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We attribute the causes of a weather event to the weather itself and we’re often confused by climatic patterns that have a longer timescale and greater geographic reach than the moment by moment shifts in temperature and dewpoint that cause the rain that spoils our enjoyment of a sunny day. As weather amateurs we can rely on the views of the ‘so-called experts’, or trust our own past experience and the sometimes accurate lore of a world before science. ‘Red sky at night’ thinking.  So we carry an umbrella, a coat and some hope! As climate amateurs we might ignore the evidence of incremental change in global temperatures because of our immediate experience of the weather.  We might therefore hope that climate change will go away or even deny that there is any causal link. The difference is that although an umbrella is adequate for weather it is a poor defence against climate! Parkinson’s disease and the RCT My mother had Parkinson’s disease for over 15 years before she passed away last October.  She had a slow progressing form of the disease unlike Philip Adey, one of the originators of Let’s Think who sadly lost his health so quickly.   My mother would have been very interested in the recent BBC documentary on GDNF, a nerve growth factor first identified from mouse tumours.  In patients such as Darren Calder it had profound effects, life changing and ‘miraculous’ but it also involved an expensive and risky process of administering the drug directly into the brain. The current view is that such promising interventions be subject to larger scale Randomised Control Trials, RCTs.  This is a model of verification based on medical trials that has been broadly successful in identifying investment worthy drugs and procedures.  In an RCT as large a number of potentially willing recipients is gathered. The members of the group are randomly assigned to the proposed intervention or a non-intervention (sometimes a mock intervention such as a placebo).  After it is believed that sufficient time has elapsed for the treatment to have had the effect the results of both cohorts, treatment and non-treatment are statistically compared using the measures of independent evaluators to see if there is a significant difference.  This would seem to provide the necessary proof, uncontroversial evidence that something works, or does not. As such it has been employed within medicine for decades and within education in the more recent past. There are however some significant issues with the approach, as good as it is.

• For an RCT to be successful the treatment has to be uniformly and consistently applied in line with the hypothesis it is based upon.
• The RCT relies on agreement about the intended effect and a shared view on appropriate measures.
• An RCT ignores the positive and negative effects on individuals that may be based on their unique circumstances in favour of the overall impact on the group. Ignoring these circumstances is felt necessary in an RCT because a view has to be taken on whether the treatment can be replicated outside the trial.
• Some interventions can only be conducted with small groups either due to recruitment or the cost or risk or disruption of the intervention.
• Randomisation of smaller groups ignores the profound effects of differences between the two groups that could be balanced by stratification and more adequate blinding..
• The endpoints in an RCT can be poorly selected, often with a preference for easily assessed endpoints.
• There is little use of selection criteria for the individuals in an RCT trial and particularly responsive and other unsuitable individuals affect the results markedly, and especially so in smaller cohorts.
• An RCT is inappropriate if there is insufficient sample size or power to make claims that would impact many future recipients.

Although the GDNF trial had a profound effect on some recipients like Darren it had an effect size overall that was inconclusive using the measures. Thus it was considered to have failed the RCT test.  But further research into the brain scans taken in tandem with the assessments show promise, even though these were not part of the original assessment regime. Let’s Think How are weather reporting, climate predictions and trials of Parkinson’s interventions informative for Let’s Think? Let’s Think is an intervention that has a long term outcome, delayed over years, but is made up of numerous short term events and actions. Like our attempts to halt and reverse climate change it aims at a change that is incremental in the short term but which has profound benefits in the long term. Its proposal for teaching is based on a hypothesis of long term development and brain activity. It’s benefits are measured by cognitive gains. Let’s Think addresses the challenging evidence that, despite apparent increases in academic success, there is an underlying decline in cognitive ability as measured by Piagetian tests. This is the ‘climate change’ that is happening in our classrooms, the unnoticed change in performance hidden by the annually reported ‘weather’. Within Let’s Think there is a broad prescription for teacher activity to address the ‘climate change’ but the teacher, like a meteorologist is expected to use the many assessments and data points that come from her class to forecast the next most effective move in the ‘weather’ of the classroom.  Although the ‘weather’ of her classroom is the most important experience in the short term; long term it’s a change in the ‘climate’ that has the most profound effect on the child. The climate of challenge, co-operation and construction, reflected on together in a mixed class has to be created by each Let’s Think teacher out of the weather of everyday classroom life and it is this that addresses the underlying climate change, the decline in cognitive ability. The Let’s Think Forum has gathered ample evidence of the underlying decline in cognition and also has evidence from many small scale and international trials of the positive impact on cognitive gains for children as young as 5 and as old as 14.  In particular from Let’s Think interventions in mathematics and science. Our goal is to regularly replicate the positive effects of halting cognitive decline that have been seen in smaller and quasi experimental trials in larger scale trials.  We also aim to communicate and clarify the Let’s Think intervention so that it can be used with precision by teachers. Previous Randomised Control Trials, RCTs, such as that for the Education Endowment Funded Let’s Think Secondary Science showed, like the Parkinson’s trial, no conclusive evidence of effect with the measures that were used. Fortunately, unlike the Parkinson’s trial, there is very little risk in implementing Let’s Think in secondary science because in the trial taking away the ‘normal’ science lessons caused no decline in the gains of scientific knowledge in test schools compared to control schools. In addition the trial revealed that there were significant benefits experienced by teachers to their general ability to question and to promote engaging lessons.  Importantly it also revealed the difficulties experienced by teachers to develop a co-operative climate where students worked on challenges and reflected together on their efforts. Something we would want to work on especially in secondary settings with future interventions.   [post_title] => How can we ever be sure? Thoughts on climate, Parkinson’s disease and Let’s Think [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => how-can-we-ever-be-sure-thoughts-on-climate-parkinsons-disease-and-lets-think [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-07-05 14:54:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-07-05 13:54:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1121 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1115 [post_author] => 2077 [post_date] => 2019-06-03 20:09:50 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-06-03 19:09:50 [post_content] => It’s almost twenty years since I first started to lead Let’s Think Mathematics courses. Many things have changed that influence the decisions tutors make about the way different aspects are covered, not least the changes to the mathematics curriculum. While Let’s Think activities are not dependent on national initiatives, being aware of the climate in which teachers are working helps to forge positive relationships with the participants. A focus on teachers’ subject knowledge comes and goes but it can’t be denied that this is an important aspect in a teacher’s repertoire of skills and competences.  