why kids should grade teachers

Next week my first-year biology students will be doing an appraisal of this semester’s paper, & of those academic staff involved in teaching it. They’re asked about the perceived difficulty of the paper, the amount of work they’re expected to do for it, whether they’ve been intellectually stimulated, the amount of feedback they receive on their work, how approachable staff are, & much else besides. (The feedback one was always my worst scoring attribute – until I asked the students what they thought ‘feedback’ met. It turned out that they felt this described one-to-one verbal communication. We had a discussion about all the other ways in which staff can give feedback – & the scores went up.) The results are always extremely useful, as not only to we find out what’s working, but we also discover what’s not (or at least, what the students perceive as not working) & so may need further attention.

Anyway, my friend Annette has just drawn my attention to a lengthy post in The Atlantic, by Amanda Ridley. It made fascinating reading.

In towns around the country this past school year, a quarter-million students took a special survey designed to capture what they thought of their teachers and their classroom culture. Unlike the vast majority of surveys in human history, this one had been carefully field-tested. That research had shown something remarkable: if you asked kids the right questions, they could identify, with uncanny accuracy, their most – and least – effective teachers.

Ridley, reporting for the Atlantic, was able to follow a 4-month pilot project that was run in 6 schools in the District of Colombia. She notes that about half the states in the US use student test data to evaluate how teachers are doing.

Now, this approach is fraught with difficulty. It doesn’t tell you why children aren’t learning something, for example (or why they do, which is just as interesting). And it puts huge pressure on teachers to ‘teach to the test’ (although Ridley says that in fact “most [American] teachers still do not teach the subjects or grade levels covered by mandatory standardized tests”). It ignores the fact that student learning success can be influenced by a wide range of factors, some of which are outside the schools’ control. (And it makes me wonder how I’d have done, back when I was teaching a high school ‘home room’ class in Palmerston North. Those students made a fair bit of progress, and we all learned a lot, but they would likely not have done too well on a standardised test of academic learning, applied across the board in the way that National Standards are now.)

So, the survey. It grew out of a project on effective teaching funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which found that the top 5 questions – in terms of correlation with student learning – were

1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

and the version used with high school students in the survey Ridley writes about contained 127 questions. That sounds an awful lot, to me, but apparently most kids soldiered on & answered them all. Nor did they simply choose the same answer for each & every question, or try to skew the results:

Students who don’t read the questions might give the same response to every item. But when Ferguson [one of the researchers] recently examined 199,000 surveys, he found that less than one-half of 1 percent of students did so in the first 10 questions. Kids, he believes, find the questions interesting, so they tend to pay attention. And the ‘right’ answer is not always apparent, so even kids who want to skew the results would not necessarily know how to do it.

OK – kids (asked the right questions) can indicate is a good, effective teacher. What use is made of these results, in the US? The researchers say that they shouldn’t be given too much weighting, in assessing teachers – 20-30% – & only after multiple runs through the instrument, though at present few schools actually use them that way. This is important – no appraisal system should rely on just one tool.

That’s only part of it, of course, because the results are sent through to teachers themselves, just as I get appraisal results back each semester. So the potential’s there for the survey results to provide the basis of considerable reflective learning, given the desire to do so, & time to do it in. Yet only 1/3 of teachers involved in this project even looked at them.

This is a problem in the NZ tertiary system too, & I know it’s something that staff in our own Teaching Development Unit grapple with. Is it the way the results are presented? Would it be useful to be given a summary with key findings highlighted? Do we need a guide in how to interpret them? Do people avoid possibly being upset by the personal comments that can creep into responses (something that can be avoided/minimised by explaining in advance the value of constructive criticism – and by being seen to pay attention to what students have to say)?

Overall, this is an interesting study & one whose results may well inform our own continuing debate on how best to identify excellent teaching practice. What we need to avoid is wholesale duplication and implementation in our own school system without first considering what such surveys can & can’t tell us, and how they may be incorporated as one part of a reliable, transparent system of professional development and goal-setting. And that, of course, is going to require discussion with and support from all parties concerned - not implementation from above.

sending mixed messages

I attended a presentation today that just didn’t sound right. It was one of several about teaching and learning, & I’m afraid that if I’d been doing a formal appraisal I’d have marked it down.

