BEING THE BEST TEACHER YOU CAN BE - SOME REFLECTIONS AT THE START OF A NEW TERM

 The Easter break is over, and a new school term lies before you. I always thought of Term 2 as being the consolidation term – the kids have settled into their new school grade; coursework is well-enough advanced for you to draw on what you have already taught them this year rather than wondering about what their last year’s teachers taught them; and by now you have seen enough of them and of their work to have a sense of who they are and of their potential, as well as of their individual needs and how they respond to you as their teacher. They are ready to work – and ready to respond to you as the most effective teacher you can be as they strive to consolidate their new learning since the start of this year.

 But what are the traits that you think define a truly effective teacher? What are the traits your own self-reflection tells you you need to emphasise in your own teaching this term? What qualities do you admire in the acknowledged champion teachers in your school? How will you change what you do this term to be more like them?

 Of course you know as well as I do that the work we do in our profession is intimately, deeply our own. Every day, in every class, we are projecting ourselves as people as much as teachers. Each one of us is an individual. Our teaching is unique; the gifts and talents we show in it are idiosyncratic. No-one can teach exactly like anyone else.

That said, you also understand that being an effective teacher – the best that you can be – involves far more than merely securing for your students high test results or high assessment scores. Being an effective teacher fundamentally is genuinely transformational. It is about making a difference in students’ lives, as Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill explain (in The Research on Life-Changing Teaching, on edutopia.org, 22 March 22).

Asked to describe the traits of a life-changing teacher, their readers said that great teachers make their students feel safe and loved, possess a contagious passion for learning, believe their students can succeed, and always know when to be tough to help students reach their full potential. Terada and Merrill’s report reviewed nearly two dozen studies in a bid to identify what are the fundamental levers that teachers can pull to refine their practices, improve their craft, and make a significant—or even life-altering—contribution to the lives of their students. Becoming a better teacher isn’t just about refining your craft, the authors suggest — it’s also about developing the right tools to shore up your weaknesses and identify your professional blind spots. 

 1. ALWAYS BE COLLECTING (TARGETED) FEEDBACK

Award-winning teachers interviewed in a 2019 study all regularly solicited feedback from their students to identify what they thought was working in their teaching and what wasn’t. Predictably, the feedback raised questions that students had about the material being covered, but Terada and Merrill note that student feedback also teased out valuable, hard-to-spot shortcomings related to how well-organised lessons were, and how easily students could find assignments, grading policies, and other crucial resources.

The authors cite award-winning teachers’ own comments in developing their advice for you. It is suggested you help your students understand their feedback is low-stakes and in it, focus on your own pedagogical practices and not the content. High school physics teacher Christopher Pagan says The purpose of my surveys is to give my students a voice to tell me what changes I can make and what practices I can implement to help them perform better in class. My surveys have nothing to do with my content. There are no questions about physics.

Be open to collegial feedback as well—particularly from someone more experienced than you, the authors advise. They note that colleague feedback contributes a significant effect size of 0.49, making it a more effective professional learning strategy than traditional professional development programs, according to a 2018 study.

Other tips Terada and Merrill offer include:

·      Use student surveys. Assure your students that feedback will be anonymous and use a mix of targeted questions as well as open-ended ones, like “Are assignments clear?” and “What should keep happening in this class?” to quickly hone in on areas to improve.

·      Invite other teachers into your classroom to observe you teach. Ask teachers you admire, and position their visit to your room as being an opportunity to seek advice and collaborate on finding solutions

·      Video yourself. Seeing yourself in action provides an opportunity for reflection: Are you calling on the same students? When are students most attentive? For many years, Macquarie University Education faculty used video to micro-teach, focusing on short, extracted elements of a lesson to identify areas of weakness to which trainee teachers could pay attention as they strove to improve.

2. ATTEND TO RELATIONSHIPS (AND CLASSROOM CULTURE)

In the classroom, as well as in school more broadly, children and young people need a sense of belonging to be productive learners, Linda Darling-Hammond told Edutopia. They need to be connected to their fellow students and their teachers and affirmed in who they are in a way that is positive and accepting. In other words, to be a life-changing teacher, you have to focus on relationships before learning.

Even the simplest efforts can yield meaningful results, Terada and Merrill explain. In a 2018 study they cite, teachers who spent a few minutes greeting kids at the door dramatically improved student attentiveness and reduced misbehaviour—adding as much as an additional hour of student engagement over the course of an instructional day. Meanwhile, a 2019 study found that when teachers used techniques centred on establishing, maintaining, and restoring relationships throughout the year, academic engagement increased by 33 percent and disruptive behaviour decreased by 75 percent.

