Chapter 17

THE MONKEY-PROOF BOX

The desire to learn from Early Years practice brings us neatly to the last aspect of a blended pedagogy: the monkey-proof box. Making life difficult might seem counterintuitive. It’s not something we’re usually concerned with, as life in school can be hard enough without deliberately going out of our way to stuff things up even more.

Having said that, there’s definitely some mileage in embracing awkwardness, and by fine-tuning our direct teaching and developing our thinking about how we facilitate learning, we’ve created the perfect conditions to start thinking about how to add complexity and challenge.

We’ve started to think more carefully about the idea of introducing difficulty over the past couple of years – particularly in maths. For the majority of my career, we were stuck in a pattern of teaching place value in maths for the first two weeks in September. In fact, if you’d gone into any school in the country, you’d have found much the same thing going on because we were all following the same basic plan. After this, we’d move on to addition, multiplication or whatever else we were supposed to be doing. At the end of the two-week block, we were pretty pleased with ourselves because the children would have lots of work in their books which all seemed to be right. I really only noticed the problem after moving to Year 6, where I found that, despite having being taught place value throughout their time in school, many of the children didn’t seem to have any kind of grasp of it at all.

One of the benefits of going for a mastery approach to maths has been a shift in this type of thinking. Two weeks on possibly the most fundamental part of maths was never enough, so to do it properly we now do it for longer. This ties into the idea of the difference between performance and learning that we looked at in Chapter 11. The children didn’t learn place value in two weeks, they simply performed. Subconsciously, I think we probably knew this was the case, because we didn’t go out of our way to test the strength of their learning; it was easier to believe that it had gone in and then move on.

As teachers, we’ve generally been trained to make the children’s lives easier rather than harder, so deliberately trying to catch them out wouldn’t necessarily be something that we’re overly keen on. Now, if the children can complete a process procedurally, instead of moving them on to whatever comes next, we can try to assess how well they understand it. We can wrap this up as ‘deepening’, ‘mastery’ or ‘challenge’, but, essentially, what it boils down to is going out of our way to make things awkward. If we reframe the learning or ask the children to apply it in a different or unusual context, and they can do it, then this gives us the confidence to say that they have mastered it. Whether this approach has managed to seep out into other areas of the curriculum is debatable, but there’s no reason why this thinking shouldn’t apply to everything.

If children can write simple sentences, then instead of reaching for the pot of conjunctions and throwing in an ‘and’, we can push them into thinking harder about what they’re already doing: ‘Can you write a simple sentence that describes the setting using exactly nine words?’ or ‘Can you write a simple sentence that describes the setting without using any adjectives?’ Automatically, the restriction means that as well as concentrating on the mechanics of constructing a simple sentence, they’ve now got an added element to think about. If their learning is shaky, they will struggle; if they’ve mastered it, then being forced into considering the words they’re choosing more carefully might be a challenge, but it won’t be a problem.

By accepting that modelling extends beyond our direct teaching, we’ve reduced the amount of time we need to spend front and centre and increased the time we’ve got for a different sort of interaction – talking to the children. In terms of actually making a difference to the process of learning, there isn’t any better use of our time, and to make the most of this, there are some specific things we can do. One of the easiest is to ensure that the children are using the layers of support effectively. Ideally, this will involve some facilitation at most, because the aim of layering support is to have the children accessing it independently. Whilst we’re at it, we’ll also be asking questions to check for understanding and keeping an eye out for mistakes and errors.1 When we get beyond this, things get more interesting.

The idea of feedback is often misunderstood, and we’ve been led to believe that it’s a one-way street: teachers provide feedback to their pupils. It doesn’t matter whether it’s verbal, written or via the medium of contemporary dance, it’s the teacher who supplies it. What this misses is the fact that the most valuable form of feedback happening in any lesson is (or at least should be) the feedback from the pupil to the teacher. This is when we notice misconceptions and misunderstandings. We then feed this into our understanding of where the children are currently in terms of the learning, where they need to go next and how this might happen.

