UPDATE (01/05/25)
Greg has just posted a long response to my (non)post. Personally, I think it is cheating to employ one’s youthful energy to post sneak attacks at 6 am. But, once I’m awake, I’ll read Greg’s post and give it some careful thought.
***************************************************
I have zero time to devote to this right now, but Greg Ashman has been busy of late and it feels that some kind of response is in order. This post is not properly that response, but it is a reminder of previous posts, and it is a promise (which I may or may not keep) to respond more fully in the near future.
Greg had a post this morning,
The establishment’s war on standardised lessons
One can argue who the “establishment” is here, and whether or not Greg is part of that establishment, but no matter. There is indeed a bit of a “war” going on now, with the non-Greg (and non-Marty) side of the establishment quite active, so let’s get to the war.
Greg’s post opens,
Ever since the Grattan Institute published its report, Ending the Lesson Lottery: How to improve curriculum planning in schools, Australian education academics have obsessed over it and the traction it has gained in policy circles. The report makes the case for providing teachers with lesson plans rather than asking them to create each lesson themselves.
Maybe, but maybe not. I think this deserves careful thought, and certainly more than I have given it so far or can give it here.
I did not pay much attention to the Grattan Report, and I will have to go back to look at it, but here is their headline recommendation:
Ensure all teachers have access to high-quality curriculum materials
Over the next five years, ensure every school and teacher has access to a suite of comprehensive, high-quality curriculum materials that they can choose to use and adapt as required.
The recommendation as I interpreted it seems like an absolute no-brainer, which is exactly why I didn’t pay much attention. I only posted on the Report when I saw Greg take a slap at some AARE clown who apparently didn’t have sufficient brains for the no-brainer. To quote myself once out of about a billion times,
Any sane teacher, or at least any sane maths teacher, could tell you that reliably high-quality curriculum materials are not readily at hand, and it’d be really really really really helpful if they were. ACARA is useless, the secondary textbooks are appalling, and the primary textbooks are pretty much non-existent. Everything else is The Library of Babel writ stupid.
But “high-quality curriculum materials” covers a very broad range, and it certainly does not equate to Greg’s “lesson plans”. Could Greg be correct, and that “lesson plans” is what Grattan had in mind? Quite possibly. Whether or not Grattan is explicitly advocating lesson plans, it is clear that Grattan has a lot of time for highly prescriptive “curriculum materials”, well beyond simply a good, solid textbook. Which does not make Grattan, or Greg, correct. Or wrong.
Greg seems to have prodded himself into this latest battle by his aggravation with a blog post by Peter TNSG Sullivan. Sullivan’s post is a full-on attack of “scripted slide shows”, and undoubtedly what really got under Greg’s skin was Sullivan’s attempt to employ “cognitive load”, twice, to make his argument. If nothing else, you gotta award Sullivan the gold medal for chutzpah.
I have very serious concerns with “scripted slide shows”, which is getting to what this long non-post is about, but let’s be clear: if I have to choose sides between Sullivan and Ashman+Grattan then bye bye Sullivan. Or anyway. Sullivan is a primary reason ACARA’s first Australian Curriculum was a disaster. I do not believe that I have ever read anything by Sullivan that was worth the read, and I have read plenty that irritated the hell out of me.
Sullivan’s post is a cartoonish attack on “scripted slide shows”, but that does not mean that it is impossible to make a substantive attack on them. If anyone is advocating them. Which is not clear. How scripty does a script have to be to be a script? How planned are lesson plans? The details matter and I do not have or looked closely at the details. But I have concerns.
Last year, Greg wrote a post, arguing the merits of his school’s “shared planning”. In the post he noted his nervousness at the idea of “an expert like Marty Ross” looking over his school’s resources. I responded to Greg’s post but was laughing too hard to remember to correct him: I am definitely no expert at this stuff. I am an expert at pissing people off but nothing else.*
In any case, I responded to Greg’s post, with some serious reservations, particularly on the use of PowerPoint, but mostly in a sympathetic manner:
… the revolting use of PowerPoint set aside, I wonder how much Clarendon’s scripting genuinely cramps teacher’s individual style and technique. Teaching is always about the interaction rather than the delivery of a script. A good teacher will always be on the lookout for a doubtful frown, and she will always be willing to pause and to go off-script, to check if those doubts are shared and to de-doubt whomever needs de-doubting. Teaching is always human and even with a tight script that can still be done very well (and very badly), even with revolting PowerPoint, if the school culture permits it.
