So today I attended the excellent ResearchEd Birmingham event and re-delivered the session I ran at the ResearchEd National conference in September 2025 about the idea of front-loading opportunities for feedback into questions and tasks so that pupils have the opportunity to get feedback directly from the task about their approaches, and to force them to make their thinking more visible - which has prompted me to create my latest website www.front-loaded-feedback.co.uk. The slides for this presentation are linked at the bottom of the blog.
During the session I had alluded to some thinking about the 'I do, We do, You do' model of instruction related to the question at the bottom of this slide:
I had planned to expand on this thinking towards the end of the session, but due to time constraints I was unable to - so I thought for clarity and posterity I would include it here.
I tend to think about most maths learning episodes (a distinction I draw as the 'lesson' is clearly not a useful unit of time in relation to securing learning) as going through through roughly four phases as we attempt to move learners through a continuum from novice to developing greater expertise. These phases are summarised in a slide I used in other sessions:
In the first phase learners have little-to-no knowledge of the concept of process that we are introducing, and so they benefit most of exemplification and modelling - any practice attempted in this phase will likely be unsuccessful.
In the second phase learners have (the exemplification and modelling) gained some inflexible knowledge of the concept or process. Practice in this phase is likely to be error prone, particularly if it strays too far from what learners have seen during the exemplification/modelling. This is the phase where guided practice is required, with learners still requiring significant support and immediate feedback on their attempts. This is where I see front-loaded feedback questions and tasks as having real value.
The third phase is one in which knowledge is moving from inflexible towards flexible, but the goal of practice now to expand beyond the the initial modelling to open other broader knowledge of the concept or process in order to target key elements of the structure of the concept or process and push learners beyond the comfort of what was initially modelled or exemplified. This is the phase where procedural and conceptual variation in questions and tasks are likely to be most prevalent and useful (although, depending on what is being taught, these could feature in all phases of learning). In this phase of deliberate practice we are still likely to see errors, and so immediate or near-immediate feedback is still a clear requirement.
However, for me, the reason for the errors and the feedback required as a result is subtly different to the guided practice phase. In guided practice, errors happen because learners are still on shaky ground with what was initially introduced, and so feedback needs to identify and focus on what learners haven't quite grasped from the initial instruction and correct that. In the deliberate practice phase, learners should already be confident in mimicry - being able to do what they were originally shown to do or identify what they were taught to identify - but the errors now come when trying to extend that thinking, going down wrong paths or under-/over-generalising certain properties. The feedback here needs to highlight where thinking needs to change for learners to be able to move forward. A simple example of the distinction here is learners being shown how to solve the simple linear equation 3x + 2 = 8, and then being asked to solve the equations 4x + 5 = 13 and 4x - 5 = 13. The first equation of these two is structurally identical to the one modelled and should be part of guided practice. Any errors arising from this can be tackled by directing attention back to the initial modelling or worked example, and either highlighting (or asking pupils to reflect on) where their approach has differed from the approach given. The second requires a deviation from what was modelled; it requires learners to adapt from the modelling (assuming the teacher hasn't modelled a specific example of this structure beforehand) and so might be considered useful as part of deliberate practice.
Depending on the complexity of the concept or process, guided practice might be as small as one question or might be several questions. It might involve front-loaded feedback, the use of mini-whiteboards or multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback, and/or backwards faded examples like those on Dave Taylor's excellent website (this is, of course, not an exhaustive list).
Whilst the deliberate practice phase might include something like increasingly difficult questions (another of Dave's websites), completion tables or similar - still completed on mini-whiteboards or otherwise monitored carefully so feedback and support can be given when needed.
The independent application phase only then comes once pupils have gained that high success rate (a la Rosenshine) in the deliberate practice phase - once learner thinking around the concept or idea is more secure and misconceptions arising from this and the guided practice phase have been dealt with. It will further stretch pupils by bringing in contexts, interleaving and/or interweaving other concepts or processes with the current one, or in general asking for wider applications of the knowledge studied.
The issue I have with the 'I Do, We Do, You Do' instructional approach is that, if we accept that learners will need to go through these, or similar phases, on their journey towards developing expertise, then this model seems overly simplistic to capture the range and nuance of practice opportunities that pupils need to engage with to develop the necessary expertise. I see and hear about teachers treating the 'You Do' as part of the independent practice, where it is, at best, the first in what should be a series of questions in the deliberate practice phase and more likely still part of guided practice. Alternatively, I see and hear about teachers moving straight into questions that might be considered more suitable in the deliberate practice phase, during the 'We Do', requiring learners to engage with adaptations before they have even got to grips with the concept or process as exemplified/modelled. And this is not to mention that the very approach of 'I Do, We Do, You Do' can be seen to imply teaching of process (several stages of doing things), which is clearly not applicable when teaching concepts (where comparing examples and non-examples are generally more suitable) or facts like a full turn is made up of 360 degrees (where repetition and reframing through choral response or similar might be more beneficial).
To me, there is a real danger that focusing on a structure like this without the conceptual underpinning of what different stages of practice are trying to achieve means that the practice that learners are offered will not lead to them developing the expertise we want them to develop.
For those reading who were in my session - you can probably understand why I didn't feel I had time to get into this in the session! If you have read through all of this to get to the slides (or skipped to the end to get to them) then your patience is rewarded here.
No comments:
Post a Comment