Curios of the week #38

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week, I have been teaching chemistry for the first time in years. I have a Year 10 ‘Head Start’ class — this is when student begin the new academic year for the final few weeks of Term 4 — and questions I have been pondering include the value of the Bohr ‘shell’ model of atomic structure for large elements such as Barium.

I did not get off to a great start. I arrived early for class during recess, placed a booklet at each student desk and the realised that not only was I in the wrong classroom, I had created a seating plan for this same wrong classroom and the seating arrangement in the classroom I had been assigned were different. Fortunately, we have a lesson planning widget that enabled me to quickly redo a seating plan to show the students, even if I was unable to print one for myself in time.

So, my first chemistry lesson in years began with me a little flustered. How’s your week been?

This week’s Curios include some classroom structure, the science of behaviour, a successful charter school network and much more.

Classroom structure of the week

Having a seating plan for all lessons is one way we structure classrooms at Clarendon. The benefits seem obvious but is classroom structure supported by research? In a sense, this is an absurd question to ask because it is too broad. However, educational meta-analyses were seemingly invented for answering such absurdly broad questions and while I question the value of computing effect sizes from diverse sets of studies, such analyses do perform the function of surveying a large body of literature and making sense of what it shows.

A new meta-analysis has examined the literature on classroom structure from both correlational studies, where different teacher behaviours are correlated with various outcomes, and intervention studies, where teachers are trained to use strategies that build classroom structure. The authors found:

“Using the evidence provided in 165 correlational studies… we found statistically significant positive relationships between classroom structure, as teachers use it… and students’ achievement, behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, cognitive engagement, and competence beliefs. However, we did not find the average relationships between classroom structure and behavioral disengagement, emotional disengagement, or overall disengagement to be significantly different from zero. Similarly, using the evidence provided in 46 intervention studies, we found that teachers directed or trained to implement structure in the classroom had students with higher achievement, greater behavioral engagement, and less behavioral disengagement compared to students in classes whose teachers did not receive such training or instruction. However, we did not find that classroom structure interventions had a significant effect on students’ emotional engagement or competence beliefs.”

Despite the wide ranges of ages of the students in the studies:

“Results suggest that classroom structure effects, particularly for students’ engagement, are relatively consistent across many forms of structure, methods, settings, and samples. There was no instance, regardless of what moderator we considered, in which the relationship between classroom structure and either student engagement or competence beliefs was negative.”

Yes, but what is ‘classroom structure?’ The authors define it as things such as rules, routines and procedures and having organised lessons and materials. They also include the use of rewards and consequences but they caution against teachers being too ‘controlling,’ because this seems to lessen the effect of classroom structure.