In 1947, medievalist Dorothy Sayers took the podium at Oxford University and delivered a lecture that would launch a referendum on modern methods of education. It took time, to be sure, but from our current vantage point in 2020, there is no doubt that her words left a sizeable imprint on the current educational landscape. The Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) reports the existence of hundreds of Christian, classical schools across the nation, many of which point to Sayers’ lecture as a source for both inspiration and guidance.
What did Sayers share that day that elicited such a response decades later?
In her own British way, the writer and poet articulated a forceful critique of modern education and then provided a compelling solution. At the 30,000 foot level, her critique was that modern educational methods were failing to equip students to learn for themselves. Her solution? Recover the lost tools of learning, also known as the liberal arts, in order to equip students to do the work of learning and be prepared for the complexities of life ahead.
In this article, I aim to demonstrate congruity between the classical principle of self-education and Doug Lemov’s concept of “Ratio” in Teach Like a Champion 2.0. This is a continuation of my ongoing series on “Teach Like a Champion in Classical Perspective.” Lemov is a leader in the charter school movement who is passionate about distilling the best techniques for the craft of teaching. Using data from state achievement tests as a starting point, Lemov and his team observed hundreds of top teachers across the nation to identify proven techniques for student success. Today I will specifically examine how Lemov’s concept of “Ratio” works well to support what Sayers believed to be the purpose of formal education: to train students to learn for themselves.
A Problem to be Solved
First, let’s get clear on the problem of modern education, as Sayers sees it. She opens her essay by criticizing modern educational methods for failing to prepare students to navigate the complexities of the modern world. In an age of mass-marketing and propaganda, schools were doing little to equip students to discern right from wrong in difficult situations where the truth is not immediately evident.
Sayers writes:
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?
It is incredible how firmly this punch, which was thrown over seventy years ago, lands today. The fact that Sayers wrote the preceding paragraph before the rise of the internet, social media, and the recent phenomenon of “fake news,” is fascinating. If the “press” and the “radio” were propagating mistruths and fallacious thinking back in the 1940’s, how much worse is the problem today? Who is preparing students to navigate such deceptive terrain? According to our lecturer, not schools.
And yet, Sayers isn’t quite finished; she continues her attack on modern education with a barrage of questions:
Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly and properly documented, and one that is to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?
Here Sayers identifies an even deeper problem ingrained within modern educational methods. According to Sayers, not only were schools in her day releasing students into the world ripe for the picking by propagandists and media producers, they were failing to prepare students to learn for themselves. Schools, instead of preparing a generation of students capable of thinking independently and equipped with the wisdom to navigate complex situations, were graduating men and women who remain dependent upon the thinking of others. Sayers concludes:
They [teachers] are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
What Sayers is referring to here is the classical principle of self-education. This is the idea that, as the saying goes, it is better to teach a man to fish rather than to merely give him one. Students need to learn how to learn if they are going to navigate this world wisely and virtuously.
Elevating the Ratio
Keeping what Sayers has said about the need for students to learn for themselves, let’s now examine what Doug Lemov writes about “Ratio.” For Lemov, the whole point of ratio is to get students to do as much of the cognitive work as possible. The more work students are required to do, the greater the ratio, and the more effective the teaching. Of course, Lemov isn’t interested in students engaging in any sort of learning activity, but the kind of work that is truly cognitively demanding. He frames three different approaches for making this happen: questioning, writing, and discussing.
First, though, he clarifies that student participation itself is not equivalent to ratio. It is possible to have a high rate of class participation and yet low ratio with regards to rigorous cognitive work. Likewise, it is possible to have high “Think Ratio”–work that is truly rigorous–but low class participation. As the graph indicates below, the key is to seek both. Lemov writes, “When you seek ratio, you ultimately seek to be high on both axes” (240).
Teachers, then, should always be engaged in self-diagnosing ratio in their classrooms, asking the questions “How rigorous is the work?” and “How many are participating?”.
The Content Prerequisite
Next, Lemov turns to what he calls “The Content Prerequisite” in order to reach the highest levels of ratio. This is the idea that in order for students to engage in rigorous thinking, they need actual mental content, or knowledge, to think about. Lemov acknowledges that in the current educational landscape, the memorization of “mere” factual knowledge is not highly regarded. But he goes on to argue that exercises where students try to “think deeply” without knowing much turns out to be vacuous. “Facts and rigor,” Lemov insists, “are not opposites as some educators continue to suggest, but synergistic partners” (19).
Interestingly, Lemov is not alone on this view. The importance of knowledge acquisition in the learning process is confirmed by the research in Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. In this book, the authors argue that retrieval practice–recalling facts or concepts or events from memory–is crucial for gauging effective learning. In an early chapter of the book, entitled “Learning is Misunderstood,” they point out that creative thinking, a popular phrase in today’s educational world, and increasing knowledge, go hand in hand. Using a building metaphor, the authors write:
Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up the house. Building the house not only requires knowledge of countless different fittings and materials but conceptual knowledge, too…Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it (18).
In other words, one can’t effectively engage in problem solving, creative thinking, or rigorous analysis without knowing from memory the facts relevant to the topic. It is all too common today to brush off teaching factual knowledge with the quip “I’ll just Google it,” or “That’s what Wikipedia is for.” While it is true that we live in an age in which more information is at our grasp than ever before, it still falls to each individual human learner to sort the information into comprehensible categories. And ironically, to sort information, you need to know information.
