“The majority of the 20,000 tasks that make a school career are teacher specified, cognitively simple, and done either by oneself or involve listening to the monologue of an adult” (Fisher & Hiebert, 1990).
Most school structures are based on the fear of children running out of control and adults always underestimate what kids can do. 80% of the work US students do in schools is procedural and recall. The tasks that teachers are most comfortable having students do are not the tasks that improve their performance. Even high performing schools often produce their results through social capital.
Teachers have internalised a fundamentally anti-professional attitude and compare unfavourably with other professions – pilots, surgeons, and architects, who have an accepted standard/code of practice. Teachers need to stop talking about teaching ‘styles’ and focus on effective teaching ‘practices’. There is a cause and effect relationship between teaching and learning. Over recent decades, a large theoretical and empirical base has emerged for understanding the sources of successful classroom teaching.
We know that students learn best when…
1. The teaching strategies and activities respect students’ prior knowledge and preconceptions. This is evident when a teacher asks what students already know about the topic, makes connections between the topic and the students’ lives, and frames a lesson around ideas emanating from students.
2. The tasks that students undertake are challenging and meaningful to them, they derive excitement and pleasure from the work they are doing, and extrinsic motivators are not their primary motivation. This is evident when students display high levels of motivation and when they are able to explain reasons for their motivation. The best way to determine this is to ask students directly, “What are you learning?”, “Why?”, “How motivated are you to improve your understanding in this topic?” and “Can you give me some reasons for this?”(and perhaps a simple way of determining the best teaching in a school is to find the classrooms that the students do not want to leave at the end of the lesson).
3. There is a high proportion of student talk, a significant amount of it occurs between students, and there is a climate of respect for what others have to say, which values constructive criticism and the challenging of ideas. This is evident when students talk for significantly longer periods than the teacher, and when most of the student talk is to other students.
4. The lesson involves fundamental subject concepts, enhances students’ abilities to recognise meaningful patterns by organizing content knowledge around big ideas, and the teacher has a solid grasp of the subject matter content. This is evident when the tasks students are engaged in are designed to enhance student disciplinary understanding.
5. The teacher tries to find out what meaning students are making by asking open-ended questions without steering students towards pre-determined responses, and selects diagnostic and helpful feedback from the student’s choices and actions. This is evident when teachers ask open-ended questions, listen carefully to student responses, and provide useful feedback to students about their progress.
Two useful websites for finding sample lessons to analyse are:
Research for Better Teaching, http://www.rbteach.com/rbteach2/index.html
TIMMS video, http://timssvideo.com/