Machine Learning and Patterns in Dialogue

1. Machine Learning and Patterns in Dialogue Professor Chris Brown

2. Overview • Current educational policy in England is grounded in the idea of schools as professional learning communities and the school system as something that can be ‘self-improving’. • These concepts envision school leaders and teachers sharing in the effort of leading instructional change, since it is assumed that both have the capacity to be reflective problem solvers. At the same time there is little understanding as to: • How the reflective problem solving capacity of teachers and school leaders can be enhanced; and • What the impact any improved capacity for reflective problem solving might have on teaching, school and student outcomes.

3. Overview • Approaches to develop the capacity of school leaders and practitioners to engage in reflective problem solving can often fail in their attempts to facilitate System 2 decision making. • As a result, rather than engage in conscious reflection and analysis regarding problems and solutions, those participating in such programmes can often resort to System 1 actions such as: • an overreliance on intuition and/or heuristics, which often contain inherent biases that are not addressed; • problem solvers judging the likelihood of an outcome not by careful analysis of a situation but rather to ‘the ease with which the mental operation of retrieval, construction, or association can be carried out’ (Tversky and Kahneman 1973, 208); • an overreliance on assumptions, which may not hold, as a means of determining the cause of problems; and • According to Kahnemann (2011) all of these actions serve to diminish rather than enhance decision making; in particular because such behaviour tends to results in fuzzy problem perception and forestalls any meaningful analysis of alternative solutions. • Furthermore, it requires considerable mental effort to overcome such errors and often problem solvers are tempted to avoid any conscious effort to do so (Cain et al., 2109).

4. Currently little understanding as to… • How the reflective problem solving capacity of teachers and school leaders might actually be enhanced: i.e. what specific approaches or forms of professional development might be most effective in developing reflective problem solving behaviours amongst practitioners (Poortman and Brown, 2018); • How we might ascertain the success of approaches to improve capacity of practitioners to engage in reflective problem solving. Traditionally measuring how practitioners have engaged in problem solving activity have been problematic since they have either used subjective measurement tools, such as self-report, or have involved the labour intensive approach of recording and analysing teacher discourse (meaning they have been small scale in nature) (Daly and Stoll, 2018); and • What the impact any improved capacity for reflective problem solving might have on teaching practice and student outcomes; itself made difficult because of the methodological problems noted in 2) above (Daly and Stoll, 2018).

5. The idea

6. Why this is innovative • Tests for the first time (to my knowledge) and on a large scale basis, a machine learning approach that, if successful, will: • provide a methodological means of overcoming self-report bias; and • provides an objective and statistically significant account of whether reflective dialogue is happening as practitioners seek to solve problems. • Such a project thus potentially marks a state of the art step change in how educational evaluation is undertaken.