Taken from the TEDx Talks YouTube Channel.
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Category Archives: Teaching
Using the physical environment to improve education
It might seem as if buildings, the physical location of education, are of only tangential interest to an education researcher: something that can be left to architects in the same way as the human bodies of teachers remain the preserve of biologists. However, as I will demonstrate, the settings for education, are linked to the practices and outcomes of teaching and learning, both directly and indirectly. Importantly, the complexity of the relationship suggests the need for developing shared, cross-disciplinary understandings, rather than the adoption of design recipes or reliance on isolated architectural expertise. There is evidence of physical environments being drivers and enablers of change, but most convincingly when alterations to the setting are integrated with other developments. Researchers and practitioners of education, therefore, need to think more about actual and possible spaces and places of education.
A fundamental finding is that quality of physical environment broadly correlates with student outcomes, such as attendance, behaviour and achievement (Durán-Narucki, 2008; Kumar et al., 2008; Woolner et al., 2007). But this is a correlational, not a simple causal, relationship. It seems to be more about poor environments having negative effects, as opposed to good environments enhancing learning or teaching. Indeed, defining a ‘good learning environment’ is problematic because its success depends on what you are trying to achieve, with different sorts of learning making different demands on the setting. This relationship ranges from the banal observation of different environments for PE, science and music, to the more interesting research finding that traditional classrooms tend to be used for teacher-centred teaching while more collaborative learning, as well as teaching, happens in alternative set-ups (Horne-Martin, 2002;Sigurðardóttir & Hjartson, 2011).
Changing the physical setting can be an important part of educational innovations: supporting initial change, then embedding and sustaining new practices of teaching and learning
The next elements to my argument, though, are to note that space does not determine behaviour, although it may influence, and, in contrast, that people can alter space to try to make it fit their intended behaviour. Individual teachers do this on a small scale whenever they reshuffle classroom furniture, and there is evidence of innovative and effective schools making active use of their setting, reorganising or adjusting as needed to support their educational endeavours (Uline et al., 2009; Rutter et al., 1979). Changing the physical setting can be an important part of educational innovations: supporting initial change, then embedding and sustaining new practices of teaching and learning. This role seems most pronounced when the attempted change integrates alterations across social, organisational and physical elements, with development of timetabling, curriculum, staffing and space, for example, pursued as a coherent whole, not as fragmented initiatives.
These sorts of multi-strand changes seem to benefit particularly from including the physical setting because changed space is a tangible sign of the more implicit alterations, and also has the power to inspire and support further innovation. In a school programme we evaluated (Open Futures: see Woolner & Tiplady, 2014), a very visible school garden was co-opted by a languages teacher to support vocabulary learning through labelling the vegetables in French and as a head teacher in another school put it: “If you’ve got that infrastructure, you can use it and you want to use it don’t you?”.
Thus, while professionals from outside education who design educational settings undoubtedly need to understand teaching and learning, it is equally important that educationalists attempting pedagogical innovation or improvement consider how the physical environment is, or could be, involved.
References
Durán-Narucki, V. (2008). School building condition, school attendance, and academic achievement in New York City public schools: A mediation model. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 28(3): 278–286.
Horne-Martin, S. (2002). The classroom environment and its effects on the practice of teachers. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22: 139–156.
Kumar, R., O’Malley, P. M., & Johnston, L. D. (2008). Association between physical environment of secondary schools and student problem behaviour. Environment and Behavior, 40(4): 455–486.
Rutter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimore, P. & Ouston, J. (1979) Fifteen thousand hours: secondary schools and their effects on children, London: Open Books.
Sigurðardóttir, A.K.&Hjartson,T(2011). School buildings for the 21st century. Some features of new school buildings in Iceland.CEPS Journal, 1(2):25-43.
Uline, C. L., Tschannen-Moran, M., & De Vere Wolsey, T. (2009). The walls still speak: The stories occupants tell. Journal of Educational Administration, 47(3): 400–426.
