In almost every classroom, you’ll witness modelling in action. Showing pupils how to complete a task by doing it yourself is one of the most common techniques used in everyday teaching and there’s broad consensus that this practice has a positive impact on learning.
Why is it, then, that its place in teacher professional development is still up for debate?
Increasingly influential theories suggest that models should be incorporated into training for initial and continuing teachers. Indeed, according to a recent systematic review that I was part of, two-thirds of evaluated professional development programmes already include models.
The remaining third, however, may have been influenced by the fact that there is little firm evidence on the benefits of models in teacher training. At the Ambition Institute, we wanted to help plug this gap, so set out to test how models can support early career teachers to develop evidence-based teaching practices.
We began by defining what we mean by “models”: they are observable examples of a specific teaching practice. Some are delivered live by another person while other models are captured on video. Whether they are live or recorded, models are thought to help teachers develop a mental image of the focal teaching practice, which can then support them with putting theory into practice.
More teaching and learning:
In our study, we used a simulated classroom environment - a virtual reality experience in which five pupil avatars “sit” at desks, and can be made to speak and perform certain actions by a computer and human “puppeteer” - to observe 89 initial teacher trainees as they used video models to develop their retrieval practice skills.
On their first go in the classroom simulator, we asked them to lead retrieval practice and pose questions to a group of simulated primary school pupils.
We then split the teachers into two groups. One group had a chance to reread an evidence summary on effective questioning for retrieval, while the second watched a video model exemplifying the good practice described in the evidence summary. Both groups then had a second go in the classroom simulator.
We found a convincing difference in the practice of the two groups. The teachers who viewed the video models did twice as well in their second simulator attempt as those who reread the evidence summary. By contrast, those who simply reread the evidence summary showed no measurable improvement.
We believe this to be the first causal evidence that adding modelling to professional development helps to bridge the theory-practice gap.
But what are the implications of our findings?
We believe that teacher educators should seriously consider incorporating models into training because it’s likely to help trainee teachers put theory more effectively into practice and therefore increase their use of evidence-based practices in the classroom.
We’d also encourage teacher training programmes to consider incorporating libraries of video models of evidence-based teaching techniques to demonstrate good practice, and to make these publicly available to all trainees.
There were a few limitations to our study: the participants were in the first year of teaching training and we only tested video models. However, we do believe that these findings may also apply to early career teachers more generally, and that similar results would be found using live models.
We know that the quality of teaching that students receive is a crucial factor in improving their outcomes across a range of measures - and the evidence points to professional development being an effective and sustainable way to help teachers and leaders to keep getting better. We hope that this research will go some way to improving professional development for all.
Dr Sam Sims is the research lead at the Ambition Institute. The full research report can be found on the Ambition Institute website
