Stand Up for Blended Learning

What stand up comedy can teach us about teaching

A couple of years ago, my wife took her stand-up show, ‘Stand Up! Weather Girl” to the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a great show - in case you missed it (and, statistically, there’s quite a good chance that you did) she adapted it into a Radio 4 programme called ‘Scorchio’ which you’ll find on BBC Sounds.

As a learning experience, it was second to none. The show was good when she arrived in Edinburgh. By the time she left, it was much much better. 

It was better for two reasons. The feedback and the iterations.

Simon Munnery, the Edinburgh comedy legend, said playing the electric guitar, like making love, is much improved by a little feedback, completely ruined by too much.

As teachers, we are always trying to find the sweet spot of feedback, the point where it will be kind and generous but will also be challenging and useful.

Assuming you haven’t ‘died on your arse’, to borrow the comedian’s argot, the feedback from a comedy audience hits the sweet spot. For a start, it’s very pure: if they don’t laugh, it’s no good. If they do laugh, it’s good. If they laugh a lot, it’s better. You don’t need to refer to a grid to understand it.

It’s also immediate. You don’t have to wait two weeks to find out if a joke works; you know the instant the punchline lands.

It’s true that the comedian’s feedback is generally fuelled by alcohol, of course. But then, in my experience, the prospect of marking a set of Year 9 ‘creative’ essays is considerably eased by a generous glass of Malbec.

Many teachers are extremely good at giving feedback. I’ve written before about how we could use technology to make the feedback more immediate, using techniques like live marking, Zoom Room Helpdesks and so on, but what about the feedback we receive about our own performances?

We often take a ‘finger in the wind’ approach to this. That lesson felt OK. No-one threw a chair at anyone. That sort of thing.

I know of one school that trialled a system where the students marked each lesson out of 10 as they left the room. I can understand the reasoning - after all, this is quite close to my stand-up analogy - but it does seem fraught with jeopardy. Set a timed essay for homework and watch your scores plummet! No-one thinks teaching should be turned into a popularity contest.

We should be seeking student feedback but in a way that promotes sober reflection, not knee-jerk revenge.

Move to a blended learning environment, though, and you suddenly have access to a wealth of focused, useful feedback, much of it in real time. 

Some of this feedback is about how much the student has understood or learnt and can use very traditional methods like quizzes, albeit made more efficient by technology.

But you also get information about the engagement levels of your students. How much do we really know about this, normally? Do we know how long they actually spend on their homework? It’s easy to berate the poor kid with terrible handwriting for doing his homework ‘on the bus’ but it might be that he’s actually spending ages on it and it really does represent his best effort. Conversely, the one who just underlines everything neatly and even uses two colours always gets a merit mark. 

When do they do their work? Are there disparities in engagement between different groups? Which type of task do they find more engaging? Are certain students struggling with specific tasks?

Tools such as Google’s Looker Studio can give you an insight into all of this and make it possible for you to slice the data in many ways, making things visible that are otherwise hidden and allowing you to transform raw data into actionable knowledge.

So, what about the second part of the feedback process - the chance to put it right quickly?

Again, there’s lots to be said about how we can use technology to give students more opportunities to try again quickly.

What about teachers? In a GCSE course in a traditional environment, for example, you might have only one lesson ‘to teach’ a particular poem…or oxbow lakes…or covalent bonding. You might not get a chance to do this lesson again for a year. How can you put right the things that didn’t work so well? Or develop the bits that flew? What chance do you have of remembering how it went from one year to the next?

As teachers, our traditional methods tend to enforce a long time span. A yearly cycle. Two years. A five year plan…

A stand-up knows that if a joke bombs, you need to try it again, slightly differently, ideally the next night.

We need to try to think in terms of shorter iterative cycles. Short courses, scheduled several times a year, become possible if we use technology to remove teachers from their silos and use a blended approach to deploy a group of teachers as an efficient team rather than as a group of individuals. Your oxbow lake specialist would then have a few chances to really hone their material. 

It will take a change of mindset but we need to stop designing courses according to traditional timetables and available time and resources and start designing them according to the desirable learning outcomes instead.

Then we’ll be laughing.