Although I saw some merits in it, I regarded and still regard Greg’s school’s lessons as “scripted”, and the discussion prompted by that blog post tended to heighten my concerns, in turn prompting a second blog post. The more this “scripted lessons” battle plays out, the more concerns I have.
It is a semi-side issue, but quickly on PowerPoint, Ashman wishes to brush away the concerns:
Some people get very animated about [PowerPoint used for lesson plans] because they have an extreme dislike for PowerPoint. To me, it is just a medium.
As Marshall turns in his grave, I’ll simply point out that no medium is “just a medium”, and certainly not Powerpoint. But we’ll leave this discussion for another occasion.
My main concern, as always, is that this discussion of lesson plans and whatnot, the question of how teachers should be teaching, inevitably crowds out any discussion of curriculum, of what teachers should be teaching. Not that the “how” is at all unimportant, but it receives 95% of the attention in these debates and it should not. This was very much in evidence in Grattan’s latest report.
Not that I am trying to tell Greg what to write about. Greg’s expertise is in teaching and underlying theory, so of course that is what he writes about, and here it is me horning in on Greg’s slapping of Sullivan. But it is important to recognise that the specific meaning given to “curriculum materials” very much determines the extent to which the discussion is about “how” or “what”.
The main purpose of a solid textbook is to give clear explanations (mostly for the teacher), clear examples (still mostly for the teacher), and a good selection of exercises (for the student), ranging from simple bread and butter, to more computationally or conceptually challenging exercises, to properly deep multi-step problems. Such a textbook makes the planning and the teaching of a lesson so much easier, but it also makes the effective curriculum so much deeper. A solid textbook could make up hugely for ACARA’s shallow, absurd curriculum.
Can “lesson plans” also help in this manner? In principle, yes, but in practice it appears unlikely. Content depth just does not seem to be properly on the radar of those advocating more prescriptive materials. Grattan’s latest report was notably weak on curriculum aspects, and very notably shaky on “extension” aspects.
A related aspect of this, and really the centre of the Sullivan-Ashman battle, is the extent to which such prescriptive materials constrain or marginalise the role of the teacher. Perhaps the materials needn’t do so, or at least not inordinately so. It is disingenuous, however, to pretend that strict guidance and constraint is not typically part of the intent when promoting such materials.
Australian mathematic teachers are generally weak, even beyond the phys ed teacher or (worse) the physics teacher. The teachers are weak pedagogically and they are very weak mathematically. Grattan and others may not say it out loud, but it is blindingly obvious that some of the push for very prescriptive materials comes from the perceived necessity to make up for this weakness of teachers. Grattan may be correct to do so, but they and everyone could be more honest about it. And, they could be more sensible about it. When Grattan seemingly promotes an abomination like Maths Pathway, which pretty much has the stated intention of reducing teachers to IT support, then Grattan should be thinking a lot more carefully about what they are wishing for.
This is absurdly long for a non-post, but what really matters, and what I have not discussed at all, is the nature of these “lesson plans”: how they are put together, how they are intended to be used and how they are used in practice. What matters are the details, I do not have the details and this is why this is a non-post.
What are the “lesson plans” being discussed and, if possible, to be critiqued? The ones that have been pointed out are:
• Ochre
• Greg’s Clarendon College stuff (as advertised by Greg and in Grattan, p 49)
Presumably there are others, and I will add them if and when people suggest them. I know little or nothing of any of these programs. When (if) I do, I’ll write a post and not just a non-post.
*) What I am is a solid mathematician in a space where these are few, along with being unusually willing to state unvarnished truth as I see it. And I’m pretty funny. That’s about it.
“The main purpose of a solid textbook …”.
The existing textbooks are adequate in supporting me in preparing lessons and exercises for my students. Maybe that says something about me as well as about the textbooks.
If a student worked through most of the textbook and most of the problems they would have a solid understanding of the material.
(1) The existing textbooks may be “adequate” for a guy with five decades of experience and a PhD in mathematics. So?
(2) “adequate”.
I reckon that the text book would be adequate for any well-qualified mathematics teacher. Everything you need is there. Lesson plans, exercises from drill problems to more complex problems, with indication of their level of difficulty; quizzes; answers; revision tests.
I said “adequate” because there are errors in the texts that I use; they are not perfect, but the number of errors is not huge. An experienced well-qualified teacher should be able to deal with most of the errors.
I do have some concerns about mathematics text books.
* I don’t understand why text books should have new editions so often.
* Although we have a national curriculum, on which all states have agreed, the states still have their own curricula which are, by and large, but not exactly, a copy of the national curricula. Therefore the publishers have to cater for all these different curricula. This must add to the costs of the text books.
