On Codifying Mode B Teaching
Reflections on a collaborative process and the benefits for teacher thinking
Since the publication of the Learning Rainforest in 2017 where he introduced the idea of Mode A and Mode B teaching, Tom Sherrington has argued for the value of instructional variety in teaching using the metaphor of a ‘balanced diet’. He suggests that good teaching involves the ‘staples’ of Mode A being explanation, modelling, practising and feedback and the ‘deviations’ of Mode B, including opportunities to explore, discover, ‘go-off-piste’ through more open-ended or hands on choices.
Yet, the notion of ‘deviation’ does not negate the need for precision and intentionality, a lesson my colleagues and I learned when we embarked on our own Mode B journey three years ago, a whole-faculty approach to integrating more structured oracy as part of a middle years ‘Critical Conversations’ program in the Humanities. As the name suggests, the conversations are critical, student-directed discussions of key topics in response to inquiry questions. In designing a program, we sought to leverage the power of collaborative discussion (drawing on Harkness and Socratic approaches) to improve student thinking and elevate student voices. However, we were also cognizant of the potential pitfalls of a method that could easily lapse into instructional looseness.
Through three years of collaborative trial and error, reading the research and observing each other, we reached a point last year where we sought to codify our techniques to assist colleagues in other faculties who were also looking to implement critical conversations in their own classrooms. We had the privilege of working (alongside many other schools) with the sensational Bron Ryrie-Jones’ The Playbook Project, which guides schools through the process through a highly practical methodology requiring the initial identification of ‘Big Ideas’, followed by one-pagers outlining specific techniques to enact those ideas.
Why Codify?
Unlike Mode A teaching, there is generally less enthusiasm for the codification of Mode B practices, possibly because they involve less direct teacher intervention (and therefore present as less prescriptive) and potentially because codification is negatively viewed by some as signifying the standardisation and de-professionalisation of teachers. But as Sherrington argues, Mode B will not occur ‘by osmosis’ and requires careful planning to be successful. Indeed, in dialogic learning, where the teacher is not the primary conductor of the classroom symphony, putting mechanisms in place to ensure the rhythm and flow of ideas is still conducive to building knowledge is integral.
Thus, in our codifying our approach, we took heed of Lee Shulman’s lamentation four decades ago in his seminal Portrait of Expertise, where he suggested that characterisations of effective teachers primarily ‘dwell on the teachers management of students in the classroom’ rather than ‘to the management of ideas within classroom discourse’. He argues that we need pictures of both if our portrayal of good practice ‘can serve as sufficient guides’. We hope that we achieved that in our playbook. What follows is a synthesis of our key learnings on how to run effective critical conversations, managing both students and ideas.
1.Knowledge first, then inquiry.
Sherrington argues that Mode A should precede Mode B and our experience supported this. We learned early on that the success of the critical conversations depended on the degree of knowledge that students bought to the table. While this might seem obvious, it goes against the common practice of having students respond to unseen stimulus in Socratic circles, where it is a matter of luck if students are able to call on relevant academic background to make their case.
Thus, we paired up literacy strategies, combining the explicit teaching of oracy strategies with the accountable close-reading of knowledge-rich, non-fiction texts (of a range in complexity) as preparation for the conversations. The impact of this strategy was immediate, with the bulk of students speaking from an informed position rather than relying on vague guesswork. We also noticed that for quiet and reserved students with a disposition towards wide reading, the focus on knowledge elevated their status in the conversation. As noted by our visual arts teacher when observing such a case:
‘A student with very little voice became the student who everyone wanted in their critique group and when she spoke, everyone listened and made notes’.
2. Apply a disciplinary lens to structuring talk
While there were some generic oracy skills that could be transferred across subjects, these were primarily social-emotional or physical, such as active listening, turn taking, body language, tone and audience awareness. On the other hand, the cognitive and linguistic elements were disciplinary specific, meaning each subject teacher had to define the way topics should be critically discussed in their contexts.
This of course reflected the pre-existing traditions of critical or public oracy in the disciplines, many of which are increasingly turning up in senior curriculum. Thus, while the Humanities has the elenchus, the Arts have critique, the Sciences their peer review and Languages have oral examinations.
