Improving Education: A triumph of hope over experience

1. Improving Education:A triumph of hope over experience Robert Coe Inaugural Lecture, Durham University, 18 June 2013

2. A triumph of hope over experience • Experience • Have educational standards really risen? • School improvement: Isn’t it time there was some? • Can we identify effective schools and teachers? • Is ‘evidence-based’ practice and policy the answer? • Hope • So what should we do (that hasn’t failed yet)? www.cem.org/publications

3. Have educational standards really risen?

5. Equivalent change in GCSE grades

6. (Updated from Coe, 2007)

7. ICCAMS (Hodgen et al)

8. School improvement: Isn’t it time there was some?

9. Mistaking School Improvement (1)(Coe, 2009) • Wait for a bad year or choose underperforming schools to start with. Most things self-correct or revert to expectations (you can claim the credit for this). • Take on any initiative, and ask everyone who put effort into it whether they feel it worked. No-one wants to feel their effort was wasted. • Define ‘improvement’ in terms of perceptions and ratings of teachers. DO NOT conduct any proper assessments – they may disappoint. • Only study schools or teachers that recognise a problem and are prepared to take on an initiative. They’ll probably improve whatever you do.

10. Mistaking School Improvement (2) (Coe, 2009) • Conduct some kind of evaluation, but don’t let the design be too good – poor quality evaluations are much more likely to show positive results. • If any improvement occurs in any aspect of performance, focus attention on that rather than on any areas or schools that have not improved or got worse (don’t mention them!). • Put some effort into marketing and presentation of the school. Once you start to recruit better students, things will improve.

11. Can we identify effective schools and teachers?

12. Problems with school effectiveness research • ‘Value-added’ is not effectiveness (Gorard, 2010; Dumay, Coe & Anumendem, 2013) • Characteristics of ‘effective schools’ • ‘strong leadership’, ‘high expectations’, ‘positive climate’ and a ‘focus on teaching and learning’ • Too vague • ‘Effects’ are tiny anyway (Scheerens, 2000, 2012) • Correlations, not causes (Coe & Fitz-Gibbon, 1998) • Can ‘effective’ strategies be implemented? • If so, do they lead to improvement?

13. Is ‘evidence-based’ practice and policy the answer?

14. Toolkit of Strategies to Improve Learning The Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit http://www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit/

15. www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit Impact vs cost Promising 8 May be worth it Feedback Meta-cognitive Peer tutoring Early Years Homework (Secondary) 1-1 tuition Effect Size (months gain) Collaborative Behaviour Small gp tuition Phonics Parental involvement Smaller classes ICT Social Summer schools Individualised learning Notworth it After school Mentoring Homework (Primary) Teaching assistants Performance pay Aspirations 0 Ability grouping £0 £1000 Cost per pupil

16. Key messages • Some things that are popular or widely thought to be effective are probably not worth doing • Ability grouping (setting); After-school clubs; Teaching assistants; Smaller classes; Performance pay; Raising aspirations • Some things look ‘promising’ • Effective feedback; Meta-­cognitive and self regulation strategies; Peer tutoring/peer‐assisted learning strategies; Homework

17. Clear, simple advice: • Choose from the top left • Go back to school and do it For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong H.L. Mencken

18. Why not? • We have been doing some of these things for a long time, but have generally not seen improvement • Research evidence is problematic • Sometimes the existing evidence is thin • Research studies may not reflect real life • Context and ‘support factors’ may matter (Cartwright and Hardie, 2012) • Implementation is problematic • We may think we are doing it, but are we doing it right? • We do not know how to get large groups of teachers and schools to implement these interventions in ways that are faithful, effective and sustainable

19. So what should we do (that hasn’t failed yet)?

20. Four steps to improvement • Think hard about learning • Invest in effective professional development • Evaluate teaching quality • Evaluate impact of changes