Other tips Terada and Merrill offer include:

·      Check in daily. In primary classrooms especially, the authors suggest teachers spend 15 minutes on activities that focus on how students are travelling to build the bonds of community and identify kids who are struggling.

·      Conduct formal relationship audits. Consider making an inventory of each student’s interests and personal details, or keep a praise checklist to chart whom you’ve praised in class each day so you can ensure you spread the opportunity for individual recognition as broadly across your class as you can.

·      Be responsive. Allowing your lessons to emerge from the interests of your students can revitalise the class. One teacher told Edutopia that she does student surveys every nine weeks, and when she implements suggestions from their feedback, she lets them know she’s doing this because she has listened to them and heard them and that tells them they matter to her.

3. DON’T GIVE AN INCH ON STANDARDS

Relationships matter—but they’re not a substitute for rigour, Terada and Merrill caution.  In fact, to get the most out of your students, they continue, you’ll need to strike the right balance between caring deeply for kids and exposing them to challenging or even frustrating materials and tasks.

The current assumption is that one can be either a compassionate teacher or a rigorous teacher, but not both—and there’s a belief that kids don’t want rigour, middle school teacher Kristine Napper told the authors, adding that high expectations are effective when you adopt a warm demander approach and work within a student’s zone of proximal development. Good learning depends on a strong relationship between you and your students. When you build strong relationships with your students – which by the start of Term 2 you probably have - you can draw on the trust that your strong relationship embodies to hold them accountable for presenting you with outstanding work. 

The impact of maintaining high academic standards is far-reaching, the authors remind you. In a 2014 study, for example, high school students whose teachers had high expectations were three times more likely to graduate from college than students whose teachers had low expectations—even when student grades were identical. 

Other tips Terada and Merrill offer include:

·      Be direct. Students who received encouraging but aspirational messages from their teachers — I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them — were twice as likely to revise their work, according to a 2014 study.

·      Embrace productive failure. Children and young people learn more from failing than they do from routine success. A 2008 study of 11th graders concluded that challenging problems that resulted in productive failure actually drove deeper learning than simpler, highly scaffolded problems that reliably produced correct answers, Terada and Merrill report. 

·      Avoid busy work and remedial work. Low expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unsurprisingly, when passionate students are repeatedly assigned uninspiring busy work, or worse, remedial work, their spark of interest is snuffed out, and the work leads to an academic dead end.

4. MAKE YOUR CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT ‘INVISIBLE’                           Terada and Merrill repeat an insight from a 2021 study that the best classroom management can feel almost invisible: proactive strategies that emphasize strong relationships are quietly at work behind the scenes, putting a stop to student misbehaviour before it gets started, pointing out that researchers discovered that expert teachers, in particular, possessed a comprehensive understanding of classroom management and its complexity.

The study showed that the most experienced educators conceived of classroom discipline holistically — looking for the root causes of misbehaviour before they considered punishment, prioritizing establishing and maintaining strong student-teacher relationships, and thinking about discipline as a natural extension of the way lessons were organised and executed, or even how the physical environment was arranged. 

Other tips offered by Terada and Merrill include:

·      Pick your battles. Sometimes you have to confront kids, but when you interrupt your lesson to call out every minor disruption, you may unwittingly be giving students the spotlight they crave and reinforcing their misbehaviour. Instead, draw attention to positive behaviour and rely on relationships and lesson engagement to do a lot of the work.

·      Be adaptive. Successful classroom management requires the adaptive application of a repertoire of different strategies, according to a 2021 study cited by the authors, who go on to remind you that what works for one student may not work for another, so consider the right tool for the situation.

·      Involve students in norm-setting. A list of rules of and by itself won’t produce compliance.  Teacher David Tow urges you to consider working together with your students to identify key guidelines—such as being respectful of others — and then reflect on, amend and adjust them where necessary throughout the year.

5. HUMANISE YOUR TEACHING

You can calibrate your bell schedules and arrange your classroom seating immaculately, but it’s the messy emotional worlds of students — their daily ration of hope, fear, sadness, passion, and confidence — that ultimately determines academic readiness, Terada and Merrill assert. Attending to the emotional well-being of kids, then, is just effective academic instruction, they add.

For the authors, it all starts with the little things, from treating kids like people to pulling up a chair and listening to them carefully’. A number of studies suggests that setting aside 5 or 10 minutes in a lesson for student self-reflection — from writing brief essays that allow kids to tackle their school-related anxieties to perspective-taking exercises before a test — can move students along the continuum from belonging, to self-confidence, to academic success. 

