Dear Reader,
Sometimes, you'll go through something a bit horrible, only to realise later that you got something positive out of it.
And the English language is fantastically imaginative in the ways it has of describing this sort of situation:
- a blessing in disguise¹
- every cloud has a silver lining
- making lemonade (out of lemons)
Not to mention one of my favourite sayings: the only way out is through.
This past week, the new concorsi have started, and I know many of you will be, well, going through the concorso next week.
As much as I know the only way out is through, I also know the concorso can be a relentless and exhausting experience, and it can feel a bit pointless: after all, why are you even studying all this stuff?
But this is where I come in: in today's newsletter, I'm going to share with you 4 of the least useless things I've learned in all my years working on the concorsi.
It will hopefully be a chance to revise some key concepts if you're doing the concorso, see the point of what you've studied and, why not, consider things from a different and not entirely useless perspective.
Ready? Get a coffee, settle in and let's get cracking² 🔥
Why I think not all of it is useless
Sure, at this point, you may be questioning why exactly you need to know how many areas there are in the DigComp 2.2³ or the details of two dozen laws that keep changing anyway.
And this week, I have been monitoring and documenting the kinds of topics that came out in the infanzia e primaria exams (spoiler: not much new under the sun compared to PNRR1 and PNRR2 topics).
I've been doing this work for over 5 years now, and my conclusion is: while I agree that our brains would be far better off remembering, say, our debit card PIN codes (because, hello, contactless has ruined my memory) rather than all the stages in Piaget's theory, I can say that a lot of the stuff I've learned has come in handy or even helped me develop a better rounded perspective as a teacher.
Not convinced? Let me plead my case with this list of 4 of the least useless things I've studied for the concorso.
1. The teaching methods
I have to start with teaching methods, because even intuitively, this is the most practical and applicable part of the concorso syllabus. I knew about most of the methodology before I started working on the concorsi, but learning the ins and outs of, for example, cooperative learning (and the 5 criteria that make an activity truly cooperative) has enriched my understanding.
Bonus points for new methods I've been able to look into, such as tinkering and outdoor education.
👉 Little note apropos of nothing: if you're studying for the concorso and missed our revision sessions last week, you can still access all the recordings, downloadable concept maps, worksheets and slides.
To give you a flavour, here's a little preview of the lesson on teaching methods, with a map and a gap fill (which were followed by an extensive, somewhat challenging quiz that is available within the course):
2. The features of feedback
So many of the questions in PNRR1 and PNRR2 focused on feedback: how to give students feedback, what makes it effective, and so on. I work a lot with feedback and I know from research (and experience) that just because we give feedback, it doesn't mean students will understand it - and that's assuming they even read it.
I've experimented with different forms of feedback, including video-based feedback (the novelty of which, I must say, nullifies the issue of students not reading it!), and putting together the lessons for the revision course helped me hone in on 3 characteristics that truly effective feedback needs to have.
According to John Hattie, who you might remember as the researcher who put together a monstruous amount of studies to show what affects learning the most (e.g. not homework), feedback needs to answer 3 questions for the student:
- Feed up, i.e. where am I going? It should clarify the goal, success criteria, or expected standard.
- Feed back, i.e how am I doing right now? This is where we describe how the learner is doing compared to the goal they're working towards.
- Feed forward, i.e. where am I going next? Finally, we guide the learner on the practical next steps they need to take to improve and progress further.
For more features of feedback and what makes it effective (and not so effective), you can find a bit of lecture from me in lesson 4 of our revision course.
3. One of the fundamental reasons behind the very unique teacher recruitment system in Italy
One of my flaws, you could say, as a teacher and trainer, is that I did all of my teacher training at university in the UK. While this was great in many ways, it also means I missed some of the nuances of the Italian education system, particularly from a political and historical standpoint.
For instance, whenever I've been in conversation with colleagues from around the world about teacher education, I've always struggled to explain the tortuous and not entirely rational path that aspiring teachers have to go down to become school teachers in Italy. For context: in most OECD countries, the path is roughly university degree ➜ teacher training (sometimes during a degree) with a practicum element ➜ qualified teacher status. This generally leads into the teaching profession.
Why is it, then, that we don't have quite as simple a path? Why did the 2018 TALIS analysis show that Italian teachers had lower than average pedagogical preparation? And why do we throw so many of our teachers into the deep end, whereby they start their first day of teaching without a shred of practical classroom background and experience? The reasons are multiple, but one of them can certainly be traced back a hundred years to the thinking of one Giovanni Gentile (and his friends).
In slightly oversimplified terms, Gentile didn't really see the point of methodology, pedagogy, educational psychology and all that jazz: the teacher was the method, no point wasting time studying on a course that would equip them with methodological tools. I for one don't really think this is true, but many people still do. This includes both laypeople and education practitioners. Studying the intricacies of Gentile's actual idealism and his educational philosophy allowed me a greater understanding of a lot of our current situation.
4. Criterion vs. norm-referenced assessment
One of the questions that have come up this year was about distribuzione forzata, a performance evaluation method normally used in business environments in which managers must assign employees to fixed performance categories, often according to a predetermined curve. So for example a manager (or teacher, if we transpose it to our context) might be required to assign 5% of their employees to the excellent category, 85% to the good category, and 10% to the below expectations category. As you can imagine, this forces the manager's hand in a way that doesn't necessarily reflect the real performance of the employees relative to a goal.
This took me back to a distinction I studied many moons ago for my Cambridge DELTA and, frankly, never really used in life: the one between criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessment.
Criterion-referenced assessment, which is what most of us use, evaluates a learner’s performance against fixed learning standards or outcomes, and not against other students. So if completing 60% of a test correctly is the passing grade, everybody who gets 60% also gets a passing grade.
Things are not quite so straightforward with norm-referenced assessment, in which the learner’s performance is assessed by comparing it to the performance of a group (the “norm"). So for example, only 10% of the students get the highest grade. It's what the Americans call "grading on a curve" and indeed I've seen the method used mostly in the American context. Personally, I've never much seen the point to this kind of assessment in a school context because it promotes far too much competition, since a student's grade is determined, to some extent, by their classmates' grades, but it was great - and it reminded me about the depth of our brain - to brush up on this knowledge from years ago!
And with this, we've come to the end of today's newsletter. What, if anything, have you found not entirely useless from your concorso experience? Let me know!
In the meanwhile, break a leg if you're doing the concorso and have a lovely Sunday with your loved ones (whether or not you're doing the concorso).
Take care, dear teacher ✨
¹ Which of course I thought for ages was actually "blessing in these guys". In my defense, I was young. Boy, do I love a good mondegreen.
² Or crackLing, like a fire. I don't know if you're into relaxing background noise at all, nor do I want to make it sound like it's my primary hobby, but with the advent of the Christmas season, I've rather been enjoying working to the sound of a crackling fire.
³ For the record, they're 5: Information and Data Literacy, Communication and Collaboration, Digital Content Creation, Safety and Problem Solving.
✨Cool things I heard this week
I've done so many courses with you and I wish we could do them in real life in school too!
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