Woolner, P., Hall, E., Wall, K., Higgins, S., & McCaughey, C. (2007). A sound foundation? What we know about the impact of environments on learning and the implications for Building Schools for the Future. Oxford Review of Education, 33(1): 47–70.
Woolner, P. and Tiplady, L. (2014) Adapting School Premises as Part of a Complex Pedagogical Change Programme, ECER, 2 – 5 September, Porto, Portugal.
Taken from BERA
Written by Pamela Woolner, Lecturer in Education
Labelling children ‘dyslexic’ could hinder teachers
To what extent do teachers’ beliefs affect their ability to develop successful classroom practice over time? This question is relevant to many aspects of teachers’ roles. Our interest was in understanding how teachers feel about how they see their ability to support children with reading difficulties. Supporting children to learn to read is seen as a critical component of primary education and as the development of polices around teaching reading through phonics have shaped practice in state schools in England it is in the spotlight more than ever. At the same time there is a sustained anxiety amongst some parents to find a reason, in the form of a label, for the difficulties their children experience.
In our recent investigation we surveyed the beliefs of teachers in primary schools in the North-east of England in relation to supporting children who struggle with learning to read
From our perspectives as academic educational psychologists we are interested in what is known as ‘efficacy beliefs’ which can be defined as the teacher’s individual belief that they can act to make a positive difference. In our recent investigation we surveyed the beliefs of teachers in primary schools in the North-east of England in relation to supporting children who struggle with learning to read. Our questionnaires were designed to elicit responses indicative of teachers’ beliefs that they could do things that would make a difference for these children (their efficacy beliefs). We were also interested in whether or not they thought difficulties with reading were ‘essentially’ biologically distinct and immutable.
Two versions of the questionnaires were developed. In one version children were described as having ‘reading difficulties’. In the second version the words ‘reading difficulties’ were replaced by the word ‘dyslexia’. From all teaching staff in 23 primary schools in the NE of England an opportunity sample of 267 teachers (just over half of all the teachers in these schools) agreed to participate. Schools were matched by number on roll, number of children entitled to Free School Meals (FSM), and number of children labelled as having Special Educational Needs (having statements of special educational needs). All teachers in a school were invited to respond to one variant of the questionnaires. Teachers in a matching school were asked to complete the alternative variant.
We found that when presented with the ‘dyslexia’ variants teachers’ beliefs about being able to do things to achieve appropriate outcomes (their efficacy beliefs) were a) closely associated with responses to items that revealed beliefs that ‘dyslexia’ was biologically determined, immutable and culturally specific; and b) that their beliefs in their efficacy did not increase with experience.
On the other hand, when presented with items describing children as having ‘reading difficulties’ teachers’ efficacy beliefs about being able to motivate and engage children in appropriate tasks were only weakly associated with an element of essentialism we termed ‘cultural specificity’. However, more significantly for us these teachers’ beliefs in their efficacy increased with greater experience.
we suggest that ‘reading difficulties’ may be a more positively helpful label (if any labels can be helpful) than ‘dyslexia’
This may have importance since in general when teachers profess stronger efficacy beliefs these have been associated with better outcomes for children. It is reasonable to anticipate that teachers in their professional careers will encounter a number of children who find it harder than some others to acquire skills in aspects of literacy. Our research suggests that if such children are described as having ‘dyslexia’, then, all others things being equal, teachers appear to be unlikely to gain in confidence that they can intervene effectively. Accordingly we suggest that ‘reading difficulties’ may be a more positively helpful label (if any labels can be helpful) than ‘dyslexia’. The reason we would offer conclusion is that this seems to open the door to a virtuous circle of increasing teacher efficacy beliefs as teachers accumulate experience of work working successfully with children having ‘reading difficulties’. Our proposition is that this could lead to better outcomes for children.
