{"id":3797,"date":"2017-11-06T22:37:57","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T22:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/?p=3797"},"modified":"2017-11-06T22:37:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T22:37:57","slug":"paper-review-inside-the-black-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/paper-review-inside-the-black-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Paper review: “Inside the black box”"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are nearly 17,000 Oxford students on taught courses. They turn up reliably every October. We send them to an army of lecturers and tutors, drawn from every rank of the research hierarchy. As members of that hierarchy, we owe it to the students – all 17,000 of them – to teach them as best we can.<\/span><\/p>\n

And where can we learn the most about how to teach? There are 438,000 professional teachers in the UK. Maybe people who spend all of their working time on the subject might have good strategies to help people learn.<\/span><\/p>\n

The context of the paper<\/b><\/p>\n

Teachers obsess over assessment. Assessment is the process by which teachers figure out what students have learned. It is probably true that assessment is the only reason we have classrooms at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inside the Black Box<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u00a0is of the vanguard of recent changes in educational thinking. Modern teaching regards good pedagogy as a practical skill. Like other types of performance, it depends on a specific set of concrete actions which can be taught and learned. Not everyone is a natural teacher – but nearly everyone can become a competent teacher.<\/span><\/p>\n

Formative assessment is the focus of <\/span>Inside the Black Box<\/span><\/i>. The article argues that this process, in which teachers figure what students know and tell them how it\u2019s going wrong, is essential to good classroom practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is the black box?<\/b><\/p>\n

The black box is the classroom. After societal convulsions over class sizes, funding deficits, curriculum reforms, and examination structure, it\u2019s time – says the article, in 2001 – that we focus on what actually goes on inside the classroom. These social changes, it says, adjust the inputs to the black box, and society expects better things out of the black box. But what if changing the inputs makes the work inside the black box <\/span>harder?<\/span><\/i> Don\u2019t we have an obligation to figure out what needs to happen to get students to learn?<\/span><\/p>\n

The article touches three questions:<\/span><\/p>\n