Using Doug Lemov’s ‘Habits of Discussion’ as a base, teachers across five subjects (Humanities, English, Arts, Languages and Science) developed subject specific ‘discussion stances’ which identified the various positions students could adopt when engaging in structured dialogue. These include making a claim, offering a critique, building on others, or respectful disagreement. In foreign languages, these were adjusted to reflect the increased challenge in terms of vocabulary where the focus was on forming relevant questions, speaking without notes and active listening for grammatical elements. In this way teachers designed the ‘talk moves’ that best suited the type of criticality they need from their students.
3. Stay within the box to achieve epistemic progress
The biggest danger (as with most inquiry pedagogy) was the capacity for students to lose control of ideas and become lost in digression, ambiguous or superficial discussion. Performative talk without any substantive gains was a very real possibility. Thus, it was imperative to include in our talk moves protectors to ensure epistemic progress and avoid the ‘are we getting anywhere’ problem.
Clinton Golding provides a helpful distinction between epistemic progress as ‘improving the substantive content of an inquiry’, which is different from methodological progress, which involves the ‘skills and quality of mind needed for inquiry’. In short, students need to come out of the process with better ideas, not only more refined discussion skills.
Techniques for ‘staying inside the box’ includes: teaching students to be on guard against digression as well as assumed understandings, argumentative deflection or derailment (such as ‘whataboutisms’) and fallacious reasoning.
Students were also taught the philosophical skill of concept attainment to assist them stay on track. This involved learning how to employ conceptual operations, which are actions or mental moves that help us to understand concepts and work with them by providing criteria. As the philosopher Philip Cam says in his practical guide to inquiry, ‘learning how to do these things will give students a head start in working with ideas’. (p. 53). These include systems of categorisation such as classification, division and opposites, followed by using conceptual questioning. For example, in an English conversation on the cultural significance of the novelist Tim Winton, students needed to reach an agreed definition of ‘national treasure’ in order to proceed forward with their discussion.
4. Epistemic progress both coexists with and sits above other forms of progress
Furthermore, Golding’s definition above helped us to evaluate the success of the conversation against the other forms of progress that Mode B teaching offered us.
Working from the assumption that progress equates to change and improvement, there are multiple contenders when evaluating whether progress has been made. These include:
1) The improvement of communication skills such as active listening and turn taking.
2) The improvement of dialogical inquiry and critical thinking skills such as questioning and identifying fallacies and justifying one’s views.
3) The improvement of dispositional elements such as confidence, and curiosity.
4) The improvement of student ethical and civic capability through developing open-mindedness, inclusivity and respectful disagreement.
We all agreed with Golding that while all the outcomes were desirable (and evident at different stages throughout the conversation) it was epistemic progress that mattered most, followed by the improvement of critical thinking skills. In other words, mere participation in a critical dialogue without improving one’s critical capacity and depth of understanding through the gaining of ‘better ideas’ was a case of ‘getting nowhere’, or the pedagogical equivalent of treading water.
4. Capture the flow of ideas through mapping tools
The most challenging part of the process was to assess student learning through capturing the flow of ideas and the quality of discussion. In Mode A teaching, class discussion precedes assessment, whereas in this case, it was the assessment.
Over three years, the contributions of a range of teachers lead to the development of both quantitative and qualitative mapping tools to be used by either teachers or students during the discussion. Quantitative tools provided insight into cognitive ratio, or who was getting the most work-out during the discussion. Furthermore, the qualitative tools allowed the nuance of student insights to be captured, allowing us to assess their thinking in relation to values of inquiry such as relevance and precision.
5.Scaffolding oracy development requires careful attention to individual student dispositions.
Finally, despite all the careful curation, we found that all the strategies above did not necessarily override the cultural elements of a class where some students still struggled to find a voice. As such, we made use of low-stakes oracy techniques such as turn and talk in advance of the conversations, mini-conversations with some students as well as including inclusivity as a criterion to try and mitigate this.
To codify or not?
Absolutely! While codifying a practice is necessary to scale out initiatives or to establish a common language amongst teachers, we felt the greatest benefit of the process was the heightened sense of intentionality we could bring back to the classroom due to the improved clarity in our thinking. Making our one-pagers was rigorous work, as we sought to articulate in clear steps what was tacit knowledge. And far from being the restrictions some claim they are, we hope that our coded techniques are the enablers for teacher growth. We look forward to sharing our playbook with our colleagues and the wider community.