By Jaya Carrier
I hope everyone has had a great week so far! For this week’s bitesize research, I was interested in looking at a study by Song et. al published in March 2021 in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness which looked at teacher professional learning in relation to teachers gaining feedback about their practice. It also looked at impacts on student achievement. This was a large-scale, randomised trial that took place over two years in the US with middle schools. Objectives:
To understand - 1) the impact of giving teachers feedback and facilitating discussion on their practice following observation of that teacher’s practice 2) the impact of working with teachers to look at student achievement in comparison to similar students in similar areas Summary:
The key overall themes are:
- There was a significant improvement in classroom practice following classroom observations, discussions and feedback
- There was a very small improvement in student achievement
How does this impact me and my practice?:
Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:
- When I’ve been observed and have taken part in discussions about the observation, what did I do to ensure I made the most this powerful tool?
- What characterises the feedback have I found helpful for my practice?
- How often am I observing the practice of others and offering feedback to support their improvement?
- With respect to student achievement, comparing student achievement to those in similar schools and with similar backgrounds is something that previously we were able to do with Progress 8 results. Without this metric being available due to the changes to the examinations in 2020 and 2021, what other opportunities can I take to engage in this kind of analysis of student achievement?
If you would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.
Thank you Jaya. I'm loving the openness with which classroom practice is being discussed at WA. It occurs to me reading this blog post that observation feedback may be effective simply because it promotes purposeful reflection on the part of the observed teacher? (See for example: https://hbr.org/2017/09/how-to-regain-the-lost-art-of-reflection)
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