Curios of the week #57

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week, I travelled to England. As this post is published, I will be briefly visiting family before driving to London, where I will be until Friday morning. If you are based in London then maybe I’ll see you around.

Before flying out, I had a contemplative long Easter weekend. I went to church on Easter Sunday — my family is more religious than me but I am a cultural Christian, a phrase I had coincidentally been thinking about before that clip of that Richard Dawkins went viral in which he uses the term. The Easter Sunday service was billed as ‘solemn’ which has a distinct ecclesiastical meaning but the everyday sense is sufficient. For a son of the chapel who usually attends a carol service around Christmas and the odd special event, the burning incense and meditative bells of an Anglican mass at its highest is quite the experience. The unexpectedly emotional sermon given by the Bishop of Ballarat focused on the Gospel of John and the point when Mary Magdalen recognises the risen Jesus only after he speaks her name.

Later, we went for a walk around Lake Wendouree — a beautiful spot, should you ever visit Ballarat and a great place for walking and thinking.

This week’s Curios include reflections, mathematical confections a union that stands up for its members and much more.

Reflection of the week, part 1

In January 2015, I had the opportunity to travel to a frozen Cincinnati to attend the annual ICSEI conference. I don’t think I knew of the keynote speaker, Thomas Good, before that. However, when he began to speak, I was enthralled.

Good is a giant of ‘process-product’ education research (see e.g. this study of elementary mathematics). Given that process-product research looks for correlations between teacher behaviour and learning gains, Good also recognised the need to validate his findings through experiments in which he taught teachers the strategies he had uncovered from his earlier studies. Along with Jere Brophy, Good authored the classic 1980s summary of process-product research — Teacher Behavior and Student Achievement. He is one of the key figures behind the research summarised in Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.

The model of effective teaching that Good and his colleagues developed is one he calls ‘active teaching.’ This is basically the same model that is often described as ‘direct instruction’ and that I tend to refer to as ‘explicit teaching’. It is characterised by the clarity of teacher presentation, it is highly interactive and gradually releases responsibility from the teacher to the student.

In a new paper, Good reflects on his work on teacher expectations and teacher effectiveness — the latter being the body of work that informed the active teaching model. It is worth reading the whole paper if you have access. However, I wanted to mention the following passage about Good’s experimental work training teachers in the active teaching. It is written under the heading, ‘Reflections and regrets’:

“Ironically, at a time when the field was achieving some understanding about how teachers’ actions influenced learning (e.g., Brophy & Good, 1986), teacher educators, especially mathematics educators, were beginning to argue strongly that due to theoretical conceptions of how students learn (i.e., they construct knowledge), teacher talk should be minimized, as though careful teaching was inherently detrimental to students’ construction of knowledge (see, for example, Draper, 2002; Grant, 1998). In the face of this mounting advocacy to reduce the teacher role in classroom learning, I regret I was not a more active voice noting the importance of teaching in student learning.”

Let us take that on as our own and make sure we continue to advocate for the importance of teaching in student learning, whatever the pedagogical furies throw at us.

Reflection of the week, part 2

Tom Sherrington is a well known voice in education, particularly in the UK. He wrote a book about Rosenshine’s principles and has worked with Oliver Caviglioli on producing the popular ‘Walkthrus’ books that diagram different teaching practices.

However, he hasn’t always worked as a consultant. A few years back, he was the head of challenging school in London. In a recent blog post, he reflects on that time and his efforts to tackle entrenched behaviour problems in the school.

“Of course as the leader I carried the can for things not working and so, of course, I have spent years reflecting on what I could have done differently. Partly, I think I was trying to do too many other things at the same time as sort behaviour – curriculum, teaching and learning, finance and redundancies, HR crises of one kind or another. Although it occupied a lot of my time, it was still only one of many priorities. It should just have been a total focus. I was good at designing systems that made sense on paper but not good enough about seeing them through month to month, term to term, building the level of capacity needed amongst the staff who did all the frontline work.”

As a deputy principal, this resonates with me. It sometimes feels as if there is a daemon in the system working tirelessly to distract me with anything other than our core work of education.

And as Sherrington implies, if you don’t get behaviour right in a challenging school, nothing else follows.

Sherrington goes on to express frustration with those carping at schools from the sidelines and criticising them for being too strict. He reflects that he should probably have expelled more students than he did to turn things around but we all understand the pressure he would have been under to not do this.

Running schools is hard. It is even harder to run tough schools when behaviour is a big issue. I agree with Sherrington that the folks who are successful at running safe and orderly schools in challenging circumstances deserve a lot more respect and far less criticism.

Country of the week

It seems we have found an heir to Finland.