For me, one of the most interesting roles for a Let’s Think tutor is to spot opportunities within the lessons to enhance teachers’ knowledge of mathematics and to help them develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between concepts within the subject. Many teachers in primary schools express their lack of confidence in the subject and the Let’s think programmes often provide a safe place to discuss what they see as deficiencies in their own learning. It’s a great moment when someone who feels nervous about their understanding about a particular topic, ‘sees the light’ for the first time in what might be many years. It doesn’t come about because the tutor has set out to teach something explicitly, but rather, through breaking the concept down to its basic level and building understanding from scratch. This is a fundamental approach when tutors simulate lessons as part of the training. Some Let’s Think lessons seem to exemplify this theme time and time again.  Take the lesson ‘Sharing an Apple’. Early on in the first episode, students are asked to explain the written fraction ½. In the simulation, teachers, like their students, offer a number of suggestions – The 2 means two parts, the 1 is how many of those parts, the / is ‘out of’. So ½ means 1 out of 2. Or, 1 divided by 2. Other fractions are explored including ¼, 2/3  and ¾. It is usual for everyone to agree with the ‘out of’ description, but much discussion takes place about the ‘divided by’ aspect. Can ¾ be 3 divided by 4? How could you show this visually? It’s not unusual for disagreement in people’s views. An excellent example of cognitive conflict! This is further challenged when the tutor writes a/b and asks what that means. Someone will answer a divided by b and refer to their own time at secondary school. The small-group discussions that follow are fascinating and its common to hear it stated ‘I never knew this – now it makes sense’! A lesson written for younger pupils ‘Giant’s Palace, explores place value using the relationship of smaller parts to a whole, comparing smaller and smaller footsteps, combining them and evolving a way of writing the total. The first time I used this lesson was a real eye-opener for me and the teachers. I took for granted that they all understood place-value and was not expecting the ensuing discussion. Several teachers were intrigued to see how the context of the story enabled the concept of place-value to be exemplified so visually. For some it demonstrated how the position of digits in a number related to their value. ‘Now I see’, said one teacher, to be followed by other similar comments and smiles from some quite unsure members of the group. It seems that teachers of mathematics in secondary schools, can also develop clearer understanding and enhance their subject knowledge through the Let’s Think approach. One of my favourite lessons, Pencils and Rulers, starts by using a grid to find the total costs for different combinations, eg 4 pencils and 6 rulers, when the unit cost is known. The lesson develops where grids show a selection of total costs and the unit cost has to be deduced in order to complete the grid. Shorthand methods are encouraged to show results Eg 3p + 4r = 36, and 2p + 5r = 38. I then write these underneath one other and ask the group where they have seen such notation. 3p + 4r = 36 2p + 2r = 20 Simultaneous equations! They are then given pairs of equations and have to solve them using a grid. The groups are then challenged to explain how the grids and the formal notion are linked. It’s a really good example of developing reasoning – a key principle within the Let’s Think approach. I’ve experienced all sorts of emotional responses to the activity. Many non-specialists start by feeling very insecure and even anxious when the topic of simultaneous equations is introduced, but by the end of the session there is a shared feeling of success and a sense of real achievement. Specialist teachers of mathematics can be quite surprised at how a very simple idea develops into something quite complex and difficult to teach. On one course, a head of department stated that she was going to teach the lesson to her colleagues and re-write the school’s scheme of work so the lesson could be included. The richness of the Let’s Think lessons caters for very different levels of experience and competence, for students and teachers alike. For some, it is about building up knowledge and understanding from simple ideas within concrete contexts. For others, it’s the other way round. Start with the formal abstract idea or algorithm and unpick it to find the basic principles. In mixed KS2/3 courses, this happens all the time and one of the great benefits is that teachers’ subject knowledge is enhanced by working together. An idea that underpins Let’s Think work regardless of age or aptitude.   [post_title] => Enhancing teachers’ subject knowledge and developing reasoning [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => enhancing-teachers-subject-knowledge-and-developing-reasoning [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-06-03 20:09:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-06-03 19:09:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1115 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1100 [post_author] => 2077 [post_date] => 2019-04-04 13:51:16 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-04-04 12:51:16 [post_content] => I have noticed the phrase “When did x become a thing?” spreading in many areas of discourse. Maybe this is a sound bite form of protest against interesting and complex ideas being reduced to something over simple. Metacognition has become a much discussed “thing” in education since the EEF and other influencers have started using it as one of the “things” that work. This is also in line with many pithy simplification “memes” such as “learning is a change in long term memory” that are gaining status through over reproduction through social media. As Let’s Think programmes have been developing the use of metacognition for decades I propose a way of discussing metacognition more as a process of taking back control of cognition rather than a tool in a toolkit. The two key ideas I want to explore are metacognition as “coordinating evidence and claim” Kuhn (1999) and “increasing learners representational capacity” Demetriou and Spanoudis (2018). These ideas clearly extend the concept of learning beyond just changes in memory. [caption id="attachment_1101" align="alignnone" width="374"] Figure 4. Really Raising Standards[/caption]   The CASE (Thinking through Science) lesson Floating and Sinking challenges students to consider the role of volume and mass of different vessels and come to a rule that explains whether these vessels will sink or float in water.  The students are presented with five opaque plastic bottles of equal volume but increasing mass. Then they are shown six opaque plastic bottles of equal mass but decreasing volume. Also a mystery bottle for which they have to predict whether it will float or sink based on the floating rule they have developed as a claim. I remember teaching  this lesson several times some 20 years ago and following  the lesson script where the first five equal volume vessels were demonstrated which led to cognitive conflict and a group social construction discussion ensued. In training teachers in my school I basically followed this pathway through this lesson during co-teaching and CASE training. However, when I started teaching this age group again, three years ago, the ideas of Kuhn and Demetriou and my own 20 years experience of adapting CASE pedagogy to different subjects and age groups had given me a new emphasis. This was making metacognition explicit at every stage in a lesson. The strategy I used was Predict, Explain, Observe and Explain. This is a modified version of POE (Predict Observe Explain) that goes back to White and Gunstone (1992). All of the five equal volume vessels had been presented to the class. Typical responses for Predict and explain were “All of them would float because large things float just like big ships float” or “They are all heavy and heavy things sink like rocks do” “or some will float and others will sink and the lightest will float”. Then each of the five vessels were tested and at each observation  a lot of monitoring and evaluation of their claims was made available. The evidence supporting their claims and the representation of their rules and inferences were challenged. After each observation a social construction and metacognition discussion ensued. As the floating or sinking results come in each offers an opportunity to monitor thinking, evaluate the rules they had thought about and plan a new way of thinking. Nascent ideas of the compound variable schema emerge  at various times during these discussions. Mediating these ideas, allows for a more detailed monitoring of how inefficiently the single variable schema coordinated the claims students had made and the evidence of floating or sinking. The form of representation shown in Figure 4 makes clear that the problem cannot be solved by just centring on the volume of the object or the mass of the object. This allows a metarepresentation of the two unsatisfactory claims and suggests the schema of compounding the two variables. The normal CASE lesson could not be completed in an hour because this intense cycling through the four pillars of Cognitive Acceleration pedagogy obviously takes more time than the normal lesson plan.  