Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Teaching: Complexity and Making a Visible Difference


Teaching: Complexity and Making a Visible Difference


Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia


[Permission to reproduce granted in authorship is acknowledged]


Teaching is complex work. It involves making an enormous number of decisions each day. All but the most trivial decisions require consideration of factors that interact with one another in seemingly countless ways.

Many decisions arise unexpectedly: decisions about responding to conflict among students, unexpected interruptions, unpredictable misbehavior, etc. Many decisions can be anticipated: decisions about lesson content, sequencing, selection of illustrations and examples, questions, etc.

On its own, instruction is massively complex--too complex to rely on experience alone. Discerning what works and what does not by examining one’s experience would be like looking for a blade of grass in a corn field. Carefully planned and executed studies are helpful guidance but relying on a single study would be foolish. It would be ideal if the carefully planned and executed study was repeated many times under the same conditions. There are unfortunately too few carefully planned and executed studies that have been replicated multiple times.

Instructional decision-making is too important to be left to the imperfections of our own experience or even to a single study however well it might have been performed.  Although imperfect, looking across studies of the same topic can provide more guidance. Over the course of the last 30 years or so, meta-analytical work has provided needed guidance for policy and practice, despite the difficulty of distinguishing the signal from the noise in the complex classroom environment.

John Hattie points out that any number of decisions a teacher might make can lead to some observed change in student performance because in education “almost everything works.” He recommends that, to minimize the risk of adopting policies and practices that may only make a marginal difference, teachers adopt practices that have a visible impact.

In his books, especially in his 2009 book Visible Learning, Hattie reports the results of his meta-analysis of studies that purport to address the same phenomenon and identifies practices that have a visible impact on student achievement.  All the practices Hattie enumerates that make a visible difference in student learning are, as one might expect, associated with how teachers teach rather than the conditions affecting their work.  That doesn’t mean that working conditions are unimportant, but it suggests that the preparation, support and professional development of teachers are where most of the attention should be directed.

Hattie identifies way-points to educational excellence that are specifically focused on teachers and teaching. They are:

1. Teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning.

2. Teachers need to be directive, influential, caring, and actively engaged in the passion of teaching and learning.

3. Teachers need to be aware of what each and every student is thinking and knowing, to construct meaning and meaningful experiences in light of this knowledge and have proficient knowledge and understanding of their content to provide meaningful and appropriate feedback such that each student moves progressively through the curriculum levels.

4. Teachers need to know the learning intentions and success criteria of their lessons, know how well they are attaining these criteria for all students, and know where to go next in light of the gap between students’ current knowledge and understanding and the success criteria of: “Where are you going?”, “How are you going?”, and “Where to next?”.

5. Teachers need to move from the single idea to multiple ideas, and to relate and then extend these ideas such that learners construct and reconstruct knowledge and ideas. It is not the knowledge or ideas, but the learner’s construction of this knowledge and these ideas that is critical.

6. School leaders and teachers need to create school, staff-room, and classroom environments where error is welcomed as a learning opportunity, where discarding incorrect knowledge and understandings is welcomed, and where participants can feel safe to learn, re-learn, and explore knowledge and understanding. (Hattie, 2009, P. 238-239)

Because teachers are the greatest influence on student achievement, governments that want to improve outcomes should make their preparation, support and professional development a priority.

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Hattie, John. (2009). Visible Learning. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.