This is how teachers in the Early Years operate, where the importance of noticing stuff (and sometimes obsessively writing it down on sticky notes) is standard and highly effective practice. Along with observing how the children are progressing with their learning, the other thing we’re on the lookout for are those who appear to have got it all sorted. If a child’s success is as a result of highly scaffolded support (via a worked example), then we can encourage them to adjust the level of challenge by switching to one of the faded examples so they’ve got less to go on. But if they are genuinely demonstrating that they’ve moved from performance to learning, then a different approach is needed.

We touched on the idea of restrictions in the context of simple sentences, but it’s a very useful way to create awkwardness in other areas too. I’ve already mentioned the fact that we’ve made great inroads with maths, so the following example now feels like a fairly natural response to children who’ve learnt the thing we’re interested in – in this case, area and perimeter: ‘OK, so I know you understand area and perimeter, but can you create a shape with an area of 12cm² and a perimeter of 16cm or less?’

The restriction isn’t complicated, but it means that instead of moving on, we’ve created some difficulty that edges the children towards thinking harder about the process they’re going through. Beyond this, we could tinker with the restriction a little more to give them another nudge: ‘How many shapes could you create with an area of 12cm² and a perimeter that’s equal to or greater than 22cm?’

If we think about the different aspects of creative thinking that we looked at in Part I, then this kind of increasing restriction is exactly what we need to draw it out: asking questions, exploring possibilities, overcoming barriers, adapting ideas, making connections – it’s all there. And by applying the same thinking, we can create the same conditions for any area of the curriculum we like.

In PE, a restriction might work its magic by tweaking the rules: ‘OK, for the next two minutes, you’re only allowed two touches of the football before passing it.’ In dance, it might be the challenge of creating a motif in which there’s always two points of contact with the floor. In art, we might ask a child to complete a sketch without removing their pencil from the paper or restrict the tools or media from which they can select. In science, we could ask, ‘Can you design an investigation using only a ball and a tape measure?’ or ‘Can you classify the materials using criteria other than size, shape or colour?’ In design technology, ‘Can you show me five different ways of joining the materials without using a glue stick or a stapler?’ or ‘Can you design a vehicle that moves without using wheels?’

In each case, the restriction is dropped in when there’s a level of expertise to be tested. There’s no point attempting to play a small-sided game of football using only two touches if the children can’t control the ball or pass accurately, but when the timing is right, a restriction is the perfect way to disrupt what would otherwise be an unhelpfully smooth process.

After an initial restriction, further difficulties can be added in layers to increase the complexity. Maybe after limiting the number of touches of the football, we start to limit the space in which the game is played. After designing a vehicle that moves without using wheels, we might constrain the materials that are available for use.

Another approach to developing this kind of difficulty is the idea of wonderings. I briefly described these in my first book, Guerrilla Teaching, as they’re a very useful way of not just adding a little awkwardness but also of encouraging a climate of curiosity. To get this right, the teacher needs to know exactly what they’re talking about in terms of subject knowledge. Of course, this should be a given, but rather than sharing it with anyone who will listen, instead we need to pretend that we don’t have it at all.

If we take the context of the children learning about triangles (and specifically internal angles), it might go like this:

In our heads …	‘Good – you’ve worked out that the sum of the interior angles of an equilateral triangle is 180 degrees. Now I want to see if you can work out that this is a rule that applies to all triangles.’
Out loud …	‘I wonder if it’s always the case that the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees?’

And after that:

In our heads …	‘OK, you’ve established a rule for triangles, but can you apply this thinking to other shapes?’
Out loud …	‘I wonder what would happen if we tried it with quadrilaterals?’

And if we wanted to keep going:

In our heads …	‘OK, you’ve got quadrilaterals sorted – let’s see if you can spot a pattern in shapes with more than four sides.’
Out loud …	‘I don’t suppose there’s a rule for polygons too – I wonder if you can find it?’

