Instructional Risk in Education

Why Instruction Can Fail

Stuart McNaughton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815355847
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351129183
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is based on the idea that instruction carries in-built risks, and instructional practices can be counterproductive unless used with care. Referencing a wide range of approaches to increasing effectiveness, Instructional Risk provides an explanation of why some forms of instruction are less powerful than they should be. Elaborating on rather than advising against these forms of instruction, it illustrates how teachers can use instructional practices effectively through managing risk and being adaptive in their use of them in the many and dynamic microsystems of the classroom.

The book is unique in bringing together disparate evidence from a range of research areas and across core curriculum areas of English Language Arts, mathematics and science, for a theory of 'Instructional Risk'; the basic proposition for which is that instructional approaches carry known and predictable risks. The book focuses on the expertise required to overcome risks, which are exaggerated for children from communities not well served by our schools. The book is also a critique of research that is 'programmatic' and limited to experimental evidence and summaries of that evidence which are uncritically developed into statements about 'What Works'.

Made to be both an explication of the theory through repeated examples as well as a technical resource, this book will be vital reading for lecturers and postgraduate students of Education and Educational Psychology.

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PART I

Introduction

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1

THE IDEA OF RISK

A case study of effective teaching

A lively discussion is taking place in a class of 12- and 13-year-old children in a New Zealand urban school. The discussion focuses on how the film Finding Nemo works as a narrative. A small group, without the teacher, is discussing and rewriting a poem about racism. The children are from communities with the highest levels of unemployment and the lowest income levels in New Zealand, from indigenous Māori families and from families from several Pacific Islands (Pasifika children). They are alert and engaged. The energy in the room is palpable.

Over two separate lessons, the teacher is able to display breathtaking dexterity and adaptability. Effortlessly she shifts the students’ focus, from the narrative to how the characters behave and the sequence of events, through to the dialogue, the words and the multiple levels which comprise the text’s language features. She gives mini lessons on specific areas of interest. She moves between the levels of knowledge and skills in the groups whilst keeping a tight rein on the collective attention on the goals of the lessons.

With the Finding Nemo group, she focuses on plot structure, its themes and characters. She identifies the attributes of the characters’ intentions (why a character is scared of a shark), introduces and elaborates on the vocabulary (‘petrified’), and includes in her own speech the use of idiomatic language (‘light hearted’). She takes some brief time to identify homonyms and homophones (‘mourning’ and ‘morning’) and words with meanings that are new to the class (‘inflation’). She elicits awareness of a narrative complication in the Nemo text and makes the intertextual link to existing examples from the children’s own writing. There is even a mini lesson on hearing the difference between [b] and [p] in ‘mob’ and ‘mop’, knowing the contrast is hard for some Pasifika children. She uses technical language that provides markers for strategies the children can use (‘prediction’, ‘checking’).

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This observation of learning is a glimpse into what constitutes effective teaching. She is an exceptional teacher. Her use of, or reference to, strategies for comprehending was embedded in the on-going activity, but unlike many teachers at this level at her school and surrounding schools, she didn’t need to engage in daily explicit teaching of the strategies. Through discussion she repeatedly drew the children’s attention to checking meanings and reflecting on why they were discussing something (“I just wanted you to know. . .”), as well as challenging them to use meanings as warrants to justify claims and comments.

I could go on. The point is that this teacher is acting consistently with a lot of what research has demonstrated is effective teaching. The teacher is known to be effective, both through the judgement of her colleagues and the research evidence showing that the children in her class made significantly greater than expected gains and were at or above national levels in reading comprehension tests. But she is unusual, especially in this setting. Her colleagues vary in how well they are able to raise levels of achievement and make the accelerated gains necessary for children who are commonly up to two years behind their peers on measures of academic achievement.

What’s the problem?

The question of ‘what is effective?’ taxes our thinking in education, just as it does in health and in the other institutions which involve human systems. At a system level there are many reasons for more of us needing to be more effective, which include the economic and social well-being of countries, regions and communities, as well as the compelling ethical concerns of inequalities and disparities. Competing, as countries and their teachers do in international standings, adds to these drivers.

