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Modelling – students as apprentices

If we are not reality TV fans, we would tend to think of apprentices as those learning a particular skill or trade, and most readily associate apprenticeships with practical learning. ‘Practical’ is a matter of degrees – replacing a fan belt, grilling a chop and solving an equation are all practical, in the sense that there is a doer and a task. So let’s not limit our idea of apprenticeship to the learning of physical skills; we can see that students in classrooms are our apprentices. After all, the core idea of apprenticeship is that a learner follows the example and tuition of a master. There’s no reason why we can’t see ourselves, as teachers, in that master role, since we want our students to follow our example and become masters themselves.

An apprentice in what we might disparagingly call a practical trade will observe the master, who’ll explain her working, question the apprentice throughout, before giving the apprentice a go. Seems to me, this is just like how we run a classroom. With many a fad interrupting us, there’s a danger the idea of the teacher as an expert who models excellence to their students (apprentices) is being muddied. So let’s re-embrace modelling as central to our roles.

At Nova, live modelling is taking off in many subjects where it may not have been so common previously. We model live to show the steps in a calculation, or to show how to structure an essay or exam answer, or how to produce a diagram. This can easily be done by (whisper it) ditching the smart board and using a pen on the board, or a flipchart, or chalk if you can find a blackboard. Alternatively, we have found that visualizers are superb tools for modelling. One English teacher has his own exercise book in which he writes essays alongside the students (‘I don’t mind working if you are sir’ was heard in the room). My students’ graphs have improved exponentially (no pun intended) since I could show them on my own bit of graph paper rather than clumsily showing them on the board, which lacks, most notably, squares.

To model shows students what excellence really looks like, allowing them to pull their work up to the standard you want, rather than stopping when they think it is good enough. Needless to say, live modelling is not simply: you do it, they copy. The model must be deconstructed as you go along, asking questions to help students interrogate the model you are producing, as well as checking understanding of the steps you are carrying out. In fact, there is evidence that studying model answers is superior to completing practice questions. One of the big benefits I find is modelling helps students focus on the things that matter, and the things that don’t. All too often we suffer the ‘curse of knowledge’, where our (the teacher’s) comprehensive understanding causes us to forget the simple errors in thought the students make, because we forget that they don’t know which aspects of a complex idea they should focus on, and which are the extraneous details. (Incidentally, this is why a typo can throw students totally off course! They think it represents an important feature of the text, or graph, or map or whatever.)

So, in academy CPD and in faculty time, we have been working on the bread and butter of lessons – the explanations we provide for students, such that they can be inducted into the body of knowledge in which we are the experts. In short, that they may become our apprentices.

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