I believe this leads to a significantly more productive awareness of the ways of the reasoning established through this sustained intellectual endeavour. This ensures that the students can more clearly represent their ideas to themselves and how these match the evidence. This evidence then needs to be represented in a more complex way, in this case with the schema of compound variables. Their representations are then further reinforced with the follow up card game activity used in this lesson which again uses the two dimensional spatial schema as a scaffold for the compound variable idea. Then the bridging activities lead to the importance of the density idea and can be followed up in the next lesson. So metacognition is now seen as a set of processes of planning, monitoring and evaluating our learning and thinking.  We can then, together with our students, increase their capacity to represent the complex world and judge how good their claims are. The EEF report stresses that teachers should model metacognition. Let’s Think lesson structures allow for many opportunities to do this. References Adey, P. and Shayer, M. (2006). Really raising standards: Cognitive intervention and academic achievement. Routledge. Demetriou, A. and Spanoudis, G. (2018). Growing Minds. Routledge: London. Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking.  Educational Researcher, 28:16-25. White, R., & Gunstone, R. (1992). Probing Understanding. Great Britain: Falmer Press. [post_title] => When did metacognition become a thing? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => when-did-metacognition-become-a-thing [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-04-04 13:51:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-04-04 12:51:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1100 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1092 [post_author] => 2077 [post_date] => 2019-03-12 10:03:18 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-03-12 10:03:18 [post_content] => On 23^rd January, Headteacher Dr Martina Lecky and her staff opened the doors of their school, their classrooms and their thinking as educators for their inaugural CA in action day.  Ruislip High is an accredited Let’s Think School: the only secondary phase school known to have embedded CA programmes in English, Maths and Science. Dr Lecky set the tone for the day with her purpose and passion.  For her, Cognitive Acceleration has been the only constant in a career in education that has seen other interventions, policies and approaches come and go.  For her, the development of young people’s thinking is at the core of her moral purpose.  Development is irreversible.  Learning can erode over time.  Might there be an improved leadership focus on development, she invited us to think, now that the phrase ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ sits in the draft Ofsted framework? The day mirrored the tenor and the tone of Let’s Think, exploring the nested development of leaders, teachers and students.  All participants, irrespective of their prior knowledge and context were invited to construct their understanding of CA through cycles of content introduction, live classroom observation and shared reflection. So what understanding did I construct through the day?

1. Even when CA leaders live the principles – or pillars – of Let’s Think, it takes strategy and effort to maintain focus and momentum. Dr Lecky and her team constantly seek to create the next generation of CA champions, rooting all development in classroom practice.
2. The CA teachers at Ruislip exhibit a core confidence in probing the development of thinking in their subject. The generosity they showed in opening their classrooms and humility in seeking feedback modelled how, for them, competence is always under construction.
3. The students of Ruislip High modelled the values and principles of CA in their conduct and discourse. They take the risk to open up their thinking to others and value the ideas of others.  They show the tenacity to work with difficulty.  They thrive on being asked not just what they think, but why they think that and how they arrived at an answer.  They are constructing how to work together with purpose and rigour as much as what and how to think in an academic discipline.

As a Let’s Think in English Tutor, I walked away inspired and conflicted.  Of course there were strong similarities between the English, Maths and Science lessons we experienced with Year 7, but there were differences too.  Reflecting on those differences has opened up a new and challenging ‘disequilibrium’ in my own understanding. Whether you are a teacher or leader, a CA expert or novice, Ruislip High School’s ‘CA in action’ days won’t fail to inspire or challenge your thinking. If you would like to attend next year’s CA in action day, email info@letsthink.org.uk. [post_title] => Let’s Think: Cognitive Acceleration in Action at Ruislip High [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-cognitive-acceleration-in-action-at-ruislip-high [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-03-12 10:03:18 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-03-12 10:03:18 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1092 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1083 [post_author] => 2077 [post_date] => 2019-02-05 12:08:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-02-05 12:08:48 [post_content] => This is the title of the Parents and Teachers for Excellence Conference I attended on 26^th January. It focussed on the knowledge-rich curriculum, but I found it surprisingly helpful from a Let’s Think viewpoint. Parents and Teachers for Excellence (PTE) is a high-powered pressure group set up in 2016 to promote a knowledge-rich curriculum in schools. This was its first conference and was very well attended – 500 (mostly) teachers giving up a Saturday at Pimlico Academy, Central London, to focus on knowledge in the KS2 and KS3 (the ‘wonder years’ of the conference’s title). It had quite a ‘cutting edge’ feel, but I found it more thoughtful and nuanced than conferences I’ve attended by ResearchED and PiXL. Amanda Spielman spoke first, mostly about the new Ofsted draft framework and saying nothing different from her other recent speeches. During questions she was challenged about why Ofsted hadn't included any special schools in the schools consulted about the new inspection arrangements. Her answer was that all the schools consulted had SEND pupils and that Ofsted's view is that SEND pupils need greater support than others, not separate treatment. I took this as the beginnings of a move away from differentiation by task which has been signalled elsewhere. Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, was more surprising. He argued that certain controversies were now resolved by evidence, giving academisation (of course) and phonics as examples, so that debate in the teaching profession should move on. I was expecting him to go on about the importance of good textbooks, but he didn't. He spent the rest of his speech talking about the importance of oracy and the need for schools to promote this to enable pupils to understand and apply knowledge effectively. He was challenged about this during questions and talked some more about the need for dialogue between teachers and pupils and opportunities for students to give presentations and take part in debates - nothing about groupwork, but perhaps this is a step too far at the moment. I found this emphasis on oracy surprising from a Conservative traditionalist and wonder if there is beginning to be concern at the DfE about a growth of rote learning in schools. Anyway, if this is a line that Gibb and others are now pursuing, it seems potentially promising for Let’s Think. He was followed by a panel of four luminaries of whom by far the most impressive was Christine Counsell, until recently Director of Education at the Inspiration Trust group of academies. She spoke persuasively about the need for pupils to learn how to generalise, but that this can be done only on the basis of a great deal of specific knowledge. In her view, a successful curriculum needs to make generalisations visible by drawing connections between specific aspects of knowledge. Again, this felt like a warning against rote learning and implicitly supportive of LT. For the next session we broke into separate groups and, with a lot of others, I chose Stuart Lock who blogs and sometimes writes in the TES. He's the head of a small secondary school and was very illuminating about the practicalities of a knowledge-rich curriculum - obvious things like the need for respectful behaviour by students and, more surprisingly, scepticism about many of what he called "proxies" for a knowledge-rich curriculum such as knowledge organisers, assessment data, Teach-Like-a-Champion and indeed requiring any particular kind of lesson delivery. He was very funny on the common SLT fallacy that, if Department X consistently gets excellent results, other departments should imitate it. His view is that every subject has its own requirements which can't be replicated by others, i.e. pedagogy arises from the needs of what is taught, not from predetermined approaches. His basic position struck me as extraordinarily libertarian - schools should insist on appointing high-quality subject specialists and leave them to get on with teaching with minimal interference (which he reckoned is the case in Finland). In particular, there is no need to implement lots of curriculum initiatives to impress Ofsted. There were a lot of PTE people in the room and he was clearly expressing a general view. These days it’s interesting to look at the Progress 8 scores of schools where the head makes public recommendations about how schools should be run. Stuart Lock was head of Cottenham Village College (P8 +0.66 – Well above average) till September 2017 and is now head of Bedford Free School (P8 +0.38 – Above average). So his approach is supported by evidence. For the final session we had to choose subjects, but English and Maths were omitted so I had no chance to hear about a knowledge-rich English curriculum. (The organisers have explained that English and Maths were omitted to give space for the whole range of other subjects which have had fewer opportunities.) But overall I found it a surprisingly interesting and promising day from an LT perspective. [post_title] => 'The Wonder Years' [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-wonder-years [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-02-05 12:08:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-02-05 12:08:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1083 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1053 [post_author] => 2077 [post_date] => 2019-01-25 11:45:33 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-01-25 11:45:33 [post_content] => I became aware, very early in my Let’s Think journey that teachers noticed a change in learners’ willingness to contribute and engage, even in the first few lessons.  Learners who were ordinarily, shy, lacking confidence or even previously disaffected seemed to forget their previous selves. Now I am a tutor and demonstrate lessons with unfamiliar learners.  During post-lesson discussion, the class teacher will always cite a learner who was more engaged and involved than is usual for them.  Sarah Seleznyov narrated a beautiful example of this recently in her blog about a boy in Reception on the autistic spectrum engaging in a collaborative problem-solving task.  Similarly, a teacher watching a Year 7 class I taught with a young girl in care was moved to tears by her ability to contribute when she was usually silent and disengaged. This strange magic niggled away at me.  Because no educational intervention works magic.  But it can work cleverly.  What is it about the Let’s Think construct that has the potential to affect learners’ confidence so swiftly?  At first glance, we might expect some of our most vulnerable learners to flounder in a learning context that makes demands on self-regulation and deliberately takes learners through challenge. To better understand this conundrum, I decided to shape one of my Master’s assignments around confidence and what follows is a summary of my findings. I swiftly discovered that the notion of confidence is not popular with psychologists, educational or otherwise. It is just too wide-ranging, context dependent and slippery.  The construct that seemed most applicable to Let’s Think is that of self-efficacy.  Defined by the seminal psychologist, Albert Bandura, academic self-efficacy is context and discipline dependent.  It is about our perception of confidence in relation to a task, not to outcomes. So, in a nutshell, “I believe I can have a good go at this task.” Where does that belief come from?  What factors affect it? There are signals that a school, a department and a teacher send out about their belief in learners in their setting and grouping practices, and in the complexity of tasks with which they ask learners to engage.  There are dialogic discourse patterns that need establishing around inclusion, elaboration, rigour and purpose.  And there is the building of metacognitive reflection through learning, so that learners are inducted into the habit of noticing, reviewing and adapting their thinking. The table below aims to summarise my findings from the academic literature in a relational format.  Effie Maclellan offers a useful overview here and Caprara et al. here. The headline in my review has to be that feeling efficacious in a given academic context is rooted in the memory of having done well.  No amount of verbal exhortation can replace this.  Equally, we cannot develop self-efficacy if we have not struggled, because we know in our heart of hearts, that we did something easy.  We don’t perceive the experience as valuable.  When we approach a novel task with a sense of efficacy, we are not only activating knowledge about similar tasks from the past – but the knowledge schemata that enabled us to tackle it.  So the voice in our head moves from ‘I believe I can have a good go at this...” to “I believe I can have a good go at this because I can remember having tackled something like it and how I went about it.”  Unsurprisingly, academic self-efficacy is often referred to as ‘self-regulatory efficacy’. So what about those ‘magical’ early shifts in learner behaviour I referred to at the start of this blog?  If teacher observations prior to Let’s Think are reliable, and I’m sure they are, the shift in a learner’s willingness to engage and contribute can’t be based on their memory of having done well.   No positive memories can yet have been formed. To explain these early shifts, we might need to pay attention to those early moves and decisions of the Let’s Think teacher that convey signals to a class about their individual and their group agency.  Teachers insist that all group members are consulted.  Learners have a safe space to orally draft ideas before going public.  Teachers ask for feedback on a group’s emerging response, not an individual’s.  They never, overtly, evaluate an idea but promote agency through self and peer evaluation with feedback such as ‘What led you to think that?’  ‘Could you tell us more about Y?’  ‘What do other groups think about X’s idea?’  They mediate and steer the group in purposeful directions, so that learners feel the task is authentically challenging and that they are getting somewhere. It is not often, perhaps not often enough, that I get the chance to interview a group of learners after their first Let’s Think lesson and ask ‘How was that different to your usual English lessons?’  The last time I did this with six pupils in Year 5 their answers were:

• The text was really interesting because it was like a puzzle. It made you want to read it.
