The Devil is in the Details

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

We are wired to be resistant – and even blind – to ideas and policies advanced by people whose values and beliefs differ from our own. Our desire to maintain connection to those who share our values disposes us to resist the ideas of those whose values differ. We have strong attachments to our own ideas and values that make it difficult to evaluate policies and claims that others make – especially if their values are different.  

We resist change. Confirmation bias, selective perception, and cognitive dissonance are among the mechanisms at work. It takes effort to overcome these mechanisms and biases. I think it is worth making the effort.  

What brings this to mind is the recent passage of The Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, 2023 (Bill 98) in Ontario. The proclaimed legislation has provisions that purport to enhance education in that province.  

The bill encompasses five key areas that would be supported by future regulatory and education policy reforms. The bill aims to increase accountability and transparency in Ontario's education sector by aligning provincial priorities and expectations with district and classroom-level implementation. Boards of education throughout Ontario will be required to fulfill government-established goals for student achievement and improve transparency and accountability regarding board performance and funding. It sounds like the provincial regulation in British Columbia under the banner of the Framework for Enhanced Student Learning.  

The second key element in the bill attempts to address effective governance by introducing standardized processes and expectations for trustees, Directors (Superintendents) of Education, and supervisory officers in school districts. This element seems designed to ensure equitable and unbiased trustee conduct across all boards and to equip trustees and Directors of Education with the necessary competencies to effectively address the government's student achievement objectives.   

In a third section, the Act seeks to optimize the use of the capital assets of school boards to expedite the construction of schools and enhance school capacity. This entails leveraging surplus property for public education and other provincial priorities, addressing accommodation needs in areas experiencing high growth, streamlining school planning and design processes, and promoting more efficient approvals procedures.  

A fourth dimension of the bill is aimed at fortifying teacher preparation and oversight by ensuring that preparation addresses the current demands of classrooms. This dimension also addresses student safety by establishing fair and effective disciplinary processes for teachers and registered early childhood educators.  

The aims of the fifth major element in the bill is less evident to me. It appears to want to foster greater uniformity in approaches to student learning and provide resources for parents to engage with their child's education.  

Like most jurisdictions the Education Act in Ontario empowers the Minister to make such regulations as are necessary for the administration of schools and school boards. While new legislation was probably not necessary, it seems that the Ontario Minister of Education is using the Bill to signal increased accountability. According to the Minister:

These new measures will focus on getting back to the basics of education: strengthening reading, writing and math, and other STEM disciplines.

We are following through on our commitment to parents through new measures that will better refocus school boards on academic achievement and the development of life and job skills.

These reforms include the new authority for our government to set binding priorities on school boards that focus on boosting student achievement focused on reading, writing and math.   

Given evidence of a steady decline in reading and mathematics performance in most provincial and national jurisdictions, I suspect that few would argue that increasing achievement in foundational areas is unnecessary. The devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. What, at first, seems promising in the Ontario Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act can wind up producing undesirable outcomes or unforeseen problems. The regulations that the bill enables will deserve scrutiny and the implementation careful evaluation. 

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.