Putting the pedagogy back into technology (or why zoom isn’t enough)

Transcript from Keynote presentation given to Newcastle College Group 21^st October 2020

Hello, my name’s Ian Harris. I’m the CEO of HOW2s. A few weeks ago, I was talking to Louisa Owen’s Head of Teaching, Learning and Assessment at Liverpool City College. (LCC) about the plans for myself and some of my colleagues to deliver some live training, albeit online, to the LCC team of teaching and learning coaches.

It struck me as we were talking that there was so much going on with the whole COVID thing that I was, amazed that they were looking to, fit it in. And so I asked Louisa whether she wanted to delay the training? She said something that struck me, and it’s going to form the basis of this talk.

She said no, we now, more than ever, need to start looking at putting the pedagogy back into technology. That last bit put the pedagogy back into technology, hit home with me and as I said it’s going to form the basis of my talk. First a little bit about HOW2s, and then I’m going to go back to 1988. I’m aware that some of the people watching this may not know what HOW2s are. For the rest of this, to make sense, you need to know that HOW2s are visual guides to evidence-informed teaching techniques.

There are around 160 on the app. Each one depicts a specific technique to use when teaching online or when face-to-face in a classroom workshop or work setting. The content is on an app that provides the organisation that subscribes with a social learning environment, where anyone in a teaching role — so that could be a teacher and assessor or lecturer, an endpoint assessor, a trainer, you name it can learn new teaching techniques.

Everybody’s got a log on; everybody’s got access to this teaching knowledge, if you like this body of teaching knowledge, these, visual guides to evidence-informed teaching techniques. An excellent analogy would be to think of an aeroplane safety card and imagine that as a teacher, you have access to a deck of 160 cards, each one depicting a teaching technique.

The techniques can be used online or in the classroom. And then in terms of the social learning aspect of the app, its really easy for individual faculty/teachers to tell everybody else what they’re doing in their context and teachers can contact each other and share their learning. So that’s what I want to say about that at the moment. We can come back to that a bit later on.

Now I want to go back to 1988 and my initial teacher training. Dr John Fines was my tutor— unfortunately, no longer with us. John took ten of my peers and me into an empty classroom, sat us down, and he said something that has stayed with me.

He said that there are only four things that a fly on a wall will ever see happening in your classrooms, whatever you’re teaching. These aren’t in any particular order. So when I say first, I don’t mean that’s the first thing that will happen. I mean ​‚it’s one of four things that will happen at some point in your classroom.

The four teaching dynamics
1. Talking to students
2. Talking to/Interacting with students
3. Students working independently of you (individually, in pairs or groups) — with you on the side
4. Students interacting with a stimulus — with you on the side

— THE FOUR DYNAMICS AS DEFINED BY DR JOHN FINES

So the first thing that a fly on a wall will see happening is you talking to students and sometimes, believe me, he said, there will be times when you need to talk directly to them. You won’t expect or want or need a reply. It’ll just be direct communication to the students. He said the second thing we’ll see is you interacting with students. The third and fourth thing that we’ll see will be students working independent of you, and he stressed that independence didn’t necessarily mean them working on their own. It would mean that they’re independent of me as the teacher. And so they’ll be doing that on their own, or they may be doing it in groups of two, three, four, or whatever group size you decide, but they’re going to be interacting with each other. And as they’re interacting with each other, your job is to determine when to intervene and support them in working effectively. And the fourth dynamic you see is when the students are working directly with the stimulus, is it either a book or in a practical subject they might be working with the materials and the equipment. John said ​“That’s it — Those four dynamics are the only four things that will happen.

your job as a teacher is to orchestrate the class and move between those four dynamics and do it in ways and find ways to ensure that the students are engaged, that they’re motivated and that the learning sticks

— DR JOHN FINES 1988 

He said your career as a teacher will be about asking questions and checking yourself to see whether or not your students are engaged, motivated, and learning. If they aren’t, find ways to adapt your teaching by moving between those four dynamics to ensure that they are engaged, motivated, and learning.

