Matthew Kraft has a gut feeling about classroom relationships: when it comes to teachers building a connection with their pupils, two years is better than one.
Kraft is the associate professor of education and economics at Brown University in the USA, and together with Leigh Wedenoja, a senior policy analyst at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, and John Papay, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown, he has published new research investigating a practice he calls “teacher looping”.
This is where students are taught by the same teacher for more than one academic year. In primary schools, that may mean a class staying with the same teacher in Years 5 and 6. In secondary, it may be having the same maths teacher for the whole of key stage 3 or 4.
“There’s a belief that the longer you know a student, the more opportunity you have to learn about who they are as a person, their interests, personality, what makes them tick,” says Kraft.
“Often in schooling, students have teachers for just one year. We were curious to see if there were benefits from having a teacher for longer than that.”
To investigate this, the researchers assessed data on millions of students and teachers for almost a decade across the state of Tennessee.
It was a complex analysis process, Kraft explains. Students were not just randomly allocated either to a group that had the same teacher twice, or a control group, so this meant there were multiple other factors for the researchers to account for.
For example, some students had the same teacher simply because they had selected a certain subject or course to study; others had the same teacher because the school had made a decision to allocate their staff in that way.
“Any differences that we found, if we had just looked at students who repeated with a teacher, and those who did not, might be not because of that repeat experience alone,” Kraft says.
Their solution was to compare students against their younger selves, as well - for example, student A in Year 2 and in Year 7 - and against other students in their school.
Overall they found that in Tennessee, in any given year just 4 per cent of students had a repeat teacher. However, 44 per cent of students, over the course of their formal education, had a repeat teacher at least once.
Having that repeat teacher makes a “small but positive impact”, says Kraft, including improvements in standardised test scores for all age groups and decreases in absences, truancies, and suspensions.
Kraft is reluctant to generalise why this is: “It’s hard to know the exact mechanisms that drive those effects. But drawing on the literature, we see that the relationships are likely to be a very key factor for explaining these positive benefits.”
It was rare, Kraft says, to find students who had teachers for more than three years, so we don’t yet know whether the effects would continue to rise if students and teachers spent more time together.
The researchers did find instances of students who had the same teacher in middle and high school across two non-consecutive years (for example, in the first year of school, and then the last). They found that this type of looping is also beneficial, although how much in comparison to a consecutive year is still inconclusive, says Kraft.
However, the results do suggest that the benefits of looping may be different for different students.
“We find that for black students, in particular, having a repeat teacher was particularly effective in helping to increase attendance and decrease the likelihood of being suspended. Whereas we found academic benefits accrued to everyone, but were largest for higher achieving and female students,” Kraft says.
“This speaks to the differential ways that looping can benefit students, and also the importance of looking beyond just academic achievement when thinking about the value of how we strategically assign students and teachers in that school.”
The benefits of a repeat teacher were also larger in a classroom where a large proportion of the students had had that teacher before.
“You can imagine that playing out: as everyone benefits from knowing the teacher, there’s less time spent explaining expectations and rules, and developing initial relationships,” explains Kraft.
Not every teacher and student will build a positive relationship, though; and while Kraft says there was no evidence in the research to suggest teacher looping was “differentially bad for some students”, teachers may still be cautious about teaching a child for more than a year if they have a bad relationship with them.
More teaching and learning:
So, what does this research mean for schools? Should they be aiming to get every teacher working with the same classes year after year, regardless of whether staff support the idea?
Not necessarily; there are limitations to this research, says Kraft. Most of the teacher-student matches observed, for example, had happened by chance, rather than by purposeful policy design.
“Our research and almost all the existing research tells us something about what happens when you have a repeat teacher coincidentally; it doesn’t tell us about the full potential benefits of a school that has a dedicated policy of teachers following their entire cohort of students over multiple grades,” Kraft says.
The impact found was small, but does lead to two suggestions for schools, he adds.
“There’s good evidence to motivate schools to experiment with looping; to see how it works in their contexts, hear from teachers and refine this,” he says.
“But I think it also speaks more broadly to the really critical role that relationships play. There are a lot of ways that schools can foster stronger relationships between teachers and students; this may be one of them.”
If schools are looking to experiment with this, Kraft says it’s important to consider the impact on teachers’ workload. Anecdotally, teachers warned the researchers about the time it takes to master new content and prepare new lessons in a year group they hadn’t taught before.
“There’s a time investment on the part of teachers that is greater because of their moving across subjects, sometimes, or up different grades. I don’t think we can discount that; that’s an important kind of effort and time costs on the part of teachers,” he says.
“We have to think about ways to support them if this is the policy schools want to pursue, so that teachers aren’t burned out by that additional burden.”
As schools in the UK are grappling with a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, providing the infrastructure required to allow teachers to stick with the same class may not be at the top of everyone’s agenda.
But where schools are already experimenting with staffing, Kraft urges leaders to bear the benefits of keeping students with the same teacher in mind.
