What Every Teacher Needs to Know
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How to embed evidence-informed teaching and learning in your school Jade Pearce
What Every Teacher Needs to Know
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First published in Great Britain, 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Text copyright © Jade Pearce, 2022 Jade Pearce has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
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vii PartAcknowledgementsContentsxIntroductionxi1 What does the evidence say? A summary of seminal research in education A. Papers giving an overview of effective teaching and learning 1. The Great Teaching Toolkit 6 2. MARGE: A Whole-Brain Learning Approach for Students and Teachers 13 3. Top 20 principles from psychology for pre-K to 12 teaching and learning 17 4. What makes great teaching? Review of the underpinning research 29 B. Papers addressing cognitive science 5. The Science of Learning 34 6. Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive educational psychology 39 7. Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning 45 8. Cognitive science approaches in the classroom: A review of the evidence 50 9. Teaching the science of learning 59
Contents viii viii ix 10. Why don’t students like school? Because the mind is not designed for thinking 65 11. Making things harder on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning 69 C. Papers addressing cognitive load theory and explicit instruction 12. Putting students on the path to learning: The case for fully guided instruction 73 13. Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know 77 14. Cognitive load theory: Research that teachers really need to understand 83 15. Cognitive architecture and instructional design 87 D. Papers addressing specific teaching practices 16. Teacher feedback to improve pupil learning 96 17. Metacognition and self-regulated learning 103 18. Eight ways to promote generative learning 110 19. The crucial role of motivation and emotion in classroom learning 116 20. Classroom assessment: Minute by minute, day by day 123 Part 2 What does evidence-informed teaching look like in the classroom? Key evidence-informed 21.practicesExplicitinstruction 130
Contents ix ix 22. Managing cognitive load 148 23. Questioning and checking for understanding 169 24. Retrieval practice 179 25. Spacing 193 26. Interleaving 199 27. Feedback 205 Part 3 How can schools develop an evidenceinformed culture? Becoming an evidenceinformed school 28. A framework for whole-school evidence-informed teaching 224 29. CPD and research engagement 231 30. Recruitment, quality assurance and performance management 241 31. The foundations of an evidence-informed culture 245 32. My school’s journey to an evidence-informed culture 250 33. Developing an evidence-informed culture: Two case studies 269 References 279 Glossary 293 Index 294
Secondly, I would like to thank my colleagues from school – Jo and Neil, who have gone above and beyond, painstakingly proofreading and giving feedback on every chapter. Furthermore, a big thanks to colleagues from across the school who have provided me with the excellent subject-specific examples you will see throughout the book. The hard work from all of the teachers across my school, to engage with research and professional development and to enact evidenceinformed teaching in reality, never ceases to amaze me, and I feel very lucky to work where I do.
Firstly,AcknowledgementsahugethankyoutoHannahatBloomsburyforpresenting me with this opportunity and supporting me along the way.
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Thirdly, my appreciation goes to my colleagues from Twitter (there are too many of you to name) who have given up their time to discuss my ideas and give meLastly,feedback.ahuge thank you to Alex Gordon and Rachel Ball for their brilliant case studies that explain how they have approached developing an evidenceinformed culture in their own schools, and to Zeph Bennett for his work on the accompanying tools, using his illustrations to bring the ideas to life.
I have now been passionate about evidence-informed teaching for a number of years. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, evidence-informed pedagogy helps us to identify our ‘best bets‘ – those strategies that are supported by research evidence as being most likely to result in optimal teaching and learning, and so have the largest impact on pupil outcomes and life chances. Furthermore, being evidence-informed enables us to dispel learning myths and prevent the use of ineffective teaching practices that may harm learning. Examples include the ‘learning pyramid’, which has resulted in a move away from teacher-led explanations and instruction, and ‘learning styles’, which resulted in lesson activities being unnecessarily tailored to pupils’ supposed preferred method of learning.Finally, evidence-informed teaching also enables us to reduce workload by identifying those practices that have a large impact on workload but little impact on learning. For example, teachers in my school are no longer required to differentiate by resource or task, include written marking in feedback, produce individual lesson plans or produce extensive written reports. In a profession that has long relied on teachers working in their evenings and at weekends, and which
years ago, my entry into teaching came at a time when lessons were graded according to the immediate and observable progress that pupils had made, and when mini-plenaries, learning styles and the belief that pupils learned more when they discovered new information for themselves dominated. Teacher talk had to be limited, tasks and resources had to be differentiated and all work had to be triple marked. There was no real reference to how we learn, memory or research.