So what’s my point? When Louisa said that we need to start adding pedagogy back into the technology, my mind went to where we’re now as a profession. Somebody could compare my peers sitting in that classroom in 1988 and me about to embark on teaching our first lessons to where we’re at now, where we’ve got ourselves tooled up with Teams or a Google Meet or with Zoom or on Canvas or Blackboard, whatever it is. We’ve got this online learning platform. And when we’re online with those students, all a fly on a wall will see happening will be us talking to students, us, interacting with students, setting up opportunities for them to interact with each other, and interacting with the stimulus. So, in that sense, there’s a comparison to be made. But also, the same question comes up. How do we do that? How do we do that in ways that make learning engaging and motivating and make the learning stick?

Now, I want to look at why we do professional learning. What is the point? Today is a professional learning day, so I want to try to pull together some key ideas around the theme of professional learning. Then, I want to put those themes from professional learning into the four dynamics. Then, I want to bring us back to the notion of supporting educators to ensure that students are engaged, motivated, and can learn effectively.

I don’t know what professional learning activities you will engage in today. Maybe there are workshops? Perhaps you’ll be doing some independent study. I’ve got question marks in the box to the right about what types of professional learning we could add. Supported Experiments where educators learn in pairs; some of our colleges and training providers have educators working in what they call learning triads or learning squares, even. It doesn’t matter what the professional learning activity is, but it’ll be helpful for you to have one in mind as we go through this. So, I will bring one to mind as we explore the purpose of all professional learning.

The purpose of professional learning activities is to help us as educators meet the student’s learning needs. So, another way of talking about learning needs is to describe a learning need as a barrier to progress. So, let’s assume we agree that our job as educators is to ensure that students are engaged, motivated, and can remember their learning in the long term so that they have access to the curriculum and, thereby, access to future life learning and employment opportunities. And sometimes, as we deliver or teach the curriculum, barriers prevent them from getting this access. Another word for that barrier is a learning need. A learning need or barrier will emerge with an individual student or within the class dynamic. And when this happens, our job as educators and teachers is to adapt our teaching. Go back to what Dr John Fines said — we’re saying it’s inevitable that we will adjust our teaching within those four dynamics. How can we adapt what we’re doing in those four dynamics to ensure that the learners can get over whatever barriers and access the content taught?

The best vocational teaching and learning is a sophisticated process; it demands​‘dual professionals’ – teachers and trainers with occupational expertise and experience, who can combine this with excellent teaching and learning practice.

— COMMISSION ON ADULT VOCATIONAL TEACHING AND LEARNING (CAVTL) REPORT (2013).

So let’s just quickly link the above to the (UK’s) Education and Training Foundation’s work on the Dual professional. All the training providers, colleges, and universities we work with employ educators who are experts in their teaching. HOW2s provide step-by-step visual guides to teaching what is taught (the curriculum content). This is the essence of the Dual Professional — educators who are experts in what they’re teaching and how they deliver it. And that takes time.

In the context of COVID, we’ve got a situation where educators who were experts in teaching face-to-face now find themselves having to teach using Zoom or Teams or whatever. I know this is a generalisation, but it’s reasonable to say that live face-to-face teaching expertise isn’t transferring. So there’s a degree of newness and nervousness about this. That’s why I wanted to refer to my experience of going into that classroom with John Fines in 1988. In 1988, I quickly got the idea that I had to talk to, talk with students and interact with each other. But I didn’t know how I was going to do that. Let’s go back to the professional learning summary. We do all of our activities so that we can support our teachers and our educators in developing their practice so that they can ensure students can access the curriculum. Another exciting thing about professional learning activities is the need to include a professional learning conversation, aka a theory of action. A theory of action goes something like this: What I’m doing at the moment isn’t working; I’m getting some results or situations and behaviours I don’t want. I’m saying that if I change this and try it, I will get a better result. And that, in essence, is what a theory of action is, which is at least implicit, and we can make it explicit within all professional learning activities.