We have just published the study of teachers’ beliefs about teaching children who have some form of difficulty with reading (Gibbs, S. & Elliott, J. (2015) The differential effects of labelling: How do ‘dyslexia’ and ‘reading difficulties’ affect teachers’ beliefs? European Journal of Special Needs Education (In Press) doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2015.1022999).
Beyond mentoring; peer coaching by and for teachers. Can it live up to its promise?
Creating opportunities for individual teachers to work together for professional development is a common ambition in schools in England. Mentoring forms a critical learning resource for both pre-service teachers and those newly qualified (NQTs), offering instruction, support and critical friendship, and typically engaging the mentor in making judgements about the new teachers’ practice. Past the NQT phase mentoring is rarely formalised, and a common concern for early career teachers is that they find themselves exposed to the performance management regime of lesson observation, judgement and target setting with fewer sources of personalised support on offer. For some teachers their next experience of such support comes as they proceed through leadership programmes when they are assigned coaches. In between the NQT and aspiring leader stages a gap can open up, which is typically occupied by membership of school professional learning networks, voluntary attendance at TeachMeets, school-based CPD, subject-based training and engagement in moderation activities. For some teachers there is a growing use of social media for ideas, feedback and a chance to share practice.
Peer coaching takes many forms, but a typical rationale is to fill this gap and to enable teachers to share good practice, work on issues they are interested in and to maintain a focus on improving teaching and learning.Coaching is usually distinguished from mentoring in that it can be accessed in between distinct career transition stages and is less likely to be based on forming judgements and linked to performance management, but instead be orientated towards professional development through learning conversations. Some coaching models deliberately locate teachers in pairs and triads across traditional working boundaries (such as subject departments or key stages) while others use coaching as a mechanism to strengthen working practices within these contexts. Sometimes coaching becomes a whole school endeavour involving all teachers, in other schools a team of coaches is established and either as volunteers or through persuasion they work with a cohort of coachees. Coaching frequently includes lesson observations, sometimes extending to the use of video to stimulate discussion. Coaching is often designed to be cyclical, sustaining sequences of plan, do and review; may be collaborative in that participants work together to plan for learning, and is sometimes reciprocal. Importantly most teachers report that they enjoy being coached. What could go wrong when this sounds so flexible, potentially productive and inclusive?
mentoring conversations are sometimes didactic or instructional, driven by target setting and checking
Having researched coaching over a decade it is clear that issues which support and disrupt it affect its perceived and actual success, and the cautionary tales are useful in diagnosing the potential pitfalls. The first of these might be related to the experience that all teachers have of mentoring. Hobson and Malderez, Wilson , Lofthouse and Thomas all found that mentoring can be distorted away from the personal learning needs of the new teacher. The outcome can be that mentoring conversations are sometimes didactic or instructional, driven by target setting and checking, and do not always engage the mentee in proactive participation in professional dialogue. Teachers’ experiences of performance management observation and feedback can be similar. These experiences can be formative creating conversational and behavioural habits that sustain in coaching. Other teachers report that even when coaching starts as a confidential and personalised learning opportunity it gets swept up by the performance management system of the school or ascribed a role linked to the school’s (rather than their own) CPD priorities. Schools are busy places and coaching uses up the most precious resource, that of teachers’ time. Managing this and the expectations that are generated is problematic. Associated with this is the degree to which decisions and actions in schools are expected to generate outcomes to which teachers and school leaders can be held to account. The drive for ‘improvement’ is incessant and as yet there is limited evidence of the direct link between teacher coaching and pupil attainment. We have started to understand these tensions through a CHAT analysis recognising that coaching too frequently fades in the perfomative culture of schools.
So, where does this leave us? Schools will continue to set up coaching, using its promise as a motive. Research gaps include establishing what can be known about the link between coaching and the desired outcomes for learners. As importantly perhaps, at this time of anxiety about teachers’ wellbeing and resilience, there are real reasons to establish whether coaching can address issues beyond teachers’ and pupils’ performance. Watch this space.
