Honing the Tools of Teaching - How Research Can Improve Teaching for the 21st

Century?
Rick Allen (from 'Curriculum Update')

The world seems to divide good teachers into two categories. Some people see
teaching as an art, where a teacher with innate talent develops her gift as if by some
genetic predisposition. Other people place emphasis on knowledge of content, where
any teacher can teach—as long as he knows his subject area. These biases seem to
leave little room for teachers to look closely at how they teach in the classroom.
"Discussions about research on instructional practices are not sought after and not well
received," says Robert Marzano, coauthor of the ASCD book Classroom Instruction
That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement.
But the definition of content standards and the public pressures of the accountability
movement are encouraging more districts and teachers to take a closer look at
research-based instructional practices that improve student motivation and
achievement, say researchers.
Oddly enough, some of these teaching strategies don't seem particularly new—
identifying similarities and differences, note taking, and homework and practice, for
example. The cumulative knowledge of more than 30 years of research, however, is
what "validates their usefulness," insists Marzano.

Converging Evidence
Professors of education like Michael Dickmann at Cardinal Stritch University in
Milwaukee find that when teachers gain a deeper understanding of old and new
instructional strategies, they tend to use them more.
"For a long time, teachers had the models of instruction, but they didn't know the 'why?'"
says Dickmann, co-author with Nancy Stanford-Blair of Connecting Leadership to the
Brain.
The evidence from neuroscience, cognitive science, and clinical studies as well as
theoretical constructs from evolutionary biology, archaeology, and philosophy converge
in support of certain instructional practices, says Dickmann. "You put all that together
and the black box opens up," he suggests.
Dickmann points to cooperative learning as an example. "Hard research now enables
educators to look through the lenses of physiological, social, emotional, constructive,
reflective, and dispositional dimensions of the way the brain learns," he says.
Cooperative learning physiologically engages more of the brain's neural networks
through the stimulation of sensory information from kinesthetic, visual, and auditory
input. A teacher who studies the research would also better understand how
cooperative learning taps into students' "natural capacities to be engaged socially and
emotionally" and supports their efforts to construct knowledge and apply it in problem
solving, says Dickmann.
Ultimately, research on the subject can enlighten teachers about how cooperative
learning can foster learning dispositions or mental habits that can help students
throughout their lives, he adds.
Dickmann likens the "breakthrough in knowledge" about instructional practices to the
work of Louis Pasteur, the microbiologist famed for his discovery in 1857 that infectious
diseases are caused by germs. It is not enough for such new knowledge to be available,
explains Dickmann; "there has to be a perceptual shift" so such discoveries might be
practically applied. Often there is a lag time between great scientific theories and their
application in everyday situations. For example, Pasteur's findings were not immediately
used to prevent wounded soldiers from contracting fatal infections. Similarly, some
teachers hesitate to tap into the practical benefits of research-based strategies.
Putting Research to Work
Although years of evidence points to certain instructional practices as keys to promoting
student achievement, sustaining such strategies in the classroom is an arduous process
that calls for commitment on every level. In northeast Iowa, a group of school districts
serving 38,000 students has been hard at work for 10 years crafting and refining a plan
that promotes the latest research-based instructional strategies. The districts use the
strategies as a key component of a larger vision of well-planned curriculum alignment
that can increase student achievement.
Administrators in the region wanted an alternative to the kind of professional
development that entailed having a "big inspirational speaker" descend in August—just
when teachers need to be preparing to teach, says Nancy Lockett, staff development
coordinator for Iowa's Area Education Agency 7. AEA7, which oversees 26 independent
school districts, including Waterloo, Cedar Falls, and surrounding rural areas, wanted to
cultivate a "common language and critical mass" of research-based best practices that
would "hit all administrators, teachers, and counselors."
The plan calls for a sea change in how teachers approach classroom instruction,
student engagement, and lesson planning. Over the years, staff in participating school
districts have learned about the latest research on brain-based learning, student
assessment, and standards and benchmarks. After taking all this information in,
teachers complained that it was difficult to incorporate strategies into lesson planning
because the information was never at hand, Lockett recalls. Looking up the right
strategy in books, notebooks, binders, file folders, and old workshop handouts was too
time consuming. To help solve the difficulty of a wealth of strategies, the agency created
a 30-page booklet of strategies it called the "skinny book" to help teachers plan lessons.
Consultants also advised school districts to reduce the number of standards and
benchmarks for each subject area, so teachers would concentrate lessons on what
students needed to know most to be successful.
Finally, the area education agency developed the Linking Learning, Teaching and
Curriculum (LLTC) program to assist teachers with aligning the selection of strategies
with curriculum, assessment, and broader educational goals. This program also allowed
teachers and administrators from different districts to coordinate professional
development that addressed common concerns.
Teachers from the 18 districts that have signed on to the agency's LLTC program set
their own training agendas by identifying the strategies they want to master. Lockett
recently led a group of 60 middle school teachers who wanted to enhance their use of
cooperative learning. Teachers arrived with baseline data about the current level of
"engaged behavior" in their classrooms' cooperative learning groups, then experimented
with a variety of strategies to improve their use of the groups. These teachers' ultimate
goal, says Lockett, is "to help kids learn to think deeply, work together better, and