Again, timing is everything – a misplaced wondering can do more harm than good – but positioning ourselves as a curious simpleton isn’t selling us short. It’s purely about getting our children to do the thinking for themselves, and with it, develop the kind of curiosity that befits our small Amazonian sex-obsessed cousins.

Beyond looking at how these types of difficulties can be introduced as part of the learning process, it’s also worth considering how the concept of desirable difficulties might make us think differently about the structure of learning. The term ‘desirable difficulty’ was coined by the cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork, who used the idea to explore the impact that awkwardness can have on learning – and, in particular, the retention of learning.2 His work throws up some interesting ideas that have some very practical applications in four different areas: generation, spacing, interleaving and perceptual difficulties.

First, we’ll have a look at the least useful of the four – perceptual difficulties. This focuses on the idea that making something more difficult to read (by using a weird font, blurring words or having very small print) leads to deeper processing and therefore better remembering. It’s more technical than I’ve made it sound but that’s the basic idea. Whether or not it actually makes a difference is debatable, but it does seem to go against my usual mode of operation. If I think about how I used to differentiate for my lower ability (lemons group) children in a lesson that needed some key language, I’d always have it printed out and ready for them to use. In doing so, I’d also print the words in a nice large font because, as well as assuming they were a bit thick, I seemed to think that they couldn’t see very well either. Maybe, instead of going out of my way to make the text easy to access, I should have been doing the opposite – or at least I should have thought more deeply about what I was up to.

Although I’m in no great rush to change all my fonts, the three other areas that Bjork investigated deserve more attention. The idea of generation works on the premise that there are greater long-term benefits from generating words, answers or processes ourselves, rather than just being given them. It’s got to be better to remember stuff for yourself than having it offered up on a plate, but whether or not we’ve had this realisation, there’s little evidence of it having had any impact on the way in which most of us have been encouraged to structure our lessons. For as long as I can remember, it’s been considered good practice amongst most teachers to start a new lesson with a recap. The ‘recap prior learning’ bit has survived various shifts in the evolution of our lesson structure, but maybe it’s time for us to think about it differently. If we’re honest, in any given lesson, most of the recap is actually being done by the teacher. We do the remembering, whether it’s by repeating language or referring to an image or process from the day before on an interactive whiteboard. It doesn’t really make sense when you think about it. Making life too easy – or, more specifically, making recall too easy – is doing away with a vital part of the whole learning process. If the children aren’t given the opportunity to remember for themselves, then there’s a good chance they won’t remember anything at all.

So, if we’re not starting lessons with a recap, how do we start them? It’s difficult to answer this without rephrasing the question. First of all, we shouldn’t be bothering with lessons per se. If learning only happens over time, then the idea of a lesson automatically becomes less important. We’re not expecting anything miraculous to happen in our sixty-minute window of opportunity, so we can stop worrying about it and start creating the conditions for learning instead.

If we consider the shift from learning to performance, and how we can use layers of support to manage it, then we’re already thinking the right thoughts. At the start of the learning process, it’s likely that there will be direct teaching. This modelling is then continued through the layered support so the children can practise and be successful (performance). After this supported practice, and having spent time talking about/listening to/generally noticing what the children are up to, it may well be the end of the session. If this takes an hour, then it’s taken an hour – not because that’s the length of the slot on the timetable, but because at around sixty minutes, it felt like the right time to stop. If it takes less time, then this is OK – it’s only the start of the process. If it takes longer because we’ve built in a break or paused for a banana, then this is good too.

No matter how long it takes, it’s got to stop at some point (we’ve all got homes to go to), and this leaves us with the problem of how to start things up again. Traditionally, lesson two would begin with the aforementioned recap and then some teaching. What we’re interested in now, though, is not the next lesson but the next stage in the learning. This changes our priorities, and if we take on board the advice around generation, then we’re better off structuring things so the hard work is done by the children. For the second session we might actually stick with the idea of a recap, but instead of it being about the learning, it would focus on the layer of support that the children had used to be successful: ‘OK, yesterday we made a great start with our learning about … [insert whatever it is]. I want you to think about what resources you used to be successful, and what you’re aiming to use today.’