Why? Well, for starters the presenter seemed a bit confused about IP & copyright. (OK, they had a fairly jokey way of presenting that could have clouded things, but still…) Students’ work is their own, it doesn’t ‘belong’ to the institution or the teacher. This means that if you’re going to make it available to subsequent classes as, say, an exemplar, then you really do need to make sure you get their written permission for this. This, of course, opens a whole new can of worms, & the wriggling is due to the power imbalance that exists in any classroom.

By which I mean that students may feel that they can’t really refuse a request such as the one I’ve mentioned. They may not actually want it to happen, but their response is always going to be tempered by the awareness that the person doing the asking is also the person doing the assessment of their performance. This shouldn’t matter – but the student may still worry about it. (This is why, when we get a paper & teaching appraisal done, the lecturers never get the original handwritten responses back until after the semester’s grades have been finalised – just in case they recognise the writing, or can in some other way identify the respondent: it protects the student.) If I was in this position, I’d be waiting to ask about using their work until after I’d finished teaching (& assessing) them. And maybe that’s what happened, but it wasn’t made clear.

The other thing that bugged me a bit was how the students were presented almost as acting as research assistants – unknowing aides, in that their projects could be mined for useful information that would inform future lectures. OK, from time to time (actually, reasonably often, & it’s one of the things I enjoy about teaching as it creates the opportunity to model how scientists think) my students will ask a question I can’t answer, or tell me about something I’ve not heard of before. In the former, I’ll find out the answer & let them know in a subsequent class (that’s how I learned about s*x determination in mosses, for example), & maybe incorporate what I’ve learned in next year’s lectures; in the latter – well, I’ll probably go & check it up. But that’s not the same as regularly ‘mining’ information to use in future classes.  Especially if the students aren’t aware that someone’s doing it, but even if they do know – well, should they be acting as unpaid research assistants? It comes back to that power imbalance thing again :(

Jokey or not, that presentation wasn’t my style.

falling numbers in physics – what do teachers think?

A topic that gets quite a frequent airing in our tearoom is the decline in the number of students taking physics. This issue isn’t peculiar to my institution – a quick look at the literature indicates that it’s a global problem**. The question is, what can be done about this? It’s a question that Pey-Tee Oon & R.Subramaniam (2010) set out to answer.

They identified (from the science education literature) several reasons why students don’t like physics: it’s perceived as boring, with signficant mathematical demands; the passive teaching methods used in many classrooms are off-putting; and the curriculum is crowded. They also noted that teachers‘ perceptions  are important as they can affect students’ subject choices, and so they sought the help of physics teachers in Singaporean secondary schools, noting that

[physics] teachers are in a position to this debate [around declining interest in studying physics at university] as the intent to study or not to study physics is made by students at the school level – the influence of physics teachers on students taking physics cannot thus be underestimated.

In addition to collecting data on teaching experience and educational background, Oon & Subramaniam asked the teachers (all 166 of them) for suggestions on how this might be turned around:

Suggest one way in which more students can be encouraged to study physics at the university.

Several key points came up again and again in the teachers’ responses to that open-ended question: reviewing the current school physics curriculum, “making the teaching of physics fun”, improving graduates’ career prospects, publicising career opportunities, and running enrichment programs.

Now, the NZ physics curriculum was recently redeveloped, as part of the rewriting of the National Curriculum document; more recently, the Achievement Standards were rewritten to align them more closely with that document. So, if that redeveloped curriculum doesn’t “go beyond the classical topics and include more modern topics which are related to current applications” (& Marcus can probably give more informed comment on that than I can), then we may have missed the boat on that one. Of course, the teachers’ suggestion that more modern topics be included means that – when we do get the chance to spring-clean – that it may be necessary to drop some ‘traditional’ content. Otherwise we’d simply be cramming the curriculum ever fuller – and the perception of an overloaded curriculum can make the subject seem more difficult (a problem that Biology shares), and which other research has found to be a definite turn-off for students. There’s also the ‘fun’ aspect to consider – how do we address that?