organize learning visually."
Tailoring Teaching
Over the years, teachers have been exposed to a variety of strategies from experts—
such as Marzano or Patricia Wolfe, who specializes in brain-compatible instructional
practices—who have developed strong professional relationships with the teaching
staff, says Edward Redalen, director of educational services for AEA7.
"An external consultant with expertise and charisma can unlock things for you," says
Redalen. "And experts say they like coming back because we follow up on using the
strategies."
After an inservice session has given teachers the "basic chocolate cake recipe," they
are encouraged to adapt a variety of strategies into a rich combination that meets their
specific classroom needs, says Lockett.
Of the numerous instructional strategies available, lateral thinking expert Edward de
Bono's Plus, Minus, Interesting approach (PMI) has worked well to open up
brainstorming sessions in teacher Pattie Bailey's gifted and regular classrooms. PMI,
which looks at pros, cons, and interesting aspects of an idea or proposal, has proved
useful in Bailey's social studies classes and even in her reading curriculum.
"Students will often come up with a statement that begins, 'What if this happened . . .?'
so we can apply PMI to foster discussion" about some line of thought that intrigues
them, says Bailey.
Another strategy she has used with 4th graders is Consequences and Sequel (C&S),
which prods students to focus on the immediate, short-term, medium-term, and long-
term consequences of actions taken by a story character or historical figure.
Bailey, who teaches math for 5th graders and gifted students at Reinbeck Elementary
School and gifted students at Gladbrook-Reinbeck High School, advises that no single
strategy is going to meet the needs of all students. Bailey has to do "lots of pre-testing,"
she says, and work with students to get to know their optimum learning styles.
For example, some of Bailey's gifted high school students want to try out many
scenarios when deciding what to write for a Future Problem Solving essay, an
international program for creative thinking that involves a changing roster of topics—
from education to virtual corporations. Other students "need time to think the whole
period," she says. Recognizing such student differences, Bailey allows for a variety of
approaches.
Dan Flaharty, who teaches math and health at Jesup High School in Jesup, Iowa, has
found visual organizers, such as a table of rubrics, helpful. At the beginning of the year,
Flaharty and students together develop a rubric about expectations and goals for class
learning. In terms of content, for instance, he uses rubrics to help students monitor
whether they've correctly carried out all the steps for solving an algebraic equation.
"They acquire higher-order thinking skills because they evaluate themselves. There's no
doubt about it that those students who are using the algebra rubric are achieving at a
higher level," notes Flaharty.
In geometry class, a kinesthetic learner would be given the option to construct different
triangle models in wood, or an artistic student could create an art project to demonstrate
her knowledge of geometric concepts.
Still, there are challenges. "We learn all of these strategies in an inservice, and try them
the next day," says Flaharty. But then it can be easy to "fall back into the old ways of the
lecture rut. It just takes a long time to change."
Learning Teams
To keep teachers from backsliding and to entice other districts into the program, the
education agency's LLTC Online at http://edservices.aea7.k12.ia.us/lltc/index.html offers
detailed resources and guidelines to help them align their teaching strategies to
curriculum and assessment goals. Although avid users of research-based strategies,
Flaharty and Bailey have joined learning teams, which are cross-curricular groups of
teachers from multiple grade levels who meet periodically to monitor how specific
instructional strategies are helping them reach achievement goals.
For example, Flaharty wanted to improve his students' ability to solve math story
problems, so he is giving them strategies for analyzing common words that appear.
Using a math word bank, Flaharty helps his students break these words into prefixes,
suffixes, and root words to better understand their meaning. So if a student sees
"colinear" on a test, she'll already understand that the prefix "co-" means "together with"
and will have applied the prefix in nonmath sentences using words such as "cooperate"
or "coed." Flaharty tracks student assessments in the targeted area in the first year and
makes adjustments in the following year. In monthly learning team meetings, teachers
compare notes and exchange ideas about their successes and challenges.
Not surprisingly, the strategy of generating and testing hypotheses is an essential
learning team strategy as teachers try out different instructional practices, explains
school improvement consultant Denise Schares.
Schares is working with a team of elementary school teachers interested in helping
students with reading problems. Having hypothesized that these students don't have a
bank of strategies—rereading, questioning, and so on—to get them through the sticking
points, these teachers selected a handful of reading strategies to teach their struggling
readers.
"I asked them to start small so they can get a sense of the process," says Schares. "The
team will now observe students and chart data for the rest of the year to determine
whether their hypothesis was correct" and what revisions they'll make to improve their
use of instructional strategies.
"Implementation is key to this business," says Redalen. "We can't just keep adding stuff
but need to get deeper penetration, and learning teams are evidence that teachers want
to sustain more and better use of these strategies."
Teachers Make the Difference
Marzano believes that even though research-based instructional strategies are not yet
widely used, the scientific evidence about their effectiveness will mount so that more
teachers will see their value.
In the current age of measuring achievement, some district administrators are taking
notice of practices proven to show percentile gains of 26–37 points in research studies.
For example, students tend to flourish when a classroom atmosphere reinforces effort
or a teacher encourages them to analyze their thinking and self-motivation.
Perhaps researchers' long-standing claims that even one teacher armed with effective
strategies—even in a mediocre school environment—can make a profound difference in
a student's learning will end up becoming the one piece of research that ushers in a
new era of teaching.