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Thankfully, when looking into how other schools were planning to deal with ‘life after levels’ in 2013, I happened across the ‘class teaching’ blog from Durrington High School. Durrington were way ahead of the curve and were already participating in research trials, discussing evidence and referring to cognitive science. From that moment on, my view of effective teaching began to change, a change that was furthered by reading seminal works such as Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? (2010) and Brown, Roediger and McDaniel’s Make It Stick (2014). I realised that many of the practices that we currently viewed as most effective may actually be harming learning. My journey towards evidence-informed teaching had begun.
Introduction xii xii xiii is now suffering from a huge recruitment and retention crisis, it is crucial (and also a moral obligation) that we make teaching a sustainable profession. It is important to note here that I am referring to evidence-informed teaching and not evidence-based teaching. Although these phrases are sometimes used interchangeably, there is an important distinction between them. Evidenceinformed teaching combines evidence from research with teachers’ experience and professional judgement, and also takes account of the context of the school or class. It acknowledges that whilst research evidence can identify those practices that are most likely to be effective, this must be combined with teachers’ judgement and experience of what works best, and must also be modified to suit different schools and classes – what works for a certain group of pupils, a certain school or in a certain subject may not be effective elsewhere. In slight contrast to this, evidence-based practice can be said to be more prescriptive and places emphasis on findings from research over teachers’ experience of context. I firmly believe in the importance of teachers’ knowledge and expertise and in adapting any strategies to the context you are in, and therefore I will discuss evidenceinformed teaching in this book.
I truly love my job as a leader of teaching, learning and professional development and have thoroughly enjoyed my journey to becoming evidenceinformed. However, there is a sometimes overwhelming amount to read, be knowledgeable about and implement. Therefore, the aim of this book is to help teachers and school leaders to make their own journey towards becoming an evidence-informed school a little easier.
In that vein, this book has three parts. In Part 1, I have attempted to summarise 20 of the most seminal pieces of education literature. These are the papers and articles that form the basis of some of the most important ideas in education and the papers referred to when reading about or discussing evidence-informed education again and again. This makes knowing and understanding their content crucial to any evidence-informed teacher or leader. Despite only choosing 20 papers, and despite some of them being summaries of research themselves, they still represent a huge amount of reading. I hope that this part of the book will help you to access them more easily. I should point out here that there is, unavoidably, some repetition in the areas covered by these papers. However, I hope that by presenting each paper separately and in full, readers can gain a clear overview of what each paper includes, and each summary can be used as a standalone resource.Part2 brings together the research on what I believe are six of the most important areas of evidence-informed teaching. The aim here was to summarise the research on each of these aspects as succinctly and accurately as possible,
Introduction xiii xiii allowing readers to gain an in-depth knowledge of the most important elements of each strategy. I have also tried to bridge the gap between evidence and practice by providing practical examples of how these strategies may be implemented in the classroom. I hope that this is useful to both read in full and ‘dip into’ or refer back to when focusing on a strategy in your own teaching or at your own school. It should be noted here that I in no way believe this to be an exhaustive list. There are many other elements of evidence-informed practice that I could have included. I have focused on those that I believe will be important to all teachers in all schools but this does not mean that other aspects are not vitally important.
The final section of the book then looks at how schools can embed evidenceinformed teaching and develop an evidence-informed culture. It begins with an account of the research and literature in this area and then details my school’s journey over the past six years. I have also included case studies from two more school leaders and hope that this will show a range of ways in which schools can reach this goal.