Carl Hendrick

Delighted to announce that the American edition of ‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ has been released this week with a new foreword by Dylan Wiliam which you can read here.

The book is the third volume in @Learn_Sci‘s Dylan Wiliam Center Collection 

In 1999, Paul Black and I were working with a group of math and science teachers. We had just completed a major review of the research on the impact of assessment on learning, and we had published our findings in a rather dense 65-page academic journal article.1 However, since we thought our findings would be of interest to practitioners and policy-makers, we also wrote a more accessible summary of our research, and its implications, which was published in Phi Delta Kappan magazine.2

One of the most surprising findings of our review, which we were sharing with the teachers, related to research on feedback. A particularly comprehensive review of feedback in schools, colleges and workplaces by two American psychologists—Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi—had found that while feedback was often helpful in improving achievement, in 38% of the well-designed studies they had found, feedback actually lowered performance.3 In other words, in almost two out of every five cases, the participants in the research studies would have performed better if the feedback had not been given at all.

In trying to makes sense of their findings, Kluger and DeNisi suggested that feedback was less effective when it was focused on the individual (what psychologists call “ego-involving”) and more effective when it was focused on the task in which the students were engaged (“task-involving”). We therefore suggested to the teachers that to make their feedback to students more effective, they should give task-involving rather than ego-involving feedback.

Most of the teachers seemed to find this advice useful, but one teacher, after some thought, asked, “So does this mean I should not say ‘well done’ to a student?” Paul and I looked at each other, and realized that we didn’t know the answer to the question. We knew, from the work of a number of researchers, that in the longer term, praise for effort would be more likely to be successful than praise for ability. However, without knowing more about the relationship between the teacher and the student, about the context of the work, and a whole host of other factors, we could not be sure whether “Well done” would be task-involving or ego-involving feedback.

What is ironic in all this, is that we had failed to take the advice we had given teachers a year earlier in the Phi Delta Kappan article, where we said,

if the substantial rewards promised by the research evidence are to be secured, each teacher must find his or her own ways of incorporating the lessons and ideas set out above into his or her own patterns of classroom work and into the cultural norms and expectations of a particular school community. (p. 146)

The important point here is that the standard model of research dissemination, where researchers discover things, and then tell teachers about their findings, so that teachers can then implement them in their own classrooms, simply cannot work. As Carl Hendrick and Robin MacPherson point out in this book, classrooms are too complex for the results of

research studies to be implemented as a series of instructions to be followed. Rather, the work that teachers do in finding out how to apply insights from research in their own classrooms is a process of creating new knowledge, albeit of a distinct, and local kind. This is why this book is so unusual and important. It is not an instruction manual on how to do “evidence-based teaching” (whatever that might mean). It is, instead, an invitation to every educator to reflect on some of the most important issues in education in general—and teaching in particular—and to think about how educational research might be used as a guide for careful thinking about, and exploration of, practice.

A second unusual—and welcome—feature of this book is the way it was put together. Carl and Robin started by identifying a number of issues that are relevant to every teacher—student discipline and behavior, motivation, grading, classroom practice, reading, inclusion, memory, technology and so on. At this point, most authors would have written advice for teachers on these issues, but of course, the danger with such an approach is that it reflects the concerns of the authors, rather than of the potential reader—what philosopher Karl Popper described as “unwanted answers to unasked questions.”4

Instead, in a novel twist, Carl and Robin decided to ask practicing teachers what were for them the most important questions in each of the areas. Then, again counter to what most writers would have done, they posed the questions to both academic experts and those with expertise in classroom practice. The result is a marvelous combination of insights into teaching that are both authoritative and immediately relevant to classroom practice.

If you have read the previous volumes in the “Dylan Wiliam Center Collection” —Craig Barton’s How I wish I’d taught maths and Tom Sherrington’s The learning rainforest—you will know that our aim has been to bring to North American readers the very best of authoritative writing on education from around the world. While the questions that were posed by the teachers that Carl and Robin worked with may appear to be focused on issues that are of particular concern to teachers in England, the extraordinary range of expertise of those responding to these questions means that the answers are relevant to every American educator. The very best writing on educational research, in an accessible form—solutions you can trust.

 

References

1 Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5(1), 7-74.

2 Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.

3 Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: a historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284.

4 Popper, K. (1992 p. 41). Unended quest: An intellectual biography. London, UK: Routledge.