Teaching Strategies Part 1: The nature of ‘student improvement’

This week’s post essentially continues where the last post left off. In last week’s post I wrote about the nature of constructivism and how teachers often misconstrue constructivist learning with student-centred teaching and how constructivism is a theory of learning that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about teaching at all, despite the teachers who think otherwise. I was going through some of the EdPsych textbooks on my shelf and all of them seem to suggest that constructivism and social constructivism encourage and even demand student-centred teaching practices, such as those that will be discussed here. However, as I suggested in the previous post, the theoretical foundations for the use of different teaching and/or learning strategies is a moot point, what matters is if they work to achieve a particular goal.  I choose my words here carefully, as it will become evident that those goals need to be explicitly defined if we are to choose strategies that can best attain them.

Before I begin though, I’d like to make a confession. In my teaching, I often proclaim the benefits and advantages of progressive education. I talk about the differences of traditional modes of education and how the progressives like John Dewey, who advocated for education reform in the 1920s, Sir Ken Robinson, whose advocation of the arts in education led to his viral TED talk about how schools kill creativity, and Alfie Kohn, a prolific author and advocate for progressive education, have got it right.  But the dirty little secret that I have, which is shared by a lot of teachers and teacher educators, is that we are traditionalists at heart. Why the hypocrisy you ask? We are traditionalists because the system we went through, which was likely predominantly traditional, worked for us; we succeeded in that system. However, what we have hopefully come to understand, and what I hope you can understand, is that most traditional forms of learning and teaching don’t work for many students and a more inclusive and nuanced approach to teaching is necessary to reach and engage all students, not only the ones who are likely already effective learners.

Anyway, once again, I digress. The issues of teaching strategies and learning goals is important to understand before we can discuss the efficacy of either.  So, let’s start with what are teaching strategies.  Here I will reference a book I assigned in a course about teaching strategies by Roy Killen, entitled Effective Teaching Strategies: Lessons from Research and Practice, in which Killen identifies, describes and justifies the use of nine different teaching strategies: direct instruction, discussion, small-group work, cooperative learning, problem solving, inquiry, role-play, case study and student writing.  While there are countless others, some of which I will raise later in the post, let’s just use these for now to denote some common teaching strategies. 

What then are learning strategies and how are they different from teaching strategies? As I stated in the last post, learning theories abound and should be taken as that – theories. If you want to read more about learning theories, try this link.  What we actually need to know about learning is that it is personal and that it is a function of our biology.  John Medina, a popular developmental molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules, says we don’t know how the brain works and therefore, theories of learning remain unproven theories, which is why, I think, they should not be that important to teachers, hence my last blog post about constructivism and social constructivism.  If you’re really interested in the Brain, you can try the book, 7½ lessons about the brain, I’m currently reading.

Now let’s talk about the nature of teaching strategies and what they are good for. What is important when choosing a teaching strategy to convey a concept to students is that it is of interest to the student, the student is ready for the level of complexity involved in learning the concept and that we allow the student some choice or autonomy in how they learn that topic, or at the very least provide a number of varying strategies for learning. These ideas are the foundations of Tomlinson’s model of differentiation, which I’ll also write about in the future, but for now, it is important to differentiate (no pun intended) between choosing a teaching strategy for the best way to convey a concept or principle or topic and choosing a strategy based on the learning goal.

Understanding the difference here is key to understanding the nature of good and effective teaching that can be appraised for its impact on students. First, we have to decide what the purpose of our teaching is.  The idea of understanding one’s own teacher identity and what you are trying to achieve as a teacher is foundational in all the ideas I will discuss on this blog. Understanding and reflecting on your own teacher identity will give you, as a teacher, perspective on what you do in the classroom and the decisions you make, including, but certainly not limited to, specific teaching strategies. I can hear the teachers out there saying: but aren’t we all trying to accomplish the same thing? And to that I can only say, I hope so, but I don’t think it is the case. My goal as a teacher, and it took me years to articulate this, is to maximise the potential of every student, what’s yours? 

Some of you, especially those who have been in my classes will know this refrain well, it is specific in what it says, without saying too much. For some teachers, learning is the goal, for others achievement. For some it will be getting their students into university/college and still for others it may be getting their students to be quiet for ten minutes or not get into a fight. We all have different intentions in our classes, but behaviour aside, the ideas of potential, learning, achievement and long-term academic success (getting into university) are all very different goals and all require different approaches to teaching.  While many, if not all, university teacher education programs advocate student-centred approaches, such as inquiry-based learning (IBL), it is important to understand what these strategies are best used for. I use IBL here as an example, but all teaching strategies have different strengths and weaknesses and some are better for specific goals than others.

