Tag: Martin Griffin

Snowploughs, Snow boots, and Supervised Struggle

–Martin Griffin

Recently I was reading an interview with a famous UK TV presenter in which she told a story about raising her son. In it she revealed something of her parenting style; something I found quite alarming at the time. If it rained in the afternoon as her boy was due to get out of school, she said, she’d send money to his bank account and text him to get a taxi home so he didn’t get wet.

This was my first encounter with what is now commonly referred to as snowplough parenting. Snowploughing replaces helicoptering – hovering around toddlers in playgrounds – when children reach middle level education. The snowplough parent aims to solve every conceivable problem their child might have ahead of time, ensuring a blissfully effortless existence.

The problem this creates for teachers compounds year-on-year. Why? Well, firstly snowploughing suffocates the development of the characteristics necessary for academic success, and crucially, creates a cultural expectation that is the school’s job to snowplough as well. The parent arranges life in the domestic context – removing issues around money-management, tech and connectivity, even walking through the rain – but it’s expected the school does the same in the educational context; tests shouldn’t be too hard, one-on-one sessions should deal with specific difficulties, lessons should be universally entertaining but also bespoke to each child, an issue was vividly illustrated by a recent GCSE student of mine. Approaching me at the end of a lesson he said, “Sir, I’d like to start revising
soon. So when are you going to put the extra lessons on?”

And we’re also dealing with a second challenge; the seemingly-daily expansion of what parents define as a problem. Helping your child to get started on their homework gradually becomes doing the homework for them, which morphs into complaining to the school that the thought of homework makes your child unhappy.

Which brings us to the question – what can we do? Having been a middle and high school teacher, at Key Stage 3, 4 and 5, for over twenty years, I’d like to make a case for replacing snowploughs with snowboots. Where one sweeps aside potential problems before they emerge, the other helps pupils suit-up and tackle them. I’m not advocating a let-‘em-get-on-with-it-and-turn-a-blind-eye approach; what I’m suggesting is that we create supervised struggle. We can do this as classroom teachers, designing a task that occurs in the middle of a lesson – a task we build-up to and carefully framework, but one that pushes students to operate at the very edge of their ability – or we can take a more holistic approach, leading struggle across a longer period of time and multiple subjects; modelling project-management tools and guiding their use over a fortnight for example.

Whichever approach we choose, we should be explicitly sharing the strategies pupils need for study at and beyond our level, rather than micromanaging every minute of their school experience. We hope to be sharing some of these tools and approaches at ELMLE’s January conference.

Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes–

Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes have a combined 40 years’ experience teaching post-16 students as classroom teachers, heads of faculty and senior leaders. They are the authors of The A Level Mindset (Crown House, 2016), The GCSE Mindset (Crown House, 2017) and The Student Mindset (Crown House, 2019). You can learn more about their work with the VESPA model online and on Twitter @VESPAmindset. 

You can join Martin and Steve in three sessions during our main conference. These sessions include: 

  1. Divers and Thrivers: introducing non-cognitive skills in middle level education
  1. ‘Clear is Kind’: coaching students in positive study behaviours 
  1. Teaching middle school students how to revise

‘Defeating Habit with Originality’ – How We Can Teach Students to Study Differently

By Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes

Much of what we do as learners is the result of ingrained habit. Many of us will be able to recall a time in our own education when results at a new level of study suggested our approaches to learning were no longer effective. How did we respond? Usually by doubling-down; doing more of the same, pedalling harder and hoping.  

In many cases students eventually give up, concluding they’re not intellectually capable of study at a new key stage or more challenging level. But they’re often wrong. We’ve worked with thousands of students who are well capable of handling new ideas and of exploring and interrogating new concepts and material. It’s the non-cognitive elements of study that defeat them – the fresh habits, routines and approaches they’ll need. What worked for pupils in Year 7 might not work in Year 9; new levels of study demand new tactics and strategies. 

This is the work we’ve been doing for the last ten years now: defining which non-cognitive factors seem to have an impact on performance, and then developing a series of tools that support pupils changing the way they work. Our strategies are designed to encourage, as art director George Lois put it, ‘the defeat of habit by originality’. 

Some of our strategies are all about vision and motivation. We’ve all seen the impact a magnetic goal can have on learners… but goal setting needs to adjust as students grow. It isn’t just a case of plucking potential grades from the air, writing them down and hoping for the best. High vision students are increasingly aware of who they are and what they stand for, and this growing self-awareness allows them to create a compelling vision of what success looks like and what the future holds for them. They don’t just focus on a ‘what’ (‘I want to be a doctor.’); they know their ‘why’ (‘Fairness is important. Equal access to healthcare is crucial. I want to help solve the inequality problem.’)  

Another group of strategies we’ve developed are all around effort. As students begin working at a higher level, the successful ones snack on learning rather than binge: they read a chapter of a textbook per week, summarise their notes in four half-hour sittings, write an essay in stages, review their understanding by testing themselves on a topic. In short, they actively set themselves work. This switch from the passive completion of directed tasks, to the active sequencing of independent study sessions is a crucial part of unlocking higher levels of effort.  

Some fresh habits we need to teach are all about organisation. There comes a tipping point in your education where you can no longer carry all your notes around with you. At key stage 1 and 2, a single plastic wallet with your homework in will suffice. Now there are textbooks, files, folders, jotters and handouts. Middle-level students need to use a range of tactics to arrange their resources thematically – i.e. by topic – rather than chronologically, and they also begin to project manage. For more distant deadlines and tasks that require multiple sittings, successful students adjust their approach to study so they can effectively sequence their work. We need to teach them how to make strategic assessments of what needs doing next and why.  

A fourth group we’ve developed are all about revision and preparation. Many students hit crisis-point when their beloved practice strategies, used successfully in the past to memorise information, seem suddenly useless. Middle-level students begin to wake up to the realisation that knowing the information isn’t enough; the information needs to be fully absorbed … and then used to analyse unfamiliar data, solve a problem, construct an argument in the form of an essay, evaluate an approach, or critique a case study. For students loyal to memorising information, this can be a shock. High practice students learn to adjust the way they revise, mastering the content as the course goes on so that the bulk of their preparation involves high stakes exam-style problem solving. They are calmer and better prepared as a result.   

And finally, we’ve put together a whole range of fresh strategies to help students with the attitudinal component of study. All pupils face ‘the dip’, that moment when progress halts and backslides. It might have happened before, but what works at one level – reconnecting with our successes, reminding ourselves of our positive qualities, comfort eating and watching a bit of TV – might need adjustment as challenges arise more frequently. High attitude students have a broader and more robust range of tactics when times are tough. They might be adept at benefit-finding. They might have a strong support network they regularly rely on, because they don’t equate asking for help with intellectual inferiority. And they have techniques for handling stress; they know exams are not a test of their self-worth.  

There has been much debate around the extent to which academic performance is predicated on inherited intelligence. Are we genetically fated to achieve certain outcomes, or are we architects of our own results? Each new generation of scientists and researchers places us somewhere else on the nature/nurture continuum. 

But as you might expect, our take is different. It doesn’t matter whether the latest research points us to the inherited cognitive ability end of the spectrum or not. It is the non-cognitive element of study – our habits, systems and behaviours – that we can most easily change as we grow. So rather than debating precisely what proportion of our success is due to genetic predisposition or emphasising a past-equals-future paradigm, we should instead be supporting students in changing the ways they work as the programme of study demands change.  

That way, we prepare them more effectively for an uncertain future.   

Posted with permission from Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes who will be some of our keynote speakers at ELMLEConnect in Malta, January 27-29. Want more information on how to register for our conference? Go here.