Now, for those not using HOW2s at the moment, you’ll notice that there’s no mention of HOW2s at the bottom of the professional learning cycle. However, the suggestion here is that when finding a solution in step two, if you have access to the HOW2s, many solutions are available to you on the app. But the first step is to say, what’s your target? What should, what’s the situation that you need to address? Now, if we go back to the COVID thing, we have this massive situation where students can no longer attend the classroom. So the solution was Teams, Zoom, Google Meets, or whatever. And we’ve had to learn to use these technologies and the features on these online teaching platforms. 

There’s another layer.

Through the use of zoom or teams or whatever platform you’re using, we’ve created the opportunity to learn. But for students to access the curriculum we’ve got to tick the pedagogy box. We know this for different reasons. One, we know that the dropout rate from online learning far exceeds the dropout rates from classroom teaching or face-to-face teaching. The data varies, but the message is the same. Rates are far worse, online than they are offline. It’s worrying to note that this is pre-COVID data.

So unless we do develop our pedagogical practice — in terms of how to engage, motivate, and to go back to Louisa’s phrase, add pedagogy to the technology then, I think we are going to struggle. That’s why I wanted to share the model with you.

So the idea of, HOW2s is to support educators in meeting the learning needs of students. And if we go back into the app, we can take a look at how the app helps you do that. So. In the model, we talked about, the need for educators to identify what are the barriers that are preventing curriculum access. One of the things we’ve done on the app is to organise the how-to’s by the everyday Barriers to progress that educators come across. Initially, when we put the app together, we organised them by teaching strategies. When I talk to teacher training universities, they all look at these strategies but what they may not do is drill down to a level of precision, a concrete example, if you like, of what the strategy looks like depicted step-by-step as specific techniques?

So, as I scroll through, see if you can connect to a barrier. The idea is that once you connect to a barrier that’s familiar to you, you can start thinking about, well, how can I start meeting those needs? The idea is that educators can learn new techniques at their own pace whenever they want to.

Organisations also use the app’s content to run workshops and add detail and precision to other professional learning activities.

However, the app’s main aim is to support the individual scholarship of teaching and to encourage every teacher and faculty member to support each other. 

Every education system in the world asks teachers to demonstrate how they are reflecting on and evidence their learning and show how they are helping their colleagues in developing their learning and how they are supporting learning across the organisation? I had to fill in forms and have an annual appraisal meeting when I was teaching. I just thought, Oh, why am I doing this? The app makes it a cinch for you to use what we’ve called the skills exchange to demonstrate your learning and how you support the teaching of colleagues across the organisation. Organisations accessing HOW2s have their own private digital space to set up and share learning across the organisation.

The development of the online HOW2s started pre-COVID, and it points to something else I want to focus on; putting pedagogy back into the technology.

In October 2019, an e‑textbook provider contacted us. The training they were providing the universities was showing lecturers how to use the highlighting tool, the note-making tool, the bookmark, and so on, but that wasn’t helping the lecturers see how to integrate textbook technology into an effective teaching sequence. So, we put together a range of HOW2s depicting how to do that. 

So much of what we’ve tried to do with the HOW2s in terms of the online and textbook collections is focused on techniques that show educators how they can quickly move to independent learning activities where the students have to work in pairs and groups. We figure that if the teachers are setting up independent learning activities, maybe by flipping the learning, the students are more likely to complete and participate in them if the activities away from the educator require them to work together. We also focussed on reducing the number of requests from students to teachers for support. So, we’ve looked at entry routines and ways of integrating peer-to-peer student support into activities. We’ve focussed on minimising unnecessary requests from students to teachers by getting students to support and work with each other.

Thank you for listening, and have a great day.

Ian Harris
CEO