This post is a work in progress. This page contains an activity that will be used in a presentation at Monash University on September 19th, 2018. Following that I will complete this post by adding slides from the presentation, as well as some reflections. 

The scenario

Your friend, Priyanka, who is an early career teacher, has just been promoted to the position of head of mathematics at her school. She knows that you have an interest, and some experience with the theory behind using and evaluating education research evidence, so she reaches out for some advice. She sends you the following email.

Priyanka's email

Hi (YOUR NAME)

I'm super excited because I just got a promotion. Next year I'll be taking on the role of head of maths. YAY!!!

Anyway. The Prin has tasked me with raising our maths scores, so I'm trying to come up with ideas of things to do next year which might help to do this. I know you've been doing some work on using and evaluating research evidence recently, so I thought I'd ask for some advice : ) Here's what I've done so far…

I want to ensure that I do the thing that's most effective, so I thought a good place to start would be John Hattie's ranked list of influences by effect sizes. I found this list of 252 influences. It suggests that ‘Collective teacher efficacy’ is the number one influence (with an effect size of 1.57, far above the second ranked effect size, at 1.37). So I went onto the page on the visible learning website on collective teacher efficacy, which then pointed me to an ‘issue brief’ by The Centre for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, which outlines the what, why, and how, of this approach. It seems to make a fair bit of sense, and I can imagine that building collective teacher efficacy would definitely make a positive difference. 

Around the same time I came across a tweet (you can see it here) from a person from Social Ventures Australia about their Evidence for Learning Teacher Toolkit. I went to their main page, which ranks all approaches by months of improvement. I ordered the list and saw that ‘feedback' comes out on top, with 8 months of additional progress. I then went to the Feedback guidance page and read the summary of feedback presented there. It seems pretty great and I know that feeback is definitely important. 

The last idea I've had came from a colleague. She's been reading Dylan Wiliam's Embedded Formative Assessment recently and thinks it contains some good ideas that could also improve student learning.

Anyway, I obviously can't do everything, and I'm not really sure which of these I should go with (or should I go with something else???). Hoping you can offer some advice!

Thanks so much.

Pry.

Task 1 (Ideally done before class, could do in class also)

Please draft a reply to Priyanka. You may answer in dot points, the most important thing is that you get your thinking and main points and thoughts down in writing. Your work will not be shared with anyone unless you give permission to do so. We will re-visit this first draft towards the end of this session.

What did your lecturers say?

Ollie's reply:

Hey Priyanka, that’s great news! Big congrats!!!

A few brief thoughts on your directions forward…

First off, it’s great that you’ve done some research and checked out some good resources. All three approaches are definitely key things to consider, and all are well worthwhile looking into. The main point I’d make is that evidence doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the key things I’d be trying to consider in your position would be:

  1. What great stuff is already happening in your department that you could leverage?
  2. What are the current issues you’re contending with (i.e., why aren’t results as high as they could be)?

Only after asking these two questions would I consider:

  1. What research suggests directions forward, given your department’s current strengths and areas for improvement? (i.e., do the mechanisms that produced outcomes in the research evidence hold in your local context?)
  2. How are you going to implement it, and how is your context likely to help or hinder this implementation? (e.g., What is your Prin likely to support? What are your colleagues likely to be into? What kind of relationships do you have with your colleagues and are they going to listen to you? What resources do you have to use in terms of both money and especially meeting time to try things out? etc).

This might sound like a lot to find out, so I’d suggest by just asking your colleagues a few questions. Things such as:

  • Is there anything that you think worked particularly well in your teaching/classes this year that you think the rest of the team could benefit from hearing about/adopting? (i.e., what should we keep doing, or do more of)
  • Is there anything we’re currently doing that we should stop doing?
  • If you magically had an extra hour per week to improve your teaching,  what would you like to spend it on?
  • What would you most like to learn about in order to improve your teaching this coming year? (So I can try to do some research around it).

If you email these Qs to your staff, then organise a time to meet with them and have a chat, that should put you in a good position to work out the answers to some of questions 1-3. You can then go to your Prin and ask about resources and meeting time (Q4). And you should then be in a pretty good position to evaluate the evidence for yourself : )

Hope that helps :

Ollie.

ps: I’m very wary of using ranked effect sizes from meta-analyses as a way of trying to work out ‘what works best’ in education. If you haven’t seen it already you might like this post in which I explore this issue in more detail: http://www.ollielovell.com/on-education/effect-sizes/

Mandy's reply

Dear Priyanka,

Congratulations on your new role. What fantastic news! I know you will be an excellent Head of Math.

In answer to your question for advice I would suggest that you first call a team meeting and ask your staff what ideas they have. Together you need to make sure you understand what evidence you have at a school level of the students’ academic progress and from there you need to understand:

1) what your team’s attitude to change is (and whether the teachers think there is an issue);

2) investigate as a team the underlying cause of the issue.

Point 1 will help you determine the culture within your math team. Do they have an Inquiring Habit of Mind? (remember the Earl and Timperley (2009) reading?). You may first need to work on developing your team before you can implement big change within your department. So, you need to ensure you are able to have Evidence Informed Conversations.

Point 2 will help you start to uncover the issue itself: why are the students not performing as well as the Principal expects them too? This also needs to be uncovered as a team; you need buy-in from your team members. So, you need to identify the issue and move the team forward together.

Once you have established the above you can then refine your focus question and start the process of refining your research question, searching for, selecting and using the research evidence within a team that knows how to have powerful learning conversations.

Best wishes on this journey and please feel free to ask me questions along the way.

Kind regards

Mark's Reply

Hi Priyanka

Great to hear from you and big congrats on the promotion. I always knew you were destined for leadership – well done you!

Now in connection with your question … you’ve caught me on a crazy busy day so here are a few top of mind initial thoughts that we can discuss in more detail when we catch up next.

So my quick thoughts are to encourage you to think about:

–       Problems as well as solutions – Beware of ‘solution shopping’. There will always be research-based solutions out there, but how well do they relate to your specific problems? And therefore how well do you understand what the fine-grained problems are that you are seeking to address?

–       People as well as programs – Remember that using research is a social as well as an intellectual process, and so how can your students and your colleagues be part of using data and research evidence to identify the problem and decide and action the way forward?

–       Context, implementation and sequencing – There’s a big difference between thinking about what to do and thinking about how and when to do it in a specific context. We often spend lots of our time and energy focusing on what we want to do but overlook how and when we are going to actually implement it.  Remember that the really wise leaders know how to sequence and layer different kinds of approaches over time.

Good luck and see you soon

Mark