Autumn 2007

Early childhood education & care

Effective teaching

Bill Louden describes one way of estimating effectiveness in teacher practice in the first two years of formal schooling, that will make the most difference to how much or little young children learn about literacy.

As any primary school principal will tell you, parents have strong views about who is the ‘best’ preschool or year 1 teacher in their school—and they often work hard to get their child into that class. Teachers also have strong private views about which of their colleagues’ classes they would prefer for their own children and grandchildren. But as a profession, teachers have been resistant to attempts to compare or evaluate the quality of teachers’ work.

One of the reasons for this reticence is that there are many goals of education. Take, for example, the Adelaide Declaration on the national goals of schooling. The Declaration identifies goals such as problem-solving ability, self-confidence, ethical decision making and active citizenship, alongside skills and understandings in key learning areas. With so many competing goals, it is not clear which should be given priority in any attempt to observe and measure differences in the quality of teaching. Or to put it another way, in a complex profession, what sorts of effectiveness matter most?

What counts as ‘effective’ in early literacy teaching?

In our work on effective literacy teaching, my colleagues and I have taken the view that growth in children’s literacy skills is one of the most important criteria for effectiveness. During the early years of education, literacy is towards the top of most peoples’ agendas. Most early years teachers put a lot of effort into stimulating children’s interest in learning to read and write and into building the bridge from oral language to written language. For most, a key goal is to produce independent readers, who can move easily from the ‘learning to read’ years to the ‘reading to learn’ years beyond years 2 or 3.

Through our study, we have been trying to work out which of the many things that teachers do in the first two years of formal schooling that are most important in producing high levels of literacy. In the study we called In Teachers’ Hands we have described one way of estimating effectiveness, and described the teaching practices which we think make the most difference to how much or little young children learn about literacy.

There have been many such studies. Most often, they begin with observing teachers who someone recommends to the researchers as ‘expert’ or ‘excellent’. The trouble with this as a starting point is that it tends to reproduce ‘effectiveness’ in terms of the educational fashions of the day. People tend to recommend people whose teaching styles, approaches and beliefs they share.

We have taken a different view. Our starting point has been to characterise effectiveness in terms of children’s growth in literacy over a school year. With funding from the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training under the Grants for National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies and Policies programme, about 2000 children across Australia were assessed one-to-one at the beginning of a school year, and assessed again at the end of a school year. After calculating which classes showed the most growth in literacy scores, we visited ten schools across the range of student growth scores. Teachers were videotaped for several days, and then we coded each part of each lesson in terms of the teaching practices used by the teacher. The observation schedule included the kinds of practices recommended by both the phonics and whole language camps in the ‘reading wars’. Were there observable differences, we wondered, between teachers whose class showed high, average or low growth in literacy?

What did most of the teachers do?

Surprisingly, when we visited our case study classrooms, we found that most teachers were following the same kinds of teaching routines. To a casual observer, looking through a classroom door from the hallway or veranda, there would have been little obvious difference among teachers in high-growth or low-growth classrooms. The same common teaching activities—shared book reading, modelled writing and phonics teaching—were used by most teachers.

Looking closer, using the video and transcript evidence, we found that teachers in high- and low-growth classrooms used these activities in similar ways. Almost all teachers were able to secure high levels of children’s engagement during literacy lessons, they ran classes where the children were clear about the purpose of the activity, they were consistent in their routines and approaches from one day to the next, and they frequently provided children with feedback about their progress.

What did the more effective teachers do?

More effective teachers used the same common activities as other teachers. They were more likely to use some additional activities—such as interactive writing and language experience. More importantly, they had a much wider repertoire of the kinds of deep literacy teaching skills we called ‘teaching practices’. We identified 33 such teaching practices and summarised them into the following six groups of practices: participation, knowledge, differentiation, orchestration, support and respect.

What do the ‘effective’ teachers look like?

When we visited the teachers who we had identified empirically as effective, we were rarely surprised by what we found. They looked to us like the kinds of teachers who parents and other teachers want to teach their children.

Readers can meet some of the teachers through the videos we have posted on the project website: http://inteachershands.education.ecu.edu.au Visitors to the website will see that these teachers were experienced, as well as effective. Most of them had many years of teaching experience and they had used these years to develop strong and subtle teaching repertoires. Many of the effective teachers had worked in a range of specialist and generalist teaching roles. Some had highly specialised training in education support or English as a Second language teaching.

But they were not followers of educational fashion. They did not come down on one side or other of the ‘reading wars’. They had learned from long experience what worked and what did not, and they patiently, persistently and energetically pursued what worked day after day. As one of the teachers, said, ‘I’ve been going in and out of fashion for years’.

Links

To download a paper summarising the report: www.alea.edu.au/AJLL_Oct2005.pdf

To download the full report: www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/profiles/ in_teachers_hands.htm

To view the videos illustrating effective teaching practices: http://inteachershands.education.ecu.edu.au

Bill Louden is dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au