Popular teaching methods, such as lavishing praise on pupils and grouping students by ability, are not based on evidence and can harm student development, a report has found.
The Sutton Trust examined 200 pieces of research on what makes great teaching, concluding that some common practices have no grounding in research while other less popular approaches can be effective. The report found that the two most important elements of great teaching were the quality of instruction and how well a teacher knew their subject.
Different methods for evaluating teaching were also examined, including lesson observations and getting students to rate their teachers. All these methods were deemed useful, but the report said that they were also easy to get wrong and should not to be used in isolation. We asked experts to share views on the report’s findings:
Let’s praise children – low self belief is a cancer in the classroom
The report has some excellent advice for teachers as they continue on that never-ending journey of professional development. The problem is that one of the headline conclusions in the report is directly contradictory to my daily experience. Apparently, there is no evidence in the research that proves lavish praise works.
Low self-belief is like a cancer in the classroom; if left unchallenged it will grow until it seems almost incurable. It can be the root cause of barriers to learning. Teachers will often challenge this with praise for the simple reason that they know it works. I have seen pupils flourish in lessons when meticulous and experienced teachers surgically insert a seemingly hyperbolic positive comment into conversation with a pupil. I’ve seen others go even further and lavishly praise notoriously difficult pupils for things that seem mundane or trivial. If you’re a pupil for whom negative behaviour is entrenched, this type of praise can help to break the cycle.
Of course you need to be careful in ensuring praise is not stifling aspiration. Using praise as a tool to raise self- belief is not the same as celebrating mediocrity. It is about creating an environment where pupils know they can succeed. Some pupils need this much more than others.
Joe Bispham is an English teacher at Frederick Bremer school in Walthamstow.
It concerns me that damaging beliefs about good teaching still exist
It is worrying to see the persistence of some damaging beliefs about effective pedagogy, such as the belief that it is important to teach with a pupil’s preferred learning style in mind, which leads to teachers pigeon-holing students and perpetuating a fixed mindset about how they can or cannot learn. The falsity of this approach has been known for years and it raises serious questions about professional development in schools given that 90% of teachers still think this is an effective approach. A recognition of the many different ways in which all students learn is at the heart of good teaching.
Similarly, the hugely successful and widely disseminated work of Stanford University professor Carol Dweck ought by now to have disavowed teachers of any notion that lavish praise is an effective tool. More surprising to many will be the relative ineffectiveness of setting.
The high value placed on the importance of a teacher’s faculty of judgment in making sophisticated decisions about how to interact with a class is heartening. Despite offering a smorgasbord of sensible suggestions about effective practice, the report makes it clear that there is no one infallible recipe for success in the classroom, and there is as much art as science in effective teaching. This will be music to the ears of those teachers who have been shackled to overly prescriptive schemes of work by distrustful managers and policy makers.
– Alistair McConville is deputy headteacher at Bedales School.
We must invest in the development of teachers
Of course the best lessons are when teachers can confidently draw from a toolkit of practice which they know works. Now that educational debate is focused on the classroom rather than the institutional status of a school, we are getting to the nub of challenges facing educators across the country – the anomalies in teaching not just between schools but within schools.
Surely we are reaching a point when teachers’ professional development should be a requirement for all? I know that many teachers take their professional development very seriously but if we are to accept that there are common threads to the most effective practice then schools must invest in the development of all their staff. The much vaunted educational systems overseas held up as models of best practice to teachers in our country make professional development of teachers a priority, investing time and money on practitioners.
I absolutely agree with professor Coe that it is a scandal we are neglecting the development of the key figure in our children’s lives – the teacher. Maybe the millions spent on the Govian dash to academies and free schools would have been better spent on supporting the professional development of our teachers.
– Tricia Kelleher is principal at the Stephen Perse Foundation, Cambridge
Teachers should be receptive to research evidence
The emphasis on the quality of teaching, the importance of teachers’ subject knowledge and the power of creating an environment of professional learning is heartening.
Where other findings in the report cause us to question our assumptions, this can only be a good thing. We should be receptive to research evidence that challenges preconceptions and makes us think more deeply about what we do and how we can improve. Isn’t it fair to say that only the arrogant or complacent would dismiss evidence which runs counter to their pre-existing assumptions?
Several of the findings in this report have been anticipated by excellent work already taking place in schools, for example the importance of effective questioning and scaffolding, and this report should encourage us to build on this for the benefit of learners everywhere. We need now to think carefully about how we use this knowledge, training the teachers of the future and developing those already in the profession.
– Jill Berry former headteacher and educational consultant. She tweets here.
Our idea of good teaching is not as clear as we might think
This is a brilliant and helpful report full of very practical advice. It moves the debate forward and has the potential to spark genuine improvements. It is upfront about the problem we face: we do not have as clear an idea of what good teaching is as we might think. So before we can discuss how to improve teaching practice, we need to clarify what good practice looks like, otherwise we risk promoting practices that are not effective.
As the report notes, one of the main problems with attempts to define what makes effective teaching is that the recommendations are often too vague and lengthy, so that anyone can read the them and think, “I do that.” One way the report finds around this problem is to make a specific list not just of features of effective teaching, but the features of non-effective teaching. I would agree that the seven ineffective practices they identify have some currency.
One of the most interesting recommendations is that teachers should create better assessments, with the tantalising suggestion that the profession could create “a system of crowd-sourced assessments, peer reviewed by teachers, calibrated and quality assured using psychometric models, and using a range of item formats”. Such a system could not only improve students’ outcomes by improving the depth and quantity of feedback teachers get, it could also shed more light on what causes learning to happen. Perhaps as a next step the authors could write about how such a system could get started and what support would be needed?
– Daisy Christodoulou is the author of Seven Myths About Education and blogs here.