3 Foundational Ideas

Hey

I’ve been a bit distracted recently… will be back soon. Until then…

Big idea 🍉

The simple model of teaching is a powerful framework. This is partly because it is built upon a suite of coherent, evidence-informed foundational ideas.

The more we internalise these 3 ideas, the better the model works for us, and the easier it gets to reason about teaching in general. They help us to THINK SMARTER about our work.

IDEA 1: What our students attend to is what they learn.
It isn't what they're exposed to, or what's on the board. It's what they actually process. Attention is the main mechanism of learning, the true currency of the classroom. Teaching, to a large extent, is the orchestration of attention.

IDEA 2: We can only attend to a very few things at once.
We can hold a few things in mind, focus on just one, and our minds wander constantly (multi-tasking is a myth). A surprising amount of good teaching is a response to this one constraint: chunked explanations, fluent routines, minimal distractions.

IDEA 3: How we learn is much more similar than it is different.
Students vary in their attentional capacity, and more still in their prior knowledge. But the mechanics of how they learn are largely shared. This is why learning styles are damaging, and why the most effective teaching for students with special educational needs is usually the same teaching, done with even more care, rather than something categorically different.

Etch these 3 ideas in your head and you’ll start to see the classroom differently. They layer on the simple model, and you’ll be golden :)

🎓 For more, check out this article on limited attention.

Summary

• The Simple Model of Teaching is built on 3 foundational ideas that can help us think better about our work.

• Attention drives learning: what learners attend to is what they learn, but attention naturally wanders, so we need to minimise distractions.

• Learners do differ, but are much more similar than different, so we should take care with fundamentally different teaching approaches.

Little updates 🥕

• Research on extra-curricular activities → suggests participation in clubs can support academic trajectories during primary school.

• Article on online learning programmes → finds that targeted programmes aligned with whole-class learning can create meaningful literacy gains.

• Study of leisure reading → connects reading with prosocial behaviour amongst 8- to 10-year-olds, with empathy partly explaining the relationship.

• Article on test boredom → suggests that boredom reduce cognitive resources & performance on difficult tasks, but not easy tasks.

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