Me: Right, you’ve been
writing for 20 minutes. Does anyone have
anything that will change the face of contemporary literature as we know it?
Jerome: [hand shooting into the air and speaking in a
confident tone] Mine’s sick Sir!
Me: OK, read me the first
few lines…
I position myself over his shoulder so that I can
follow what he is reading. The opening
line is written very clearly as follows:
‘It was a rain day they we’re tired’
Confidently, Jerome begins to read.
Jerome: [reading with excellent dramatic emphasis]
It was a rainy day. They were tired…
Me: [interjecting gently] Read it as it’s written Jerome.
Jerome: OK Sir: It was a
rainy day. They were tired…
Me: [interjecting a little more forcefully ] No, Jerome. Concentrate.
Read the words as you’ve written them on the page.
Jerome: [with a quizzical look] I am Sir, look [points at book]: It was a rainy
day. They were tired…
Me: [interjecting forcefully] Jerome, I’m trying to teach you something
here. Read each word as it’s written on
the page please.
Jerome: OK Sir: It was a
rainy day. They were…
Me: [interjecting
more forcefully] What are you doing?
Jerome: Reading, Sir. But you keep stopping me. And the next bit is siiiick Sir - it will definitely change the face of literacy!
Me: ...You’re not really
reading what you wrote though are you?
Jerome: [confused] What am I reading then Sir…?
Me: [with creeping exasperation] Right, let’s try this one more
time. This time, I want you to read very slowly and really pay attention to
each word in the opening line. OK?
Jerome: OK Sir: It [pause] was [pause] a [pause] rainy…
Me: [interjecting wildly like a pedant possessed] No! Read what it actually says! On the actual
page where you actually wrote
it! You
wrote it for goodness sake, you should
be able to read it! I swear, it would be easier to teach an actual potato!
Jerome: [nonplussed] That’s harsh Sir.
Me: Harsh but fair Jerome,
harsh but fair…
Jerome: You’ve got problems
Sir.
Me: Please shut up, Jerome. I’m trying to focus on gouging my eyes out
with my board pen as I plunge into existential crisis.
Bell rings; exeunt all players, one with the
joyful bounce of youthful ignorance, the other with the uniquely haunted look of
a man urgently in need of half-term
_____________________________
The above exchange (amended
only marginally to trim the sardonic extremity of my usual soul-crushing classroom rhetoric)
has been a fairly common one over the years.
I once had a pupil read me an error-strewn sentence a full seven
times. Each time, he read the sentence
as if it were error-free. It was infuriating but illuminating in equal measure. The thing that’s
important to note here is that this pupil could read. In fact, he could read very well – his
inference skills were not the most developed but he could certainly decode text
accurately: his phonemes and blending were very secure and his comprehension
was sound. If I asked him to read a section
of a novel or a newspaper article aloud to the class he would do so very
competently. He certainly wouldn’t
invent letters on the page that weren’t actually there or inadvertently add
articles where none were really present.
What’s more, if I put were and
we’re on the board he would, I have
absolutely no doubt, have been able to read each correctly and explain the
difference between them. He could even
have explained why there was an apostrophe in we’re. He could also
identify a full stop and explain its use.
So what was going on? Why was he making so many basic mistakes with
things that he ostensibly knew not to do and why could he not spot these
mistakes when they were so glaringly obvious?
And, earnest pedagogue of the English language that I am, how was I
supposed to help him fix things?
The answers to these
questions, I think, have to do with cats, jumpers and, most probably,
basketball, gorillas and, I’m pretty sure, Boston radiologists. That is to say that the root of my student’s problems
likely has more than a little to do with the theory of schema and the inherent tendency towards self-deception of the
human brain.
Our brains, as many studies
tell us, are, in some very important respects, designed not to think. For those of you
not acquainted with much cognitive psychology, this may sound counter-intuitive. But really, it makes perfect sense: the role
of our brains is, largely, to interpret information for us so that we don’t
have to exert ourselves unnecessarily by laboriously thinking stimuli through
and drawing conclusions. In fact, this is
largely the central premise of the thesis promulgated by cognitive scientist J
D Willingham in his book Why Don’t
Students Like School? (2010). Willingham surmises that much of how we
expect our students to learn in a classroom relies on conscious,
exertion-intense thinking, not the natural, intuitive kind that our brains have
evolved to be best at.
