Notes from the webinar hosted by Steve Bissonnette, Teaching effectively, yes, but how?
Full Professor in the Department of Education at TÉLUQ
This webinar aims to answer the following question: what are the best methods for helping students with the greatest difficulties succeed?
It’s been known since the 1960s that students from disadvantaged backgrounds perform less well in school than others, but there are exceptions to this rule. So what’s happening in these schools?
1/ The educational context
Students in difficulty, those at risk of failure, are those most likely to drop out of school. There are risk factors with greater weights, the most significant risk being academic delay. The number one factor predicting dropout is academic failure . Young people leave school because they are failing, so to counter dropout, we must aim for academic success, especially for students who are struggling the most.
Often a student in difficulty has both difficulties, behavior and learning, so it is necessary to intervene on both at the same time.
Educational research must be based on evidence, that is, practices validated by scientific evidence. Educational research can be classified into three levels:
level 1 descriptive research, it is a teacher who describes his practice
level 2 small-scale comparative research
level 3 large-scale comparative research
Experimental research combines level 2 + level 3.
A meta-analysis is a quantitative synthesis of level 2 + 3 research, a mega-analysis is a synthesis of meta-analyses (therefore with a very high level of evidence)
2/ The teacher effect
It brings together 800 meta-analyses, 50,000 studies, for approximately 250 million students. The question posed by this mega-analysis is: what are the factors that influence student success? In the end, 138 factors were identified as having an impact on student achievement. These factors are grouped into six broad categories:
The category that comes first is the teacher, so it is the factor that has the greatest weight in the success of the students.
What is an effective school? It’s a school located in a disadvantaged neighborhood whose students’ academic performance matches or exceeds that of students in more affluent neighborhoods. These schools exist. What happens in these schools? It has been highlighted that it’s the teams, the staff, who make the difference. These staff have principles and beliefs:
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belief in the success of their students
take responsibility for their results
teamwork, collaboration and harmonize their practices
So what helps students learn is the teacher with their methods and when they work in collaboration with other teachers to harmonize practices. This is how we move from an effective teacher to an effective school.
3/ Effective teaching
A mega-analysis carried out by Steve Bissonnette et al. published in 2010 in the journal RRAA asks the question of what are the effective teaching strategies promoting fundamental learning (reading, writing, mathematics) among students in difficulty (who show learning disabilities or who are at risk of failure)?
This mega-analysis synthesizes 11 meta-analyses representing approximately 30,000 students. The results show that two teaching methods stand out from all others:
explicit teaching
reciprocal teaching
Explicit instruction is a pedagogy that emerged from the observation of teachers recognized as effective. It is not a pedagogical theory. It was highlighted in 1976 by Barak Rosenshine through classroom observations of teachers who succeed with their students.
Explicit teaching is broken down into 3 stages
Step 1: Modeling : This involves making explicit and visible any implicit or invisible reasoning to the student. The teacher explains and demonstrates.
step 2 guided practice : here the teacher checks that the students have understood and gives feedback on the task completed by the student. Reciprocal teaching can be done here
step 3 independent practice : the student reinvests alone what he has understood from the modeling and the guided practice
The principle is that you never let a student work on a task for long without ensuring their success.
Reciprocal teaching is mutual teaching, the teacher demonstrates then the students get into pairs and one of the two students explains to the other how to do it, we speak here of “mini teacher”
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Studies have also shown that even if the teacher provides explicit teaching, he is not guaranteed to achieve 100% success with his students. According to a second mega analysis by John Hattie published in 2012, it appears that if a teacher does a “good job” in terms of classroom management, explicit teaching, … he is guaranteed the success of his students for about 80% . Despite the good teaching received, about 20% of students do not succeed. We can break down this 20% as follows: for 15% of these students, additional and targeted interventions are required, and for the remaining 5%, intensive and individualized interventions are required because these students often have dys disorders.