Why Parents, Policymakers and Philanthropists Need to Look Elsewhere If We Are to Transform America’s Classrooms

School systems around the world spend billions on education “fixes” that, the evidence shows, are unlikely to deliver the impact that American parents are seeking and that students deserve.
One reason these “fixes” persist is that they are seemingly plausible. For example, take the familiar call for smaller class sizes, where many rigorous studies have found little impact. The explanation for such small gains is found in the messy reality of classrooms and the hard graft of changing teacher practice: In smaller classrooms, most teachers continue to teach in the same way that they always have. It’s simple, really — if you don’t change the pedagogy, you won’t change the learning.
Or take the popular “fix” of increasing school choice and inventing new types of schools. The mistake here is to misunderstand the unit that matters, which is much less the school and much more the classroom. Again, it comes down to the teaching skills and practices that the students experience.
What should we do, and how can we find a way through the forest that almost every intervention in education seems to have some supporting evidence (and a plausible narrative) that it makes a positive difference to student learning?
To answer this question, I used a new method (well, it was new in the 1980s) called meta-analysis, which allows researchers to merge many studies into one big study to estimate the average impact of the intervention in question. Then I went one step further and began synthesizing the meta-analyses.
This synthesis now contains more than 1,200 meta-analyses and 60,000 studies, representing about 250 million students. It allows us to move beyond asking, “what works?” and to start asking the more important question: “What works best?”
My claim is that the greatest influence on student progression in learning is having highly expert teachers and school leaders working together to maximize the effect of their teaching on all pupils in their care. I’ve called this Collaborative Expertise and describe it in more detail in a paper published by Pearson in June entitled “What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise.”
At its heart it involves:

  • Developing and nurturing inspired and passionate teachers who are experts at working out where students are in their learning, delivering multiple learning interventions each with a high probability of success and then re-starting this cycle in light of the impact achieved.
  • Creating a shared understanding of what one year’s worth of student learning should look like, and then getting all adults in the school to work to deliver that for each and every student, irrespective of their different starting points.
  • With that shared understanding in place, going on to create ways for all teachers to come together to share defensible evidence of their impact — and impact is what is important, this isn’t about sharing war stories in the teacher’s lounge.

What’s great about this list is that all of these strategies can begin now; they don’t require any permissions, and they cost relatively little. They are all related to the core of learning and teaching, and this is what we should be talking about even though this does lead into a difficult — but vital — acknowledgment that teachers do vary in their impact on students.
Acknowledging this shouldn’t lead us into the trap of proposing things like teacher performance pay — another topic where it is difficult to find a model that has made much, if any, difference to student learning. A much better approach is increasing the effectiveness of all teachers.
In my work, I have seen the transformational impact that this approach can have. Under the Visible Learning banner, my colleagues and I have worked with schools and teachers across the world to put the theory of collaborative expertise into use. One such school is the Wolford Elementary School in McKinney, Texas.
Students at Wolford Elementary were achieving good results. Despite this, teachers couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t as engaged in their learning as they could be. So they asked students what they thought good learning was all about. To the teachers’ surprise, the majority of pupils associated learning with good behavior in class.
In order to help students grow in autonomy and awareness as learners, school leaders developed a team-based program for teachers. In the teams, educators found a safe place in which to talk and share their expertise, which resulted in the co-design of challenging and engaging lessons using proven instructional practices.  Further, through their work together, the teachers developed a deepened focus on their role as evaluators responsible for constantly assessing their impact on student learning.
Wolford Elementary is a different place today, with the single biggest change being that language and behavior now focuses on learning, as opposed to teaching. Professional conversations abound, and teachers view themselves not as instructors, but as active facilitators of learning. During walkthroughs and classroom observations, school leaders note higher levels of student engagement in learning, and teachers are seen trying out instructional strategies like classroom discussion, reciprocal teaching, concept mapping and worked examples.
There is every reason to believe that if we leave behind the distractors and embrace Collaborative Expertise that we will see the changes in learning that American students deserve. This isn’t calling for some Utopia. It’s about having the courage to dependably recognize the excellence that is around us and building a coalition of success based on this excellence and inviting others to join.
This is where policymakers, parents and philanthropists should devote their energy (and dollars). If they do, the benefits will be manifest, powerful and exciting.
“What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise” by John Hattie is published as part of Open Ideas at Pearson, a series featuring independent insights on the big unanswered questions in education. Click here to find out more.
 
 

Will Bringing Big Data Into the Classroom Help Students Learn Better?

