1 00:00:04,080 --> 00:00:08,779 My name is Heather Hill, and I'm a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 2 00:00:09,619 --> 00:00:14,539 Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting with the staff at the Consejería de Educación in Madrid. 3 00:00:15,339 --> 00:00:21,219 At that meeting, I gave a talk about my areas of expertise, teacher professional development, and teacher preparation. 4 00:00:21,859 --> 00:00:27,179 The staff at the Consejería asked me to distill the lessons from that talk into this short video. 5 00:00:30,260 --> 00:00:35,320 Before we get into the research literature and what it says about teacher preparation and professional development, 6 00:00:35,320 --> 00:00:43,719 A quick note about U.S. research on these topics. Prior to 2002, there were lots of options for 7 00:00:43,719 --> 00:00:48,420 teacher professional development and many more opinions about what worked in terms of teacher 8 00:00:48,420 --> 00:00:54,520 professional development, but really little rigorous evidence on the topic, on what professional 9 00:00:54,520 --> 00:01:00,780 development features or programs impacted student outcomes. Since 2002, the federal government has 10 00:01:00,780 --> 00:01:05,099 prioritized rigorous, meaning experimental, studies of educational interventions. 11 00:01:06,620 --> 00:01:11,680 And these studies have, as a whole, succeeded in debunking older myths about what works 12 00:01:11,680 --> 00:01:17,260 in teacher professional development. Many programs that had, quote, effective features 13 00:01:17,260 --> 00:01:22,519 turned out to have null effects on student outcomes when put through a rigorous trial. 14 00:01:24,040 --> 00:01:29,859 Now we are approaching the point where we can reach new conclusions about the most promising 15 00:01:29,859 --> 00:01:35,200 forms of teacher learning. There's about 60 to 70 rigorous studies that have come out featuring 16 00:01:35,200 --> 00:01:40,599 teacher professional development in some form or another, and we can actually start to look across 17 00:01:40,599 --> 00:01:52,129 those and aggregate and make conclusions. So the research on teacher preparation suggests a focus 18 00:01:52,129 --> 00:01:59,030 on practice-based teacher learning experiences. In the U.S., teacher preparation coursework can 19 00:01:59,030 --> 00:02:06,030 either focus on theory, meaning grand didactic principles or academic debates or the philosophy 20 00:02:06,030 --> 00:02:14,770 of education, or it can focus on practice-based activities, such as tutoring students or teachers 21 00:02:14,770 --> 00:02:19,430 learning about and doing the curriculum materials that they will later be teaching from with 22 00:02:19,430 --> 00:02:24,370 students, or even rehearsing teaching moves in simulated settings. 23 00:02:24,370 --> 00:02:30,129 So, for a long time in the United States, there were arguments on both sides. 24 00:02:30,129 --> 00:02:34,330 And you can see the arguments, for instance, for theory, in that if you teach pre-service 25 00:02:34,330 --> 00:02:40,129 teachers grand principles of education, they'll be able to apply them in any setting, regardless 26 00:02:40,129 --> 00:02:43,129 of where they teach. 27 00:02:43,129 --> 00:02:46,610 And there's an argument for practice-based teacher education, in that teachers are learning 28 00:02:46,610 --> 00:02:50,530 about the students that they will be teaching, and they're learning the skills that they 29 00:02:50,530 --> 00:02:52,810 will need to actually function in classrooms. 30 00:02:54,370 --> 00:03:13,629 About 10 or 15 years ago, a group of economists and teacher educators got together, and they followed teachers in New York City through their coursework and into the classroom, collecting information about the courses they took from those teachers, and also collecting student test scores in the early years of their teaching practice. 31 00:03:13,629 --> 00:03:19,729 and they linked those two. They compared those courses with the student outcomes and found that 32 00:03:19,729 --> 00:03:24,930 it was these practice-based courses that were more effective in producing those later student 33 00:03:24,930 --> 00:03:32,430 outcomes. This suggests that teacher preparation coursework should lean toward being more practice 34 00:03:32,430 --> 00:03:44,689 focused. So next our focus is going to turn toward teachers in-service learning experiences 35 00:03:44,689 --> 00:03:51,789 where the research literature that has developed since 2002 suggests a focus on practice-based 36 00:03:51,789 --> 00:03:57,770 in-service learning experiences. This aligns very well with what's in the teacher preparation 37 00:03:57,770 --> 00:04:03,069 research literature. And if you look at this teacher professional development literature 38 00:04:03,069 --> 00:04:07,430 closely, you see that there's three kinds of teacher professional development that seem 39 00:04:07,430 --> 00:04:12,229 likely to produce more reliably positive effects on instruction and student outcomes. 40 00:04:12,590 --> 00:04:20,670 The first category in this positive bucket is observing and providing feedback on teacher's practice. 41 00:04:22,410 --> 00:04:27,290 A typical program that would fall into this category of this bucket is teacher coaching, 42 00:04:27,949 --> 00:04:34,329 where a coach goes into a classroom, observes a teacher teaching for a period of weeks or even months, 43 00:04:34,470 --> 00:04:38,470 and offers that teacher feedback on how to improve her practice. 44 00:04:38,470 --> 00:04:44,149 It also helps the teacher figure out and feel good about making those changes in the classroom. 45 00:04:52,339 --> 00:05:02,439 A second kind of program that seems promising in terms of producing positive impacts on student outcomes is when teachers improve and perfect the use of curriculum materials. 