It’s hard to see how the universities can improve physics graduates’ career prospects (something that probably needs a push at government level, if the government of the day is serious about the importance of studying the sciences) but we can certainly help to promote those options that are available. Among other suggestions, the teachers thought that the following could help: careers talks emphasising the value of physics, roadshows fronted by high-profile research scientists, better marketing by university physics departments, and enhanced career guidance (at both secondary and tertiary level). On the career front, Oon & Subramaniam point out that “Wall Street has a high concentration of physicists”, which suggests that career opportunities are more diverse than many students might think.

As for physics enrichment programs – again, a significant majority of the teachers surveyed felt that the following steps would be valuable:

• creating opportunities for physics researchers and lecturers to go into schools to promote the subject;
• running workshops in schools to raise awareness of the importance of this subject;
• offering ‘popular’ physics seminars;
• running on-campus physics enrichment camps;
• and developing outreach programs supporting and promoting physics.

The teachers felt that university-level teaching also needs a review (ie, the problem of declining enrolments won’t be solved solely by changes in & support for physics teaching in schools):

One of the most striking findings from this study is the urge by teachers for a rebranding of the university physcis curriculum. Creating innovative interdisciplinary programs at the undergraduate level – for example, marrying physics with other disciplines (eg, finance, management etc) to meet the growing needs of current market demand, deserves consideration… For example, students can gain scientific training in physics and technical skills in finance if physics is integrated with finance… It is a win-win solution with minimum sacrifice… [that] will not only increase the employability of physics graduates but will also further the attractiveness of undergraduate physics programs.

The researchers note that such interdisciplinary programs are already being offered at some overseas instititutions, and certainly we are beginning to see an increasing emphasis here in New Zealand on the value of interdisciplinarity.

Oon & Subramaniam have definitely provided some food for thought. And given the nature of the problem, perhaps it’s time for physicists around New Zealand to work together to address it?

P-T Oon & R.Subramaniam (2010) Views of physics teachers on how to address the declining enrolment in physics at the university level. Research in Science and Technological Education 28(3): 277-289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2010.501749

** Having said that, Michael Edmonds has just drawn my attention to this talk (shown on Youtube) by UK physicist, Professor Brian Cox.

charter schools (from letters to the editor)

Usually when I choose to base a post on the ‘letters’ section of a newspaper, it’s because something that someone’s written has rather got my goat. This time - this time, it’s because I agree with the sentiments & feel they warrant a wider audience & further analysis.

The Government wants to introduce charter schools, apparently, to solve issues of under achievement. It points to students failing to achieve NCEA Level 2 as justification for this policy. In fact, if the Government actually bothered to look at NCEA data, it would see that pass rates have been rising over the past decade, something achieved without charter schools.

And in fact, the NZ Herald ran a story on this in early 2011.

Studies clearly show that the most effective way to assist schools to lift achievement levels is employing trained teachers and providing quality professional development. Charter schools can employ untrained teachers and the Government has cut funding for much of the professional development it offered.

As I’ve said previously, it’s hard to see how using untrained teachers is going to improve teacher quality.

New Zealand has a very good education system. In countries with poorer education systems than ours, with greater academic under achievement, charter schools have failed to make any significant improvement to under achievement. So, if the Government wants to make a dent in education under achievement, why import policies that have failed overseas. Failure simply replicates failure.

The evidence on success (or otherwise) of charter schools is mixed. In some US states, for example, they seem to have a marked positive effect on learning outcomes for their students. In others, not so much. We’re told that in NZ, charter – sorry, ‘partnership’ – schools will be run following best overseas practice; it would be useful to hear more about what that will entail, sooner rather than later.

