Coaching Letter #196

On the role of research in instruction

Carl Hendrick giving the keynote at ResearchED Greenwich

Hello, how are you, and thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter! I’m so glad you do. Here in Connecticut we are still waiting for spring to arrive; much of the state got a few inches of rain last week although it was warmer today and almost felt like spring…

This Coaching Letter is my reflection on the ResearchED conference in Greenwich on Saturday. First of all, I’d like to confess that I feel bad about not advertising the existence of the conference, because it was well worth attending. I think I just assumed that it would be full by the time I thought about including it in a Coaching Letter, but I don’t think that was the case. So I’m sorry about that, and to make up for it, here’s the information about the next ResearchED event in the US, in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 19th, 2024. I may even apply to speak, if I can figure that out. Second, it was very fun to meet people like Patrice Bain, and to get to hang out with Kim Marshall for a bit. I think that what I’m able to pull off in terms of writing a newsletter is pretty impressive, and then I think about what he's accomplished over the years…

ResearchED is an organization that attempts to get the science of learning—i.e., a research-informed, cognitive-science approach to learning—into the hands of teachers by providing inexpensive (I think mostly because they are held in schools—a great deal of the expense of professional development is what it costs to host PD in a hotel, which is why at PEL we avoid it like the plague, plus those windowless rooms are killer) access to scholar-practitioners—people who are or have been teachers and bring that lens to leverage theory and research. Which, interestingly enough, is harder than it sounds. Much of what is promulgated about good instruction is not supported by research—for example, the keynote speaker, Carl Hendrick, showed a slide of teachers’ beliefs about learning styles, a theory that has been widely and thoroughly debunked and yet still lives on, and similar fallacies. (The photo at the top of this CL is of that slide.)  I wrote, in Coaching Letter #184, about the amazing work in Milford regarding high quality instruction, and how a lot of improving instruction is asking teachers to let go of practices that have little or no research support, but teachers employ them because they think they should, they have been taught that they should, and they think they are failing students if they do not employ these practices. The practices/ideas that I challenge in that CL are:

1. It’s all about relationships;

2. Individual traits are fixed and superordinate;

3. Differentiation is always an effective instructional practice (I’ve had to think about that a lot lately—more soon—but it still remains the case that what most educators think of when they think of differentiation is not good practice);

4. Learning styles is a thing;

5. Formative assessment is an event.

To this list, I would now like to add learning objectives, in the knowledge that this may make me very unpopular. So just to be super clear up front, I think learning objectives are really important. For the teacher. The research that they are important for the students is just not that simple. Why is that? I think it helps to understand that our current practices around learning objectives (sometimes used interchangeably, and therefore confusingly, with learning intentions and instructional objectives) are a mash-up of several strands of research going back probably a century to the beginning of behaviorism. There have been objectives established to measure increases in performance of children, to evaluate the impact of teachers, to establish goals as part of an effort to teach self-regulation, and to clarify learning intentions for the purpose of instructional design. If you read about learning objectives in Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers, or Marzano’s Classroom Instruction that Works, you won’t find a citation to a meta-analysis showing the effect size of learning objectives, although I think that is what these books imply. The citations they rely on are to articles that are focused on learning objectives for the purposes of metacognition, not learning of knowledge or skills. The advice given in VLT and CITW goes beyond the research. Which is not uncommon. And then there was the need to find things to measure to add to teacher evaluation rubrics. Learning objectives posted? Check.

If you read Dylan Wiliam (which I always recommend), you will find a much more nuanced take, including clarity on what is important to include, for what purpose, and situations in which a learning objective is decidedly unhelpful. Peter Liljedahl, another must-read, actively discourages learning objectives, because they pull students out of the task that you want them to focus on, and because they can give too much of a hint thereby depriving students of the opportunity to think, and thinking is exactly what you want them to be doing. He too is very interested in student self-regulation, but for him it is all about the task; when students know what success looks like, which they get from the task itself, then they can self-assess and figure out what to try next. 

So to sum up, the research on learning objectives is cloudier than generally realized, the practices around learning objectives are complicated, and there is no research (and I’m pretty sure that that means none) to support the idea that students are more likely to achieve more simply because their teacher wrote a learning objective on the board. A requirement that teachers always post learning objectives with the presumption that doing so will ipso facto improve student achievement is not supported by the research. But the presumption that teachers should plan instruction based on clear learning objectives for students certainly is.