Making school buildings fit for purpose
In ‘Ideas for an Incoming Government’ no. 14, Dr Pam Woolner from the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences argues that with pupil numbers rising, our schools are under pressure, and our school buildings need to catch up. Her idea is to make working with school students, staff and the wider community a priority in tackling the problem.
What’s the problem?
Our school estate is not fit for purpose. Although this government and the previous Labour administrations have overseen new school building, it was long overdue and has not got anywhere near renewing or refurbishing all the schools in need. It has also led to very uneven provision: schools built over the last 150 years that have been designed for disparate understandings of education.
Meanwhile, student numbers are generally rising, putting pressure on this already-strained infrastructure. For the first time in decades, the UK is experiencing a sustained increase in birth rate which will translate into steady increases in school numbers. As Sarah Healey (then Director, Education Funding Group, DfE) commented in 2013, “this is not a very short temporary bulge […] so it will continue to be a challenge.” (Westminster Education Forum, 16.1.13).
This is concerning because there is an established, if not entirely understood, link between the quality of the school space and student outcomes. In particular, research shows that there are clear negative consequences of inadequate school buildings. Focused research has found direct effects on learning of specific physical problems including noise, high and low temperatures, poor air quality and limited learning space. Other studies reveal correlations between measures of school building and classroom quality with student outcomes including attitude, attendance and attainment. We can see how a poor school environment might contribute to a spiral of decline: this could involve declining student attitudes, increases in poor behaviour, reduced well-being and attendance, lowered staff morale and difficulties in staff retention.
Yet research into the physical environment of education also demonstrates that there is not a single perfect or ideal setting for learning. Although spacious, well-ventilated classrooms with good acoustics and temperature controls will tend to be beneficial, the suitability of other aspects of the school building will depend on what the school community wants to do: collaborative learning in groups, hands-on science, musical performance and sport all make particular, sometimes conflicting, demands on space.
The solution
There is some evidence that in effective schools, staff tend to engage with the physical environment and attempt to make it fit their needs. Other research suggests an important role for students in such evaluation and adaptation activities. In these processes, everyone comes to understand the helps and hindrances of their particular building much better and are able to make better use of it.
The evidence base reveals the negative effect of poor school premises, but it does not provide priorities for fixing them, and shows that there is no ideal to aim for. We need to understand the intentions and needs of the school community to design them an appropriate setting.
This all implies a necessity of actively involving school students, staff and the wider community in any redesign or rebuilding, helping them to think collaboratively about exactly what their requirements are. There is expertise among architecture and design professionals to make such participation happen, but it needs to be a central requirement of rebuilding and refurbishment processes to ensure that it does. Unfortunately, it is this element of participation that is being determinedly left out of the current government’s funding arrangements for school rebuilding.
An incoming government needs to ensure that the understandings which school users have of education in their settings are brought together and developed to drive decisions in re-builds, re-designs and refurbishments. Ultimately, this is the most productive way to address the shortcomings of the school estate, which if ignored will detrimentally affect the education of the citizens of tomorrow.
The evidence
Bakó-Birób, Zs., Clements-Croomea, D.J, Kochhara, N., Awbia, H.B. and Williams, M.J. (2012) ‘Ventilation rates in schools and pupils’ performance’, Building and Environment, 48: 215-23.
Barrett, P., Zhang, Y., Moffat, J. Kobbacy, K (2013) A holistic, multi-level analysis identifying the impact of classroom design on pupils’ learning. Building and Environment, 59: 678-689.
Durán-Narucki , V. (2008). School building condition, school attendance, and academic achievement in New York City public schools: A mediation model. Journal of Environmental Psychology 28: 278-286.
Flutter, J. (2006). ‘This place could help you learn’: student participation in creating better learning environments. Educational Review 58(2): 183-193.