Brad McIlquham was tutoring at-risk youth in Durham, N.C., when a former co-worker gave him the educator’s equivalent of the Social Network pitch. What if, instead of teaching at most 50 kids a year, you could help bring personalized tutoring to 100,000, or a million kids?
McIlquham’s co-worker, Jose Ferreira — who had taught SAT and GMAT prep with McIlquham at Kaplan — was proposing an upending of the traditional “teach to the middle” classroom model. When teachers instruct students of varying ability in the same class, some students get bored, while others struggle. And often, teachers don’t discover which students have failed to understand key concepts until their tests get graded. But by then, they’ve already fallen behind. In the meantime, all the potentially useful data from students’ individual homework assignments, quizzes and textbook exercises — everything but the final grade — disappear into the ether.
Ferreira came up with an idea to capture that data and use it to create digital education tools that help tailor the curriculum to each student as he or she learns — by detecting gaps in knowledge early on, recommending the appropriate exercises to help students acquire skill and alerting teachers when students are struggling. “Our goal is to personalize education,” says McIlquham, now director of academics of the education startup called Knewton that Ferreira founded, “to take educational content and understand not only the ins and outs of that content, but how students interact with it — when students run into difficulties, when they start to forget things — and use it to customize the educational experience.”
Knewton, which launched in 2008, bills itself as an adaptive learning “platform,” a behind-the-scenes service that schools can use to personalize their existing digital coursework. Assisted by Knewton, schools can monitor students’ progress as they work through lessons and make sure students are grasping the material before moving on. In its early years, Knewton was designing its own digital coursework. But since 2011, it has partnered with the textbook publishing company Pearson, combining its analytics tools with that company’s educational material; and last summer Knewton announced a similar partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishing company. So far, Knewton’s also received $105 million in funding from Pearson and a collection of venture capital firms.
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Knewton didn’t invent adaptive learning: There are a lot of digital education tools that tailor coursework to individual students, giving them more difficult problems as they get better at solving them, for example. The technology has become increasingly popular with the growth of the “flipped classroom,” a way of organizing courses so that students watch video lectures and do reading at home, then do coursework and exercises in class, where teachers are there to help them.
Knewton brings advanced data analysis to this model, looking at factors like how much time students spend on specific questions and whether they consistently fall for certain false answers. “This shows a misconception, that they’re thinking about a concept in the wrong way,” McIlquham says. It’s something that might be easy to fix, but would be difficult to detect from looking at the results of a single test.
McIlquham emphasizes that this kind of adaptive process is a boon to teachers as well as to students, giving them new insight into what lessons are working, what concepts need to be revisited and which students are falling behind. “Teachers will be so much better equipped when they walk into the classroom,” he says.
As Knewton gathers more and more data, McIlquham says, it will also be able to figure out patterns in learning, drawing connections between certain types of students and what learning methods work best for them — a sort of Netflix-style “people who did well with this exercise also did well with this” recommendation engine. “If you’re a similar student and you struggled with something I struggled with, we can see that if I learned it the same way, data suggests you’ll learn well that way too,” explains McIlquham.
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Knewton will have a lot of data to work with. Through its partnerships with Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it is now “powering” interactive education programs for 3 million students, and will reach up to 10 million by the end of 2014, from kindergarten all the way through college.
Mcllquham envisions an educational system where grade levels and semesters fall away, and students progress at their own pace, learning key concepts in small groups with help from a teacher. One of Knewton’s earliest test programs involved remedial math students at Arizona State University, which contracted with Knewton in 2011 to design an adaptive math program. ASU had a dropout problem. Some of its remedial students had been away from school for 10 years and needed a quick refresher, while others had never received basic math education in the first place. When these students were dumped into the same classroom, few received the right kind of instruction and many dropped out.
Knewton’s program let more advanced students skip concepts they already understood and focus on ones they didn’t, while an instructor went from student to student giving individual help. Initial figures from Knewton’s adaptive program at ASU showed that withdrawal rates dropped by half after two semesters and the proportion of students getting passing grades rose from 64 percent to 75 percent. Almost half the students finished their classes four weeks early. McIlquham says this sort of variable pacing and small-group instruction could become the norm.
Some observers have pointed out that while go-at-your-own-pace learning works well for some students, it can allow less motivated students to fall far behind. There are also questions about whether adaptive learning can extend beyond basic introductory classes, and whether it would work with less quantifiable, more intuitive subject matter, like literature and philosophy.
McIlquham thinks that adaptive education will free up teachers in any setting for more one-on-one instruction with students, and help them figure out which students need special attention. “Teachers are going to have so much more relevant information about their classes available to them,” says McIlquham. “As a teacher myself I’m excited about that. I’m much happier working with students on problem solving, critical thinking and issues they’re having, than standing up in front of a class and lecturing as if they’re all the same student.”
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