What was the last bandwagon you jumped on?
We’ve all been on them - you might even be sat on one now. Some have even driven them. They’ve got shiny wheels, they go fast and they promise the earth.
What am I talking about? Zeitgeist bandwagons carrying magic beans, magic bullets and magic potions, in the form of educational research. These ideas are attractive when you’re trying your best to improve student outcomes but they are often fuelled by faulty claims and dodgy research which is hard to spot. It’s easy to get hoodwinked and carried away by
I’d like more detail on ability grouping. Are you saying there should be no Honors or AP classes? For math it surely makes sense, and for languages to be taught in any meaningful way it’s pretty much essential for at least students in their first 400 or so hours of tuition to be working on level appropriate material.
There is 30 years of research that consistently proves that ability grouping is damaging to pupils. It puts a lid on learning, lowers teacher expectations and negatively affects pupil self esteem. Mixed ability grouping does the opposite in that teachers see all pupils as equal, so do pupils. There you have it, raised teacher expectation, raised pupil self worth and belief, raised standards.
Why I spent 12 years of my teaching career ability grouping I don’t know. I wish I had taken account of the research sooner. And yes I have mixed ability in maths too.
Interesting but flawed analysis of theories.
Thanks for citing my post ‘The Politics of Setting’ at 11. above. It is very pleasant to enjoy a Christmas spike in my readership.
However, could I just mention two things:
1. You have linked to my old Gifted Phoenix Blog, which I closed down in 2015. My Gifted Phoenix persona returned to the ashes. All my new posts appear under my own name on my Eponymous Blog, where I have also reblogged ‘The Politics of Setting’ – https://timdracup.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/the-politics-of-setting/
2. More seriously, on the basis of the evidence I have read, I would not be ready to include ability grouping in your list. You yourself fall into the trap of conflating many different kinds of grouping under a single generic heading, even though your own text points out that there are very different effects for different practices. My piece criticises the EEF Toolkit for falling into the same trap. As for setting specifically, my reading of the research suggests that many studies fail to distinguish properly between effective setting practice and much existing, sub-optimal setting practice. As matters stand, I would argue that one cannot conclude that effective setting practice has no impact on high attainers, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds. I still think the balance of evidence suggests relatively small positive effects for this subset of the school population. I would also disagree strongly with the suggestion that ‘mastery has made setting irrelevant’. I live in hope that the EEF-funded setting study will reach balanced, evidence-based conclusions on the impact on (disadvantaged) high attainers when its report is published in 2018. However, I have observed that ideology typically influences even ‘evidence-based’ studies in this field and I would not be greatly surprised if that continued.
Hi Tim – thanks for your comment and pleased you’ve had a spike in stats. I will pass your comments onto John who wrote the blog – if I could add one point, I’ve been reading The End of Average by Harvard graduate Todd Rose, in which he challenges the notion of the bell curve and standardisation as we know it. I’d highly recommend you read it – it’s totally changed the way I perceive students/teachers as good/not good for particular assessment in maths, English or even teacher-appraisal. In essence, education on the whole the world over, is still operating under Edward Thorndike’s (1874 – 1949) principles of learning, that we can measure a student by their ability and therefore, teach by ability grouping to prepare them for adult life. I think it’s flawed and we must get to a place where placing students by ability is simply designed for teacher-advantage, not the student’s. As a solution, I have no idea what it is… as we still work on the model of one teacher vs. 30 students in class. I’ve written about differentiation recently and cite Todd Rose’s work.
“….that we can measure a student by their ability and therefore, teach by ability grouping to prepare them for adult life….”. There are five things there that each could have their own library! ‘Measure’ is such a mechanical word but it beyond question that we can assess, at a given point in time, a student’s ability (depending on how that is defined)/abilities (ditto). But so assessing need not necessarily be for ability grouping, even though ability grouping works for ‘more able’ (more definitions!!) students.
The cross on which differentiation hangs is that for each of my students, in a standard 40 minute mixed-ability class, I have 92 seconds of one-to-one time. If we cluster grouped, that 92 second has a higher quality to it.
‘challenges the notion of the bell curve’???
Gauss would have been interested. Take a look at the Central Limit Theorem and tell me why we wouldn’t expect a normal distribution
Really interesting read and there are definately some I have and was until now some I was falling for. As a primary teacher one aspect though I just cant get my head around is not grouping by ability for Maths. I havent had the pleasure of receiving training for Maths Mastery, I’ve read lots about it over the years from NCETM so continue to group by ability. I did try unsuccessfully not grouping but working in the infants with a group of kids who cant even count or write numbers to 10 and others who are adding 3 numbers plus adding and subtracting mentally within 20 I found differentiation easier to group. Any comments?
