Wouldn't it be nice to be able to say that more often? "Take your time..."

These are three words which can make a world of difference to a student grappling with a difficult concept. We work in a system which forces us, as teachers, to keep the momentum, stick to the scheme of work yet not let anyone fall behind. Arguably, by the very nature of this teacher-paced experience, students fall behind all the time. Not because teachers are not good enough, and not because children have some innate glass ceiling which limits what they can learn or how fast, but because they are not afforded the opportunity to take responsibility for their learning and control how long they need to spend on a task to ensure they achieve deep, intuitive learning.

Let's think about the phrase "take your time". The time belongs to the students, as does the learning, and control of when they choose to do it. So when we say "take your time", we should really mean it. Students should take their time and own it. They should manage their resources in such a way that means they can learn at a pace that suits them, allows them to go back and recap or skip ahead and be curious, and allows them to take breaks when they want and ask for help when they need it, not when the teacher has finished talking.

What we are proposing is that the student takes complete control over the pace and direction of their learning. So no more teaching from the front of the class. Say we broadly divide teaching into two parts: delivery of information and supporting students. In a student-paced model, the delivery of information cannot be a one-pace-fits-all experience, like it is in the majority of classrooms, because when the teacher is ready to teach something the student might not be ready to learn it and vice versa. The student has to control when they are ready to take the teaching. Perhaps they are still struggling with yesterday's lesson, or they have a gap in their knowledge which is making it hard to grasp this new concept. So we have to make teaching available 24/7 and repeatable as many times as needed. Even the very best presenter of information in the world, delivering content live and only available once will be less effective than an average deliverer of information who is available on demand. We harness the power of video tutorials streamed to students' devices in order to achieve this. It has the added benefit of making teaching available to parents, carers and tutors too, which means they might be able to support learning. The classroom spills out of the school into the community in this respect. For the record, our teaching is very, very far from being average so the student really does get the best of both worlds.

With teaching on demand, the teacher is free to spend more of their time supporting students. Let's face it: chalk-and-talk is easy; coaching, questioning, mentoring, provoking, facilitating and giving feedback are the more difficult skills and the ones which make a real difference to students' learning. So we should spend the majority of our time doing these.

We know that this model works. The Khan Academy, the world's largest school, works on this very model and has published compelling evidence to support it. The following extract is taken from here.

Results from the 2010 Los Altos School District pilot test, which used the California Standards Test (CST) to measure performance:
The CST's grading scale was...

Advanced
Proficient
Basic
Below basic
Far below basic

The number of 'advanced' & 'proficient' students in the Los Altos nearly doubled from 23% to 41%.

The worst 6% of students, namely those in 'remedial math', drastically improved their performance from the previous year, leapfrogging from 'far below basic' to 'advanced'.

Zero students performed in the lowest category 'far below basic'.

12% percent of students who had been 'basic' improved to 'proficient'.

What we have noticed through our own trials is that, in order for students to be fully equipped to take control of their learning, they not only need the teaching on demand but all other resources which they can use to support their learning. Traditional worksheets, activity instructions, note-taking sheets for the videos, past papers, mark schemes and exemplar material all need to be available through the entire learning window. In other words, we can't prepare resources as we go, prior to each lesson. We have to have all the resources available all the time so that students can use them when they need them. This is the biggest stumbling block of this model. It necessitates a huge upfront resource building time. The EverLearner would like to support with this by providing resources specific to this type of classroom; with activities, notes pages and worksheets. Some examples of this can be found below.

The resources here are available to purchase here as a complete pack.

Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash