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

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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.

Preschool Needs

 This week's article summary is What Kids Need From Grown Ups (But Aren't Getting).

To me, it’s a great start-of-the-school-year reminder of why and how we teach at Trinity.

The article reminds us that kids are innate learners and like baby animals (think of kittens and puppies or any nature show you watch) they learn through interactive and collaborative play—a little instinctive behavior and a little emulation of the adults they see. 

We are fortunate that Trinity’s reputation and brand are understood and esteemed by prospective and current parents. 

Our mission, program pillars, and curriculum are replete with child-centeredness. As I repeat in faculty/staff meetings, Trinity’s special sauce is finding the intersection of celebrating childhood while simultaneously developing a strong academic and character foundation in our students. What’s the norm for Trinity is often elusive for other schools.

We embrace our students’ natural inquisitiveness and build upon it through meaningful educational experiences and challenges that further engage, excite, and inspire them.

I hope as you read the article you are filled with the same pride I was: we’re a great school and we do what’s right for kids!

Thank you for great start to the school year! 

Enjoy your weekend!

Joe

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Erika Christakis' new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flash cards, and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word: Play

That's because, she writes, "the distinction between early education and official school seems to be disappearing." If kindergarten is the new first grade, preschool is quickly becoming the new kindergarten. And that is "a real threat to our society's future."

It is the reality that science is confirming on a daily basis: that children are hardwired to learn in many settings and are really very capable, very strong, very intelligent on the one hand. On the other hand, the paradox is that many young children are doing poorly in our early education settings.

We have very crammed preschool schedules with rapid transitions. We have tons of clutter on classroom walls. We have kids moving quickly from one activity to another. We ask them to sit in long and often boring meetings. Logistically and practically, lives are quite taxing for little kids because they're actually living in an adult-sized world.

On the other hand, curriculum is often very boring. A staple of early childhood curriculum is the daily tracking of the calendar. And this is one of those absolute classic mismatches, because one study showed that, after a whole year of this calendar work where kids sit in a circle and talk about what day they're on, half the kids still didn't know what day they were on. 

We're underestimating kids in terms of their enormous capacity to be thoughtful and reflective, and, I would argue, that's because we're not giving them enough time to play and to be in relationships with others.

It's incredibly weird — this fake dichotomy. The science is so persuasive on this topic. There's all kinds of research coming not only from early childhood but animal research looking at mammals and how they use play for learning.

There are two answers. There really has been tremendous anxiety about closing achievement gaps between advantaged and less advantaged children. You know, we're always as a society looking for quick fixes that might close those gaps. Unfortunately, it's had downstream consequences for early learning, where we're going for superficial measures of learning.

The other problem is that the rich, experience-based play that we know results in learning — it's not as easy to accomplish as people think. And that's because, while the impulse to play is natural, what I call the play know-how really depends on a culture that values play, that gives kids the time and space to learn through play.

Playful learning is embedded in relationships and in things that are meaningful to children. Meaningful to them is when they have a chance to learn through relationships—and that happens through play. But a lot of out curriculum is organized around different principles.

It's organized around the comfort and benefit of adults and also reflexive: "This is cute," or, "We've always done this." A lot of the time, as parents, we are trained to expect products, cute projects. And I like to say that the role of art in preschool or kindergarten curriculum should be to make meaning, not necessarily things. But it's hard to get parents to buy into this idea that their kids may not come home with the refrigerator art because maybe they spent a week messing around in the mud.

Preschool teachers are very interested in fine motor skills, and so often they think that these tracing and cutting activities are important. I would argue that those are not the most important skills that we need to foster.

The No. 1 thing is that children need to feel secure in their relationships because, again, we're social animals. And children learn through others. So I think the No. 1 thing is for kids to have a chance to play, to make friends, to learn limits, to learn to take their turn.

The research base is pretty clear. I'll start by telling you what it isn't. We start by looking at two variables. One set are called "structural variables" — things like class size, student-teacher ratios, or even the square-footage of the classroom and what kinds of materials are in the classroom.

And then there are so-called process variables, which are different. They tend to be more about teaching style. Is the teacher a responsive teacher? Do they use a responsive, warm, empathic teaching style? And then the other key process variable is: Does the teacher have knowledge of child development? And is that teacher able to translate that child development knowledge into the curriculum?

There are many good measures — things like: Is the teacher on the floor with the child? Is the teacher asking open-ended questions? 

But here's the thing. The structural variables are easier to regulate, and it's much easier to focus on the structural variables.

Boredom can be a friend to the imagination. Sometimes when kids appear to be bored, actually they haven't had enough time to engage in something. We quickly whisk it away and move them along to the next thing. And that's when you say, "How can I help the child to look at this in a new way? To try something new, to be patient."

You've really kind of adultified childhood so kids really don't have those long, uninterrupted stretches of time to engage in fantasy play. And because we've kind of despoiled the habitat of early childhood, a lot of times they don't know what to do when given that time. So we kind of have to coach them.

I think there's a little bit of a repair process that we need to engage in. Because if you've got a kid who's used to going to a million lessons and only uses toys that have one way of using them and then, suddenly, you put them in a room with a bunch of boxes and blocks and say, "Have fun!", the kid's gonna say, "Are you kidding me? What?!"

Teaching Advice in Seven Words or Less

Thank you all for an uplifting and motivating first week of preplanning! So much positive energy, camaraderie, and dialogue!

For me, there’s always a blend of excitement and nervousness as we begin prepping for and putting the finishing touches on what’s needed for a smooth opening of school as we get ready to welcome back our students and their parents.

I always enjoy preplanning (much more comprehensive in Atlanta compared to other schools I’ve worked in across the country), especially the opportunity for us to learn, grow, collaborate, and socialize together.

For those of you new to Trinity, most Fridays during the school year, I send out a summary of an educational article that piqued my interest and that I hope provokes thought in you as well.

I don’t necessarily agree with every article, yet I really enjoy the ones that make me think, challenge me to reflect on my educational beliefs, and perhaps even confront my educational biases. As we discussed in this morning’s meeting, a little cognitive dissonance is good for everyone!

This week’s article is Advice from Teachers in Seven Words or Less.

Back in June, the publication Education Week asked teachers to provide advice for other teachers in 7 words or less.

As we get prepare for another school year, take a few moments to think about and reflect on the words of wisdom that are relevant in the classroom and also in our daily lives. I was struck by how the quotes affirmed our discussion topics this week: Growth Mindset, Process of Learning, Teaching as a Calling, Need for Grace and Forgiveness, Multi-Dimensionality of Everyone, Importance of Laughter, Community of Learners, Empathy.

Enjoy the final weekend of summer!

 Joe

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 Give yourself permission to make mistakes

 Success is failure all grown up

 Teach with passion, love, and patience

 Give grace, receive grace, accept grace

 The best teachers know their students’ stories

 Humor is good for learning. Seriously!

 Behavior challenges? What if it’s me?

 Students aren’t the only learners in class

 Reflection is powerful: pause, think, then speak