Improving Instruction: an Alternative to Conventional Wisdom

With all the talk these days about how to improve teaching, and with political attacks on teachers that take a variety of forms, James Hiebert and Anne Morris from the University of Delaware presented a fascinating proposal today, at the NCTM Research Presession, for how we can best go about improving instruction.

Entitling their session “Improving Teachers or Teaching: Alternatives for Improving Classroom Instruction,” Morris and Hiebert argued for a radical change in the education of both preservice and inservice teachers.

I’ll try to summarize their argument, but it’s better if you can read it in their own words. The most recent article they’ve written appears in the January/February 2011 issue of Educational Researcher: http://www.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/Educational_Researcher/4001/05-14_02EDR11.pdf

As I understand it, their proposal is that teacher education needs to be firmly grounded in the collective planning, execution, and reflection of specific lessons. Their presentation and article is from the viewpoint of teacher educators; I’ll try to rephrase it from the teacher’s viewpoint, and I’ll try to shorten it enough for a blog post without doing it too much of a disservice.

As inservice and preservice teachers, it’s not so important for us to become involved in discussion and reading about teaching strategies and trying to obtain directly the whole complex of knowledge and skills that we need to teach well. Instead we should focus on how to teach specific lessons well, and do so in a structured, intensive, collective way. Our objective should be to create a product – a lesson plan – with more elements, more detail, more careful analysis and thinking — than any lesson plan we’re likely familiar with. This plan would contain very specific learning goals, discussion of instructional strategy, likely student misconceptions and plans for responding to them, contingency plans for adapting to unexpected occurrences, and so forth. These lesson plans would not be solely our responsibility as individual teachers; their creation should involve curriculum designers, educational researchers, and teacher educators as well as involving us as the practitioners. 

But our part in the process would be key, as the experts who are the closest to our students, who are directly responsible for their learning. And further, they say, our involvement in creating, using, and refining such detailed and extensive lesson plans should be a collective involvement, in which we work with colleagues both in our own schools and in other schools. Working together with colleagues in our schools and in other schools and districts, we should become part of a larger effort to create a library of such lesson plans, in a way that allows us all to benefit from the effort of each other.

This is an ambitious proposal, and there are lots of practical difficulties in its way. And I assure you that I have not done it justice in this too-brief description.

Let me close by mentioning several aspects of it that I found very appealing.

First, the approach concentrates on what we as teachers understand is the most important part of the process, the place where learning occurs: our direct communication and interaction with our students. It validate the importance of what we do in our classrooms.

Second, the approach says that rather than talking about good and bad teachers, we should talk about good and bad lessons. This insight, that it’s not who we are but what we do, is very reassuring. When I teach a bad lesson, it doesn’t mean I’m a bad teacher, it just means that I should learn from what happened so that the next time I teach that lesson I can do it better.

Third, shared responsibility for lessons plan gives me resources I wouldn’t have otherwise, and the opportunity to share successes, failures, and insights with colleagues.

Fourth, implementing it would require a change in the culture of schools and teaching that would help to make the school environment a more satisfying place to work.

Fifth, it directly contradicts the too-common view among some politicians and some school administrators that the problem is bad teachers, and that we just need to use some sort of data-driven teacher evaluation system in order to replace our bad teachers with better ones.

Such a radical revision of teacher education will take a long time, and will both require and induce changes in school culture and in our society as a whole. Morris and Hiebert don’t expect any of this to happen quickly – Jim Hiebert mentioned a 30 to 40 year time frame for developing a comprehensive bank of annotated lesson plans. My conclusion is that theirs is a vision that can guide us in our efforts to change both our own teaching (by engaging in shared creation and refinement of annotated lesson plans) and our entire educational system (by working with other teachers, teacher educators, and others to promote these ideas).

An interesting and exciting start for my time in Indianapolis!

-Scott

(After teaching in Philadelphia public schools for 18 years, I now work at KCP Technologies, mostly developing Sketchpad activities for students in grade 2 through early algebra. I also work as an adjunct instructor teaching Advanced Secondary Math Methods at the University of Pennsylvania.)