Professional Development

Keeping Up With the Research

My Ed Psych text book advised me to “keep up with research”. Wonderful, yet another source of reading material I have little time for, and yet, after spending a morning surfing about the internet, looking at educational sites, I have to confess I learned something. Educating children is a complex task. Too complex for any one person, or single group, to grasp. I learned today that keeping up with the research is the best way to help you improve your skills. To keep you on the path to being a better teacher. Anecdotes; hearsay; intuition; and that rare bird,common sense; simply aren’t enough

I’ve just read a paper from The Math and Science Partnership Network MSPnet Library. MSPnet is brought to us by the Center for School Reform at TERC and is funded by the NSF. The article I read is titled Effective Science Instruction: What Does Research Tell Us? and it’s well worth the time to read.

The authors begiin by dismiss the mode of learning debate;

Debating the mode of instruction misses the point, however, as current
learning theory focuses on students’ conceptual change, and does not imply
that one pedagogy is necessarily better than another. For example, students
may be intellectually engaged with important content in a dynamic, teacher directed
lecture, or they may simply sit passively through a didactic lecture
unrelated to their personal experience. Similarly, a hands-on lesson may provide
students with opportunities to confront their preconceptions about scientific
phenomena, or it may simply be an activity for activity’s sake, stimulating
students’ interest but not relating to important learning goals.

and they summarize current ideas in education with;

Whatever the mode of instruction, the research suggests that students are most likely to learn if teachers encourage them to think about ideas aligned to concrete learning goals and relate those ideas to real-life phenomena.

Finally, a voice of reason.

The article recognizes five components of effective teaching.

1. Motivation, intrinsic versus extrinsic
2. Eliciting Students, Prior Knowledge,making connections
3. Intellectual Engagement, relating to daily experience
4. Use of Evidence to Critique Claims, critical thinking
5. Sense-Making, building new intuition for a concept

Discussions of each component are provided with examples and are followed by sample lessons.

Most interesting is the discussion of current research. There seems to be teachers trying to use the workshop model and those that stick the direct mode and many other models will have proponents as well, but the research shows that the mode isn’t the critical factor in effective teaching. It’s follow through. Many teachers, will motivate extrinsically, others will do workshops, and yet others will concentrate on critical thinking, but most don’t provide elements for all components.

I have always believed in hands on curriculum supported with classroom discussion under the teachers direction, but now I have a new checklist for my lesson plans. As I have said before, we have to do it all.

© 2008 Learning Teaching.