The worst thing I’ve heard this year was:
The training about exit tickets was really useful. Even though I didn’t use them.”
My carefully-crafted training failed to stick. Like so many good intentions and excellent bits of training, it disappeared into the enormous pressure of the black hole that is day-to-day teaching.
It’s not just my training though. A meta-study of North American research on teacher education concluded:
There is no clear evidence that certain approaches in teacher education may be more effective than others… it may be questionable whether teacher education can make a difference at all (Korthagen et al., 2006).”
Why doesn’t teacher training stick?
1) Weak training?
Training might not stick because its weak. My biggest concern is lack of practice, but I also like to worry about debunked theories, poor sequencing, and inadequate exposure to excellent models. This year however, I’ve realised training often fails to stick even if all these things are in place.
2) The power of culture?
A recent Harvard Business Review article, Why leadership training fails – and what to do about it, underscores how weakly training sticks if it doesn’t fit organisational culture:
learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things”
The authors describe a brilliant training course: a week with real-time feedback, changes in participants’ attitudes and a plan to transfer the learning back to the organisation. Yet an evaluation two years later showed that trainees:
found it impossible to apply what they had learned about teamwork and collaboration, because of a number of managerial and organizational barriers”.
Ultimately:
Senior executives and their HR teams continue to pour money into training, year after year, in an effort to trigger organizational change. But what they actually need is a new way of thinking about learning and development. Context sets the stage for success or failure, so it’s important to attend to organizational design and managerial processes first and then support them with individual development tools such as coaching and classroom or online education.”
Organisational culture – the way things are done around here – trumps training, every day of the week. As Robert Cialdini puts it:
We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it… Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion).”
The power of culture in schools
A recent study powerfully quantified the influence of school culture on teachers. The authors combined a decade’s student data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District with data on teachers’ perceptions of their schools as professional environments: how orderly and collaborative they are, how good the leadership, professional development and evaluation systems. They found that:
the degree to which teachers become more effective over time varies substantially by school. In some schools, teachers improve at much greater rates than in others. We find that this improvement is strongly related to the opportunities and supports provided by the professional context in which they work.”
This graph shows the impact of school culture on students’ maths results. It shows how students’ results improve as teachers become more experienced – and how much more results improve for teachers in schools with better professional environments:*
The gradual improvement of a teacher in a school in the top 25% over one in the bottom 25% – 0.035 of a test-score standard deviation per year – leads to 38% difference in total improvement over a decade (Kraft and Papay, 2015). Excellent professional environments accelerate teacher development and student learning.
What is to be done for new teachers?
The obvious conclusion is that effective professional development and good leadership require more time, money and attention: every new teacher deserves a brilliant mentor; every existing teacher thoughtful development.
In the real world, low income schools often lack the experienced and expert teachers who can provide this kind of support, as Becky Allen and her team demonstrated recently.
So, given a third, crucial barrier to teacher training sticking – how hard it is to change our behaviour consistently – and assuming the worst – a culture in which teachers aren’t supported to use effective techniques consistently – what is to be done?
Two approaches seem crucial, but insufficient:
1) Practice
If we want teachers to use a technique in the classroom, they have to master it outside the classroom. I’ve emphasised this point previously, so won’t labour it here.
I fear however, that this is rarely enough if teachers don’t see techniques used around them, and receive encouragement to adopt them within their schools.
2) Checklists
Checklists offer powerful reminders of best practices for professionals under pressure. That’s why I wrote Ticked Off.
Sharing checklists with trainees guarantees nothing however. As Atul Gawande put it:
The power of checklists is limited, [the checklist designer] emphasized. They can help experts remember how to manage a complex process or configure a complex machine. They can make priorities clearer and prompt people to function better as a team. By themselves, however, checklists cannot make anyone follow them (The Checklist Manifesto).
I sometimes catch myself failing to use my own checklists. If I can’t remember to use them is a new teacher under pressure more likely to do so?
We can give teachers the best training, we can practise with them, we can offer them checklists, but the point at which they need all these things, the point at which they’re under pressure, is the point at which they’re least likely to stop and remember them.