Now, this will only work if the children understand the point of weaning themselves off the layers of support (and are motivated enough to want to do so), but given the fact that we’ve been drip-feeding the concept of a ‘great start’ into their daily diet, they should respond in exactly the way we want. Following this, we can get straight back into a period of deliberate practice, with the children primed to reflect on the stage they’re up to in their learning and also to consider the best way to move forwards.3

To help with this process, one of the things we can do is to display an overview of the learning that sets out the different stages and/or layers of support that are being used along the way. This can be as simple as pinning up a sheet of paper showing arrows linking the stages. At a glance, the children can see their learning mapped out and use it to help them decide what they’re going to do next.

Timing wise, if we’re removing the necessity to go through the whole teaching process again, then we also need to get rid of the need for it to take an hour. It might be that this second session takes twenty minutes, but it will be twenty minutes of deliberate practice. In a traditional lesson the children would only get this much practice time anyway, after taking into account all of the recapping, remodelling, instructing and mini-plenaries thrown into the mix.

This approach should make us think much more flexibly about our timetables; learning doesn’t fit into neat hour-long chunks, so we shouldn’t try to force it. If we’re clear about how learning works, then it follows that we should be the ones to decide how to map it out.

Finally, we come to spacing and interleaving. The idea of using spaced intervals between learning (and ideas about its impact) has been around for quite a while. However, this isn’t something that most schools have paid too much attention to, largely because of its apparent incompatibility with the ‘rapid and sustained’ progress bandwagon which saw us rattle off sequences of sixty-minute lessons before moving on to a new topic. With a better understanding of long-term learning, as opposed to short-term (and short-lived) gains, it’s something we might start to think about more seriously.

At its simplest, spacing means that we’re leaving gaps between each ‘reloading’ of the learning and, as a result, creating the conditions in which the children have to work harder at remembering. If we take English and maths as an example, the traditional model has been to deliver five literacy and five numeracy lessons a week – usually organised into hour-long slots in the timetable (example 1).

Monday	Maths session 1	English session 1
Tuesday	Maths session 2	English session 2
Wednesday	Maths session 3	English session 3
Thursday	Maths session 4	English session 4
Friday	Maths session 5	English session 5

Example 1

Whilst this might vary a little – maybe it’s English first, then maths, or maybe it alternates between the two across the week – it’s fairly common practice in most schools, and you could even argue that this set-up is compatible with the idea of spacing. After beginning the learning in maths session 1 on Monday, we switch to English, and then whatever else we fill up the empty slots with, before returning to maths and ‘reloading’ the learning on Tuesday morning in maths session 2. There’s no doubt about the fact that there’s a space between the first two maths sessions, but this pattern doesn’t make much of an effort to optimise the effect. Above all, if we accept that we don’t need to be bound by the hour-long lesson rule, then we can adopt a more flexible approach and increase the number of times the learning can be reloaded by the children.

Monday		Maths session 1 (45 mins)
Tuesday	Maths session 2 (20 mins)		Maths session 3 (20 mins)
Wednesday			Maths session 4 (25 mins)		Maths session 5 (20 mins)
Thursday		Maths session 6 (25 mins)		Maths session 7 (20 mins)
Friday					Maths session 8 (20 mins)

Example 2

In example 2, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday have two spaced practice sessions each in place of the single lesson. In terms of the total time spent on maths across a week, it’s less that we might currently give it, but the impact of changing the way we structure things on learning could be significant. With example 1, the learning in maths would be ‘reloaded’ four times across the week at the beginning of each new session, but in example 2, there’d be seven occasions when the children were in the position of having to switch back into maths mode to reload whatever it was they were learning about.

There’s no definitive answer in terms of how long the spaces should be, so it’s something we can play around with. Given that the traditional lesson structures we’ve always used don’t appear to support what’s actually going on inside the children’s heads, what’s the worst that could happen?

