How teaching happens

Following the success of 'How learning happens: Seminal works in educational psychology and what they mean in practice', Emeritus Professor Paul A. Kirschner and Dr Carl Hendrick (with illustrator Oliver Caviglioli) added Dr Jim Heal to the team to write a follow-up, namely 'How teaching happens: Seminal works in teaching and teacher effectiveness and what they mean in practice' (published by Routledge).

The book seeks to closely examine what makes for effective teaching in the classroom and how research on educational psychology and expert teaching can be used in practice. Here, the authors whet your appetite with a short summary of some of the chapters.

All schools want expert teachers. Research shows that children taught by expert teachers learn more and/or better. Policy makers and governments are even willing to financially reward expert teachers financially and otherwise. Each chapter in our book takes an important work in the field of teaching and teacher effectiveness, and illustrates clearly and concisely what the research means and how it can be used in daily practice. So in Chapter 1, we discuss David Berliner's article Learning about and learning from expert teachers.

In that article Berliner looks at questions like: What exactly is an expert teacher? How do we know one when we see one? What determines whether a teacher is an expert or just experienced? Is experience enough or is there more? He notes that while inexperience goes hand-in-hand with being a novice, experience doesn't automatically go hand-in-hand with expertise and discusses how experience and expertise interrelate. He also tries to define a number of metrics, speaking of the difference between good teaching and successful teaching. In Berliner's view, good teaching is 'judged through reliance on standards applied to the tasks of teaching and related to norms for professional behavior, including moral considerations'. Successful teaching on the other hand is more banal. If teaching is successful, then 'intended learnings were achieved. Judgements of successful teaching are concerned not with the tasks of teaching or professional behavior, but with the achievement of ends'.

Teaching 25-30 students in a room with wildly differing abilities and states is an incredibly complex enterprise.

The book continues with Lee Shulman's famous article Those who understand teach: Knowledge growth in teaching based upon his Presidential Address at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Beginning with George Bernard Shaw's demeaning and insulting depiction of the teacher – 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches' – Shulman looked at what was covered in the California State Board examination for elementary school teachers from March 1875. These were all very specific and most were content-related. Fast forward to 1985 and they were all fuzzy and relational. Shulman then asked the questions: Where did the subject matter go? and How did it happen that content disappeared in favour of an emphasis on procedures? Shulman discusses what teachers should know and do and the term Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is born. He concludes: 'We reject Mr. Shaw and his calumny. With Aristotle we declare that the ultimate test of understanding rests on the ability to transform one's knowledge into teaching. Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach'.

We further address the role of the teacher by exploring the work of Jere Brophy and Thomas L. Good and their seminal paper on the relationship between teacher behaviour and student achievement. In it, they focus on the significance of teacher-effect inputs (the steps and moves teachers make) and teacher-effect outputs (the student achievement gains that result from certain teacher actions). Though they offer a rich list of teacher actions that lead to student achievement, perhaps the most prominent theme in their findings is the importance of teachers as conveyors of information.

Within that concept, they offer Structuring and Sequencing Information as just one set of practical means by which teachers can more effectively convey that information:

• Overviews and outlines of to-be-remembered content refers to any organising structure for information that situates a specific knowledge item within its broader context and which helps students to integrate parts of knowledge into an overarching, coherent structure.
• Rule-example-rule patterns refers to any approach which invites students to link specific pieces of information to the broader concepts or rules within which they reside.
• Summaries and sequences of learning refers to any structure that revisits and reviews key concepts and associated rules so as to integrate and reinforce the learning of major points over a given course of study.

Teaching and learning are often counterintuitive acts where doing the opposite of a common-sense approach is often the way to go.

Teaching 25-30 students in a room with wildly differing abilities and states is an incredibly complex enterprise which is why it's been so difficult for researchers to capture 'what works.' The chapter on authenticity is an important one as it gets close to capturing what works by celebrating a kind of beautiful chaos and attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. It's based on a study by Pedro De Bruyckere and Paul Kirschner in which they surveyed students through a series of semi-structured interviews on what they felt made an authentic teacher. This led to four constructs: expertise, passion, unicity and distance. Expertise resonates strongly with the work on PCK where Lee Schulman showed that it's not enough to know your subject, you need to know it in several ways. Students can sniff out when a teacher does not really know what they're talking about and as a result can often tune out. Teachers who don't just know their content but know how it can be conceived and more importantly, misconceived and often have a repertoire of examples, analogies and explanations to address students misconceptions and misunderstandings. On top of that, teachers who can present, explain and deliver content in a passionate way often elicit a strong reaction from students and can engender a new way of seeing the subject and its potential. Explicit instruction done well is never dull and counterintuitively, often very interactive.

Unicity refers to a particular idiosyncratic or unpredictable style in which lessons are never the same and content is delivered in a range of ways. Students said they appreciated teachers who were able to digress or go off on tangents and adapt to the context of the lesson. The teacher teaching a poem about death and has a recently bereaved student should not 'stick to the lesson plan' but rather show a kind of heightened sensitivity to their students, adapting and tailoring the content accordingly. Lastly, distance refers to a healthy and respectful working relationship where the teacher cares for the students' wellbeing and progress but is not trying to be liked by their students. They adopt a kind of 'warm/strict' stance where the student feels safe but also challenged and hopefully inspired. Teachers who try to be popular are often not very popular.

When planning instruction, a knowledge of cognitive architecture and how the brain learns is essential but thinking about authenticity and what that means for each individual teacher, is perhaps just as important starting point for the aspiring classroom practitioner.

Through writing this book, we came to appreciate the impact of these and many more seminal works on our conception of teaching. We also came to realise that teaching is itself a seemingly paradoxical act. For instance, we saw how teaching is highly dependent on context but is also underpinned by a fundamental set of 'best bet' principles. This allows teachers to know what to do even when they seemingly don't know what to do. We saw that it's possible for teachers to apply such principles to the otherwise chaotic arena of classrooms and instructional settings. We saw how teaching and learning is made all the more complex by the fact that experts are notoriously bad at explaining complexity and learners are notoriously bad at understanding how they learn. Finally, we saw how both teaching and learning are often counterintuitive acts where doing the opposite of a common-sense approach is often the way to go.

For these reasons, we hope that this exploration of How Teaching Happens will offer some practical guidance to navigate the immeasurably complex but endlessly rewarding act we call teaching.

How teaching happens: Seminal works in teaching and teacher effectiveness and what they mean in practice is published by Routledge. As a reader offer, the code HTH20 will give you 20% off at checkout, valid until the end of the 2022.