Why you can't 'just tell them' (Teaching Facts)
Why students can 'regurgitate' facts, but not use them
Podcast is AI generated, and will make mistakes. Interactive transcript available in the podcast post.
Jacob raises his hand. I come over to help and he says ‘sir, I don’t know what to do?’
He’s in a room with 40+ other students, and at least half a dozen teachers. The students are all In Year 10 and working their way through past papers in preparation for the exam in January.
The question that stumped him: What is the mathematical name of this shape?
I ask him to count the number of sides.
He counts to five, and then asks me, ‘sir, is it a pentagon?’
He knows the fact that a five-sided shape is called a pentagon, but even after counting the number of sides he is not confident that it’s a pentagon.
Why not?
Because every example of a pentagon he’s ever seen has looked like this:
Yet the shape before him looked more like this:
If Jacob had instead been taught the concept of pentagon using a categorical sequence, he wouldn’t have had this problem.
‘Just telling him’ that a pentagon is a five-sided shape wasn’t enough.
I’ve just had a resounding success. I’ve taught my Year 7 nurture group, a small class of six students, to correctly identifying prisms.
It was my first attempt to use a categorical sequence, and despite it being a very poorly designed sequence, it worked. Every child can successfully distinguish between the prisms and the non-prisms I’m showing them.
Great.
So now I ask ‘can you tell me what a prism is?’
Silence. Nothing. Tumbleweed.
I’d delivered the exact same sequence to a Year 8 top set, and when I asked this, about half the hands went up, with one boy giving a textbook answer ‘a solid with consistent cross-sectional area.’
I wasn’t expecting that, but I guess I thought someone might be able to put it into simpler words in some way.
A short while later, one girl bravely raises her hand.
I ask her to go ahead.
She takes in a breath.
Readies herself to speak.
Holds her breath a little longer as she gathers her thoughts.
And then slowly lowers her hand, lowers her head, and gives it a silent shake as she exhales.
Each situation demonstrates a different problem.
Jacob could tell you in words what a pentagon is, but he couldn’t identify them.
Amal could identify prims, but couldn’t tell you in words what one was.
Why had this happened, and what can we do about it?
How can we make sure that our students both develop a full generalisation of a concept, and can talk about it verbally?
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