[MUSIC] We are now going to examine in more detail the research evidence on effective teaching. Because it's very important that your professional practice is under pinned by research and evidence rather than fad or fashion or superstition or some form of untested assumptions about teaching. In a previous lecture, I noted research going back some decades that I have been involved with which has examined quality teaching, effective schools, leadership, and so forth. One of the key findings from that work is that effective teachers, faculties, and departments in schools frequently have the central focus on knowing every student as a learner and a person. In addition, leadership plays a key role in those schools. Both leadership in formal positions such as principles and deputy principles and heads of departments, but also teacher leadership. We also noted how teachers' professional learning has a large to a very large effect on student achievement. And finally of course, what we see in those schools and those classrooms, is high quality teaching by high quality teachers. There are some key questions for you at this point to consider. Can we say for example, that every student in your school is known as both a learner and a person? If that's the case, what processes do we use to gain that knowledge? What's our evidence? How do we act on that evidence on student achievement, for example? And are there any implications from your answer? I want to return at this point to the concept of socio-economic status. In an earlier lecture, we mentioned how while it is an influence on student learning, it's a not a life sentence. Socio-economic status and family background each have an effect size of approximately 0.6. In other words, they have a large effect on student learning. We need to distinguish between socio-economic status and family background, because it is possible, for example, to have a very effective family in a low socio-economic status household or school and conversely, we could have in a high socio-economic background, a dysfunctional family. But each of these two things has a large effect on student learning. So, what is socio-economic status about? It is about foundations and advantage. If your parents for example, have regular employments, they've been able to achieve a relatively high level in their schooling, they may be members of a profession, they may have a university degree. They may have money in the bank, all those things would give you an advantage. It's also about opportunity and support, it's about role models and encouragement. Many people would be the first in their families to go beyond a fairly low level of secondary education. In my case, I was the first member of my family to go past year nine at high school. When you don't have that sort of family, cultural background, it can be quite difficult and daunting to move into a new area, and to complete higher levels of education. However, socio-economic status is not about innate ability. It's not about one racial or cultural group being superior or not to another. And it's not about potential. To demonstrate this, I want to use the example of PISA. PISA is the international program on student assessment, and is an international testing regime for 15 year olds in OECD countries. What you see here are the reading scores for Australia, with 200 being a low score, on the vertical axis and 800 being a high score. On the horizontal axis, we see socio-economic status, or SES. With zero being a medianal average SES, 2.5 being high, minus 2.5 being very low socio-economic status. The line that you see on the screen initially shows the relationship between increased reading scores on PISA and increased socio-economic status. However, when we look at those dots that you see across the screen now, they represent individual students. What we see is a great dispersion of student ability within the various sectors. For example, in the low SES schools below minus 1.5, we see much the same sort of distribution of student achievement as we see in higher SES schools. So, while SES is associated with student achievement, it's a very big mistake, For example, to assume that all students in a low SES school or community are low in ability. Plainly, they are not. Likewise, when we look at low student achievement, generally, we can see it spread across the SES spectrum. One of the big mistakes we make in education is to stereotype or stigmatise or draw conclusions about students because of the type of school they're in or the sort of background that they have. The facts are that poor student performance is spread across the SES spectrum. Schooling is something of an obstacle course. Some students have certain advantages, others don't. But the key thing here is while life may not appear to be fair on the surface, good teaching and good schooling are the best opportunities we have to over come the effects of disadvantage. An assumption that's sometimes made is that because this is a low SES school, or these students come from a low SES background, we can't expect too much. In actual fact, our expectations should be equally high, regardless of the type of school, or the type of community background we're talking about. Something we frequently do in teaching and in education is to categorise students. There are reasons for doing this because we want to treat people as members of a group, in some cases. The more able students, for example, or those who may be struggling, but there are dangers in categorising and labeling students. We know that the effects size for categorising students is actually a large one in terms of limiting their achievement. Here's an example for you from England where a school decided to categorise their students on the basis of academic ability. The response to competition from the non-government school sector and from other schools in this case was to divide students into three groups: the most able, those in the middle, and the