(For some eye-opening information about other practices in education more generally that are not as unfailingly helpful as educators often think, see the new book, Duck and Cover.)

Another big theme of the conference was the importance of a knowledge-based curriculum. This article from KQED makes the case: reading proficiency is strengthened when students have better background knowledge, because comprehension cannot be divorced from schemata. Carl Hendrick made that point with a paragraph from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (credit to Karne Vaites for the picture—here is her entire Twitter thread of the keynote). There is plenty of vocabulary here that, if you don’t already know it, will hinder your comprehension of the paragraph. And there are, furthermore, allusions that will also get in the way of comprehension.

But also, beyond what a knowledge-rich curriculum means for reading comprehension, don’t we also think it’s important that students know stuff? I didn’t grow up in the American education system, and I am always a little confounded by the emphasis in some districts in the US on skills over knowledge. Problem-solving is not possible without knowledge of the field in which the problem is situated. My son is in Chicago at the moment. He is on his university’s aviation maintenance team. His task in the competition is to diagnose what is wrong with an engine—27 events, each 15 minutes long, and he’s competing in 7 of them—you can’t do that without a really deep understanding of how engines work, and so the idea of problem-solving being a skill that you can teach separate from content is just strange.

Similarly, critical thinking is a constellation of cognitive skills that vary from subject to subject. And therefore, like problem solving, critical thinking is not separate from content. As the saying goes, you can’t just think, you have to have something to think about. And the idea that you can have all knowledge in your smartphone doesn’t help much. Any time you have to do any kind of work to retrieve information, let alone perform a calculation or solve a problem, you are drawing on your limited working memory, which severely constrains your ability to reason. (Obviously, you don’t want your airplane mechanic having to pull out their phone…)

I expect many people reading this are thinking, “Why is she talking about this? Doesn’t she already know that the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows?” Yes, I do, thanks, and I also know that you’re quoting from David Ausubel’s book on educational psychology from 1968. But I also know that the extent to which students should be taught content versus transferable skills is a live conversation in many school districts.That’s the reason I’m bringing it up.

For a more explicit argument for curriculum-based school reform, read Robert Pondiscio’s just-published piece in The 74. Some of the research on the quality of instructional materials commonly in use is a bit shocking. But I don’t agree with his very pessimistic take on school reform…

I would also like to talk here about Coe’s Poor Proxies for Learning, but you will do much better to read Tom Sherrington on the topic. (Tom Sherrington was also at the conference in Greenwich and his blog, teacherhead, is amazing. If you stop reading me and start reading him instead, I will not like it but I will understand.) The big idea here is that there are several features of classrooms that are often associated with student learning, but it is possible that they are present and students are NOT learning. Including, but not limited to, students are busy, engaged, well-behaved… and so on.)

And the best thing about the keynote was one of the final slides, which seemed to sum up exactly what I’ve been working on over the last few years.

To that end, I want to advertise that we are looking for partner districts who would like to form cross-district networks to do exactly this: work together to identify and remove systemic barriers while testing research-informed practices in the classroom that lead to more equitable opportunities, experiences and outcomes for students. We want to find groups of districts who will agree to create teams that will come together several times a year. We think that we have a lot to offer in the way of organizing for improvement, and that we have learned a ton since the beginning of the pandemic that is narrowly focused on ensuring that all students have access to grade level content and what the authors of Systems of Instructional Improvement call equitable and ambitious instruction. I am very happy to meet with you to talk about this in more detail—just drop me a line!

Finally, some odds and ends. Not every educator on the planet has signed up for our free book study of Systems of Instructional Improvement, so please help me change that and share this information with every educator you know—it’s free and the first session starts April 30 at 3:15 pm Eastern. The September Coaching Institute is full so we are currently looking into adding another one, but in the meantime there are plenty of spaces in Coaching for Leaders July 23-25, which is a steal (again, because we don’t use hotels…).  Substack tells me which readers have forwarded the Coaching Letter most often, so the top dozen sharers are about to get an email from me asking them if they’d like to choose one of my books as a wee thank-you 😀. Also, Substack may have emailed you to offer you 20% off the price of a paid subscription to the Coaching Letter—please know that I didn’t initiate that, I care not whether you pay or not, and there are no perks to being a paid subscriber. I have never wanted the additional pressure of thinking that I have paid subscribers to please…

If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. Best, Isobel