt these models, we need to provide opportunities for them to observe ‘expert thinking’– teachers need to demonstrate ‘thinking out loud’. Explicitly modeling how, we as teachers, use the same metacognitive frameworks helps pupils to understand that they need to adopt this practice. This can be achieved in a number of ways:

ü  Walking Talking Mock – The teacher talks through their thought processes as they work through questions.

ü  Annotated paper (annotated with thoughts only)

ü  Live modelling – often using a document camera.

ü  Pupil to pupil modelling.

ü  Modelling the thinking and the answer.

ü  Metacognitive workbook

Thinking about how to meet the increased demands of the GCSE reforms? Test your pupils more and scaffold and model to increase their ability to think like experts. Judging by the amount of custard my year 11s bought me at the end of this year, they seemed to appreciate the advice!

For more information on preparing pupils for examinations and metacognition you may wish to read the blog posts below:

 ü  This much I know about…what REALLY WORKS when preparing students for their examinations!

 ü  What is meta-cognition and can we teach it?

 ü  This much I know about…The Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit and the Golden Thread from evidence to student outcomes, via deliberate intervention