What works in schools: Best Evidence Synthesis

Published waaaay back in 2003, the BES on Quality Teaching for Diverse Students remains a go-to document for effective pedagogy in the mixed-level classroom. Adrienne Alton-Lee and her team conducted a meta-study of research into what works in schools and their findings can be reduced down to: quality teaching makes the difference. Defining what constitutes 'quality teaching' takes up the remainder of the study. Read the 15 page executive summary for a cheat sheet on how super teachers are created.

These are her findings, in order of effect size:

Finding:	Translation:
1. Quality teaching is focused on raising student achievement (including social outcomes), and facilitates high standards of student outcomes for diverse learners	Teaching should be about learning and achievement. Set and maintain high expectations of what students are capable of.
2. Pedagogical practices enable classes and other learning groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities	Learning is a social activity and we learn best when in a caring community. Communities give care and support to learners.
3. Effective links are created between school cultural contexts and other cultural contexts in which students are socialised to facilitate learning	Acknowledge who students are and let them bring this to the classroom. Use it for learning.
4. Quality teaching is responsive to student learning processes	Know how learning occurs in the brain, but also know that every brain is different. Account for this.
5. Opportunity to learn is effective and sufficient	Give learning time to occur. Use the students' timeframe, not yours.
6. Multiple task contexts support learning cycles	Use a range of different approaches and arrangements: theory & practical; abstract & real world; individual, group and whole class.
7. Curriculum goals, resources including ICT usage, task design and teaching are effectively aligned	Everything in the organisation should be geared towards giving teachers and students what they need to learn.
8. Pedagogy scaffolds and provides appropriate feedback on students' task engagement	Give specific, effective, appropriate feedback that helps students to learn better.
9. Pedagogy promotes learning orientations, student self-regulation, metacognitive strategies and thoughtful student discourse	Teaching should encourage students not only to learn, but to become better learners.
10. Teachers and students engage constructively in goal-oriented assessment	Teachers and students should all what is being assessed and how it will be assessed. Assessment should impact positively on student motivation.

The other fascinating (and scary) piece of information in the executive summary is this:

"Quality teaching is identified as a key influence on high quality outcomes for diverse students. The evidence reveals that up to 59% of variance in student performance is attributable to differences between teachers and classes, while up to almost 21%, but generally less, is attributable to school level variables."

In short, the difference between the most and least effective teacher in a school is far greater than the most and least effective schools. I say this is scary because it means that schools leaders are far, far more important than a Ministry of Education in having an impact on student achievement.

What works in schools: Classroom Instruction That Works

While this is not related to software specifically, I'm going to begin a series of blogs about effective pedagogy in schools.
I've revisited this book recently and it's still as good as I remember. Robert Marzano's meta-study of effective pedagogy pulls together research from over 100 studies and looks at the most effective way to raise understanding with students. If you've never read it, here's the spoiler. The most effective classroom strategies are (in order):

For those who need a little interpretation here. If you had two classes and continued as normal with one class (let's call it the 'control' class) and were to explicitly focus on teaching and reinforcing the skill of identifying similarities and differences with the other class, the second class would achieve at a level 1.61 standard deviations (or an average of 45%) above the control class. In short, if you're looking for a silver bullet and a magic wand rolled up in one, here it is. Add to that the compound effect of using more than one strategy at once and you've got a pretty effective intervention.
Dust off the Venn diagrams, the double bubble maps, the classification charts and get busy.

Google Apps to replace the LMS?

I've been musing this over for a while. While I'm a great fan of Learning Management Systems (LMSs, or VLEs) like Moodle and believe they have huge potential to create engaging, meaningful activities for students while providing excellent data to teachers, but I also believe that most teachers don't use them to anywhere near their potential. When I saw this article come through, I was reminded of a slide Martin D used in his video conference keynote into NZ's MoodleMoot in 2011:

He talks about the pedagogical progression possible with Moodle, but also acknowledged the fact that most teachers spend their time using it (and most other LMSs) to store and share files. It strikes me when reading this article that if all teachers want to do is share worksheets, they don't need an LMS.

http://mfeldstein.com/google-apps-for-education-when-will-it-replace-the-lms/

Do you teach from the bandstand?

Ewan Macintosh asks the right questions:

"Do you have a plan that you stick with, no matter what? Do you have a plan at all? Do you have a plan that you're prepared to give up totally when a student proposes something, anything, interesting? Are you patient, listening to what's going on, allowing yourself to be pulled, and slick enough (skilled enough?) to react and create something magical out of your box to make a lesson sing?"

EDvent Calendar: Day 5 (Campfires, watering holes and caves)

Learning Spaces for the Digital Age
Prakash Nair is one of the great thinkers in the area of innovative learning spaces. One of the great ideas he explores is the notion that in all learning spaces there needs to be:

• Campfire spaces
• Watering hole space, and
• Cave spaces.

Campfires are where stories are shared (presentation spaces), watering hole spaces are where ideas are exchanged and connections are made, and caves are quiret, reflection spaces. Have you got the right mix of these three kinds of spaces in your school?

Nair asks:

"Why do schools look the way they do? Why is there a chasm between widely
acknowledged best practice principles and the actual design of a majority of school
facilities? Why has the disconnect between learning research and learning places been
so difficult to repair?"

If you read nothing else this summer about learning spaces, you should read this:
http://www.designshare.com/images/TheLanguageofSchoolDesigneBooksummaryweb.pdf
(...and if that floats your boat, you'll love Dr Kenn Fisher)