Why we might not be consistently effective raises questions about whether our evidence base is complete enough. And in New Zealand there is a cultural context – we live in a country which prides itself on ‘knocking off’ big challenges, just because they are there.¹ But we haven’t as yet done this for our equity challenges. Changing from being a country of high quality but low equity, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD) typifies us, to one that is high in both areas is something many of us have spent a lot of time trying to ‘knock off’.

For all these reasons, educators need to learn how to be more effective. What we do know is that doing this is not simple. It is rocket science, or at least should be seen as akin to rocket science. It takes ingenuity and perseverance and, most importantly, time; time for administrators, leaders, teachers and their community partners to make this happen in schools.

We know that teaching can have a substantial impact on student learning and achievement (Hattie, 2009). This book adds to our understanding of what effective teaching is. In particular, it sets out to address a less well-known part of what it is be effective. This part has to do with the basic design of our instruction, especially in English language arts, mathematics and science.

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Why is effective instruction so variable?

In 2006, after decades of research and after major federal initiatives, Michael Pressley summarised the state of comprehension instruction as largely formulaic, pedestrian and boring, if it occurred at all. Pressley lamented this state of affairs as existing despite the research community having well-articulated knowledge based on systematic and replicated research of what effective instruction looks like. Much of the knowledge on how to teach like the teacher I have just described is available. In later chapters, I will use examples to show the same phenomena occur in mathematics and science too.

So, the question remains as to why effective instruction can look so different from what we know to be effective? To be fair, there are many answers to this question and well-established research disciplines in education are built around different approaches to answering it. They range from a focus on leadership practices through to the knowledge teachers have of content and pedagogy and the quality of their instruction; and further, to the cultural practices of families and their relationships with those of the school (McNaughton, 2002; Robinson, 2007; Hattie, 2009). It has been suggested as being about how to sustain research interventions and to take to scale instructional programmes known to be effective (Coburn, 2003).

These different approaches to the question of why we find the instruction known to be effective so variable across classrooms have provided some answers. Leadership and teaching separately and together account for some of the variations in children’s achievements in schools (Robinson, 2007; Hattie, 2009) and they are mutually influential. We know that we can design more effective schooling with changes in such components as leadership and teaching, so that practices in and across schools become more consistently effective. Most importantly, we know that, ultimately, these changes, in the moment-by-moment episodes of teaching, can advance learning and hence cause higher achievement. We also know that making schools more effective is achievable, but it comes at a cost. For schools serving communities whose children have disproportionately underachieved, we know the change process is resource intensive, difficult to accomplish and even harder to maintain and scale up (McNaughton, 2011).

More recently, researchers have realised that perhaps our research approach isn’t as robust as we thought, and we haven’t been asking the questions, which, on the surface, appear to be pragmatic, but turn out to be deeply complex. Anthony Bryk argues that we need an educational version of ‘improvement science’ – a science built on solving everyday problems such as the difficulties faced by teachers in the moment by moment dynamic environment of the classroom – to be consistently effective (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow & LeMahieu, 2015). We now know that approaches based on improvement science can provide a better understanding of how to embed and generalise effective practices across schools, and at the same time provide answers to basic scientific questions.

This book adds to all these approaches to overcoming our limited effectiveness. What it adds is an argument that some of the very ways in which we teach are the reason for its limitations. The book explains why some forms of instruction are less powerful than they should be; indeed, as I will explain in this book, are even counterproductive. The explanation is not in competition with these other approaches. Rather, it is an explanation that elaborates on one segment of the overall mesh of the known causes, from leadership through to community relationships. It is an explanation below the level of national policy, below the district and school levels. It is at the level that the developmentalist Urie Bronfenbrenner called the ‘micro’ system level (Bronfenbrenner, 2009), where the rubber hits the road in interactions between a teacher and a student. Specifically, it is how teachers use their instructional tools in the many and dynamic micro systems of the classroom.

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The idea of instructional risk

The central idea of this book is that instruction carries in-built risks – instruction is not benign. In a sense, our instructional practices, our tools, are dangerous in the hands of teachers; just as dangerous as medicines or types of fuel are, unless used with precision, acumen and care.

