The problems with pace.

I just want to take this opportunity to discuss something that I know worries some people; the pace of lessons. Recently I have been thinking a lot about optimising the time in lessons and how fast I should teach my classes. I wrote a bit about this here.

I’m sure most of us at some point have had visitors to our lessons discuss the pace of lessons with us. Either they have given praise that the lesson was very ‘pacey’ or maybe they have given feedback that the pace was insufficient. 

I hate this.

So today I want to spend some time looking at some aspects of the concept of pace, what it might mean to different people and if it should be a concept used at all.

When discussing pace I have two main issues:

1. It’s poorly defined and the feedback often does not give the teacher specific actionable feedback on how to improve.
2. It is hard to actually determine if the pace was sufficient when watching a part of the lesson.

Defining pace

When people say the pace of a lesson is two slow they often mean that there is too much dead time whereby students are not being asked to think hard enough (A ratio issue) or the students could have finished the same work in a shorter time (A time management/expectations issue) 

So if you get some feedback on pace from the learning walk my top tip is to ask them to clarify and give specific examples of what they would do differently and let that be the starting point for your discussion.  

This isn’t the only issue we have with pace. We can often conflate the pace during a lesson with the rate of progression through the curriculum. Most subjects are teaching specifications which are very dense and probably too big for their allotted curriculum time. This creates a pressure to rush through the curriculum maps to ensure the curriculum is covered in the time you have available. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, completing the course is a very good idea. Afterall if a student sits an exam and they haven’t been taught the curriculum that is an issue that the teacher takes sole responsibility. It’s the idea that the students should progress through the curriculum at a steady place and in lockstep with other classes that creates an issue. It’s also an issue when departments condense their timescales even more to fit assessment windows and provide enough time for ‘revision’. There is this idea that faster is better. If we get though the entire course we will have plenty of time to go back and reteach or revise the areas the students struggled with. However when we talk about pace we often identify the pace of the lesson and this is not the same as the pace of learning. It is very likely that we can teach pacey lessons that progress through the curriculum but do not secure learning for our students. We can then bemoan the lack of curriculum time and how when we revise a topic the students seem to have not grasped enough and need teaching all over again. Can you see how these two ideas are linked? By progressing faster we do not establish the core concepts that we later build on, so have to then quickly reteach those things to move on the second time, then again the third time. Because we do not establish a level of mastery of the core components earlier in the students education, then plan in interleaved content and retrieval practice to ensure those are retained, when we come to a topic we have to start from scratch putting ourselves under a time crunch once again. 

What if we taught a bit slower but provided more opportunities for students to think hard about ideas, so they became more permanent and therefore needed less re-teaching? This would save us time later where checking prior knowledge will allow us to skip or accelerate through some content later in the curriculum. This can feel scary because we can feel like the class is trudging in treacle early on. However the time spent will pay off in the long run. I think teachers often mistakenly think of learning over time as a linear function, but I think it’s probably more exponential, as the more you know the easier it is to learn more, often called the Matthew effect.

Judging the pace of a lesson.

The other aspect of this is the problem with assessing pace in a particular lesson. 

Say you walk into a lesson and you see a teacher going through some content and really laboring a point. They are mentioning it multiple times with many different examples.

Do they have good pace? 

Unless we know what happened before we walked in, or the reason why we can’t judge. This is why one of my 4 C’s of quality assurance is curiosity. So instead of using the word ‘pace’ we need to think carefully about what is actually the problem and be more granular. Is it actually that the students got it earlier (so it is a lack of checking for understanding issue) or that the explanation is not clear, so preventing the students from grasping the concept in good time? We can try to gather evidence for our theory and use that to frame questions to the teacher during the feedback conversation. 

As observers we owe it to the teachers we see to help them develop. If we can avoid using these poorly defined words like pace (and engagement) then we are one step closer to fulfilling out obligation.

The elephant in the room.

It is worth recognising an inconvenient truth when discussing how fast to progress through the curriculum. 

For some students and classes there is a point whereby we have to cut our losses. Unfortunately we have to be pragmatic on the time we spend and there might be some students who do not establish a strong grasp. That’s where professional judgement comes into play.