Maxwell, L.E. (2003) Home and School Density Effects on Elementary School Children: The Role of Spatial Density Environment and Behavior 35: 566 – 577
Uline,C. L. Tschannen-Moran, M., and DeVere Wolsey, T. (2009).The walls still speak: The stories occupants tell. Journal of Educational Administration, 47(3):400–426.
Woolner, P. (2015) (Ed.) School Design Together, Abingdon: Routledge
Woolner, P.and Hall, E. (2010). Noise in Schools: A Holistic Approach to the Issue,International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 7(8): 3255-3269.
Woolner, P., Hall, E., Higgins,S., McCaughey, C., Wall, K. (2007a) A sound foundation? What we know about the impact of environments on learning and the implications for Building Schools for the Future. Oxford Review of Education, 33(1): 47-70.
Taken from the Newcastle University Institute for Social Renewal blog
Written by Pam Woolner, Lecturer in Education
PROJECT TEACH: Applying Intelligence to Teacher Education
As part of our ‘Ideas for an Incoming Government’ series, Rachel Lofthouse from the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT)within the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University,writes about the pressing need for supportive improvements to the currentteacher training infrastructure.
What is the problem?
A change is needed in our education system. Rapid policy developments prioritise the role of schools as providers of workplace learning, affecting the experiences of and infrastructure for teacher training. Even those professionals who support ‘on the job’ training for teachers appreciate that meeting the learning and social needs of children and young people has to be every school’s priority. In the current system new teachers are immediately exposed to the performative culture of schools, having their individual successes and failures measured and graded from the moment they arrive.
In some cases this creates significant anxiety. Student teachers may not be encouraged to innovate and instead they simply learn how to survive. Instead of new teachers being a source of inspiration and innovation, they adopt normative practices, and their potential and energy is not garnered for their individual benefit or that of the schools. In the worst cases, instead of building the necessary professional capacity to work flexibly to meet ever changing demands of the job, they become less resilient to the stresses of the job.
The solution
Student teachers should be educated not only individually but also in teams, tackling real-life workplace challenges through projects based on research, development and practice. The teams would be supported by co-coaches (experienced teachers and academic tutors working together) who enable their team to develop collaborative, empowering and supportive relationships, as well as the knowledge and skills required for them to tackle the genuine challenges of teaching. The responsibility for the professional learning of all student teachers in a team becomes a collective one; each team is aiming for the best possible outcomes in terms of professional learning, pupil outcomes, and school development.
Through PROJECT-TEACH, intelligent thinking would be applied to teacher training, drawing on the principles of successful learning organisations, coaching and project-based learning:
- Post-graduate student teachers would form project teams hosted by, and learning on behalf of, an alliance of schools, supported by ‘co-coaches’ – providing combined professional and academic expertise and drawing on principles of servant leadership. The motto of this approach is to ‘gather intelligence and use it intelligently’.
- The project teams would work through a number of core projects spanning the school year, based on the principles of ‘project-based learning’. Each project would include the need to teach, and as the year progressed this would be over more sustained periods and include working with learners across the relevant age range and with complex needs. This teaching comes as a culmination of research and development, making it more evidence-based and allowing for systematic evaluation of outcomes. Student teachers would be registered as post-graduate students, and gain academic awards as well as evidence of meeting professional standards as a result of PROJECT-TEACH.
- Learning is a social process, and PROJECT-TEACH would enable new teachers to develop skills and knowledge through collaboration on authentic and rich learning tasks set in the context of the workplace. The project briefs would be planned by drawing on the combined expertise of the professional and academic co-coaches who would design them to meet the ambitions of the host schools as well as to take account of the development stage of the new teachers. New teachers would meet the Teacher Standards through coherent development opportunities rather than through atomised practice. The ‘standards’ would develop significance in terms of long-term occupational capacity, rather than simply as a checklist of time and context limited competencies.