Here I want to focus on a specific report by the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation in NSW Australia, entitled: What works best: Evidence-based practices to help improve NSW student performance.  In all such reports and in all such research about teaching and learning, what we need to pay attention to is the details. This report is about what works best in student performance. The question is how does the report define performance and, if we are going to follow what the report suggests, as far as teaching practice, is improving student performance our goal?  As I mentioned earlier, my goal is maximizing student potential, yours might be to improve student learning, but performance is different than both of these.  

When I first read this report, I was struck by section 2: Explicit Teaching. In the report John Hattie and Steve Dinham are both quoted, names very familiar in the Australian context. The report advocates explicit teaching and/or direct instruction, terms the report deem interchangeable. Here is the first paragraph of the section: “The evidence shows that students who experience explicit teaching practices perform better than students who do not” (2020, p.8). This is followed by:  “This model of explicit teaching is sometimes represented as the opposite of inquiry-based or ‘constructivist’ teaching, which involves students discovering or constructing essential information for themselves (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006).  As Dinham notes, this is one of education’s false dichotomies”  (2020, p.8).

Here we see that pesky notion of constructivist teaching practices again.  If you read my first blog post you’ll know constructivism is a learning theory, often misunderstood and misinterpreted as a way to teach. This section of the report seemingly promotes explicit teaching over other strategies such as IBL or, other student-centred teaching strategies as a vehicle for student achievement.  And that makes perfect sense doesn’t it?  If you want students to learn something specific, such as the formula for solving a quadratic equation or the chemical elements on the period table of elements, you teach it to them: you tell them or show them the elements, they memorise the elements, you test them on the elements and voilà, your students get a good mark and we raise achievement/performance.

But is this what we are trying to achieve? If we want to improve achievement, in terms of marks and grades, it’s that easy, isn’t it?  Tell students what you want them to know and then test them and achievement will go up. This is what I would call knowledge acquisition; however, if the goal is learning, then we may need a different approach.

This is not to say that explicit teaching or direct instruction are not essential tools in a teacher’s repertoire that can improve learning.  Teachers at all stages of their career need to work on and try to perfect the skills associated with explicit teaching, but this is not to say that IBL and other student-centred teaching practices aren’t also essential. While Dinham and Hattie are accurately represented in the report, their words need deeper consideration. When reading Dinham’s paper or Hattie’s work, one has to consider not just the excerpts in the report, but the context.  What they say, and I hope they forgive my cheap summary, is that learning requires guidance. IBL and other student-centred approaches still require guidance and some explicit teaching of difficult concepts. The idea that IBL and other student-centred approaches do not require guidance is a misunderstanding of the strategies. Students simply will not learn everything the need to on their own. In my previous post I used the example of a year 8 student needing to be taught the theory of relativity; s/he isn’t simply going to discover it on their own.

When I teach about teaching and learning strategies and the nature of improvement, I always point out the differences that I see in what government is trying to achieve; what institutions and schools are trying to achieve; what teachers are trying to achieve; what students are trying to achieve; and, what parents are expecting from all of these stakeholders. This is the quintessential question: what are we trying to achieve and how can we best accomplish it?  I have raised two significant points here: the first is one that follows on from my last blog post about constructivist learning: the ideas that emanate from a distorted view of constructivism, such as student-centred learning approaches are valuable, but still require guidance and teacher input. The second point, more poignant to this post, is that there are various agendas at work within education. Raising achievement, depending on how achievement is defined, may be counter to the ideas of improving learning, or maximizing the potential of students. I will write another post about rewards, punishments, incentives and the nature of achievement versus learning, but suffice to say, for this post, that the goal of achieving a grade is much different than a goal of higher-order learning.

So, what does all this mean for teachers?  What it means is that we have to be purposeful and thoughtful about what we do and why we do it in the classroom.  While sitting students in groups to learn may be a good practice, we should know why we are doing it and what we are trying to achieve. As far as picking teaching strategies to help facilitate learning, we need to be careful about what the research suggests those strategies are best for. Strategies, such as IBL, are wonderful at getting student to think through complex ideas and come up with solutions. However, even the method by which IBL occurs likely needs to be explicitly taught to students.

All research-based teaching strategies likely have their place in our classrooms, but what we need to figure out is what we are trying to achieve and how our agenda for our students may differ from those of the school, parents, school system and government. Understanding these conflicting agendas and navigating our way through the profession trying to do what’s best for our students is hard work at times. The changing nature of the teaching profession and the accountability frameworks that now exist at all levels of education make this even more difficult. That said, I’ve never met a parent, school principal, or education bureaucrat who refuted a teacher’s judgement to focus on strategies that maximise that student’s potential for learning.

Teachers should be advocates for the students in their classes, and while we would hope that all stakeholders in education have the same goals, the politics of education, sometimes muddy those waters.