By Jaya Carrier
I hope everyone had a great half term, and that you’re having a good week so far. Given that we are in the thick of GCSE exams, this week, I was interested to see the TES reporting of the findings of research by the Nuffield Foundation about teacher influences on student attainment (specifically GCSE results). Objectives: To understand the influences that teachers have on student attainment. Summary:
- The data for this study was from 14,000 students, in 32 secondary schools
- The study confirms that the classroom practices of teachers do matter and do influence student results. It also shows that the classroom practices vary from subject to subject in terms of their impact.
- For example, in English lessons - facilitating interactions and discussions between students appear to be important to raising test scores
- In Maths lessons - making time for students to practice individually appears to be important in raising test scores
- Teacher ratings were also examined, and the teachers ranked most highly by peers appeared to have the biggest impact on GCSE scores
- The report authors suggest that peer observations of these highly ranked teachers are likely to be helpful in both professional learning and in improving student outcomes
Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:
- What do I notice about my planned classroom activities and their relationship to student attainment? What evidence do I have?
- When was the last time I observed a colleague who is highly rated by students? What did I learn?
- How can I factor in time for observation in T6 of a highly rated colleague?
This is very thought-provoking Jaya, thanks for sharing. It seems so intuitive that "the classroom practices of teachers do matter and do influence student results" but that doesn't make the details easy to pin down! Collaborative reflection and planning time out of class are so scarce in a school like ours so in-class tools like exit formative assessments are vital in helping a teacher gauge the effectiveness of a lesson. With 75 mins per lesson next year, teachers can more easily dedicate 5 mins at the end of each lesson to evaluating it with student feedback.
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that "facilitating interactions and discussions between students appear to be important to raising test scores". Such *active* engagement is a great way to help students learn more deeply, compared to the *passive* engagement of listening to a teacher explain/describe something. With longer lessons, I hope to see teachers allocating more lesson time to such activities.