PROJECT-TEACH sits firmly in the current Department for Education policy of creating a ‘Self-improving school led system’, in that it would be ‘evidence based, data rich, sustainable, focused, attract and retain talent and create a collective moral purpose’. It does however challenge some of the current practices of teacher education. While the Carter Review of Initial Teacher Training (DfE, 2015) recognised that the ‘challenge for the nation is to maintain a supply of outstanding teachers so that every child has the opportunity to be taught by inspirational, skilled teachers throughout their time in school’ (p.3), it lacked imagination in its proposals for re-creating teacher education. PROJECT-TEACH can be afforded within current budgets; student teachers pay their training fee, and gain DfE bursaries according to prior qualification. It is a matter of ensuring that the resource is deployed differently to support the approach and ensure excellent outcomes.
The evidence
- Billett (2011) identifies three dimensions to workplace learning; the practice curriculum, the practice pedagogies, and the personal epistemologies. PROJECT-TEACH would act on each dimension by developing a curriculum based on project-based learning and by addressing the student teachers’ learning needs through more open engagement with authentic complex tasks.
- Student teachers would be supported by expert co-coaches drawing on the principles of effective teacher coaching (Lofthouse et.al, 2010) and servant leadership through which they prioritise the needs of the student teachers as their main professional role. . This would counter the impacts of the pervasive performativity culture (Ball, 2003) and detrimental practices of judge mentoring (Hobson & Malderez, 2013) in which judgements made by experienced teachers are rapidly revealed to the novice student teachers undermining the potential of mentoring processes to support development.
- PROJECT-TEACH would develop new teachers’ resilience by enabling them to develop positive collective teacher efficacy and beliefs, which can help to mitigate the deleterious effects associated with socio-economic deprivation (Gibbs & Powell, 2012) and as such would help to address the problems in teacher supply and retention in England.
- PROJECT-TEACH would support schools to become learning organisations where staff and students ‘continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free’ (http://infed.org/mobi/peter-senge-and-the-learning-organization/).
- PROJECT-TEACH would build a ‘culture of trust (and challenge) in schools to enable professional learning of teachers to prosper’ which was recognised as key by the 2015 Sutton Trust’s ‘Developing Teachers report and thus encourage the essential components of professional learning of ‘creativity, innovation and a degree of risk-taking’ (Major, 2015).
We need to put energy and vitality back into educating (not simply training) new teachers, ensuring that those that enter the profession gain relevant expertise but also the experience and insight to fulfil their potential role to transform schools for the next generation, not simply replicate the working practices of yesterday’s schools.
References:
- Ball, S. J. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215-228
- Billett, S (2011) Workplace curriculum: practice and propositions, in F. Dorchy, D Gijbels. Theories of Learning for the Workplace, Routledge, London (pp.17-36)
- DfE (2015) The Carter review of initial teacher training (ITT)
- Gibbs, S., & Powell, B. (2012) Teacher Efficacy and Pupil Behaviour: the structure of teachers’ individual and collective efficacy beliefs and their relationship with numbers of children excluded from school. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(4), 564-584.
- Hobson, A.J. (2013) Judgementoring and other threats to realizing the potential of school-based mentoring in teacher education, International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol 2 [2] 89-108
- Lofthouse, R., Leat, D and Towler, C., (2010) Improving Teacher Coaching in Schools; A Practical Guide, CfBT Learning Trust
- Lofthouse, R. & Thomas, U. (2014) Mentoring student teachers; a vulnerable workplace learning practice, International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education Vol. 3 (3) pp. 201 – 218
- Lofthouse, R., Thomas, U. & Cole, S. (2011) Creativity and Enquiry in Action: a case study of cross-curricular approaches in teacher education. Teacher Education Advancement Network Journal, Vol. 2(1), pp.1-21.
- Major, L.E. (2015) Developing Teachers; Improving professional development for teachers, The Sutton Trust
Taken from the Newcastle University Institute of Social Renewal blog
Written by Dr Rachel Lofthouse, Head of Teacher Learning and Development (Education Section)