If you’re looking for evidence about what makes good teaching, you don’t have to look far. In 2014, the Sutton Trust released its What makes great teaching? report. Meanwhile, the Education Endowment Foundation regularly publishes guidance on a variety of themes.
The latest attempt to characterise effective teaching comes in the form of a new Nuffield Foundation report by Professor Simon Burgess and colleagues. In the study, the research team combined classroom observation of teachers with students’ scores in high-stakes GCSE exams in maths and English.
In doing so, they tried to explore the different ways in which teachers chose to spend class time.
Interestingly, the activities that teachers dedicated class time to were found to be unrelated to their subject, their students’ characteristics or how effective they were as teachers.
But their choices did make a difference when it came to students’ attainment. Here, there were striking differences between the two subjects. In mathematics, students had higher GCSE exam scores “when assigned to teachers who give more time for individual practice”, but in English “more time working with classmates predicts higher scores”.
Good teaching doesn’t fit into ‘neat boxes’
The study adds to the body of literature that can say something meaningful about the use of direct instruction (for example, lecturing and the use of textbooks) and other methods, such as students working with peers or on their own.
But it also serves to highlight how hard it is to put teaching practice into boxes. When, for example, can we say that an activity is truly “teacher-led”, and when is it “student-centred”?
This problem is illustrated by how the study looked at activities that included “direct instruction” and “student-centred instruction”. The researchers pooled results for both subjects and showed that only the latter is predictive of test scores. However, this is driven more by the results for mathematics than for English.
The report then states: “A broad characterisation of the results is that activities which require active student participation are more likely to promote student learning than direct instruction.”
Digging a little deeper, though, we find that beneficial “active student participation” does not look the same in both subjects. For maths, it is driven by practice and assessment, while for English it is driven by peer interaction.
The findings are then further complicated by the fact that the report groups the activities using principal component analysis - a technique that reduces the dimensionality of a dataset, allowing it to be more easily summarised - and so many different activities can be encompassed by one label.
Take, for example, “teacher-guided learning”, which was found to be broadly effective: when we look at the data more closely, this category includes more time spent on “use of white board by teacher” and “spending special time to assist weak students”, and less time “lecturing or dictation” or “children doing written work alone”.
For most teachers, the fact that such labels cover quite a diverse mix of activities simply reflects the realities of teaching; in classroom practice, there really is no such thing as a neat little box.
But, at the same time, it’s also clear that subjects differ.
What, then, does effective practice look like? That, it seems, is up to the teacher to determine. Based on their knowledge of their students, good teachers will use their judgement to decide what is the most effective teaching method, at that time, in that particular context.
Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies
