Better than Best Practice

Developing teaching and learning through dialogue

Adam Lefstein, Julia Snell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134653898
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Better than Best Practice offers a new way of thinking about classroom practice, professional development, and improving teaching and learning. This companion book and website together offer a selection of rich and realistic video-based case studies, context and narrative, step-by-step guidance through key issues, and commentary and debate from a range of expert contributors.

Carefully chosen video clips from primary school literacy lessons show real teachers in a variety of often knotty situations: classroom conversations that take unexpected turns; grappling with assessment; managing disagreements, to name a few. The book explores the educational potential of classroom talk and, in particular, the promise and problems of dialogic pedagogy.

With an emphasis on the complexity and 'messiness' of teaching, Better than Best Practice considers how to learn from observing and discussing practice in order to develop professional judgment. It offers practical advice on how to organise and facilitate video-based professional development in which teachers share their practice with colleagues in order to learn from one another's challenges, problems, dilemmas and breakthroughs.

This exciting new resource argues that critical discussions of practice, which highlight dilemmas instead of prescribing solutions, help to develop and support thoughtful, flexible, and insightful practitioners: an approach that is better than best practice.

Part 1 Where we're coming from

DOI: 10.4324/9781315884516-1

Chapter 1 Better than best practice

DOI: 10.4324/9781315884516-2

Video is hot in educational improvement. It seems to promise an easy technological fix for a long-standing problem in teacher professional development, namely that teachers work largely alone, behind closed doors, and rarely have opportunities to learn from one another. With the advent of relatively inexpensive digital video technology, classroom practice can be easily captured, edited and made public. And, indeed, a number of teachers and researchers have begun to experiment with various models of video-based teacher professional development, in which participants view and discuss recordings of their own or others’ practice. When done well, such activities are indeed promising. However, they are surprisingly difficult to do well, especially in settings in which classroom observation is associated with inspection and performance management, and a pervasive ‘best practice’ mentality shuts down possibilities for critical discussion of the complexities of teaching.

This book offers a vision of teaching as the sensitive and flexible exercise of professional judgment and repertoire, and a set of video-based practices for teacher professional development. It is based upon our experiences researching dialogic pedagogy in a London primary school, and facilitating a series of workshops in which the teachers at that school reflected on recordings of their literacy lessons and discussed how to improve their teaching. The book’s primary goals are:

• to challenge current orthodoxies regarding ‘best practice’ in classroom teaching, advancing instead an approach to pedagogy and professional development that is sensitive to and appreciative of the tensions and dilemmas inherent to teaching and learning in classrooms;
• to develop a multidimensional approach to dialogic pedagogy that is informed by actual practice, is grounded in existing classroom conditions and acknowledges the complexities and problems inherent in dialogue;
• to offer a set of rich and realistic cases for reflection and discussion;
• to model the sorts of professional vision and analysis that we believe are particularly conducive to learning from video recordings of practice; and
• to offer practical guidance for organizing and facilitating video-based professional development.

In this first chapter we briefly outline our view of teaching practice and the implications of that view for teacher learning from video.

Problematizing ‘best practice'

The idea of ‘best practice’ has become part of international educational common sense. In England, for example, it sits at the heart of ambitious and wide-reaching governmental reforms of teaching. The 1998 National Literacy Strategy (NLS) sought to radically transform curriculum content, lesson structure and teaching method in all primary classrooms across England, all at once. Michael Barber, then Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on School Standards and the architect of the NLS, explained the policy’s rationale:

For years and years primary teachers have been criticised for the way they teach reading. But then nobody ever said to them: ‘Here’s the best practice, based on solid international research and experience. If you use it your children will make progress.¹

Barber’s confident prognosis nicely captures both the tone and the content of the prevalent ‘best practice’ approach to educational improvement, which involves identifying, capturing and disseminating proven teaching methods.² In such a way, it is assumed, the vast majority of teachers are able to learn from and emulate the innovations and secrets of the gifted few. While such an approach has its merits, which we discuss below, we argue that it can only advance teacher professional practice so far. We offer here a complementary way of thinking about and conducting teacher professional development and educational improvement. This approach involves teachers sharing their practice with colleagues in order to learn from one another’s challenges, problems, dilemmas and breakthroughs. Gifted teachers, in this model, appreciate the complexity of teaching, have the courage to expose their practice – ‘warts and all’ – to their peers and are adept at making sense of and learning from their own and others’ experience. This approach is better than best practice, because it helps to develop and support thoughtful, flexible and insightful practitioners, who exercise a large degree of leadership in directing their own professional development.

Echoes of the ‘best practice’ idea resonate throughout the education system: Teachers ask, ‘What is best practice for grouping children in mathematics lessons?’ Scholars systematically review the research literature to ascertain ‘what works’ in teaching higher-order thinking skills. Policymakers wonder, ‘What is the evidence that one early reading intervention is better than another?’ The schools inspectorate publishes reports on ‘learning from the best’ education providers and schools. And government, education publishers, school improvement consultants and even the entertainment industry, produce and market videos of ‘outstanding lessons’, ‘evidence-based methods’ and ‘best teaching practices’.³

We want to clarify from the outset that we see a role for research into which pedagogical practices are more or less effective (for which purposes and under what circumstances), and for demonstrations of productive practices and the principles underlying them, including through video recordings. Teaching involves structures, tools, techniques and routines that can be demonstrated and imitated, and it would be foolish to expect teachers to devise all their methods on their own.⁴ Our concern is with teacher professional development that is focused exclusively on the inculcation of best practice through demonstration and imitation, and specifically with the dominance of this approach in the production and consumption of video recordings of practice.

So what is wrong with over-reliance on best practice? Our primary concern is that the best practice strategy is founded upon an unrealistic – and distorting – vision of teaching. Teaching is complicated and difficult, but ‘best practice’ tends to iron out or overlook complexities, and thereby makes teaching practice appear relatively straightforward and even simple. Teaching is complex first and foremost because multiple factors interact to shape the success of teaching encounters:

• the pupils – their relationships with the teacher, their relationships with one another and social dynamics as a group, their differential levels of knowledge, understanding and interest;
• the content, its demands on teacher and students;
• institutional requirements and supports, such as assessment, performance management and professional development;
• the physical setting; and
• the teacher, their skills, manner and values; and more.⁵

Such complexity poses formidable challenges for designers of best practice methods: How can they ensure effectiveness across multiple, unpredictable situations? A method that works in one context – in the particular constellation of teacher, pupils, relationships, culture and setting – will likely unfold differently, and with different effects, in a different set of circumstances. Transferring good practices between teaching contexts is possible, but requires sensitivity, flexibility and judgement.

A further source of complexity in teaching is the overwhelming demands practice places on practitioners’ attention. There is a lot going on in the classroom, all at once, and from every possible direction. Walter Doyle describes this phenomenon:

During a discussion, a teacher must listen to student answers, watch other students for signs of comprehension or confusion, formulate the next question, and scan the class for possible misbehavior. At the same time, the teacher must attend to the pace of the discussion, the sequence of selecting students to answer, the relevance and quality of answers, and the logical development of the content.⁶

Teachers must interpret and act upon a great deal of information rapidly. There is insufficient time to process consciously the multiple signals, the issues they raise, the options available, their relative advantages and the overall lesson strategy. Instead, teachers rely heavily upon intuition and habit, and their knowledge about such habitual activity is primarily tacit, that is, knowledge that teachers don’t know they possess or find difficult to articulate. Here then is a second challenge for the design of ‘best practices’: How to recognize, formulate and transfer such tacit knowledge? How can it be acquired except through direct experience?

Another cause of complexity in teaching, which undermines attempts to achieve agreement about which practices are best, are the many and contested goals of education. Teachers are supposed to impart academic knowledge and skills; and also to care for their pupils’ emotional and spiritual well-being; and to promote their moral development; and to make sure that everyone is engaged and interested; and that no one is excluded (socially or academically); and to promote civic values such as tolerance and integrity; and to foster safe and caring learning environments; and to instil respect for authority while cultivating critical and independent thinking; and more. Goals conflict, sometimes deeply, such as the tension between maintenance of teachers’ authority and cultivation of pupils’ critical thinking, and at other times superficially, inasmuch as attending to pupils’ emotional needs demands time that might otherwise have been devoted to academic content. Which goals should be given priority, and when? At any given moment goals shift as new opportunities and/or crises present themselves. So, teaching is not merely complex because teachers must simultaneously attend to multiple signals, but also because those signals beckon them to move the lesson in different directions, all legitimate and desirable.

In summary, many facets of teaching – its complexity and unpredictability; its dependence on the particularities of changing contexts; the centrality of tacit knowledge and the mu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributing commentators
• Acknowledgements
• Key transcription conventions
• Part 1 Where we’re coming from
• Part 2 Classroom episodes
• Part 3 Where to go from here
• Methodology appendix: pedagogically oriented linguistic ethnographic micro-analysis
• References
• Index