In that last post, I also expressed concern about the potential for charter schools – which, let us remember, will be state-funded – to include subjects such as creationism in their curricula. A ‘Stuff’ piece by Kelsey Fletcher expands on this, describing the intention of one group keen to run a charter school to use the ‘In God’s Word’ philosophy (something that would somehow still be able to be ‘marked’ against the Cambridge curriculum – presumably only if the evolutionary underpinnings of the biology curriculum component are ignored). Associate Education Minister, John Banks, tells us we don’t need to worry (the following is from the ‘Stuff’ item):

John Banks said the ministry had received a lot of correspondence, including complaints about public funding of faith-based education. He would not comment on the trust’s charter plans. “There’s no proposed partnership to consider, because we haven’t received any formal applications, and none have been called for,” Banks said. “The first schools open in 2014, and expressions of interest will be called for next year.”

I would feel more sanguine about this whole process if the nature of charter schools, and what they can and cannot offer in their curriculum, was set out clearly well in advance. Finding out after the event is not an appropriate option.

 

academic olympics fail to gain government support

This is a guest post – I’m running it on behalf of my friend & colleague Dr Angela Sharples.  Angela is the current chair of OlympiaNZ (the umbrella organisation for the various NZ Olympiad committees) and leads NZ International Biology Olympiad. She received the Prime Minister’s Science Teacher Award in 2011. I completely agree with her comments; like her, this is an issue I have very strong feelings about & I believe her comments deserve a wider audience. (Cross-posting from SciblogsNZ.)

At a time when we celebrate all things sporting we should reflect on our attitudes towards success in all forms of endeavour in New Zealand. The Olympics showcase the world’s best in sporting endeavour and we rightly look up to these elite athletes and admire the effort and dedication it took for each and every one of these athletes to reach the top of their field. The personal attributes required for them to even participate at the Olympics are transferable to all areas of performance in life and so we celebrate these athletes, admire them and aspire to like them. They are role models that encourage younger athletes from primary school to university level to participate in the sport of their choice and to dream that with hard work and dedication they too may reach Olympic level.

The government recognises this social benefit of elite sports and funds it accordingly, through SPARC and the high performance programmes. They have their eye on the long term benefits that participation in sport at the elite level provides to the wider New Zealand community. The government also recognises that New Zealand must foster innovation through a responsive, high performance education system if New Zealand is to remain globally competitive in a rapidly changing world.  Unfortunately, whilst the government has
published any number of reports on the importance of Science and innovation in New Zealand we see very little action on establishing and supporting programmes which foster such excellence.

Just last week, the New Zealand International Biology Olympiad withdrew from hosting the International Biology Olympiad here in New Zealand in July 2014. This prestigious international event challenges and inspires the brightest young secondary school students from 60 countries (and the number of member countries continues to grow) to deepen their understanding of biology and promotes a career in science. The focus is on the importance of biology for society, especially in areas such as biotech, agriculture and horticulture, environmental protection and biodiversity. These are all areas of academic endeavour crucial for New Zealand’s economic success in the future. Hosting this event in New Zealand was a chance to showcase our innovative education system and biological research to some of the world’s top academics and to inspire our own students to develop the dedication and put in the sheer hard work required to reach this highest level of academic endeavour. It is an opportunity lost!

Unlike our sporting Olympians our academic Olympians receive little support from the government and even less acknowledgement and celebration of their success. New Zealand has performed outstandingly well in the International competitions since we first competed in 2005, winning 16 Bronze medals, 7 Silver and 1 Gold Medal. These high performing students are New Zealand’s economic future and yet few in the country are even aware of their achievement.

Until we apply the same high performance strategies to our science and innovation system in New Zealand that we utilise in sports we will continue to talk about the importance of fostering excellence in science and innovation whilst we watch our competitors on the global stage outperform us. And we will continue to lose our best young minds to countries where their contribution is valued.

more on accreditation

I spent some time recently in an interesting discussion around the question of whether tertiary teachers should be required to complete some form of national accreditation. Now, many – but by no means all! – institutions do already have something like this available for their staff, albeit that take-up is essentially voluntary. What would happen to these in-house programs, we wondered, in the event of such a national qualification becoming the norm? Would the individual organisations stop running their own systems? – a pity, in many ways, as these are likely tailored to the needs of their own staff and students. There’s also the issue of portability: whether the putative national qualification would be portable, between institutions and between countries. If this could be guaranteed, then why would teachers bother with the in-house model? This would be a negative result overall, as it would then remove any need for an individual institution to develop and maintain its own programs for its own staff.