A central way that our
brains avoid over-exertion (and therefore reduce our cognitive load) is through
the use of schemas. A schema is a
cognitive framework that helps us organize and interpret information. In simple terms, this means that the brain
builds up internal frameworks of expectations.
This, on the whole, is incredibly helpful.
Imagine, for example, if
every time we walked into or through a familiar place our brains had to re-compute
everything that was there and reinterpret it as if it were new. Our cognitive load is significantly reduced
when we enter our lounge and everything is as we expect it to be.
Despite their overwhelming
usefulness (indeed, their necessity to our very functioning) schemas can cause
us some difficulties. These can relate
to both the misinterpretation and omission of information. Supposing, for example, you have a black cat
that tends to sit in a particular place in your lounge. If you come home from work one day and
someone happens to have left a dark-coloured jumper where your cat often sits, you
can most likely imagine the trick that your brain may play on you when you
first enter the room: you will interpret the jumper as your cat. You will also have a separate set of
schematic stimuli that constitute ‘cat’ in your brain – the jumper, being of
similar size and colour to your cat, will trigger at least some of these
stimuli. When coupled with its placement
as part of a broader contextual schema, this ‘mis-recognition’ can be
particularly powerful: your brain receives a number of signals that are consistent
with your cat being on your sofa and, although it hasn’t received all of the necessary signals, to save
you from thinking it simply fills in the gaps and assumes that the cat is
present.
Indeed, it might even take
a second or two for you to realize that the shape you are looking at is, in
fact, not what you first assumed. In
this sense, you see what you expect
to see, not what is actually there until your brain processes the finer details
of the information on display and readjusts.
The second piece of
cognitive self-deception – which many readers are likely familiar with - is the
omission of information that does not fit with (or within) a particular
schematic context. This was beautifully
demonstrated by one of the most well-known experiments in cognitive psychology:
The Invisible Gorilla. Conducted by two
Harvard psychologists in 1999, participants were asked to watch a short video
of people playing basketball; they were tasked with counting the number of
passes made by the players in white shirts.
Unbeknown to the participants, midway through the video a man in a
gorilla suit enters the frame and remains on screen for a full 9 seconds. Following the video, participants were asked
if they had seen the gorilla. A full 50%
of participants had missed it entirely.
To all intents and purposes it was invisible. The devisors of the experiment termed the
phenomenon ‘inattentional blindness’ – the brain is paying so much attention to
see and process what it expects to
see that it completely ignores information which does not fit with those
expectations.*
The experiment has spawned
a host of spin-offs both from its original creators and many others with an
interest in cognitive function. One of
my favourites is Trafton Drew’s (2004) experiment involving radiologists at
Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Drew asked 24 radiologists to study a batch of CT scans from 5 patients. Aping (pun intended) the original experiment,
Drew added an image of a dancing gorilla to one of the scans in each batch. Despite detailed analysis of each scan, only
four of the 24 participants spotted it.
It’s worth noting that the gorilla was a whopping 48 times larger than the average lung nodule – something that
radiologists are very adept at spotting as a matter of routine – yet still it
remained invisible because (quite understandably) participants did not expect
to see a dancing gorilla on a CT scan. By
tracking the radiologists’ eye-movements, Drew ascertained that half of them had
looked directly at the gorilla but, for the vast majority of them, it had simply failed to register. When Drew
repeated the task with laymen who had no specialist medical training, not a
single participant spotted the gorilla.
It seems to me that the
findings of these experiments and the cognitive theories upon which they are
based might go a long way towards explaining the maddening literacy
difficulties of my pupil (and the countless others like him).