* I am old fashioned, but coloured pictures throughout the text do not add to the explanation of the material, and they must add to the cost of production.
Terry, you’re out of your mind.
Having read the posts, I think the gap between you guys is not very big. It’s mainly about how much flexibility is allowed teachers. Clarendon is an unusual School in being not only directive but also extremely competent. However, it’s not for everyone, it’s for teachers who are happy to work that way. And in a diverse system that’s fine. It wouldn’t be for me, but I can see that it works extremely well for those who it does suit.
Yes, I agree. I think there is a genuine issue/conflict to think about it, but I think Greg and I are more in agreement than our posts may make it seem. I’ll bat the ball back tomorrow.
I look forward to seeing it, particularly if you have some McLuhan insights applied to PowerPoint or slide decks which are not Microsoft in nature.
Thanks, Gerard.
The Powerpoint thing is off the main point of “scripts” and “plans”, and I wasn’t planning to get into that. But I think there is something to get into there, and I’ll look to write a separate post on it.
Amusingly, though, PowerPoint is probably how I got sucked into this discussion. On a previous “lottery” post, I had whacked the use of PowerPoint at Greg’s school, and I think he was then sub-posting me, when he referred to PP as “just a medium”. I may have responded anyway, but that line clinched it.
And Terry is right about his criticism of current textbooks. This would be solved by an open source textbook based on a sensible curriculum. But that’s a dream in its own right
Terry is right about his criticisms of the textbooks. He is wrong about them being remotely adequate.
I view high school textbooks as ‘good enough’ for a few reasons (I would not use the word ‘adequate’):
1. It cuts down on having to come up with lots of drill questions that have nice numbers for practicing a particular skill (like factoring quadratics, for example)
2. They, at the very least, make some sense of what the curriculum actually wants, and, thus, give me a good idea of what things I actually need to target – because I don’t want to wade through any Australian curriculum descriptors if I don’t have to!
3. It is a good refresher for moments where I forget some stupid method they expect kids to learn ‘oh, yeah. That’s a thing!’, like the ‘butterfly’ method of adding fractions (admittedly, this has been a good way of teaching disengaged students that fractions are not hard because it always works albeit without simplifying)
Thanks, Fox. I definitely take the point, that an appalling text is, in practice, way, way better than no text. It helps you survive. But I think this also gets to the nub of why I get so irritated with this debate. The textbooks are “adequate” in the sense that they “adequately'” reflect the AC, which is a million miles from adequate.
The textbooks are the concretisation of mediocrity.
The butterfly method. I might ask whether you ever advocate the method for, e.g., 1/7 + 3/14. But I assume you and the kids simply pretend that such fractions do not exist.
Hey, Marty
I do not advocate for the method at all. In a pinch it works, like when I’m helping in a class and a kid doesn’t get it, I’ll pull it out since I’m often not in there long enough to be of much use otherwise.
I have had one kid who uses the method religiously and am now trying to undo that mess! He is a smart kid otherwise, but breaking his habits is hard
If a student is at the point where adding 1/7 and 3/14 is a struggle, my suggestion is that they be pulled out of maths to engage with intervention programs designed to make them fluent at their times tables. Unfortunately, at the high school level, kids are considered a lost cause and are expected to (read: pushed into) dropping out by Year 9
That is to say, Marty, I see it as a neat trick to make stuff like 1/3 + 3/4 easier to do mentally and nothing more. It should not be the go-to method of teaching (which it often is)
Thanks, Fox. I didn’t really think you were advocating it. But suggesting it to any kid seems to be either madness or a polite way to avoid dealing with the real problem. If a high school kid cannot do 1/7 + 3/14 then they do not understand what a fraction is. The butterfly method is then a way to pretend (for now) that the kid needn’t understand.
I obviously wouldn’t say no to some better textbooks, but I think it’s important to understand that textbooks aren’t structured in the same way that good in-person teaching is.
The chunking is typically too much in one go before any practice, with topics grouped by conceptual coherence rather the drip drip of good pedagogy. Then the exercises are in a no-man’s-land between the sort of targeted blocked practice you want for bedding in a new concept and the interleaved, problem-solving stuff you want for reinforcing and deepening secure knowledge. There’s not much spaced repetition, mixed starters, checks for understanding etc.
Textbooks serve a lot of different ends – teacher’s guide, self-teaching tool, question-bank, reference, etc – so they’re always a compromise. It’s possible to imagine writing a textbook that is exactly what you need for lesson planning, but it would look very unfamiliar. And it would probably be overly-prescriptive for most teachers I know.