We also wondered what form accreditation – accreditation, not a qualification - should take. Teaching excellence is not a static thing: the best teachers are always reviewing, reflecting on, revising and enhancing their practice. A qualification based on examinations are not going to adequately measure these attributes. Far better, we thought, to go with portfoliosmeasured by portfolio of work. This would be a living document as the individual’s practice should be constantly self-reviewed & enhanced, a process reflected in the portfolio.

Part of the discussion hinged on just how you define ‘excellence’. We were all Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award winners, so you’d think we’d know, wouldn’t you? But we’re all excellent at different things, so a definition proved hard to pin down. Can we define ‘excellence’ a la John Hattie’s work on secondary teaching? Possibly. Well, maybe not ‘define’, but we could certainly give examples of excellence from the portfolios of previous TTEA awardees.  could then act as basis of any form of professional development. In fact, you could argue that those awardees show something called ‘positive deviance‘ – and in this instance ‘deviance’ is something to aspire to!

So maybe accreditation would be based on a portfolio – a ‘living’ document – demonstrating someone’s ongoing professional & personal development, & built around a clearly explained concept of ‘excellence’ as it applies to facilitating students’ learning (& helping others to do the same)? Something to be think about, anyway.

quality counts – except when it doesn’t

A few weeks ago, writing about the ‘great class size debate’ that we have been having in New Zealand, I also touched on the question of quality teaching. There’s no question – at least, there shouldn’t be – that children deserve the best possible learning experiences, and one of the requirements for that is quality teaching by excellent, expert teachers. It’s quite tricky to pin down just what defines that excellence, but at least our current system of state sector teacher training and subsequent registration goes some way to ensuring that the people teaching our youngsters have been trained in how to go about the multitude of tasks that teachers encounter every day: planning, classroom management, assessment, pastoral care & general admin, and have gained experience in said tasks…. (and that’s before we even get to the actual teaching!).

But a couple of days ago, Minister of Education Hekia Parata & Act MP John Banks announced that charter schools – oops, sorry, ‘partnership schools’ – would be able to employ at least some non-registered teachers, along with setting their own curricula & deciding on things like the length of the school day, term dates, & teacher pay rates. This is strange – to say the least! – following as it does on a recent meeting of the Ministerial Cross-Sector Forum on Raising achievement, which “discussed… improving teaching practice with a focus on priority learners.” As well that discussion, the meeting heard from the Chief Education Review Officer, who

presented the latest Education Review Office findings on how to raise the quality of practice in New Zealand Schools.

His remarks focused on three dimensions: assessment for learning; student centred learning; and responsive school level curriculum.

Minister Parata, who chairs the Forum, commented that

The Forum will continue to discuss ideas around how we can achieve quality teaching practice.

It’s not exactly clear how allowing charter schools to use some unspecified proportion of non-registered teachers will achieve this. Concepts and practices related to assessment for learning and student-centred learning are best acquired before arrival in the classroom, not on a learn-as-you-go-when-you get-there basis. (Yes, state schools can already employ non-registered staff, under a ‘limited authority to teach’ provision, but that’s temporary and for a limited period.)

Some real contradictions here…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The freedom of charter schools to set their own curriculum also concerns me somewhat. We already have ‘special character’ schools which teach creationism in their classrooms, for example (see here, here, andhere, for starters). It is rather irking to gain the impression that state funding could support the same in charter schools – and to date I’ve heard nothing to say this will not be possible.

writing rubrics shouldn’t be an imposition

I had an interesting conversation with a couple of colleagues yesterday, concerning the value of rubrics. I write them routinely (must be my background as an examiner at the national level), but my friends really didn’t seem to see the point. ‘You just get a feel for what’s a good essay & a bad one,’ they said, ‘and anyway we don’t have time to write a whole bunch of model answers; it’s quicker just to get in there & start marking. Besides, you can never include every possible answer. ‘ ‘And,’ they said – we were talking about rubrics for someone else to use in marking – ‘it’s far more consistent just to do it all yourself.’