• You didn’t help us with the puzzle, you made us do it together.
• You made us notice that we had different ideas and we had to argue with each other about that.
• When I think now, the lesson got harder but we kept going. I still don’t know what the answer is.
• What is the answer, Mrs Crawford?

I replied that I still wasn’t sure – but they should take the text with them, share it at home and keep thinking. [post_title] => ‘But Pupil X never talks! How did you get them to talk?’ [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => but-pupil-x-never-talks-how-did-you-get-them-to-talk [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-01-25 11:45:33 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-01-25 11:45:33 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1053 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [6] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1047 [post_author] => 60 [post_date] => 2018-12-13 09:48:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-12-13 09:48:39 [post_content] => Schools’ provisional Progress 8 scores for 2018 were published in October and the full scores will be published in January. In the light of Ofsted’s new interest in the curriculum that schools provide, these will take on an even greater importance. Some schools will be under pressure from Ofsted to improve their English, Maths and/or EBacc P8 scores to match their Open score and Let’s Think can help with this. As background, Progress 8 (P8) was introduced as a measure of the value added by secondary schools between the KS2 tests in Year 6 and GCSE in Year 11. It is the average of a school’s Year 11 students’ personal P8 scores in eight subjects. These derive from their best GCSE grades in four elements known as ‘slots’ or ‘buckets’: English, Maths, three EBacc subjects and three other subjects. Since October 2017 Ofsted’s priority has been schools’ awareness of the need to provide an appropriate curriculum. This is a significant change of focus – previously Ofsted accepted what schools provided and commented only on delivery. From September 2019 the focus will be explicitly on what schools choose to teach and their rationale for teaching it. There will be far less interest in data collection and progress tracking – Amanda Spielman has been scathing about “byzantine number systems”. This change of focus from data collection to the reality of teaching and learning is only possible because of Progress 8 which provides a consistent, nationally referenced value-added figure for all schools. Progress 8 will therefore be central in assessing schools’ curricular provision and this deeper significance is only gradually being realised. As an example of this, in September 2018 Emma Ing, one of Ofsted's Regional Directors, pointed out that many schools do much better in the Open slot of Progress 8 than in English, Maths or the EBacc slot. She reported that, in 2017, 209 schools had entered more than 95 per cent of their Year 11 for the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) and 2240 schools had used this qualification to some extent. She writes: “The average points score for ECDL in 2017 was 52 (equal to a grade A) and schools with high levels of entry, not coincidentally, tended to have very rosy Open P8 scores.” Progress 8 overall English element Maths element EBacc element Open element +0.23 -0.09 +0.01 -0.06 +0.88 Ofqual has now discontinued ECDL as a possible GCSE, but Emma Ing implies that there are other ‘vocational’ subjects with similar potential high Progress 8 scores. She concludes: “I would want to know, if a school is doing so well at ensuring pupils gain great grades in the Open subjects, why leaders and teachers are not able to make the same difference to their learning in English and mathematics.” Sean Harford, Ofsted's National Director for Schools, has now indicated that discrepancies of this kind will now be investigated during inspections. If a school’s English, Maths and/or EBacc P8 score is significantly lower than its Open score, it will be asked to explain why and, if a convincing explanation isn’t available, this will appear in Ofsted’s report and be reflected in the school’s Ofsted grade. It would be prudent for schools in the situation identified by Emma Ing to start planning on how to raise their scores (as appropriate) in English, Maths and/or Science as Science always appears in the EBacc slot. For this, schools will need help. Most Local Authorities no longer have subject advisors, so schools and MATs will need to buy in advice. Rather than a one-off session with a consultant, it would be safer for schools to consider programmes which (a) have a long track-record of success, (b) provide at least 30 model lessons for teachers to use over time, and (c) provide both initial and ongoing teacher support. The Let’s Think programmes in English, Maths and Science have all these features. If you want to find out about how secondary schools are using Let’s Think to raise attainment in the core subjects, visit Ruislip High, a Let’s Think accredited secondary school on 23 January or 14 May to observe Let’s Think lessons and talk to school leaders about the approach. The school has taught Let’s Think lessons in English, mathematics and science since 2011. Read more about this opportunity on the home page of our website. [post_title] => Progress 8, reforming the curriculum and Let's Think [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => progress-8-reforming-the-curriculum-and-lets-think [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-12-13 09:49:21 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-12-13 09:49:21 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1047 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [7] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1037 [post_author] => 11 [post_date] => 2018-09-10 21:08:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-09-10 20:08:25 [post_content] => Every year over the summer break I aim to read at least one educational book a month and in 2009 it was the turn of Guy Claxton’s ‘What’s the point of school?’. On page 113 he pays great tribute to his A level Chemistry teacher, Michael Shayer, the leading academic on the Cognitive Acceleration project. As Michael Shayer begins his 91st year the pieces of his work are falling into place. This struck me recently when I read another piece by Guy Claxton entitled; ‘Effective learning: beyond the traditional/progressive Punch and Judy show’ published by the Chartered College of Teaching in their Impact magazine . In this short piece, Claxton raises some interesting questions regarding the mindset of teachers and the professional choices they currently face. Claxton argues that we should be arming young people with the confidence, capacity and the appetite to engage with difficult things i.e. to approach uncertainty with a curious, adventurous and buoyant spirit. The section that resonated with me is where he adds to the vocabulary we can use as teachers to describe our pedagogical choices. He talks about the third layer i.e. our beliefs about the learning environment. This is the real us, the one we cannot hide and the one our children pick up on, it is our teaching DNA so to speak. He asks several questions that we all would do well to reflect upon: Do we make time for our students to struggle, think and talk? Do we encourage them to work things out for themselves, even though that may be different to the strategies we had anticipated? In the same edition of Impact, there is an article by Helen Lewis, a member of the Let’s Think Forum. She shares information about her work supporting teachers to encourage metacognition in young children using video to support their reflections. This article focuses on the role of the teacher in the metacognitive process and the fact that we need to make thinking visible in the classroom. Helen states that ‘reflective talk’ may be particularly supportive of young children’s self-regulation and metacognition. Most notably for me she mentions that the videos used in the reflective dialogues formed a ‘site for joint meaning making’. Lewis’ article links well to Claxton’s in that both focus on the way we approach teaching in the classroom and the choices we as teachers need to make in order to facilitate effective pupil thinking. If we want to make our classrooms thinking environments, we need to support children to move away from believing that thinking means behaving well, and to move explicitly towards a view of thinking as an active and diverse set of activities that are common to all, including the adults in the room. Little did I know that when I first heard the word metacognition in 1992 that even today it would be such an integral part of the way I reflect upon my classroom life, and that it would be an understanding that is continually shaped by my engagement with research and the ideas of others. This summer the book that further enriched my understanding was ‘Imaginations Heartwork’ by P Hogan. His ideas really spoke to me - there is something about seeing things though another’s eyes that helps you to better formulate your own understanding. In describing learning he suggests that for pupils, ‘reflecting back on the experiences can transform a problem into questions’ and that these arise as a consequence of engaging with a challenge. Using a lovely phrase, that to me now encapsulates metacognition, he terms these reflections ‘the conversations that we are’. Hogan is both describing, and making an appeal, for a continual process where efforts to understand and the questions asked in response, are predisposed by previous experiences – i.e. a reciprocal relationship that develops over time. When I first encountered the work of Philip Adey, Michael Shayer and Carolyn Yates all those years ago metacognition was always presented as a continual process and one that cannot be a simple add on – it is an attribute that grows and matures like a muscle! The more you develop it the healthier and stronger it gets and vice versa. Now August is upon me I think it may be time to put down the educational tomes and pick up that Dickens book I have been meaning to read for some time – I wonder if he has anything relevant to say about education and schooling? [post_title] => Reflections upon metacognition and the role of teacher beliefs [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => reflections-upon-metacognition-and-the-role-of-teacher-beliefs [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-09-10 21:08:25 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-09-10 20:08:25 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1037 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [8] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1020 [post_author] => 97 [post_date] => 2018-07-03 18:44:24 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-07-03 17:44:24 [post_content] => As a Let's Think tutor I visited Finland in spring at the invitation of teacher educators at Turku University. They are very interested in the Let's Think approach and I was interested in what sets Finland apart as a high performing education system with a narrow range of attainment. There are of course many differences between Finland and the UK.  Finland is a lot colder in late March than the UK. Helsinki was -20 whilst London was +8 Celsius.  Finland has a small population in a larger country: 17 people per square km. The UK has a larger population in a smaller country: 259 people per square km. There are a lot more trees in Finland and the Finns love to eat food gathered from the woods.  You are more likely to find a sauna in a Finnish home! Because education systems are not isolated from the climate and cultures we might expect differences and some of the differences do seem to arise from the geographical, political and social history of Finland rather than any educational principles.  For example a difference that seems to affect the psyche of people in Finland is the extent to which there was and is land ownership.  Finland has a population used to land ownership and it is widely distributed. As one Finn put it, 'We all had a small farm, a lake and forest'.  This wide distribution of land wealth meant that Finland didn't move from a feudal social system to an industrial one in the way that the UK did.  Another evident difference in the Finnish approach to life was explained to me as being based on the experience of Finland after gaining independence from Sweden and the subsequent resistance to the Russian and German invasions of the 20th Century.  There is a fierce independence and resilience in extreme conditions that permeates people's choices. People are pragmatic rather than political. The social contract with Government is that it takes taxes to solve problems that affect the population and these problems are best solved by collaborative action and agreement. What stood out for me as a different about education in Finland from such a brief visit was:

• There's an emphasis on early play, cooperation and the values and skills needed to live a rounded life.
• Inclusive and comprehensive with additional support as part of mainstream schooling for children with educational needs.
• It's a permeable system where progress to higher tiers in education remains available to all. Support and counseling for students throughout education aiming to help before problems arise.
• There are no tuition fees for basic or higher education.
• Free school meals throughout education.
• No testing but professional assessment and student self assessment.
• No inspection system but lots of guidance, support and additional funding.
• Highly educated teachers given professional autonomy over pedagogy, curriculum and assessment.
• Local authority maintenance of schools.
• A broad base of schools, universities, teaching unions, local authorities and the central education department that support the vision for education and develop reforms collaboratively.
• All provided at a similar cost to the UK!

Apart from feeling I had found my happy educational place I found that we also had something to share via Let's Think. The feedback given after CPD based on some Let's Think science and maths activities and the pedagogical principles that underpin our approach convinced me that teachers colleagues in Finland are striving for the collaborative and challenging educational environments that Let's Think creates. They also want  to access the rich and engaging activities in the various schemes that have been produced for primary and secondary age children. They feel that their students are lacking the opportunities to develop their own strategies for problem solving within the curriculum and can avoid challenges. The children's reluctance to work together on problems within the curriculum was also an issue for them. They also wanted to know how to shift the emphasis form teacher input to pupil ownership. Does that sound familiar? Fortunately we have a chance to visit Finland again as Turku University is one of our strategic partners within the ACTS project led by the University of Lincoln. Another partner is  the Thinking Approach Group of Latvia . This 3 year project has begun to develop An Assessment Companion for Thinking Skills which aims to help teachers become more clear when children are thinking, the opportunities for developing thinking and the progress made by pupils as their thinking develops. We are at an early stage of understanding each partner's perspective on thinking and there will be more to write about this later but already our differences and similarities are the origin of some challenging collaborative work. More evidence, if any were needed, that a mixed group in Let's Think is most likely to be profitable for thinking. [post_title] => Let's Think in Finland [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-in-finland [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-07-03 18:47:52 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-07-03 17:47:52 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1020 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [9] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 981 [post_author] => 1034 [post_date] => 2018-03-05 15:54:06 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-03-05 15:54:06 [post_content] => It would seem from pupils’ responses from Let’s Think in English lessons that sometimes they are often provided with definitions of literary terms e.g. genre, sonnet etc but are infrequently provided with an opportunity to apply the definition to a text and see if it fits. Pupils need an opportunity to make meaning from the knowledge passed to them. It’s not uncommon at the start of a LTE lesson on classification to ask pupils to define genre yet despite recently studying a genre, they struggle to define it and furthermore are unable to provide different types of genres leaving the class teacher puzzled. One of the LTE reasoning patterns is Classification, which develops: “the ability to group or sort ideas or objects purposefully by one characteristic or variable and then being able to regroup them meaningfully using another characteristic or variable. Classifying includes the ability to rank concepts according to a particular criterion and then resolving any conflict when a different criterion is introduced. Within Let’s Think in English we ask pupils to classify: character types, genre, text types and grammar. The lesson I explored with the Year 6 class looked at how we might classify a short story. I commenced the lesson by asking pupils: what are the main features of a short story? Working in groups pupils built a classification list based on their prior knowledge of short stories. Working in threes the pupils developed an initial classification list. Below are four groups initial lists:

