[MUSIC] Welcome everybody to Being a Professional. We've completed the first three weeks of lectures and we're now about to enter the final three weeks. Week 4 is about developing a personal philosophy of teaching. And Lecture 1 is about how teaching and education changes lives. We're going to begin by reinforcing some of the key points raised in earlier lectures. To begin with, if you remember, up until the mid 60s the view was schools make almost no difference. And, as a result, student achievement is attributable to things such as family background, socioeconomic status and so forth. [MUSIC] In the period following World War II, there was a heavy investment in education in many countries. This was seen as important in opening the doors of opportunity for individuals, but also, in terms of national prosperity. Something very interesting happened at this time because when we started to compare the outcomes achieved by very similar schools, in places like North America for example. We found that despite the fact they might have had similar numbers of students, students of a similar background, similar numbers of teachers and resources following a similar curriculum et cetera. Some schools were doing considerably better than others, and when we started to investigate why this was the case, we started to realise school effectiveness, was the result of things such as leadership, and later, the quality of individual teachers. Initially, our focus was on leadership that makes a difference, but increasingly, we began to realise that the quality of the classroom teacher, was a very important factor in the achievement that individual students were able to demonstrate. [MUSIC] When we began to delve more deeply into student achievement within schools we found that some students were doing far better than other students of similar ability, in the same school. This led us to the conclusion that the quality of teaching varies more within schools than between schools. In other words, some teachers are highly effective in their teaching of a group of students, others, less so. Because of this, since the mid 80s, we've been increasingly focusing on the quality of teachers, and the quality of teaching, as the major in-school influence on student achievement. We examined the work of John Hattie in a previous lecture and he conducted an extensive meta-analysis of student achievement research internationally. His findings showed that the major in-school influence on student achievement is in fact, the quality of the classroom teacher. And, this accounts for approximately 30% of the variance in student achievement. So once again, it's been underlined for us how important teacher quality is. [MUSIC] As we mentioned in a previous lecture, we now have a fairly good idea what good teaching looks like from our extensive research. We have a good idea how teacher expertise develops. And, that's reflected in standards, for example, such as those developed by the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership. Which has four levels of teacher professional standards. However, knowing what good teaching looks like is not enough. We need to make good teaching more widespread, and that's been a major focus for us. A quality teacher in every classroom then, is actually the biggest equity issue in education today. More so, than school facilities and school resources. Some have speculated that with the widespread access to the internet and all the information that the internet contains, we don't need teachers as much as we did. And teachers need to be the guide by the side, rather than the sage on the stage. This is a false dichotomy, and is not correct in the current situation. We need good teachers more than we did previously, it can be argued. Because there is so much material out there, there is no guarantee of the quality or accuracy of what we are encountering. As a result, teachers need to be able to direct their students to reputable sources of information. And to very carefully filter and screen, the sorts of resources they may use in the classroom. I'm now going to look at some popular, but non-evidence based approaches to teaching and learning, that you need to be very careful about. And I've called this session, educational myth busting. I'm going to draw upon the work again of John Hattie and his widely known and respected work, Visible Learning which appeared in 2009, which is based upon extensive meta-analysis of educational research from around the world. One of the key indices he uses in this work, is the notion of an effect size. An effect size is what results from a particular strategy or intervention, in terms of student learning. To give you an example, if a strategy has no effect on student learning whatsoever, the effect size will be zero. Up until 0.2, the effect is fairly small. Possibly insignificant. Between 0.2 and 0.4, we start to become interested because, 0.4 is approximately the average of all teacher effects. 0.6 or above, is a large effect size. 0.8 is very large. And anything above 1.0 is considered extremely large, if not radioactive, in terms of student learning. We are now going to examine evidence on effective teaching in more detail. [MUSIC]