I do agree that some essays spring out as being absolutely wonderful (the very first exam script I marked yesterday was a case in point: a beautifully-constructed answer to a ‘design-a-plant’ question) while occasionally you’ll also come across one that makes you feel like banging your head on the desk. But how can you be sure that you’re treating them consistently? After all, with a big class you’ll likely be marking exam scripts for several days, & your concentration & energy levels are going to vary over that time! Constructing a marking rubric before beginning the marking task will help with that.

It doesn’t have to take a heap of time either, because a rubric is most definitely not a detailed model answer. (I’ve copy-pasted one of my own from last year’s ‘cellular & molecular biology’ final exam – itself adapted from an earlier Schol Bio exam – at the bottom of this post **.) The ones I use identify the key concepts/ideas that I’m looking for, plus usually a non-exclusive list of possible examples, & the mark weighting. I’ll often change them when I’m actually doing the marking, if students are writing good answers that include options I hadn’t considered (yes, it happens!). If my team’s marking term essays, then such changes are made in consultation – something that helps ensure consistency across markers. Moderation helps there, too – check-marking a couple of papers from each of the top, middle, & bottom cohorts will quickly show if another team member’s marking is consistent with mine.

And that ability to ensure consistency is important – not only so that students can be sure that their work has been marked fairly and well, but also so that if an individual’s marking is ever questioned (let’s say, for example, that a student’s not happy with their final grade & opts for a re-mark of their year’s work), then the rubrics can be made available to a new marker to use.

I should add that, when I set the term essay questions (which I really must do Very Soon Indeed), I write the rubrics at the same time & both are available to students from the beginning of the semester.You might ask, why? And I’d say, why not? Having a good rubric to hand helps the students in so many ways, in terms of learning how to structure an essay & an argument, & also in learning some of those key critical thinking skills: they need to assess the information they’re gathering & decide what’s relevant & what’s not, & how to pull it all together. The last thing I want to be reading is a series of brain dumps, where a student’s simply written everything they know in a rather incoherent manner. Nor do I have time to help each individual student who does that sort of thing – & we used to see quite a few, before I started using rubrics in this way. Providing a marking scheme in advance saves both parties time & helps the students acquire some desirable skills. (The old adage about leading horses to water still applies, alas!)

I hasten to add that the essay rubrics don’t include information on content in the way that an exam marking rubric does! I’ve added an essay example below as well ***, so you can compare the two :-)

 

**Final exam question & rubric

Mammoths are closely related genetically to African elephants and similar to them in body mass. Although mammoths became extinct around 20,000 years ago, a number of individuals have been found frozen in the Arctic permafrost. Some scientists believe that it is technically possible to clone mammoths from cells in these frozen bodies, thus ‘bringing mammoths back to life’ and producing a self-sustaining wild population.

Describe how this cloning could be done – including identifying a likely species to provide surrogate mothers – and discuss the genetic and evolutionary issues associated with such work. You could consider the impact of genetic drift, inbreeding and inbreeding depression on such a population of mammoths, and their long-term prospects for survival.

Describe how cloning could be done: Basic description of method (3 mks) Identifies African elephant as likely surrogate (1 mk) Explains reason for this choice (2 mks)	6
Genetic drift Gives definition (2) Describes impact on population gene pool (2)	4
Inbreeding Gives definition (2) Describes impact on population gene pool (2)	4
Inbreeding depression Gives definition	2
For all three of the above, Discusses impact on population’s prospects for long-term survival from a genetic perspective. Could include eg effects of decline in heterozygosity, decreased ability to respond to evolution of pathogens/parasites, decreased fecundity	4

***Term essay question & rubric

On the basis of fossil remains, Neanderthals are viewed as a sister species to Homo sapiens. Now new data from molecular biology are changing our understanding of human evolution.