Looking at spacing within a week is a good place to start, but to see long-term impact, we need to extend this thinking over greater chunks of time. If this is an example of what week 1 could look like, what about after that? To take advantage of this effect, the spaces need to get bigger, and in line with our desire to move from performance to learning, the support available will decrease. This perfect storm of desirable difficulty does exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, and instead of getting in the way of learning it actually enhances it. We might experience some short-term forgetting, but we need to see this as part of the process, rather than panicking and desperately topping it up. As strange as it sounds, over time, it turns out that the process of forgetting (and our management of it) is just as much a part of learning as remembering is.

The other deliberate action going on in example 2 is the scattering of maths over the whole of the timetable. I’ve had enough of the mornings being dominated by literacy and numeracy, and as far as I can see, there’s no good reason why it needs to happen. If we’re working on interconnected immersive projects, then relegating everything else to the afternoon slots sends the wrong message about how much we value them: ‘We’ll be doing our project work later, but we need to do English and maths first whilst you’re still nice and awake!’

Even if English is woven into a project (and possibly maths too4), we can still be reluctant to break the morning/afternoon divide. But there’s no rule about where things have to sit within a timetable, so having a much more flexible approach is within our grasp. We could even go as far as utilising the ‘last thing on a Friday’ slot, in which you might otherwise stick something like ‘golden time’ on the grounds that it’s nearly the weekend. Because we don’t need to be teaching them anything, the children can just get on with their self-directed practice and a calm end to the week is guaranteed – without the need to make them watch Ice Age for the twenty-first time.

To make the most of the idea of spacing, we also need to think about what to do with the gaps. This is where interleaving comes into play. The main thinking behind this is pretty simple: if we’re leaving spaces between bits of learning or practice, then it’s helpful to fill the gap with something so we’re not just sitting around twiddling our thumbs. Most primary schools are already set up for this kind of operation thanks to the fact that we deliver such a wide range of different subjects and switching between them is unavoidable. This switching is also helpful in its own right because it doesn’t leave us with any option other than to frequently reload the relevant pieces of learning. When we move from a little bit of maths to a little bit of history, then a little bit of RE, and then back to maths, the children are forced to remember whatever it was all over again.

Experimenting with this kind of thinking gives us the chance to approach the idea of timetabling with much more flexibility, and, more importantly, it helps to shift us from a purely organisational mindset to the kind of decision making that is entirely focused on learning.

1 We define ‘mistakes’ as being the things they’ve got wrong but shouldn’t have – it might be a missed capital letter when they do know better or a forgotten ear on their portrait. Usually a quick finger point is enough to set things straight before moving on. An ‘error’, on the other hand, is something that stems from a misconception and will be addressed either by referring to a specific part of the worked example or by doing some remodelling for clarification.

2 E. L. Bjork and R. A. Bjork, Making Things Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough and J. R. Pomerantz (eds), Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society (New York: Worth Publishers, 2011), pp. 56–64.

3 This process is exactly what we mean by ‘metacognition’ (the ways in which learners monitor and direct their learning). If you’re interested in seeing some of the research that backs up this thinking, there’s a very useful guidance report by the Education Endowment Foundation called Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning (London: EEF, 2018). Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence-summaries/teaching-learning-toolkit/meta-cognition-and-self-regulation.

4 I use the word ‘possibly’ because I’m a bit cautious with maths. English is always linked to a project because without it the children’s writing wouldn’t have a purpose or an audience. You can apply the same thinking to maths, but you have to work really hard to make it link, and even if you do, it’s often tenuous and frequently unhelpful. The only time that maths can link to a project is at the point when the children have learnt the thing that we have been focusing on. At this point, a context can work well as a form of desirable difficulty: ‘OK, I can see that you’ve learnt the process, but can you apply it to this …’ A good example of this working well was in the Year 5 project on the Black Death that we looked at in Chapter 5 (‘Do our choices really matter?’). After learning about rounding decimal numbers in maths, the children’s depth of understanding was tested by presenting them with problems that revolved around ingredients for their own plague remedy. Each ingredient had a price which needed to be rounded to the nearest pound before finding a total.