21. 1. Think hard about learning

22. www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit Impact vs cost Promising 8 May be worth it Feedback Meta-cognitive Peer tutoring Early Years Homework (Secondary) 1-1 tuition Effect Size (months gain) Collaborative Behaviour Small gp tuition Phonics Parental involvement Smaller classes ICT Social Summer schools Individualised learning Notworth it After school Mentoring Homework (Primary) Teaching assistants Performance pay Aspirations 0 Ability grouping £0 £1000 Cost per pupil

23. www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit Impact vs cost Does your theory of learning explain why … 8 Feedback Meta-cognitive These work? Peer tutoring Homework (Secondary) Effect Size (months gain) These don’t? Collaborative Phonics Smaller classes After school Teaching assistants Performance pay Aspirations 0 Ability grouping £0 £1000 Cost per pupil

24. Poor Proxies for Learning • Students are busy: lots of work is done (especially written work) • Students are engaged, interested, motivated • Students are getting attention: feedback, explanations • Classroom is ordered, calm, under control • Curriculum has been ‘covered’ (ie presented to students in some form) • (At least some) students have supplied correct answers (whether or not they really understood them or could reproduce them independently)

25. A simple theory of learning Learning happens when people have to think hard

26. Hard questions about your school • How many minutes does an average pupil on an average day spend really thinking hard? • Do you really want pupils to be ‘stuck’ in your lessons? • If they knew the right answer but didn’t know why, how many pupils would care?

27. 2. Invest in effective CPD

28. How do we get students to learn hard things? Eg • Place value • Persuasive writing • Music composition • Balancing chemical equations • Explain what they should do • Demonstrate it • Get them to do it (with gradually reducing support) • Provide feedback • Get them to practise until it is secure • Assess their skill/ understanding

29. How do we get teachers to learn hard things? Eg • Using formativeassessment • Assertive discipline • How to teachalgebra • Explain what they should do

30. What (probably) makes CPD effective? • Intense: at least 15 hours, preferably 50 • Sustained: over at least two terms • Content focused: on teachers’ knowledge of subject content & how students learn it • Active: opportunities to try it out & discuss • Supported: external feedback and networks to improve and sustain • Evidence based: promotes strategies supported by robust evaluation evidence

31. 3. Evaluate teaching quality

32. Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better. Dylan Wiliam

33. Identifying the best teachers Sources of evidence: • Colleagues (peers, SMs) observing lessons • Trained outsiders observing lessons • Pupils’ test score gains • Progress in NC levels (from teacher assessment) • Pupils’ ratings of teacher/lesson quality • Teacher qualifications • Tests of teachers’ content knowledge • Parents’ ratings • Ofsted ratings • Colleagues’ (including senior managers) perceptions • Teachers’ self-evaluation

34. Next generation of CEM systems … • Assessments that are • Comprehensive, across the full range of curriculum areas, levels, ages, topics and educationally relevant abilities • Diagnostic, with evidence-based follow-up • Interpretable, calibrated against norms and criteria • High psychometric quality • Feedback that is • Bespoke to individual teacher, for their students and classes • Multi-component, incorporating learning gains, pupil ratings, peer feedback, self-evaluation, … • Diagnostic, with evidence-based follow-up • Constant experimenting

35. 4. Evaluate impact of changes

36. Bad reasons not to evaluate • We are sure this works • This is so important we need it to work • Everyone is working really hard and fully committed to this • Evaluating would be a lot of work • We don’t have the data to be able to evaluate • We don’t know how to evaluate • We can’t do a really good evaluation, so what is the point of doing it badly? • We do happy sheets and ask people what they thought of it; isn’t that enough? • You can’t do randomised trials in education • What works is different in different schools or contexts

37. Key elements of good evaluation • Clear, well defined intervention • Good assessment of appropriate outcomes • Well-matched comparison group

38. A triumph of hope over experience • Experience • So far, we haven’t cracked it: don’t keep doing the same things • Hope • Think hard about learning • Invest in effective professional development • Evaluate teaching quality • Evaluate impact of changes