Discuss the validity of the biological species concept in the light of recent molecular data from sapiens, neandertalensis, and the Denisova hominins.

 

Introduction – should include a definition of the biological species concept, and the nature of ‘sister species’.	/4
Briefly explain why Neandertals and modern humans have previously been viewed as sister species. How does this relate to the ‘out-of-Africa’ hypothesis for modern human origins?	/3 /2 /5
Outline the results of comparing neandertalensis and sapiens genomes, and the implications of these results.   What is the significance of the Denisova remains? (This should refer to the DNA analyses and their results.)	/3 /2 /5
How well does the biological species concept apply to Neandertals and modern humans, in the light of these findings? What are the implications for the ‘out-of-Africa’ hypothesis?	/6
Mark for content of essay	/20

thinking about academic reviews

In a couple of months I’m going to be involved in a review of another institution’s academic programs. So, as you might expect, the subject of reviews has been much in my mind, & it came up again yesterday when I was discussing paper content with a couple of colleagues.We were talking about a 3rd-year paper where, as it turns out, about half the class doesn’t have any formal background in a particular topic. (We will so not go into the ‘whys’ of this at the present point in time, but they have to do with alternate routes into & through a program.) This places obvious constraints on what the lecturer for this topic can actually cover, & they give a ‘review’ session at the start to try & cover the basics – really helpful for the ‘newbies’, and a quick refresher won’t do any harm to those who have encountered the material previously, either. But it also begs the question: how do we do our best to ensure that all students in that paper will have had previous exposure to some of the relevant concepts, albeit at a lower conceptual level?

And the obvious answer is, the program that this paper’s part of needs a review of its own. If a particular set of concepts are deemed important in developing a student’s understanding of the topic/subject, discipline, then we need to make sure that they’re introduced and then regularly reinforced – at progressively higher levels – as students progress through that program. And we need to look at where that information would be most apt.

As an example, let’s take part of the content I’ll be helping students to master next semester: the ideas around the Hardy-Weinberg equations. (These allow you to calculate allele and genotype frequencies in a population, given a set of assumptions about that population, & so to determine if it’s undergoing evolutionary change.) None of my first-years will have encountered this material before, so I give a broad-brush introduction & explain why the H-W equations are useful in population genetics, & that anyone intending to go on in ecology is going to encounter them again at third-year.

Which is fine, but then as a result of that inital conversation I sat down & had a think about where & when that particular set of concepts is going to be reinforced & further developed. I know that the lectures at 3rd-year are much higher-level than those I deliver, so what’s the link, the progression, between the two? Is the best place our second-year evolution paper? Probably not, as not everyone in that paper will have taken the first-year paper I’m about to teach. (So should we make it a compulsory prerequisite? I’m not convinced, as that would close off access to people with only the one biology paper but a keen interest in the history & evolution of life on earth, & I believe that would be a Bad Thing.) What ab0ut the second-year ecology paper? This is the most logical place to do that progressive build on the first-year intro, & it would segue well into the 3rd-year paper. H-W gets a mention there, but is it enough to further scaffold students into the requirements of the following year’s paper? And if the answer is ‘no’, then how do we address it – without impacting on the students’ acquisition of all the other relevant material???

I feel another review coming on…

the great class-size debate

Here in New Zealand, the compulsory education sector has recently received a lot of media & political attention (see here & here, for example), culminating in the reversal of a Ministerial decision to change pupil-teacher ratios in our primary, intermediate & secondary schools. Part of the money ‘saved’ by this move was to have gone towards improving teacher quality, a praiseworthy goal but one that so far lacks any clear mechanisms to support it (apart from a Ministry of Education statement that “[r]aising the quality of teaching will be helped by attracting higher quality applicants, raising the entry criteria for becoming a teacher and improving the quality of programmes of learning in ITE [Initial Teacher Education].”

Like most educators I know, I was concerned at the now-reversed proposal, for a number of reasons.