(Side note: If you are looking for a great strategy to increase the amount of memory recall in your classroom we recommend checking out Jason’s eBook on the practice of narration.)
The Importance of Knowledge
In her own way, Sayers confirms the importance of the knowledge prerequisite in her lecture. She creatively ascribes the Trivium, the three classical language arts, to three coinciding stages of childhood development. Admitting herself that her views on child psychology are neither “orthodox or enlightened” she defines the work of the grammar (elementary school) stage as memorizing, reciting, chanting, and observing. In short, it is about collecting mental material, or knowledge, that the mind will go to work on in later developmental stages. Sayers writes:
What that material actually is, is only of secondary importance; but it is as well that anything and everything which can usefully be committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not…At this stage, it does not matter nearly so much that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known and remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.
While most classical educators today will disagree with Sayers’ explanation of the Trivium, from a historical standpoint, and critique her understanding of childhood development, let’s not miss her key insight here. It is the same idea that Doug Lemov and the authors of Make it Stick are touching on: knowledge matters. A rigorous education, one in which students are doing the cognitive lifting in a manner that prepares them to learn for themselves, requires the acquisition of knowledge. Where precisely this fits within the liberal arts paradigm is debatable, but the necessity of knowledge, or the content prerequisite, as Lemov calls it, is not.
Building Ratio in the Classroom
Now that we have discussed these preliminary matters, let’s turn to Lemov’s three ways for building ratio and empowering students to do the work of learning: questioning, writing and discussing.
First, teachers build ratio through questioning. When students are asked good questions and expected to give thoughtful answers, they are doing the bulk of the cognitive lifting. They are being asked to explain the concept or make a connection between two ideas. Rather than the teacher lecturing from “on high,” students are engaged in the demanding task of working out knowledge for themselves. Some of the most useful techniques I have found for increasing ratio through questioning are as follows:
- Wait Time: Allow students time to think before answering. If they aren’t productive with that time, narrate them toward being more productive.
- Cold Call: Call on students regardless of whether they’ve raised their hands.
- Break it Down: When a student makes an error, provide just enough help to allow her to solve as much of the original problem as she can.
A second way to build ratio is through writing. As Jordan Peterson shared in a classroom lecture, the best way to teach students to be critical thinkers is to teach them to write. Both the amount and quality of writing students do on a regular basis are key determinants for their ability to think and learn for themselves. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of writing assignments is that 100% of students are doing the cognitive work, as opposed to one or two when a question is answered orally by one or two students. I have to say, as someone who has been teaching writing for several years now, I actually get a small adrenaline rush when I’ve crafted a well-worded writing prompt and watch every single one of my students go off to the races in fulfilling it. Some key techniques that I’ve found helpful for building ratio through writing include:
- Everybody Writes: Prepare your students to engage rigorously by giving them the chance to reflect in writing before you ask them to discuss.
- Art of the Sentence: Ask students to synthesize a complex idea in a single, well-crafted sentence. The discipline of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms.
- Build Stamina: Gradually increase writing time to develop in your students the habit of writing productively, and the ability to do it for sustained periods of time.
Building Ratio Through Discussion
A final way Lemov offers teachers to increase ratio in their classrooms is through discussion. He saves this way for last because in some sense it is the most predictable. When students are sitting in a circle and engaged in discussion, there is an (almost) inevitably high degree of ratio going on. In most classical schools, discussion is constantly used pedagogically as a tool for training in the liberal art of dialectic. So the benefits of discussion are well-known and celebrated.
Nevertheless, teachers would do well to remember that not all discussions are created equal. Students simply sitting in a group and restating their opinions at each other, as Lemov notes, does not qualify as a discussion (314). These are merely disconnected verbal interactions. Instead Lemov defines a discussion as “a mutual endeavor by a group of people to develop, refine, or contextualize an idea or set of ideas” (315).
I agree with Lemov’s definition here with one philosophical caveat. It should be clarified that the ideas Lemov is speaking of are not to be understood as mere personal accounts of what people think about the world, whether or not these ideas actually correspond to reality. Rather, a worthy discussion should lead to the discern of objective truth, of the way the world actually is. Thus discussion always has a morally formative and humanizing goal: to expose students to the truth, that they might abide in it, and go on to express it prophetically to others.
Some helpful techniques for building ratio through discussion are as follows:
- Habits of Discussion: Make your discussions more productive and enjoyable by normalizing a set of ground rules or “habits” that allow discussion to be more efficiently cohesive and connected.
- Batch Process: Give more ownership and autonomy to students–particularly when your goal is discussion–by allowing for student discussion without teacher mediation, for short periods of time or for longer, more formal sequences.
Conclusion
In this article, I’ve attempted to demonstrate agreement between the classical principle of self-education and Doug Lemov’s idea of building ratio. When students are expected to do the cognitive lifting in the classroom, they are being prepared to learn for themselves, not just at school, but throughout all of life. Certainly Lemov’s techniques are insufficient for achieving the broader vision of human flourishing from a classical perspective, which entails growth in wisdom and virtue, but nevertheless, his insights for ways teachers can empower their students to learn for themselves are noteworthy. I heartily commend them to you in your broader aim to recover the lost tools of learning in the education of your students. As Sayers implies at the end of her lecture, it would seem that nothing less than the future of western civilization depends on it.
Other articles in this series:
Work, Toil, and the Quest for Academic Rigor
“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 3: Check for Understanding
“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development
“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 1: An Introduction