On one of my commutes to work, I started thinking about the similarities between teaching and football. As I write this, Arsenal are still clinging to the top of the Premier League table. Much has been made of their success with set pieces this season, with numerous goals coming from corners and the beautiful head of Gabriel Magalhães in particular.
Manager Mikel Arteta is a friend of the Los Angeles Rams coach, and has perhaps learnt from the set play tactics commonly used in the US National Football League. Arsenal have evolved their game to include more dynamic set pieces, or what we might see as little creative fire-crackers. They are deeply controlled and rehearsed moments, which explode into light, confusion and movement. And above all, goals.
Learning as a flow of thoughts
It’s not enough to plan the most brilliant set pieces, though. In teaching, we too can see learning as either set pieces or open play. I have always felt that only 50 per cent of teaching is planning. The other 50 per cent is responding.
Learning is not like a ladder you can steadily climb up, on a pre-ordained route to success. Once released, it is more like the sea – the students respond in different and surprising ways, and the current changes. The energy flies this way and that, and misconceptions emerge that you hadn’t thought of. Brilliant questions are asked which make you stop, stagger back and reflect.
Learning becomes a flow of thoughts, with students moving in different directions. Your job as teacher is to respond, adapt and change route. It’s to pass the learning around the classroom in the mould of a creative midfielder, to keep that momentum going, and keep everyone involved and thinking.
We have our dead ball moments
Yet we also have our set pieces. Our dead ball moments, so to speak, come at the starts of lessons and at transition points. These are strategies we prepare, practise and distribute through lessons knowing we have a formula we want to deploy.
There’s the Do Now, designed to get students thinking as soon as they enter the room. Starter activities which throw back (retrieval practice), or warm up (for new learning). Quizzes to assess, using tools like Kahoot. Polls to gauge, using Mentimeter. Project briefs for group work. Structures for asking questions like Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce. Exit tickets for plenaries.
In many ways these are the safe parts of the lesson – the stepping stones we jump to and hold onto, especially when we are early in our careers. There is a danger they can start to feel formulaic, though. So the goal (no pun intended) is to ensure that they remain dynamic, and that we shuffle our pack, remaining creative and purposeful. It’s that we use them to create light and movement, rather than predictable passes.
Open play: the part we learn on the ride
As for open play, this is the part of teaching we learn on the ride. It’s about listening and watching, feeling the vibe in the room, and being prepared to abandon the plan when needed. It’s about noticing the expressions on our learners’ faces, on asking the right questions to drill down, rather than assume. It takes confidence, flexibility, humility, and the willingness to allow students to direct the learning too.
It’s this bit that comes with experience, where we learn through feeling the surprises and the chaos how to help learners make meaning of it all. This is adaptive teaching in action. It’s something we have been working on at South Bank Colleges. As the American ventriloquist and educator Ignacio Estrada said: “If they can’t learn the way we teach, we need to teach the way they learn.” And the better we know our students, the more equipped we become to anticipate the challenges and misconceptions.
But there will always be surprises. As teachers, we don’t have the capacity to bring fresh legs off the bench through substitutions. We still need to be able to respond though to new currents, unexpected barriers, and faces which say, “we don’t get it”. Or, “we get it already – let’s move on”.
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