Two further ideas flow from this core idea. One is that in order to use instructional practices effectively and to manage the risk, teachers need to be experts who are adaptive in their function. A second idea is that a particular way of engaging in educational science, the approach referred to earlier as ‘improvement science’² is needed to help us identify the operating principles for managing those risks and the antidotes for succumbing to risky practices.

A wider definition of risk

Risk is scrutinised and regulated in most industries and professions, and this book looks at the different approaches that have been used to manage risk. A common starting point is a business and project management framework, such as the one codified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 3100). From this framework comes the idea of risk management; knowing about, assessing the values of and prioritising the actions for those events and opportunities where there is a higher probability of loss or negative impact. Knowing this means that resources can be deployed to minimise, monitor and control the probability or impact of events, or to optimise opportunities. I have borrowed elements of this framework.

When carrying out activities we need to know where there are problematic consequences and how to manage them. An associated concept from microeconomic theory is ‘opportunity cost’,³ which is central to explaining instructional risk. The cost comes from what wasn’t done, given the choice to act in one way when there were alternatives. This turns out to be very important in classrooms, because teaching takes place in an environment where the resources such as time and the distribution of actions and materials around a group of students are very limited.

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Take an example from teaching mathematics in kindergarten in the United States. In a recent study, teachers reported the days per month spent covering different mathematics content in the classrooms of over 30,000 children (Engel, Claessens, Watts & Farkas, 2016). In two different cohorts, the teachers’ coverage of simple maths content such as basic counting was negatively associated with advanced mathematical knowledge and problem solving by the end of kindergarten. Whereas, coverage of more complex concepts and procedures, such as addition, subtraction and place value was positively associated with more advanced mathematical knowledge. This is not surprising. After all, children learn, at least in part, what teachers cover. But the self-evident nature of this point illustrates the opportunity cost challenge. Time repeatedly spent on basic counting may take time away from more advanced content.

There is an additional meaning of risk – the statistical sense of risk (Silver, 2012) – which is used in many domains, including engineering, education, health and the environment. This sense of risk uses the components of known risk such as not graduating from high school, or a morbidity outcome from a threat to health such as a drug. It calculates the magnitude of the potential loss – say in income not earned if one doesn’t graduate from high school and the probability that this loss will occur.

The American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates food safety through risk assessment, forecasting the likely effects and side effects of our actions. This is important for the idea of instructional risk too: knowing the possible outcomes of a course of action, but being aware that the outcomes can change depending on a number of conditions.

So how does all this relate to teaching? When teaching, a teacher chooses to act in certain ways and this means not acting in other ways – this is the opportunity cost. Ideally, they make choices based on the probability that acting will lead to likely outcomes for the children’s learning – this is risk forecasting.

A theory of human activity in the context of teaching

To better understand the application of risk management we need to visit the context in which teachers operate. Teaching does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place within professional activities such as hearing a child read in an early reading group or explaining quadratic equations to a whole class. These professional activities generally have typical ways of participating with rules and functions. To continue with an early reading example, when a child in their first year reads a text in a group with a teacher, both the specified and the unwritten rules for instruction will cover how the group is composed – selecting the right text, when a student takes a turn, what that student should do (and not do) when reading out loud, and what is commented on, corrected or elaborated on by the teacher. The intended functions might include decoding more accurately texts that have a certain difficulty level, or being able to discuss core themes between members of the group. Ideally, a teacher knows how to most effectively make this happen and why, thereby managing the risks that threaten the most effective learning.

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In addition, the participants in these activities, the teachers and their students, have intentions, emotions, beliefs, knowledge and skills, which they bring to the activity, and, crucially, have brought in the past. There is, if you like, a prehistory to any one act that includes the immediate past acts and the distant preceding acts, which have occurred in this activity. At the moment in which the participants c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Instructional Risk in Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Too Much Support
• Part III Too Little Support
• Part IV Misdirected Support
• Conclusion: Grand Designs for Teaching, Learning and Research
• Index