Schools are in a crisis.
You have in Australia, according to recent data by the education
research group learning first, Australian kids are lagging behind
their international counterparts in reading mathematics and science.
In response to this, it was thought that one of the reasons we're lagging
behind in reading it because of a lack of explicit instruction.
And I addressed this in episode 22.
I'll link to it in the show notes
so you can have a listen to that only once you finished this one of course.
I think a logical question to ask is what are the best strategies then
and practices for teachers to use to get the best out of children?
As professionals, of course, we're not interested in any old strategy.
No we want evidence based strategies.
And when we want evidence, it leads us to High Impact Teaching Strategies or HITS.
These are instructional practices that reliably increase student
learning and they emerged from studies and findings across
Australian and international schools.
And in the work of John Hattie and Robert Mazano.
Who took these findings, and ranked them by their level of
effectiveness in student learning.
Otherwise known as their effect size.
In other words, how these strategies or how much these strategies
effected student learning.
So the higher, the score, the higher the effect, the better the strategy.
Now, we should note that researchers like Hattie, Manzano and others have
all used slightly different methods to calculate this effect size.
But they're all agreeing on the most powerful.
And those that make the most difference to learning.
And you can find these, even in the AITSL standards here in Australia and I'll link
to this in the show notes for you as well.
Now, of course, nothing is ever that simple
is it.
These on their own don't necessarily mean much to have to be
implemented in a complete framework, within a pedagogical approach.
But according to this, the 10 most impactful strategies are the following.
Setting goals, structuring lessons, explicit teaching, worked examples,
collaborative learning, multiple exposures, questioning, feedback,
meta cognitive strategies, and differentiated teaching.
Did you notice something?
In this list of the 10 high impact teaching strategies, there
is no inquiry based learning.
So of course, as a curious educator, and this is a curious human being,
someone asks a lot of questions, which sometimes gets me into trouble and doesn't
often make me very popular, but Hey,
that's just me.
I I am someone who asks questions.
What does inquiry based teaching entail?
Well, there's goals setting.
Students and teachers decide on what they want to determine, and
then through the inquiry process, you determine a path to get there.
Contrary to popular opinion, inquiry, isn't just Willy Nilly lessons.
They're structured.
And it's plain nonsense to think that teachers simply say to children,
well, go off and inquire I really urge you to read Kath Murdoch's book,
Getting Personal with Inquiry Learning and Trevor Mackenzie's book Inquiry
Mindset the Elementary Edition.
And you'll see just how structured lessons are supposed to be
especially in the beginning when students and teachers are just getting started.
Inquiry's also explicit.
So when you start teaching the process, You'll see that in a good
inquiry classroom, we explicitly teach the process in a step by
step fashion and with modeling.
Any good educator worth their salt knows the value of explicit instruction and
in a good inquiry classroom, explicit instruction dovetails with inquiry.
It's not one or another.
It's both.
This is the way I've always run my classrooms, and I've had great
success, which was not only evident in grades, which I wish never
existed in early childhood, but also in the attitude towards learning
and the attitude towards school.
And what about worked examples?
Well, of course that goes without saying.
Showing students, what a good one looks like showing them the standard you
want them to achieve and giving them a clear example of what you expect is
essential for great learning outcomes.
Every other strategy on that list is part of inquiry based learning.
Collaborative learning, multiple exposures, questioning, I mean questioning
forms the basis of inquiry, inquiry and questioning go hand in hand.
By the way, if you're wondering about the types of questions you should be asking
young children, then I have a list of question starters you can use with young
children in my resource library, and I leave a link for you in the show notes.
Feedback and metacognitive strategies.
In other words, teaching kids to think about their thinking so that
they become aware of their learning process, these too are strategies
used in an inquiry classroom.
Lastly differentiated learning.
And this is where inquiry comes into its own.
Inquiry is probably the best strategy I know of for differentiation.
In fact, a typical classroom has a handful of kids, as we all know, as teachers
on the high end, most of them are in the middle and then another handful
on the end that needs more support.
It's generally a typical bell curve and inquiry is great because those
high-end students, they can just get on with the things that they need
to do with very little direction
once you've got the hang of it, and then that frees you up to give those students
that need more help, more direction, and they are working at their level,
but no matter where your students sit on that bell curve, I believe that to
really get the best out of students, we need to have high expectations of them.
All of them, not just some of them.
Not impossible expectations, but aim high for each one.
And I'm going to come back to that point in just a moment.
