What is Good Teaching?

This week's article summary is The Paradox of Good Teaching.

As we begin to settle into the school year, this article asks what constitutes ‘good teaching’.

Most of us probably remember a select few of the teachers we had—yet we often remember them for different reasons. My 6th grade teacher (Mr. Podmore) was fun, caring, and engaging. His class every day was like a circus! In contrast, my eleventh grade American History teacher (Miss Roosevelt) was an uber strict task-master; her students, including me, were terrified of her even though we learned a lot about history and how to form strong opinions with substantiation. Her class every day was like being in the Hunger Games!

The article focuses on what type of teacher is better: the teacher who focuses principally on content in a no nonsense classroom (Miss Roosevelt) versus the teacher who focuses more on whole child development in a lighter, more child-friendly classroom (Mr. Podmore).

As you’ll see in in the article, research shows that the task-master type of teacher benefits students in the short run, e.g., an end-of-year standardized test. Yet it’s the caring, engaging teacher who reaps the long-term benefits in students. The primary reason for this is that it’s the whole-child-focused teacher who best helps students develop the social emotional and executive function skills and habits needed for future success. 

There are teachers who combine the two, of course. The article highlights how hands-on, active learning as well as collaborative classroom learning often stimulates both student learning and engagement. These teachers have also mastered classroom management: predicable routines, clear individual and group behavioral expectations, and seamless student misbehavior correction.

As elementary school educators, most of us lean more towards the whole-child side than the content-only side.

I like articles like this because they remind me to take time to reflect on the type of teacher I am and where perhaps I could adjust a little.

Joe

 -------

What is “good” teaching? Ask 10 people and you’ll get 10 different answers. Hollywood celebrates teachers who believe in their students and help them to achieve their dreams. The influential education economist Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, argues that good teachers raise their students’ achievement. Teachers are expected to impart so many things, from how to study and take notes to how to share and take turns. Deciding what constitutes good teaching is a messy business.

Two researchers from the University of Maryland and Harvard University waded into this mess. They analyzed elementary school teachers and math instruction. Students were asked to rate their math classes the way consumers fill out customer satisfaction surveys: “This math class is a happy place for me to be;” “Being in this math class makes me feel sad or angry;” “The things we have done this math this year are interesting;” “Because of this teacher, I am learning to love math;” and “I enjoy math class this year.” 

The results found that there was often a tradeoff between “good teaching” where kids learn stuff and “good teaching” that kids enjoy. Teachers who were good at raising test scores tended to receive low student evaluations. Teachers with great student evaluations tended not to raise test scores all that much. 

It’s hard to understand exactly why the tradeoff between achievement and student engagement exists. One theory is that “drill and kill” style rote repetition might be effective in helping students do well on tests but make class dreadfully dull. The researchers watched hours of videotaped lessons of these teachers in classrooms, but they didn’t find statistical evidence that teachers who spent more class time on test prep produced higher test scores. High achievement didn’t seem to be associated with rote instruction. 

Instead, it was teachers who had delivered more cognitively demanding lessons, going beyond procedural calculations to complex understandings, who tended to produce higher math scores. The researchers admitted it was “worrisome” that the kind of cognitively demanding instruction that we want to see “can simultaneously result in decreased student engagement.”  

Other researchers and educators have noted that learning is hard work. It often doesn’t feel good for students when they’re making mistakes and struggling to figure things out. It can feel frustrating during the moments when students are learning the most.

It was rare, but the researchers managed to find some teachers in the study that could do both types of good teaching simultaneously. Teachers who incorporated a lot of hands-on, active learning received high marks from students and raised test scores. These teachers often had students working together collaboratively in pairs or groups, using tactile objects to solve problems or play games. 

These doubly “good” teachers had another thing in common: they maintained orderly classrooms that were chock full of routines. Though strict discipline and punishing kids for bad behavior has fallen out of fashion, the researchers noticed that these teachers were proactive in setting up clear behavioral rules at the start of each class. The time that teachers did spend on student behavior typically involved short redirections that did not interrupt the flow of the lesson.

These teachers also had a good sense of pacing and understood the limits of children’s attention spans The teachers seemed intentional about the amount of time spent on activities, the researchers noted. 

Given that it’s not common or easy to engage students and get them to learn math, researchers were curious to learn which teachers were ultimately better for students in the long run. This experiment actually took place a decade ago in 2012, and the students were tracked afterward. Researchers are currently looking at how these students were doing five and six years later. In preliminary calculations, they’re finding that the students who had more engaging elementary school teachers subsequently had higher math and reading achievement scores and fewer absences in high school. The students who had teachers who were more effective in raising achievement were generally doing better in high school too, but the long-run benefits faded out somewhat. Though we all want children to learn to multiply and divide, it may be that engaging instruction is ultimately more beneficial. 

Researchers hope to develop a “science of teaching,” so that schools of education and school coaches can better train teachers to teach well. But first we need to agree what we want teachers to do and what we want students to achieve.