46 00:05:04,399 --> 00:05:12,819 When teachers actually sit together and go through their curriculum materials as if they were students, doing the problems that students will do, 47 00:05:12,819 --> 00:05:19,759 anticipating the typical issues and difficulties that students will encounter as they go through 48 00:05:19,759 --> 00:05:26,240 the material. Their implementation of those curriculum materials improves and their student 49 00:05:26,240 --> 00:05:39,240 outcomes also seem to improve. Finally, there's been some studies that get teachers thinking about 50 00:05:39,240 --> 00:05:43,920 how to improve specific lessons and the lesson planning process in general. 51 00:05:43,920 --> 00:05:52,220 planning a sequence of lessons in ways that are attuned to ideas about high quality and that 52 00:05:52,220 --> 00:05:58,860 connect topics across lessons for instance or teaching a demonstration lesson thinking about 53 00:05:58,860 --> 00:06:03,699 how to improve that lesson and then re-teaching and demonstration lesson similar to what teachers 54 00:06:03,699 --> 00:06:11,779 do in japan these types of activities have been shown to improve instruction and student outcomes 55 00:06:11,779 --> 00:06:30,730 Returning to the teacher preparation literature, another lesson from that literature comes to this question of where new teachers, pre-service teachers, should do their practice teaching. 56 00:06:33,199 --> 00:06:38,060 Matt Ronfeld, who was one of the folks who worked on that New York City study that I 57 00:06:38,060 --> 00:06:42,500 described earlier, asked whether pre-service teachers should conduct their practice teaching 58 00:06:42,500 --> 00:06:48,040 in typical urban schools where there may be many, many challenges, for instance, with 59 00:06:48,040 --> 00:06:53,540 student discipline or with a lack of principal leadership, but that are typical of the schools 60 00:06:53,540 --> 00:06:59,160 that new teachers will go into when they start their first job, or whether pre-service teachers 61 00:06:59,160 --> 00:07:02,019 should conduct their practice teaching in more sheltered environments. 62 00:07:02,300 --> 00:07:09,240 with lower teacher turnover and presumably a more skilled staff to help them learn their craft. 63 00:07:10,459 --> 00:07:17,540 What he found by comparing teachers' practice teaching assignment with their later student 64 00:07:17,540 --> 00:07:22,079 test scores is that it was the more sheltered environments that seemed to make a difference 65 00:07:22,079 --> 00:07:31,250 in terms of later student impacts or outcomes. This is consistent with other evidence in the 66 00:07:31,250 --> 00:07:36,649 field that suggest collaboration with stronger teachers yields student test score gains over 67 00:07:36,649 --> 00:07:48,589 time. So finally, there's a little twist in this literature that relates back to some of my own 68 00:07:48,589 --> 00:07:52,430 thinking and development work over the last 10 or 15 years. 69 00:07:54,250 --> 00:07:59,550 Scholars, including myself, Deborah Ball, and other people have identified specialized knowledge 70 00:07:59,550 --> 00:08:05,750 that teachers use when they're teaching children. This is in mathematics, for instance, is knowledge 71 00:08:05,750 --> 00:08:13,959 that goes beyond what a competent adult would need to do their job. It's knowledge that encompasses 72 00:08:13,959 --> 00:08:20,759 things like knowledge of typical student mistakes. When you talk to an expert teacher and you show an 73 00:08:20,759 --> 00:08:25,620 expert teacher a student error, the teacher will say, oh, I know exactly what that kid did and I 74 00:08:25,620 --> 00:08:32,419 know how to remediate that because I know where that mistake is coming from. It also encompasses 75 00:08:32,419 --> 00:08:39,340 knowledge of unusual methods for solving problems. If you show a teacher, for instance, a student 76 00:08:39,340 --> 00:08:44,860 who's using benchmark fractions to compare fractions, it's not a typical method for comparing 77 00:08:44,860 --> 00:08:50,259 fractions, but an expert teacher will have that specialized knowledge to be able to say, 78 00:08:50,379 --> 00:08:55,320 I know exactly what the student's doing, and in fact, that's a good method for the student to be 79 00:08:55,320 --> 00:09:01,960 using in this particular problem. This knowledge also encompasses knowledge of how to design 80 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:07,340 instruction, how to choose appropriate examples, for instance, that push students' understanding 81 00:09:07,340 --> 00:09:13,139 forward, or to choose questions or design tasks that get at student understanding. 82 00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:19,259 In the United States, in the last 15 to 20 years, there's been a lot of programs that have been 83 00:09:19,259 --> 00:09:25,279 designed to improve teachers' specialized knowledge for teaching students, particularly in mathematics. 84 00:09:25,840 --> 00:09:33,120 In mathematics, the programs intended to improve this knowledge show mixed and sometimes null 85 00:09:33,120 --> 00:09:39,519 results on student outcomes. In these cluster randomized trials, what we're seeing is that 86 00:09:39,519 --> 00:09:45,159 the improvements in teachers' knowledge are typically just very modest. Teachers may, 87 00:09:45,299 --> 00:09:50,679 out of 25 questions, get one or two more questions correct on a teacher knowledge test. 88 00:09:51,779 --> 00:09:56,059 We also see that we're not getting the improvements in instructional quality 89 00:09:56,059 --> 00:09:59,820 that we expected from improving teachers' specialized knowledge, 90 00:09:59,820 --> 00:10:05,980 which suggests that this is a problem that we have yet to unpack and that we need to design 91 00:10:05,980 --> 00:10:10,779 better and different interventions most likely to get at the things that we care about which 92 00:10:10,779 --> 00:10:19,700 are improving instruction and student learning. Of course the extent to which U.S. findings 93 00:10:19,700 --> 00:10:25,360 generalize across contexts is an open question. That's why we at Harvard would be interested in 94 00:10:25,360 --> 00:10:30,500 collaborating with Spanish colleagues interested in asking and empirically answering questions 95 00:10:30,500 --> 00:10:33,700 about teacher professional development and teacher preparation. 96 00:10:34,659 --> 00:10:39,299 Thank you for your time and feel free to contact me at the email address on the screen.