If you haven’t read the last article in this series, it might help set the context as I’ll be referring to a few of the authors and ideas presented in that post; however, if you would prefer to start here, the post can stand on its own as well. In the first post, I referenced an article in The Conversation, which addressed the debate about teaching methods/strategies quite well. At the heart of that article is the argument that teachers use many different approaches to help students learn, and pitting those strategies against one another, is less than helpful. Still, as I mentioned in the last post, this post will focus on the foundational shift in education away from ‘traditional’ methods to more progressive ways of teaching and learning.
The recent shift back to more traditional modes of teaching, such as direct instruction and/or explicit teaching, which I’ll use interchangeably, has won its advocates in some of the most cited researchers in Australian educational research: Pearson, Sweller, Dinham and Hattie. The analysis expounded by these researchers about explicit teaching can be seen in the NSW Department of Education’s What Works Best (2020), which illustrates the benefits of explicit teaching by measuring those teaching practices, as expressed by students, against NAPLAN (National Assessment Plan, Literacy and Numeracy). This, however, falls into the trap of evidence-based practice, which, in theory, sounds great, right? Shouldn’t we, as professional educators, implement practices that have an evidence base? Hasn’t this blog advocated for evidence-based practice as essential for professional teachers? Yes, and yes. However, (you knew there would be a however), the difference is what evidence you look at and the underlying premise of that evidence.
Now we need to come back to the teaching strategies aspect of this – proponents of these traditional methods would see that the advocacy for direct instruction/explicit teaching is far-reaching and vehement. The authors/researchers/academics cited above would have you believe that there can be a one-size-fits-all model for teaching and students’ learning, but every teacher knows or should know that that is simply not the case. There is over-conflation with the ideas of direct instruction and traditional models of classroom teaching. Yes, what we think of as more conventional classrooms employ more direct instruction, and yes, I might even acquiesce to the fact that test scores had gone down since the time when practice started to shift to more progressive pedagogies, but that conflates far too many things in one contention. Traditional models of teaching are outdated, by definition. Gone are the days when we need knowledgeable adults to convey what they know to the blank-slate children sitting in classrooms. We can no longer approach education as if teachers are the holders of knowledge ready to pass it on to a willing cohort. If we can accept this premise, we can move on. If not, maybe stop here and read a different blog.
Okay, so traditional teaching and direct instruction are not the same. So now, let’s look at the following premise, direct instruction improves achievement. Firstly, we have to ask what achievement is. The academics I’ve cited above would have us think that the only way to measure student achievement is through tests, and the more standardised, the better. But what teachers know is that tests only measure specific aspects of education. Let us not forget that every curriculum in every Western school has multiple purposes – socialisation, the individual development of the child and academic development (see this post for more on that). Tests measure a snap-shot of academic achievement – how well any given student performed on a given day. What a standardised test can tell us about any specific child is extremely limited. What it can and does tell us about is whole schools and systems. This article from ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research), the architect of NAPLAN, articulates the issue quite well while still advocating for standardised tests. The authors Jackson and Turner (2017) say, “NAPLAN is an imperfect measure by nature and cannot be expected to measure children’s learning as well as the teacher who spends hours with them every day. On the other hand, individual teachers’ judgements cannot map learning across the entire education system.”
In other words, the teacher in the classroom is the best judge of a student’s learning, not a standardised test. The standardised test provides an aggregate of all students to provide data to educational leaders and policymakers about the state of a school or the system as a whole. We all know this, yet we depend on these tests to provide helpful information about individual students. I’m not saying that these tests can’t be used diagnostically to understand where particular students stand (above/below grade level) and then be used to target specific instruction to aid deficient areas; instead, I contend that the teacher knows best and that any test, or any classwork that student completes, serves the same purpose – for the child the standardised test is superfluous.
This view of traditional education produces a cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecy of the need for data. Researchers want data so they can inform practice, but they also need to ensure that practice is data-driven and data-producing so they can produce an evidence base for that practice. Case in point, in the same article from ACER, the authors speak of the need for evidence to inform evidence-based practice, hence the cycle. So here is what happens, we tell teachers that explicit teaching is good evidence-based practice and that they should collect assessment data to inform their practice – so they explicitly teach what they are going to assess and collect data. And so, the cycle continues – teach, assess (both standardised and classroom), feed the data collected back into the teaching and feed the standardised test data to researchers. The teachers provide evidence to the researchers, and we end up with a system that teachers know doesn’t work. A system that produces over-assessed students and over-stressed teachers who have become data collectors and analysts, and an educational system that continues to go down in the rankings. What the empiricists can’t seem to get their heads around is that quality teaching and learning in the classroom don’t need them.
It’s not a numbers game in the classroom, rather it’s a relationships game.
Maximising Student Potential 