First up: the cuts in teacher numbers would have impacted hardest on intermediate schools with technology units – units offering technology classes both to their own students & in many cases to students from smaller ‘client’ schools. These classes give students the opportunity for a range of hands-on experiences – including science-based experiences – that they’d otherwise miss out on. At a time when primary schools have been reproached because many pupils miss out on quality learning in science, it did seem strange to put intermediate schools into a similar position by incorporating technology staffing for students in years 7 & 8 (the ‘intermediate’ years in NZ) into the curriculum staffing rations for years 2-10, with the end result that some schools stood to lose several teachers in this important learning area.

Secondly, part of the rationale for raising pupil-teacher ratios at all – and I recognise that for many schools there would probably have been little change – seems to have been the idea that class size doesn’t matter; that ‘teacher quality’ (however it’s defined) is more important. However, it’s clear from meta-analyses carried out by Prof John Hattie (then at the University of Auckland) that smaller classes do see appreciable changes in “[a]chievement, attitude, teacher morale and student satisfaction” – in classes of 10-15 students, with little effect when class sizes change from around 40 to 20. This was the case across all subjects & levels of student ability, in both primary & secondary schools. And it’s likely that one of the key factors involved in these improvements is time: the fact that in smaller classes teachers have the opportunity to spend more time with each individual student, providing feedback & reinforcement on a one-to-one basis.

For Hattie has found that

the most powerful single moderator that enhances achievement is feedback. The simplest prescription for improving education must be “dollops of feedback” — providing information how and why the child understands and misunderstands, and what directions the student must take to improve

where ‘feedback’ includes things like “reinforcement, corrective feedback, remediation and feedback, diagnosis feedback, and mastery learning” (based on that feedback). And giving that sort of feedback takes time, & quite a lot of it.

Funnily enough, just about every year when the paper & teacher appraisal results for my papers come in, my lowest score is for the statement “this teacher regularly provides me with feedback about my progress”. Now, I suppose you could say that in a class of ~200**, the opportunities for me to provide this are limited, but in fact students get feedback in class via things like pop quizzes; on Moodle – for example, through ‘common errors’ feedback almost as soon as essays are submitted; in writing, on test papers & written assignments; & face-to-face. Last year I asked the class about this – it turned out, to my surprise, that most of this was not recognised as ‘feedback’: many of them saw only verbal, face-to-face responses as feedback! This was a timely reminder that teachers and their students don’t necessarily have a common understanding around common classroom terminology.

And thirdly – well, the proposed changes did rather seem to be putting the cart before the horse, in that we seemed to be lacking a common, public, understanding on just what constitutes teacher quality, let alone how we should measure it. (For our national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, the latter is done on the basis of portfolios submitted by those nominated for an award: a daunting task where there are some dozens of portfolios. I can’t imagine doing anyone the same for the 52000+ teachers in our compulsory education sector!) Despite all the heat around issues such as class sizes & performance pay, what we haven’t had is just that public discussion around what constitutes an excellent, expert teacher. There are studies (again, including work by John Hattie) that identify the attributes of such teachers. What we seem to lack is any agreement on how to apply these studies to the classroom in order to identify & esteem those experts – or any substantive discussion*** on how to encourage and support our very many other experienced teachers to join their ranks.

**The NZ Herald has covered the whole story in some depth. One of the silliest comments I’ve seen was in response to an op-ed piece by Dita di Boni, when F Max remarked that

And amazingly kids can go from a class of 30ish to a university lecture of 300+ learning far more difficult concepts. So why is the teacher ratio argument ignored at uni? Apparently our universities are in crisis and everyone must be failing. Or maybe it’s less about numbers and more about quality, something most of our teachers greatly lack.

Apart from impugning the professionalism of our classroom teachers, & ignoring the fact that the students in university classes are different in many ways from those in a primary or secondary classroom, F Max seems unaware that uni lecturers like me don’t just stand up in front of a class & lecture at them. Tutorial classes of 10-30 students give much better opportunities for feedback & one-on-one instruction – opportunities that many classroom teachers may only dream of.

*** Perhaps this is something that individual Ako Aotearoa Academy members might be interested in contributing to?