Many teachers will be
familiar with a pupil making a number of spelling mistakes in an extended piece
of writing with words that, if they were written discretely, the same pupil
would spell correctly. They will likely
be similarly familiar with pupils making grammatical or structural mistakes
within sentences when pupils are writing a multi-paragraph piece which they
would not make if they were writing a discrete sentence.
It would seem they are
concentrating so greatly on simply retrieving words from their head, attempting
to put them into an intelligible order both within and between sentences and
paragraphs, as well as on the motor skills necessary to transfer these words
onto the page,that they experience significant cognitive strain - for the
weakest writers, we might even say cognitive overload. Their exertion is so great that errors in
their writing are inevitable. The fact
that they are paying so much attention to the multitude of micro-tasks
necessary for them to produce the written word seems to leave them prone to a
kind of ‘active’ inattentional blindness – pupils require so much concentration
just to put pen to paper that they fail to recognize the gorillas of their own
creation.
And this blindness holds
true not only when they are in the act of writing, but when they are reading
their work back to themselves. It occurs
even when they are, on the surface at least, actively looking for errors.
The fact that pupils fail
to spot their own mistakes would appear to be a classic piece of schematic
deception. Our learning and appreciation
of language rely as much on schemas as anything else. Thus when pupils read their work back to
themselves they do not necessarily see what they have actually written – or at
least, they see it, but do not accurately process it. Their brain interprets what they have written
based upon their schematic understanding of linguistic structures: they have
been repeatedly exposed to correctly constructed written language and their
brains have developed a set of expectations for what this looks like. The consequence is that when they read their
own work their brains deceive them into thinking that what they have written conforms
to their schematic expectations of correct written language, even when it does
not.
The idea that inattentional
blindness occurs when self-checking a piece of writing is hardly anything new;
it is, after all, why publishing houses have professional proof-readers. But in my years of teaching I have not once
heard it discussed amongst English teachers and I certainly don’t recall it
ever being mentioned during teacher-training which would suggest that many
remain ignorant of the phenomenon. I suspect that it is, at the least, due a little more
consideration than it is currently granted.
Where school-age (particularly teenage) learners are concerned, I also
suspect that the depth of this ‘blindness’ is deepened by a kind of confirmation-bias.
A number of studies have
shown that students, particularly boys, have a tendency to perceive their own
academic ability as higher than it appears under objective assessment. If pupils perceive themselves as competent
writers (irrespective of whether they actually are) it follows that their brain
is less likely to expect to see errors.
In this sense, it is likely that students may also selectively -
although subconsciously - ignore mistakes in an attempt to maintain the
security of their self-esteem as a learner.
Perhaps this natural over-confidence can even influence learners’
schematic frameworks for their own language production thereby compounding
their inability to identify their own errors even further.
This is likely to account
for some pupils’ maddening resistance to acknowledging their own mistakes. Many teachers will be all too familiar with the
frustrating irony that weaker pupils (who are naturally more error prone) are
also far less likely to admit their mistakes when they are dutifully pointed
out to them. Their desire to preserve a
positive sense of self and of their own ability level in the face of evidence
to the contrary can be infuriating but fits neatly with Festinger’s (1957)
theory of cognitive dissonance.
Festinger claimed that we
have powerful motives to maintain ‘cognitive consistency’ which can cause
apparently irrational and even maladaptive behaviour. Festinger’s initial experiment involved
interviewing members of a cult which believed the Earth was destined to be
destroyed by a flood. Festinger
investigated what happened to its members when the flood did not occur. The more fringe elements of the group were
more likely to recognize the errors in their beliefs but committed members were
found to make all sorts of leaps of unreason to explain away the world’s
survival without questioning their core beliefs (principal amongst these, of
course, was the view that the Lord had taken mercy on the world on account of
the group’s great faith). Apart from
explaining why such groups as the Seventh Day Adventists are still going strong
despite incorrect predictions of the second coming dating back to 1844, I
suspect that Festinger’s ideas might also help further explain why some pupils
seem to find identifying and correcting the mistakes in their writing so
intractably difficult.