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D
Not much description Not much detail Funny openings Funny ending A surprise A beginning, middle and end	Paragraphs no chapters Not too much description Maybe a problem at the beginning	Characters Main Event Solution	Sub-titles Subject Little detail

As in the previous post the challenge for the LTE teacher is to scan and assimilate the different points raised so feedback can clarify misconceptions and probe the responses that offer greater depth. To assist the pupils, I used “live bridging” in the lesson, linking the classification system they created to the texts they were already studying. For example, the class developed the idea of short stories requiring “a problem at the beginning” by explaining it had to be introduced early as the writer had to work “quickly”. This led to a further clarification feature as the pupils felt a short story would only have one problem. I asked them to compare this to the “London Eye Mystery”, their class reading book. They felt the London Eye Mystery had one main problem but also a number of minor problems that are resolved as they protagonist proceeds. Pupils included in their classification of short stories the main features of all stories: characters, setting, plot, problem and themes. They felt short stories would contain the same features but they would be different from longer texts in significant ways. In terms of characters they felt it would be more likely to focus on 2 characters and have few, if any, minor characters. Likewise with setting, a short story would have a setting perhaps two. They felt the plot would be similar to a longer text but the time-scale would be shorter. However, the concept of themes proved confusing for many as they frequently referred to plot when trying to identify themes. Again, I returned them to the story they are studying and asked them in groups to briefly clarify the plot of “London Eye Mysteries”. Once they had established this I asked them to consider what the themes might be and this led to suggestions of hope, trust and childhood. I hope the above example helps clarify the subtle interplay between teacher and pupil in developing skills and knowledge in a LTE lesson. A misunderstanding of our programme is the teacher just facilitates understanding and sees where the pupils get to. An important component of LTE is to allow pupils the opportunity to air their ideas and equally importantly evaluate the ideas shared. There is no need for the teacher to tell Group D short stories are unlikely to have subtitles as the other groups provide effective feedback. The class are involved in ongoing review and alter their classification list based on the feedback. However the teacher needs to appreciate when pupils are struggling with understanding and provide an effective mediation to assist them. We’re reminded of Vygotksy’s words: “A thought can be compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words” We can best assess pupils’ understanding and knowledge when we enable them to share a shower of words and then we can consider the best way to assist them. Next the pupils are given an opportunity to apply their classification list. However the previous activity is still open and ongoing. They are not merely applying their classification list they are through the act of application reviewing the very list they created. LTE lessons we believe are fluid with questions seeping into follow on questions; the question posed and responded to at the start of the lesson does not end there. It is an enquiry we carry with us until the end of the lesson and beyond. The first text the pupils were presented with is a story from: “Short! A book of Very Short Stories” by Kevin Crossley:

 “Talk About Short"

He was alone and in the dark; and when he reached out for the matches, the matches were put in his hand.” Working in groups pupils attempt to apply their classification list. Their immediate thoughts are it’s not a short story as they express doubts such as “There are no characters”, “It’s too short”, “There’s too little description etc”. Yet some disagree and when feeding back from their groups argue there are characters and in fact we know there must be at least two and one is a man. As differing points of view are exchanged in the whole class feedback pupils evaluate not just the ideas shared but also their own thoughts. Whereas at the start of the activity in groups the vast majority felt it wasn’t a short story by the end of the discussion half the class have changed their mind persuaded by the logic and evidence presented by others. Pupils were then presented with an even shorter text, a six word short story credited to Ernest Hemingway: For sale; baby shoes, never worn. It’s interesting to observe how the introduction of the new text resets the pupils’ thoughts. Once again almost everyone claimed it is not a short story because of its brevity. However as they are provided with an opportunity in their groups to socially construct their own and a collective understanding they begin to probe and question their immediate assumption and speculate on possible character and setting. They move from expressing thoughts to reasoning. This time the majority of pupils don’t believe it’s a short story but rather think it would be a poster advertising the shoes. One pupils’ remarks triggers the class to take a new pathway of enquiry as they ask would it be different if the six words were in speech marks. They grapple with what the problem of the text might be. For many it is the need to sell the shoes, some infer the shoe might be the wrong size with one pupil suggesting it may hint at a more tragic problem. As a mediation I share with them that it is alleged to have been created by a famous writer and ask them to review the text once more. The idea that a story can be told very concisely is well established now although how many words or how much detail is required is an enquiry. The pupils are asked to review further examples of 6 word short stories by famous writers but they must now try to identify: character, setting, problem, plot and themes. Whereas with the initial texts they struggled to identify character when they weren’t clearly stated now the pupils are confidently inferring around the text and relating their inferences to textual evidence. This leads the pupils to another cycle of reflection upon their classification list. Are we any clearer on the features of a short story? Should we change our list? Are some factors more important than others? They seem to suggest plot is less important in short stories than other features. Could we use this list again in another context? As the lesson draws to a close I immediately start bridging with them; providing them with an opportunity to apply the skills and knowledge acquired. The pupils are asked to compose six word short stories either as a group or individually. Interesting the majority opt to write their own; they are very keen to do so. As they place their first thoughts on paper, we invite pupils to share their first attempts and ask peers to provide feedback with responses such as “What’s the problem though?”, “We need to know more about who is saying that?”