IMHO, it’s difficult to conflate the approaches to be used across different age groups. In early learning, there’s bound to be huge differences between children’s individual developmental stages. If you are required to explicitly teach, than you will most likely move to different groups set on current levels of attainment, in order to satisfy demands of leadership. At middle secondary stage upwards, mixed attainment teaching is the norm outside of Maths and Sciences, and works well.
I am not aware of any studies showing that ability grouping in maths is a bad thing, only that it can be done badly. To say setting is a myth in the same category as learning styles is very misleading.
There are people trying mixed ability and doing it successfully, and there are people setting and doing it successfully. The problem is not the setting but the sometimes low expectations that can come with it for some groups of children. Don’t stop setting unless you’re confident you know how you are going to do it.
The helpful assessments of the research are undermined by the superficial, inaccurate, one-liner summaries. The problem with most of the theories described as ‘balderdash’, ‘bilge’, ‘piffle’ etc is the way they have been presented to teachers, rather than the theories themselves. Tabloid headlines don’t help teachers make an informed impartial analysis of the research findings. Pleased to note the superlatives eventually dried up.
I tend to agree with Sue. The headlines are bereft of deep analysis and simply therefore sound bites which are deeply unhelpful to already polarised education discussions -with much of that promoted by some of those quoted. These theories will inevitably be flawed and require much deeper debate than a blog and further research and analysis in order to validate which, if any, elements are actually useful to teachers. However, as Tim says, much of the cited contradictory evidence referred to is itself ideologically driven and therefore as flawed if not more so than the theories.
Teachers need to be a part of this research and debate rather than being told what to think and who to believe.
I like your take in things @bock1 and think you sum it up perfectly in your mention of teachers needing to take part in this research. That approach would surely help to bridge the theory-practice gap that is seemingly rife in education . I believe that this is where action research can contribute, for whilst it may not be as generalisable as large scale research, it at the least tuned teachers into the world of research.
You could add these myths from the educational testing realm:
– high stakes cause “test score inflation”
– no/low stakes test scores are reliable and can be used to “audit” allegedly unreliable high stakes test scores or the “value added” of individual teachers
Thank you for explaining all the myths so well. It really helped me in understanding the way how one should research actually?
Another Myth – that knowledge, skills and concepts are in some way able to be separated. All good learning requires all three. The bunkum about ‘Knowledge rich’ is just the old chestnut on knowledge verses skills finding a new shiny bandwagon. It is as ridiculous to say “We don’t need knowledge any more” as it is to say “We don’t need skills any more” or “We don’t need to understand concepts any more” – did anyone with any credibility really ever say these myths? Basically knowledge is easier to examine cheaply and we are pretty obsessed in the UK by tests. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to know fewer words that are useful in schooling when they start but they also tend to have had fewer conceptual challenges and fewer opportunities to develop underpinning skills. Unfortunately if someone believes the myth that you can separate the three they tend to go for being a ‘knowledge based’ person as it is apparently the easiest of the three to rectify and test!!!!!!
I really enjoyed reading this article. It is in fact scary to find out that some of these Myths were originally based in peer reviewed studies that later were proven to be unreliable. I completelly agree and never understood the “ability grouping” as to me it just feels that you are giving up or you don´t really believe in the students “classified” as low ability, and this can really hurt their chances to become competent learners and access further education.
I love such on-going confirmation that it’s worth staying in touch with academic literature to ensure you don’t get trapped into the wrong belief system. But be careful – Maslow’s list is really worthwhile knowing, and to recognise that on different occasions different levels will be more important than others. We cannot do without knowledge, and I quite like the pyramid as it reminds us there is a lot to learn. Equally, I like the small point that is at its peak, showing the ability to evaluate is important, and often the hardest element. At what stage should we depart from the myth that mixed ability classes work well in all subjects and at all levels. It may be that teaching Maths in Academic ability sets for GCSE is a bad choice, but as Professor Coe often says, the other choices are even worse.
Best still is we always need to remember that our profession is dominated by ‘Confirmation Bias’, leading to so many practices being installed and continued because ‘Ofsted want it’, and other stuff. Anybody wants to read how such bias has damaged a profession for decades, just have to read Atul Gawande’s checklist manifesto… in which he highlights for example the incredibly different checklists clinicians use prior to commencing an operation across the globe, and the very interesting point that until recently in the UK, the surgeon did not have to be present to be part of that checking procedure.