If a pupil holds the belief
that they are more intelligent and/or a better writer than they actually are,
when they are made aware of their mistakes many of them are likely to enter a
kind of denial. Often this takes the
form of excuses or an abdication of responsibility which, frankly, can border on abject lunacy. I recently observed a colleague
point out a spelling mistake in a pupil’s title. The title had been copied from the board in a
previous lesson. The pupil’s instant
response was: ‘If I copied it then it’s your fault. You wrote it on the board wrong.’ Only when my diligent – and remarkably
self-controlled – colleague had shown this young lady the books of three other
pupils in which the title had been copied down correctly did she accept that
the mistake was hers. This kind of thing
is, of course, more common amongst more challenging pupils whose sense of self
is either extremely fragile or (usually as a consequence of compensatory
over-inflation) far superior to objective reality.
So how do we sort this stuff out?
Ideally, the most
successful response should have the effect of re-structuring the way pupils
think when they write and, of course, when they check their own work. What
you’re hoping to do is to prod the pupil into a quick piece of meta-cognition
that forces them to effectively re-set their schematic framework for how they
perceive their own writing. This, in
turn, makes them more likely to expect to
see errors in the future and hence be more likely to spot and correct
them. If carefully managed, pupils then
become more conscious of their tendency to make errors when in the actual
process of writing; consequently, they rebalance their cognitive load towards how they are expressing themselves as
opposed to what they are expressing.
This, over time, makes them less likely to make errors in the first
place.
The key to all generating
this progress is feedback and, dare I say it, some really good Assessment for
Learning (the kind that’s as rare as unicorns in Skegness and actually does
something useful…).
First of all, when you are looking
at errors in a piece of pupil’s writing, have a think – which errors are a
result of gaps in knowledge and which are a result of inattentional
blindness? It’s important to delineate
between errors that require teaching to be corrected and errors that require seeing. The errors with high-frequency words or common
structures that you are confident pupils have been taught (in some cases
repeatedly) are most likely to fall into the latter category. These mistakes have become embedded blind-spots
and they are the first weed that you should aim to uproot.
The simplest way to begin
this process is with your trusty highlighter.
Rather than correct pupils’ errors for them, simply highlight them. Then leave your pupil a brief comment which
actually makes them think and engage with whatever mistake they are making:
‘What’s the problem with the highlighted areas?’ seems to work well for
me. If the error was a result of inattentional blindness, pupils are able to respond to the comment by identifying the specific error that they have made; if they can't respond, there's an obvious knowledge gap that needs filling. A nice follow-up question is: ‘How many of
these errors have you made?’ Simply
getting pupils to count the number of times they have repeated the same mistake
can be powerful in itself and help to pierce any of the latent self-defence
mechanisms which ultimately obstruct their learning. It also provides the pupil with a very easy
way of tracking how their writing is becoming more accurate since, in their
next piece, you will require them to aim for fewer errors.
This process yields particular fruit when you can demonstrate the same error being made over a number of pieces of work – to paraphrase the Lord and Master of edu-research, John Hattie, this makes pupils' mistakes visible in a way that simply correcting their work does not. It’s also vital to make sure that your pupils respond to your questions in writing so as to ensure engagement with them. This can be onerous at first but, with a little training, most kids enjoy this process and find it surprisingly enlightening. Of course, they especially enjoy it when they are able to self-track their improvements which, if the process is implemented consistently, can be rapid. The boost to pupils' self-analysis and meta-cognitiion skills also bears subsequent fruit.
It's easy, and, most comfortingly given the ingloriously mangled slew of pseudo-psychological teaching strategies that have been inflicted upon us in recent years, it actually bloody works.**
* Pedant's corner: I find the term 'inattentional blindness' somewhat irksome as it seems to be a double negative - surely 'attentional blindness' would be more accurate since the subjects were actually paying attention, they just couldn't see what was really happening.
** For some excellent debunking of said pseudo-psychological approaches to teaching, see Make It Stick (Brown, McDaniel and Roediger, 2014); for some regular psych-teach fodder get over to learningspy.co.uk (although, if you're reading this, you probably already have)