least able, and give them different school uniforms. You can imagine some of the negative consequences arising from this. This connects with some very important work by a psychologist called Carol Dweck. And she developed what's known as an Entity Theory of Intelligence. There are a number of invalid beliefs that she talks about, including the fact that students with high ability are more likely to display those capabilities in schooling. The answer is no. The second invalid belief is that success in schooling directly fosters mastery-oriented qualities in students. The answer is not always true. A third point is that praise, particularly praising someone's intelligence, encourages them to achieve. Once again, we will see the answer to that question is incorrect. Finally, student's confidence in their own intelligence is a key to mastery or achievement. Once again, we'll see that that is incorrect. So, what do we mean by Entity Theory of Intelligence? Quite simply, if I asked you to complete a task, and you did so successfully, and I said to you, "You must be very bright to be able to solve that problem or to get that answer." That would trigger something in your mind. You would say to yourself, "I'm very bright. I'm very capable." On the other hand if I said to you, "That's a great solution to that problem. You must have worked very hard to find that solution." What you're now getting is a message that effort brings reward. When we say to students that either they are very bright at something or very capable of something or that they can do it, that's a powerful message which stays with people. Entity thinking is about a theory of fixed intelligence, believing that you can or can't do something. Many of you might well have been told early in life that you were no good at music, or languages, or sports, that will stay with you, and it will powerfully constrain your efforts in the future. The group of students who are told that they are good at something, in actual fact, the next time when they're faced by a challenge, they're less likely to take it. Because one of the dangers for them is that they'll be exposed as not being good at something. On the other hand, those students who've got the impression that effort brings reward, are more likely to take risks in their learning, and be open to new opportunities. We call this malleable intelligence or incremental theories of intelligence. [MUSIC] Here's an example for you, of a boy, age 14, who's been able to achieve an enormous amount. He attributes this is not to innate intelligence, entity thinking, but to hard work. Now, what about self esteem? We know from research, that self esteem or self concept, in other words, how we feel about ourselves, how confident we are in our abilities has a fairly significant influence on student learning. The problem here is that because of that relationship, some teachers have made the error of judgement, that if we can boost students self esteem in various ways, that will lead to even higher levels of achievement. The answer to that is actually no. When we boost self-esteem, or attempt to boost self-esteem through things like empty praise, never giving any negative or constructive feedback, giving people an inflated view of their own capabilities, eventually, they'll face the reality that they're actually not as good as they thought they were. And in this particular occasion, their self-esteem or self-concept will take a blow. So, what's the key to this conundrum? The best way to boost self-esteem or self-concept for students, is for them to get regular feedback on their performance that demonstrates that they're actually learning. Feedback that is constructive and assists them to answer that important question, how can I do better? Once this occurs, and students get that regular feedback and they know that they are learning even in small amounts, that will lead to increased self-esteem or self-concept, and that will lead to improvements in learning. Now, one form of categorisation, which is a particular concern is that of learning styles. That is, categorising students on the basis of their supposed learning style, or the style in which they learn best. There are many, many, advocates for this, but when we look at the research, background for this notion, the evidence is actually very, very weak. Most of the publications have not been refereed, not been through a thorough process of validation. But, it's extremely popular. The issue here is that teachers want their students to learn. And we can understand their enthusiasm for what appears to be a way of teaching more effectively. But when the research has been examined in terms of linking a particular learning style with a particular teaching style, it's not been supported. So, what are the problems with learning styles? Well, the first is that there are many, many models. Some of the more popular ones talk about things like kinesthetic learners for example. I've seen schools where students wear a T shirt with a particular letter on there which is supposed to help teachers identify their learning style, and act accordingly, or a different colored hat band. Well, the means we use to categorise students according to their learning styles are flawed in many cases. The decisions to put a student in a particular type of learning style is often quite abitrary. This would not be a concern in itself, except for the harm that can come from this categorisation. Students for example can believe that their abilities in certain areas are limited. And this reinforces what Carol Dweck was talking about with entity thinking. That labelling, the limiting of learning experience has all been found to be quite problematic. And yet learning styles persists as being an approach that supposedly leads to enhanced student outcomes. I've given you some references there you might want to follow up on. Not just for learning styles, but for some other attempts to categorise students. [MUSIC]
