Teaching for Impact

Believe

A series of statements that describe ideals promoted by the West Australian Department of Education. Most teachers would agree with these messages. Things like:

“Effective teachers believe they can unlock the learning potential of every student”

We believe that expectations should be aspirational. As Doug Lemov says, “We do this without apology,” because we know that every student is capable of improvement. Rosenthal and Jacobson’s famous Pygmalion Effect study highlighted the impact of teachers simply having higher expectations of their students.

Teachers believing in the potential of all of their students is a start, but research reminds us that if we care about student well being, success in the classroom is critical.

Know

Teachers should know…

Themselves
The Students
The Curriculum
What Works Best

It can be challenging for teachers to know what works best. There is a great divide between the strongest educational research and what is taught in initial teacher education (ITE). This permeates into schools, where the significant variance in the knowledge and practices of teachers.

Teaching for Impact is important because it acknowledges the evidence base that is informed by the Science of Learning and that features High-Impact Teaching Strategies. This is a huge step in the right direction for education in WA.

Plan

Students need to experience both success and challenge across the curriculum. Meaning that content designed for diverse classrooms must range from remedial to extension, and be tailored to the needs of individual classes and students.

Teachers don’t need to be cognitive scientists, but they do need to understand how attention and memory work. This knowledge when combined with good instructional strategies, allows teachers to instruct in ways that support all students to succeed.

As the great Barak Rosenshine said, “no matter how brilliant someone is… there’s no getting around background knowledge”. Teachers have the important job of building this knowledge. To do this, it helps if the curriculum is fine-grained and sequenced in detail, down to a schedule of suggested lesson objectives. This is what many teachers want. We know this because we made one, and thousands of teachers across Australia are using it.

Engage

There is no opportunity for teaching if students are not engaged. John Sweller calls attention a prerequisite for learning, as without attention, no information can enter working memory, which is the pathway to long-term memory. Daniel Willingham defines learning as a change in long-term memory, so this pathway between attention – working memory – long-term memory actually lies at the heart of all effective teaching.

There are a range of strategies that we use to elicit engagement from students from experts that include Hollingsworth and Ybarra, Doug Lemov, Dylan Wiliam, and Anita Archer.

The benefit truly emerges when the strategies are established as an automatic routine for students that requires minimal conscious thought. Automaticity in this sense, unburdens working memory so that students can succeed under more challenging conditions (like inquiry).

Instruct

Lessons should be guided by clear learning intentions and measurable success criteria with strong links to curriculum. Experts like Dylan Wiliam and John Hattie emphasise the importance of having a clear direction to guide learning.

As highlighted by the Deans for Impact, “students learn new ideas in relation to what they already know.” It is therefore important to activate prior knowledge before explicitly teaching new concepts, ideas, and skills.

To gradually release a skill to students, a teacher must be able to check for understanding during practice. A common misconception is that this happens in the space of one lesson. It can actually take many exposures to occur, and teachers need evidence-based strategies for this (daily review).

Practise

Anita Archer says, “I worry that students aren’t getting enough practice… Students need three types of practice: They need practice with a purpose, they need retrieval practice, and they need practice that is spaced”.

When learning a new concept or skill, Louisa Moats suggests that it can take anywhere from 1-200+ exposures for mastery to develop. The famous researcher Ebbinghaus found that forgetting starts to occur immediately after learning and that remembering interrupts forgetting and supports long term learning. It is therefore important that routines of guided retrieval practice are established for every learning area. We call these daily reviews, and we invest deeply in them because we believe they may be the most important strategy for truly embedding knowledge.

Timely feedback is crucial to ensure accurate encoding. It is built into the Hollingsworth & Ybarra TAPPLE teaching protocol via the provision of effective feedback (TAPPLE).

Apply

As the great John Sweller says, “The contents of long-term memory are sophisticated structures that permit us to perceive, think, and solve problems, rather than a group of rote-learned facts. Learning requires a change in the schematic structures of long-term memory and is demonstrated by performance that progresses from clumsy, error-prone, slow, and difficult to smooth and effortless.” Expertise develops through opportunities to practise under the guidance of an expert.

As expertise develops, higher-order thinking tasks, including inquiry, become viable. It is sometimes argued that inquiry (student-led) and explicit teaching (teacher-led) are in opposition to one another. When in fact, they can and should work in harmony together.

Assess

All assessment types have their time and place, but for classroom teachers, nothing compares to the power and importance of formative assessment. As Dylan Wiliam highlights, “Short-cycle formative assessment has to be the priority for schools and teachers, because the impact on students is greater”.

Diagnostic assessments occur prior to learning and help to group students and to inform planning. Summative assessments are used after learning has occurred to measure the impact of teaching and learning. Formative assessment is distinctive in that it occurs in real-time while learning is happening and importantly, creates the opportunity for targeted feedback.

We focus on evidence-based approaches to formative assessment that allow teachers to embed these meaningful opportunities in their daily teaching. This process of eliciting responses and providing feedback has many peripheral benefits, including that students become increasingly aware of their own learning (metacognition) and are able to make more informed decisions (agency).