Finally, don’t underestimate the role that identity plays in learning. Students are resilient, but peer pressure and academic self-doubt can send them reeling: In a 2021 Scientific American article, researchers concluded that students as young as 7 years old are keenly aware of social reputation and begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others. Terada and Merrill advocate that you give students private channels to seek help and try to reduce the stigma associated with mistakes. Create a culture in your classroom where it is OK to ask questions about content, instructions or other matters.

Other tips offered by Terada and Merrill include:

·      Give grace. If a student misses an assignment, it may be for reasons outside of their control. Retakes let students know that I acknowledge their humanity, that we all have bad days, high school teacher David Cutler avers. 

·      Opt for low-stakes tests. Testing season is misery for many students, driving up stress and interrupting sleep. Frequent, low-stakes quizzes do not imply a reduction of rigour. According to Terada and Merrill, they can be game-changers: They rely on proven learning methods, reduce student anxiety, and dramatically improve retention.

·      Give kids a break. A 2021 study found that during breaks, the brain replays learned material over and over at high speed, compressing and consolidating it. The research strongly endorses more downtime, concluding that wakeful rest plays just as important a role in learning as practice does.

6. CHECK YOUR BIASES

Terada and Merrill then turn to our subconscious biases as a focus for our attention. Bias is sneaky; they warn - it has a way of creeping into spaces we think are airtight. A 2021 German study found that overweight seventh-grade students were more harshly graded in language arts and maths, and a 2011 study concluded that teachers were more likely to perceive shy or quiet children as less intelligent than more exuberant or talkative ones.

Other tips offered by Terada and Merrill include:

·      Use grading rubrics. When rubrics articulate clear standards and are applied rigorously, bias in grading is greatly reduced, a 2020 study found. NSW teachers at least are well-familiar with the stringent requirements regarding rubrics for whole-of-year assessment tasks and in other settings.

·      Get a second opinion. While commonplace in many schools, which recognise the consequent advantages, periodically having other teachers review assessments with you can be very beneficial, especially for the confidence it promotes among students and parents that student work has been judged fairly. Mere awareness that people’s work will be reviewed for bias decreases the level of bias at play, according to David Quinn, a professor of education at the University of Southern California.

7. AUTHENTICITY + PASSION = SUCCESS!

Be yourself. Children – and especially young adults – see through you extremely readily, and deeply mistrust teachers who are not authentic, whom they see as fakes. Holden Caulfield was not the first, and nor will he be the last, adolescent to resent and despise adults who are fakes. Don’t spend time trying to live up to mythical teachers or fall prey to the popular notion that educators are entertainers, the authors counsel. 

In a 2019 interview with Edutopia, Sal Khan, the influential educator and founder of Khan Academy, suggested that teachers make stronger connections to students when they let their quirkiness shine and engage in collaborative, messy learning. A 2017 study meanwhile concluded that students prefer teachers who have an authentic, conversational style—and suggested that when educators are passionate about their material, it inspires their students to invest more time and effort in learning.

Life-changing teachers aren’t just nominally passionate about the subjects they teach, however, the authors conclude. Like talented professionals in any field, they spend time every day honing their craft, whether it’s by reading books and articles, learning from their colleagues, or trying out new ideas.

Other tips offered by Terada and Merrill include:

·      Continually update your knowledge. From learning walks — where groups of teachers visit each other’s classrooms to pick up new ideas — to book clubs,  strive to expand your teaching expertise.

·      Connect to your passions. No matter what subject I’m teaching, I find ways to bring my hobbies into the classroom, writes educator Hubert Ham. For example, I’m a car enthusiast, so when I teach physics, I contextualize concepts with my knowledge about cars. This does wonders for student engagement and relationships, says Ham.

8. CLOSE THE BOOK ON THE DAY

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that teaching is clearly getting harder—too hard, in many cases, the authors concede. In our 2021 research round-up, we reviewed the research and identified an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between teachers’ work and home lives and found that teachers were being asked to adopt new technology without the resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use. They might have added that the pandemic exaggerated this trend, but it was already coming before Covid. Allowing students to contact their teachers via their school email at any hour even on weekends, for instance has meant conscientious teachers have felt they have to be turned on 24/7.

But as Terada and Merrill rightly point out, to educate kids, teachers need a clear end to their work day and time to replenish themselves, and it’s the school systems—not the teachers—that need to adjust accordingly. What else should be done? they ask.

Their research concluded that creating strict school policies that separate work from rest; not demanding the adoption of new tech tools without proper professional learning and supports; distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being; and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start.

But for now, your take-out is to consider the suggestions above as strategies you might adopt to improve your teaching practice and enhance your students’ learning. Not all will suit you. Not all will fit your style. Others may not feel authentic to you. The real benefit of these findings from pedagogical research, though, rests in your own self-reflection, and your own determination this term once again to strive to be the best teacher you can be for your students this term. They deserve nothing less.