So what more can be done to help training stick – to help teachers do the right thing under pressure? I have one more suggestion, which I’ll cover in my next post.
* In truth, the graph shows how student test-score data diverges from the average for ‘prototypical’ teachers in schools at the 75th, 50th and 25th percentile rank for professional environments, but I have failed to convert these terms into plain English and remain readable.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
Great article Harry. As a coach I am constantly reminded of the powers of the systems which we all inhabit. Whilst individuals can certainly be encouraged to change, if they go back into a system that restricts change it will becomes extremely hard work to put anything into practise. That is not to say that any change is not possible however. But often you have to build an alternative system around the learner to support them in challenging the status quo. The elements of this alternative system could include: mentoring, social networks, forums, gamification and use of IT for push notifications and support. This is not guaranteed to work but it counters the statistic of 90% of information being lost the moment the participant leaves the training room.
Nothing differs teachers from other learners, but any new learning that is not paired with actual use, call it retrieval practice if you wish, is doomed to be stored away somewhere in memory. And culture rules, that is very true. I still say this video is an excellent example of how culture can be changed and the obstacles of guarding what you’ve gained over time against the never ending change of organisation, new policys, etc. https://urskola.se/Produkter/200554-UR-Samtiden-ResearchED-2017-Att-prova-och-omprova-undervisning
Hi Harry,
Another compelling blog. I’ve been riveted by your blogging in the last few months – it has been superb.
One query: given many of your last posts, and ones after this one, cite evidence of failures and successes with CPD. What evidence is there for the efficacy of practice and / or checklist for teacher training and development? They are posed as solutions, but that isn’t as substantiated as the issues you raise or the other matters about CPD that you have discussed in other points. The latest Deans for Impact paper is really interesting, but it appears to me something of a working theory about potential teacher development rather than something rooted in an evidence base. I recognized there isn’t a massive amount that works with teacher development and training!
Alex
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the comment and for the great challenge. I’d describe the evidence for practice in teacher training as converging around a strong hypothesis, nothing stronger. My own conviction derives from three sources:
1) The experience of receiving and delivering training with and without practice and the different effects I’ve seen/experienced.
2) The adoption of deliberate practice among some of the most thoughtful, innovative and effective trainers (Deborah Ball, Pam Grossman, Doug Lemov) and among schools, universities and systems they work for – and again, its effects.
3) The signature pedagogies of almost any other field in which practitioners must make decisions under pressure (health, the military, emergency services, sports).
Another part of my conviction comes from the failure of so many other training methods and a search for alternatives: we need to see practice-based training tested to the rigorous standards other methods have received.
Three caveats to this:
1) From my experience of Teach Like a Champion training and attempts to emulate it it, the method is more than ‘just’ practice: it involves the careful examination of models, bite-sized activities and immediate, focused feedback. Firstly this complicates whether we’re ‘just’ talking about practice, but secondly, there’s a robust evidence basis for the merits of models and feedback.
2) Practice’s power dissipates in cultures which are inimical to the behaviours practised (seeing my own training not being used was what led me to the reflections in this post). Practice nested in a culture which supports it is where the true power lies (which I think comes through from TNTP’s ‘The Mirage’).
3) The critiques of the limits of Ericsson’s work and the explanatory power of deliberate practice have a lot going for them. (McNamara et al., 2014) provides a strong indication of its limits in explaining variations in performance – it’s worth accepting that there is a limit to how much we can change people’s behaviour at scale.
On checklists, the point I was trying to make when I wrote the post was that checklists are profoundly limited in their power to change behaviour.
I’ve changed my mind since I wrote this though. I think that a good toolkit can have a significant impact on people’s behaviour, because if they see its merits they will use it willingly – the way that teachers adopted York’s multiple choice questions in science rapidly and voluntarily is a good example of this (Millar et al., 2003).
As with practice, there’s good, quantitative evidence of the power of checklists in medicine and engineering – but it’s a strong hypothesis in education. If the EEF wanted to fund an RCT distributing copies of Ticked Off to schools to test this, I wouldn’t object.