S4 Ep7 - The Critical Issue of Teacher Knowledge Building

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy podcast. I’m Jocelyn and today I’m recording on the lands of the Palawa people here in Tasmania. In our last episode of the podcast, I shared 5 reasons that traditional professional learning probably isn’t leading to student outcomes. In that episode, I discussed cognitive biases that lead us to believe that we have more knowledge than we do. It turns out that people with less knowledge about a topic are more likely to overestimate how much they know. If you haven’t listened to the last episode, I encourage you to do so. You can find it here. 

In this episode, we’ll discuss what you can do to help your teachers build knowledge that leads to improved student outcomes and doesn’t just take up valuable time and money.

The first thing to know is that, as with our students, teacher knowledge building is not achieved through a one-and-done undertaking. In fact, this traditional workshop model without targeted focus or follow-up has been identified as a feature of ineffective practice. 

The ultimate goal of any professional learning undertaking is for teachers to take their new learning and apply it for the benefit of students.

Newman and colleagues have written,

Individual teacher competence is the foundation for improved classroom practice, but to improve the achievement of all students in a school from one academic year to the next, teachers must exercise their individual knowledge, skills, and dispositions in an integrated way to advance the collective work of the school under a set of unique conditions. The collective power of the full staff to improve student achievement schoolwide can be summarized as school capacity (Newman et al, 2000).

In other words, professional learning must involve teachers working in a way that contributes to the collective good of the group and in doing so, they need to think for themselves and engage in applying new learning in their own teaching practice.    

In their article, The Role of Coaching in the Implementation of Innovations, Joyce and Showers identified that a barrier to the transfer of knowledge and skills to a teacher’s own practice is that the teacher may think that all they need to do is take a process from training and plop it into their classrooms. However, when teachers understood that adopting new teaching methods involved new learning and not just new doing, they were much more likely to be successful.

A big part of this was accepting that there would be setbacks and failures and knowing that this was all part of the process.

The view of professional learning as something you pick up in training and simply put down in the classroom can lead to bigger problems than just a waste of time.

Trying to use a new technique without understanding the when, where, and why of it can negatively impact student outcomes.

Doing something new does not always lead to better outcomes.

Joyce and Showers described an example of this. Teachers attended professional learning about using higher-order questioning in the classroom. They learned to discriminate higher-order questions from lower-order questions, to generate examples of each, and to increase their rate of higher-order questions used in the classroom. After the training, teachers implemented this new technique with their students. You might say that the training was a success. Except that it wasn’t. It turns out that the technique of asking higher-order questions is only successful in specific circumstances, namely, that you have taught foundational skills and understanding first. But teachers weren’t doing this. Their questioning efforts actually resulted in worse results for students. The teachers were missing the critical element of knowledge often called conditional knowledge. That’s knowing when, where, how much, and under what circumstances a practice is most suitable.

So if traditional PL doesn’t get the job done, what does?

Joyce and Showers described three conditions for successful teacher learning: the study of the theory underlying the skill, the opportunity for multiple demonstrations, and practice and feedback either under simulations or in the classroom. Further, they named onsite coaching as a critical factor in transferring that knowledge to the classroom.

It’s understandable for leaders to, at this point in the podcast, be thinking, “Well, we’ve done all of those things.”  Let’s unpack that a bit more.

Joyce and Showers talked about the ‘study of the theory underlying the skill’. I’m sorry to tell you that an hour or two of an information session is not study. It’s an introduction. 

As leaders, we often provide information to our teachers, but perhaps we aren’t doing the necessary follow-up to make sure that the doing results in learning. 

Let’s unpack this idea of knowing a bit more to really dig down into what it means for us. To do this, examine a study by Li and Sang from 2022 published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education. In this study, Li and Sang examined the concept of knowledge. They created a continuum of knowledge from tacit/implicit knowledge through to theoretical.

Tacit knowledge is what we know but cannot explain. It’s practical and highly context-dependent. Think about all of the things that you do in the classroom. Think about the lesson you just taught that wasn’t from a highly structured program. Would you be able to explain the how and why of it all? If someone asked you why you chose to teach at a certain pace, use certain words, or stop a lesson at a certain point, could you provide a deep explanation of your reasoning, or would you say, “It just felt right based on what I know of the students”?  If you couldn’t, then that’s tacit/implicit knowledge. This kind of knowledge is difficult to transfer.

The next kind of knowledge is explicit knowledge.  We could write it down on paper or give someone else specific steps. It’s straightforward and easily documented. 

Tacit/implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge combine to form practical knowledge. They are about what we do. Li and Sang write that while most practical knowledge is implicit and not particularly easy to transfer, some of it is explicit. When we give someone a program to use that has strong guidance for how the lessons should be run, over time, they develop explicit knowledge. They come to know the steps and can document them for others.

We then have theoretical knowledge that is accessible, highly transferable, and can be used by various people in various contexts. When you undertake professional learning that shares the reading rope or a visual of cognitive load theory, you’re dealing with theoretical knowledge. 

We could all evaluate the professional learning efforts in our schools and say that we are, in fact, addressing these types of knowledge.

However, what’s going on when we have been doing this work for a considerable period of time and our teachers still can’t answer questions about that reading rope or apply the principles of cognitive load theory to their planning and classroom practice? 

