Observations . . . by Larry On Expert Teaching

By Larry Malone, FOSS Co-director

After many years devoted to all things scientific, I have become a fairly accomplished observer. One of the most intriguing subjects of my observation has been teachers. Based on data accrued over the years, I have developed a personal profile of attributes common to expert teachers. Expert teaching is supported by three essential pillars of teacher knowledge and personality. Expert teachers:

Essentially, great teachers know what they are teaching and the level to which they expect their students to acquire that content knowledge. They are fascinated and excited by the opportunity to enter into a sacred pact with students to guide and stimulate the development of student minds. They understand that the learning process is fraught with impediments that can stall learning if feedback related to the learning process (formative assessment) is not infused into the process continuously.

This third element of expert teaching is perhaps the most difficult to master. It requires the practitioner to recognize that the act of teaching, even really good teaching, does not guarantee really good learning. Interestingly, this means that the measure of a really expert teacher is not the excellence of the teaching, per se, but rather it is the excellence of the learning.

The FOSS staff spent six years thrashing around in the area of formative assessment. With the help of hundreds of teachers and thousands of grade 3–6 students and advice from expert panels and critical friends (colleagues) around the country, we made some discoveries. First of all, we learned that our “perfect” curriculum, which presented key ideas in natural science for student consumption, could not guarantee a uniform, conceptually coherent learning experience for all students. Individual students integrate new information into their established cognitive constructs in ways that make sense to them, but may fall short of the mental model intended by the curriculum developers.

In order to know what’s going on inside a student’s head, student thinking must be made explicit. This is where teaching gets very crafty. It’s not possible, yet, to peer into a student’s ear to see the cognitive wheels turning. The expert teacher finds a way to extract that thinking by inducing students to produce artifacts that are representations of thinking that can be observed and analyzed for evidence of learning. The extracted artifacts can take many forms, including verbal elaborations, graphic representations, and written explanations.

Discussions, graphics, and written work can all be used for valid and informative assessment of learning. These artifacts are all produced as a matter of course during the instructional sequence. Based on student thinking, expert teachers step in to correct or enhance learning when it will be most effective—at the time of misunderstanding while a concept is taking shape. Typically a misconception is discovered after instruction has been completed, when it can take a great deal of effort to remedy the faulty learning.

Establishing a formative assessment mindset is rather like installing radar as part of your classroom sensory system. Formative-assessment radar can allow you to detect unidentified flying concepts and invisible obstacles in the environment that may interfere with conceptual navigation in the lesson.

Formative assessment is a kind of sensitivity to the progress of learning. Formative assessment is a methodology, a process, not an instrument. Note that the above discussion did not mention giving an assessment, but rather using naturally evolving artifacts of learning as the focal points for formative assessment. Be clear on this distinction. Formative assessment is not a “test” or other evaluative instrument. A considerably aggressive industry calling itself formative assessment has sprung up in the last few years. These products are not legitimate formative assessments; they are examinations intended for use at critical junctures in a course of study. They are designed for two main purposes—standardized test preparation and as predictors for performance on standardized tests. Such disingenuous use of the term formative assessment is detrimental to the valid and effective implementation of legitimate formative assessment practice.

This is not to say that tools that take the form of quizzes and tests cannot be used as part of a formative assessment process, but their use must be constrained to serve the purpose of informing and improving learning and instruction, conforming to the definition of formative assessment.

Formative assessment includes all the activities undertaken by teachers and students that provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. (Modified from the work of Black and Wiliam.)

Expert teachers draw their students into the formative assessment process, too. When teachers create a classroom culture in which students fully understand their responsibility as learners, as the pall of competition is lifted from the classroom, giving opportunity for the light of cooperation to shine through, students feel free to share their confusion in an atmosphere of support and mutual assistance. In such a formative-assessment classroom culture, students engage in peer- and self-assessment to clarify their thinking and assist one another with learning.

Expert teachers keep a finger on the pulse of learning at all times. Constant monitoring keeps the learning from lapsing into a crisis condition, which requires much more effort to remedy than continual small adjustments all along the way.

I recently read an erudite, concise paper written by Margaret Heritage on this subject, Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity? The paper was delivered at a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers. I highly recommend this paper to all FOSS teachers and administrators. The text of the paper can be found at http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/2010/Formative_Assessment_Next_Generation_2010.pdf.

Reference

Black, P. and D. Wiliam. October 1998. “Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment.” Phi Delta Kappan, 80, 2:139-144.