. They are now using the classification list to create and evaluate their own text. I emphasis to them that when hearing an example we should be able to identify the key features and the writer should be able to explain them if called upon. We end the lesson by inviting pupils to share their examples if they wish. Every pupil is keen to share and we use and review the classification list once more. The class teacher suggests they can return to this in the afternoon to redraft their examples although we emphasise the need to keep their first drafts and to write an accompanying explanation identifying the features. It seems by saying more and writing less the pupils are moving forward in their understating of the features of stories and in their ability to classify. Below are examples from the class for you to review:     [post_title] => Writing less and thinking more! [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => writing-more-and-thinking-less [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-07-03 18:45:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-07-03 17:45:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=981 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 10 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1121 [post_author] => 2077 [post_date] => 2019-07-05 14:54:47 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-07-05 13:54:47 [post_content] => Climate and the weather  “The weather forecasters are always getting it wrong, it promised rain all day but look at this sunshine!” “This is global warming, is it?” The everyday descriptions of weather, forecasting and the causes of our experienced weather are riddled with misconceptions.  Weather forecasting is expected to be precise rather than probabilistic. We attribute the causes of a weather event to the weather itself and we’re often confused by climatic patterns that have a longer timescale and greater geographic reach than the moment by moment shifts in temperature and dewpoint that cause the rain that spoils our enjoyment of a sunny day. As weather amateurs we can rely on the views of the ‘so-called experts’, or trust our own past experience and the sometimes accurate lore of a world before science. ‘Red sky at night’ thinking.  So we carry an umbrella, a coat and some hope! As climate amateurs we might ignore the evidence of incremental change in global temperatures because of our immediate experience of the weather.  We might therefore hope that climate change will go away or even deny that there is any causal link. The difference is that although an umbrella is adequate for weather it is a poor defence against climate! Parkinson’s disease and the RCT My mother had Parkinson’s disease for over 15 years before she passed away last October.  She had a slow progressing form of the disease unlike Philip Adey, one of the originators of Let’s Think who sadly lost his health so quickly.   My mother would have been very interested in the recent BBC documentary on GDNF, a nerve growth factor first identified from mouse tumours.  In patients such as Darren Calder it had profound effects, life changing and ‘miraculous’ but it also involved an expensive and risky process of administering the drug directly into the brain. The current view is that such promising interventions be subject to larger scale Randomised Control Trials, RCTs.  This is a model of verification based on medical trials that has been broadly successful in identifying investment worthy drugs and procedures.  In an RCT as large a number of potentially willing recipients is gathered. The members of the group are randomly assigned to the proposed intervention or a non-intervention (sometimes a mock intervention such as a placebo).  After it is believed that sufficient time has elapsed for the treatment to have had the effect the results of both cohorts, treatment and non-treatment are statistically compared using the measures of independent evaluators to see if there is a significant difference.  This would seem to provide the necessary proof, uncontroversial evidence that something works, or does not. As such it has been employed within medicine for decades and within education in the more recent past. There are however some significant issues with the approach, as good as it is.

• For an RCT to be successful the treatment has to be uniformly and consistently applied in line with the hypothesis it is based upon.
• The RCT relies on agreement about the intended effect and a shared view on appropriate measures.
• An RCT ignores the positive and negative effects on individuals that may be based on their unique circumstances in favour of the overall impact on the group. Ignoring these circumstances is felt necessary in an RCT because a view has to be taken on whether the treatment can be replicated outside the trial.
• Some interventions can only be conducted with small groups either due to recruitment or the cost or risk or disruption of the intervention.
• Randomisation of smaller groups ignores the profound effects of differences between the two groups that could be balanced by stratification and more adequate blinding..
• The endpoints in an RCT can be poorly selected, often with a preference for easily assessed endpoints.
• There is little use of selection criteria for the individuals in an RCT trial and particularly responsive and other unsuitable individuals affect the results markedly, and especially so in smaller cohorts.
• An RCT is inappropriate if there is insufficient sample size or power to make claims that would impact many future recipients.

Although the GDNF trial had a profound effect on some recipients like Darren it had an effect size overall that was inconclusive using the measures. Thus it was considered to have failed the RCT test.  But further research into the brain scans taken in tandem with the assessments show promise, even though these were not part of the original assessment regime. Let’s Think How are weather reporting, climate predictions and trials of Parkinson’s interventions informative for Let’s Think? Let’s Think is an intervention that has a long term outcome, delayed over years, but is made up of numerous short term events and actions. Like our attempts to halt and reverse climate change it aims at a change that is incremental in the short term but which has profound benefits in the long term. Its proposal for teaching is based on a hypothesis of long term development and brain activity. It’s benefits are measured by cognitive gains. Let’s Think addresses the challenging evidence that, despite apparent increases in academic success, there is an underlying decline in cognitive ability as measured by Piagetian tests. This is the ‘climate change’ that is happening in our classrooms, the unnoticed change in performance hidden by the annually reported ‘weather’. Within Let’s Think there is a broad prescription for teacher activity to address the ‘climate change’ but the teacher, like a meteorologist is expected to use the many assessments and data points that come from her class to forecast the next most effective move in the ‘weather’ of the classroom.  Although the ‘weather’ of her classroom is the most important experience in the short term; long term it’s a change in the ‘climate’ that has the most profound effect on the child. The climate of challenge, co-operation and construction, reflected on together in a mixed class has to be created by each Let’s Think teacher out of the weather of everyday classroom life and it is this that addresses the underlying climate change, the decline in cognitive ability. The Let’s Think Forum has gathered ample evidence of the underlying decline in cognition and also has evidence from many small scale and international trials of the positive impact on cognitive gains for children as young as 5 and as old as 14.  In particular from Let’s Think interventions in mathematics and science. Our goal is to regularly replicate the positive effects of halting cognitive decline that have been seen in smaller and quasi experimental trials in larger scale trials.  We also aim to communicate and clarify the Let’s Think intervention so that it can be used with precision by teachers. Previous Randomised Control Trials, RCTs, such as that for the Education Endowment Funded Let’s Think Secondary Science showed, like the Parkinson’s trial, no conclusive evidence of effect with the measures that were used. Fortunately, unlike the Parkinson’s trial, there is very little risk in implementing Let’s Think in secondary science because in the trial taking away the ‘normal’ science lessons caused no decline in the gains of scientific knowledge in test schools compared to control schools. In addition the trial revealed that there were significant benefits experienced by teachers to their general ability to question and to promote engaging lessons.  Importantly it also revealed the difficulties experienced by teachers to develop a co-operative climate where students worked on challenges and reflected together on their efforts. Something we would want to work on especially in secondary settings with future interventions.   [post_title] => How can we ever be sure? 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