In their paper, Li and Sang talk about a transformation of knowledge from one part of the continuum to another. It’s not about just addressing these different types of knowledge, but about connecting them. In considering 36 separate studies that were eligible for inclusion in their 2022 study, Li and Sang were looking for common threads. Teacher knowledge has been written about extensively, but there still isn’t consensus about what it is, why it matters and how to build it. Li and Sang identified several conditions in the literature that facilitate the transformation and building of teacher knowledge.

These include:

• High-quality collaboration in and between teams.
• Supportive leadership, not just in being nice to people but in ensuring alignment between the big picture goals of the school and the knowledge being built. At a minimum, sufficient time needs to be allocated to this work. A quick information session doesn’t get it done.
• Professional guidance from an external person can be highly effective if: the external guide uses the principles of effective professional learning experiences (i.e., intensive duration, content focus, coherence, active, practice-based, collective participation). The external guide also needs to provide a framework for the team to think about teaching and learning.
• The fourth condition is that technological environments were used effectively, so online learning is a part of the mix.
• Next is the provision of tools, frameworks, documents, pathways of learning to give team members a way to conceptualise the knowledge being built and provide a shared point of reference for discussions and reflection.

I’d like to end this episode by coming back to Joyce and Showers. Their work was concerned with how we support teachers to transfer new learning to the classroom in a way that leads to substantial learning outcomes for students. Critical in this desire, is that the teacher can not just replicate something from a training session in their classroom, but can use that new learning to deepen and expand their existing practice.

Let me read what they had to say all the way back in 1981,

The positive, cumulative transfer of learned teaching skills and strategies to classroom practice is enormously complex. Newly acquired skills must be integrated into an existing repertoire of skills and knowledge. Curricula must be reexamined for appropriate uses of new skills, and goals must be reviewed in relation to new strategies. Thus, learning to perform a new skill or strategy is only the first step toward affecting student outcomes. Transfer of training to the learning environment requires skillful decision-making by the classroom teacher and redirection of behavior until the new skill is operating comfortably within the flow of activities in the classroom. (Joyce and Showers, 1981)

We all know how long this takes and how much effort is required. We all know that there is never enough time to do all the things we want to do. We all also know how it feels to be working so hard and just not seeing the results we are hoping for.

Maybe it’s time to slow down and do less.

Maybe it’s time for a slow-learning movement for teachers where we focus on practices and principles of instruction instead of programs.

Don’t get me wrong, we need guides, tools and programs to help us know what to do. That was identified by Li and Sang through their review of research. But it seems to me that we are in a time here in 2024 when programs are being thrown at people with a bit of light-touch training and schools are expected to just take it from there. This work is complex. It’s long-term and it’s all about people.  

Here's a bit more from Joyce and Showers:

...believe that a major problem in teacher training designs has been the assumption that a skill, once learned, can be "popped into place" in the classroom (transferred laterally). The situation is, rather, that transfer of teaching skill involves much new learning - when to use the skills, how to modulate them to the students, etc.- learning which has to take place in the process of transfer. 

This paper was written in 1981 – over 40 years ago and we are still seeing the same issues. It is time for that to change. We don’t need an inquiry or a report to tell us that. We are seeing the results in front of our eyes.

So what’s the answer to this issue of transformation and transfer of teaching knowledge? Well, there isn’t one simple thing, but I’ll add to the suggestions in this episode by saying that coaching has been consistently identified as a key factor in helping teachers build all types of knowledge, including pedagogical practices. But this work is about more than just having a supportive ear and someone to run ideas by.   Coaching isn’t an exact science but it is important. 

This episode won’t give you everything you need to know about building teacher knowledge, but if you are going to take something away from it, let it be this:

• Think beyond programs, they are just the starting point for growth.
• Be specific about what you want your teachers to grow knowledge in and make sure that it aligns to your strategic vision.
• Allocate time for learning, but don’t let it be random. Having teachers go and observe their teaching bestie to pick up some tips isn’t going to get it done.
• If you can, when you are setting staffing budgets, allocate a sufficient amount of money for a coach and then make sure they are well trained and supported.
• Knowledge building and teacher growth can’t be add-ons that distract from the work of the classroom. They are the work of the classroom.
• Remember, real learning isn’t about ticking PL boxes in the strategic plan. It’s about helping teachers integrate new learning with existing schemas of practice and then working alongside them as they test and try and evaluate their efforts. That’s the coaching bit. It’s the most important bit but it’s also the bit that is least often done well.
• Do less, do it better and be in it for the long haul.

You’ll find the references for this episode at the bottom of the show notes at www.jocelynseamereducation.com.

This is work isn’t easy. It is achievable, but we can rarely find success in our own. Don’t worry. You don’t have to.

Until next week, happy teaching

Bye

References:

Joyce, B. R., & Showers, B. (1981). TRANSFER OF TRAINING: THE CONTRIBUTION OF “COACHING.” The Journal of Education, 163(2), 163–172. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42772926

Newmann, F. M., King, M. B., & Youngs, P. (2000). Professional Development That Addresses School Capacity: Lessons from Urban Elementary Schools. American Journal of Education, 108(4), 259–299. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1085442

Xiaoyan Li & Guoyuan Sang (2022): Critical review of research on teacher knowledge building: towards a conceptual framework, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, DOI: 10.1080/1359866X.2022.2141606

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