The Teaching Stocktake: How to Reduce Learning Shrinkage

I’ve noticed a worrying trend in schools lately… 

With all the pressure to ‘catch kids up’, ‘prepare for the NAPLAN’, and ensure they’re ‘implementing evidence-based instruction’, schools are falling into the trap of adopting approaches without first passing them through the ‘does-this-match-with-what-we-know-to-be true-about-teaching’ test.  

It seems that in their haste to tick all the latest boxes, schools are forgetting some of the simple truths they know about effective instruction.  

Truths such as the fact that assessment should be used to inform teaching. As Ausubel stated back in 1968, ‘The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him [or her] accordingly.”  

Fascinatingly, our industry isn’t the only one that sometimes makes this mistake… 

What teachers can learn from deli workers 

My twin sister Shirl has worked in a supermarket since we were teenagers. She started in the deli, moved on to become a cheesemonger and is now a Buyer and Specialist for the deli and bakery departments across all the company’s stores.  

What Shirl doesn’t know about stock management, supply and demand, food safety and customer service isn’t worth knowing. She’s a stickler for following processes and she has trialled, tweaked and trained successful innovations across countless stores. 

One time when we were having a chat about our jobs, Shirl voiced her frustration about the way one of colleagues blatantly disregarded the company’s simple food ordering practices.  

‘He didn’t even check how much stock we already had in the cabinet before ordering more!’ She said. ‘Any wonder we end up throwing so much stock out!’ 

Once she said this, she uttered a sentence that is surprisingly relevant for schools:  

“Everyone knows that if you blind order, you’re going to end up with shrinkage.”  

Note: ‘Blind order’ = to order without checking the current levels of stock. ‘Shrinkage’ = the stock that’s thrown out because it’s reached the end of its shelf life. 

The lesson for schools: 

Assess BEFORE you teach.  

Do a stocktake of your students’ skills, strategies and knowledge before blindly rolling out the entire deck of free ‘evidence-based’ PowerPoint slides.  

Use the knowledge gained through your stocktake (assessment FOR teaching) to inform decisions around what, when and how you teach. 

Why teachers should conduct more stocktakes 

Just as blind ordering in the deli leads to shrinkage of profit, blind teaching in the classroom leads to shrinkage of potential growth. 

When you outsource the planning of your writing lessons, for example, to an external source that doesn’t know your students’ existing knowledge, you risk wasting precious instructional time reteaching concepts that they already know.  

Scarily, researcher Graham Nuthall found in one observational study that ‘typically, students already knew at least 40% of what the teachers intended them to learn.’  

40%! Now, that’s a lot of shrinkage! 

If, on the other hand, you slow down to take stock of what your students already know about writing, you’ll speed up their learning and growth as a result. 

You’ll waste less of your students’ time teaching concepts they already know. Which means you’ll have more time to teach the things they don’t know. As a result, you’ll end up with much less shrinkage (and much happier co-workers). 

How to stocktake your students' student writing 

The most effective way to do a stocktake on your students’ writing is to have them engage in a Cold Write. 

This simply means asking your students to create a piece of writing in the target genre without receiving any explicit instruction beforehand. (I’ve spoken about this in more length on my blog: 3 Reasons you Should Use Cold Writes In The Classroom)

The purpose of a Cold Write is for your students to show you what they already know about writing in that genre.  

As you read your students’ Cold Writes, you should efficiently analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their writing. The use of assessment rubrics such as the 6+1 writing traits rubrics can be useful here (especially as the traits align so neatly to the NAPLAN marking criteria).  

Finally, you should use the information gathered, to plan for writing instruction that is targeted directly at your students’ needs. E.g.: 

• Do your students really need to spend 3 weeks learning about the structure of a narrative, or, is that part of the 40% of content they already know? 

• Which part(s) of narrative writing don’t they know about? 

• Which aspects of narrative writing could you teach to strengthen the quality of their writing?  

The final takeaway 

Let’s not lose what we know to be true about good teaching.  

Assessment should come before instruction. And, the information you glean through assessment should be used to inform your instruction.  

Stop blind ordering. 

Start stocktaking.  

And keep reducing shrinkage.   

Tip: If you’re interested in building your capacity to quickly analyse the strengths and weaknesses in your students’ writing, I suggest taking a look at my Writing Traits Masterclass. Enrolments close next Sunday and won’t open again until Term 3. Click here to learn more. 

References: 

Ausubel, D. P. (1968). Educational psychology: a cognitive view. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 

Related Blog Posts 

• The Critical Key To Improving Student Writing Data 

• How Do The 6+1 Traits Align to NAPLAN? 

• The Problem With Writing Assessments