Now if you go and you dig around John Hattie's visible learning website.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
You can actually look up the meta analysis of all these different
influences in different categories,
for example, you've got to teaching strategies, you've got curriculum,
student, teacher, home, student learning strategies, etc. And
because I have a curious mind, as you know, I need to know stuff.
If I hadn't become a teacher, I promise you, I think I would've made
a great investigative journalist or pathologist, you know, like
those guys that you see on CSI.
I love that, but I digress.
Let's get back to the best influences on children's learning.
So I noticed that Constructivist Teaching has an effect size of 0.92,
which of course is really quite high.
And by the way, Hattie said that 0.4 is kind of the average.
So anything above 0.4 and the higher above 0.4, it is, the better.
So constructivist teaching involves providing students with learner
centered, active instruction, where students are actively involved in
exploring ideas and making meaning, not passively receiving information.
Constructivism as a theory of how we learn, but inquiry
is a pedagogical strategy.
In other words, how we actually teach and it goes without saying
then that strategies like inquiry facilitate or help students to
construct meaning and understanding.
Classroom discussion, which has an effect size of 0.82 also has a
significant effect on student learning.
Once again, discussion is a really big part of the inquiry classroom.
And I immediately think about the talking tub.
And I discussed this with the creator of the talking tub, which
is Dr. Claire Warden in episode 24.
So that's another episode you might want to listen to after this one.
Getting children to talk and collaborate with peers is not only a highly
effective strategy for learning outcomes.
But also another one that goes hand in hand with inquiry based learning.
And one of the characteristics that children develop when you're
teaching through an inquiry lens is critical thinking.
And that has an effect size of 0.81.
So another really high teaching strategy for great learning outcomes.
On the visible learning website, critical thinking is defined as a set of cognitive
skills, including analysis, inference, evaluation, interpretation, deductive
reasoning, and inductive reasoning, that collectively enable a thinker to
reasonably decide who and what to believe.
And these are exactly the skills or capabilities that inquiry teaching
strives to develop in students.
There's another big influencer on student learning and that's Outcomes Based
Education with an effect size of 0.97.
We read on the site, that outcomes based education, is based on developing
the desired outcomes of education experience and expecting all students
to then reach those benchmark goals.
Which brings me back to the point I made earlier, about setting
high expectations for students.
I think that holding students accountable and setting high, but achievable
goals is essential for achievement.
This is something that I've always done.
Not only in the classroom with my students, but also with my own children
and actually for myself personally, too.
I think too many times we underestimate children.
They are strong and capable of so much
if only we'll let them.
Too often we rescue them and we do things for them.
Instead of helping them set goals, give them examples of what an achievement
looks like and then holding them to that.
And encouraging them with regular positive feedback, which by the way, feedback
is really has a high effect size, and scaffolding them where we need to, and
not accepting subpar work from students.
That will not help them reach their desired outcome.
And I'm not saying by any means that we should stress kids by expecting
things from them that's too far out of their reach, but what I am saying,
is that things shouldn't be easy.
Easy is a recipe for boredom.
The tasks, which would be differentiated, should be slightly challenging to those
students and they should push them to problem solve and critical think.
Have you ever seen kids playing challenging video games?
How excited they are about achieving the next level or completing a challenge.
Well, that's what school should be like.
It should be fun, enjoyable, but push them just enough to make it
challenging so that those neural connections are made, and then with
achievement, they receive a dopamine hit.
Which then sets them up for the next challenge.
That's why kids love computer games.
Not because they're easy, but because they're challenging.
It gives them something to strive for.
So we've seen that learning is impacted by so many different influences.
But I really believe that our jobs as educators is firstly to teach kids,
to read, write, and do arithmetic in the early years I'm talking about.
But that's not actually enough.
Our job is to teach children to think.
Not to tell them what to think, which is happening in too many places around the
world, or what to believe, or to feed them the latest, often flawed information
from which whichever government or media outlet is pushing an agenda.
But to give them the skills that will help them think for themselves.
And how do we do that?
Well by firstly being curious ourselves and secondly, encouraging their curiosity.
Now here's a funny thing.
The effect size for curiosity is 0.66.
Based on 15 studies with 3,350 students in total from Germany and
Australia, but the 10 studies conducted in Australia with 2,692 students
resulted in an effect, size of 0.90.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that unless kids are curious and
interested in learning in the first place, you can do double back, flips all day,
you're not going to get them to meet their full potential if they're not interested.
And once you've got them interested, then using all these fabulous
strategies, the sky is the limit.
I've spoken about effective teaching strategies and pedagogy, but
another big influence on student learning, is you and me, the teacher.
Influences that rank really highly in this category are teacher clarity with 0.85.
shared teacher efficacy 1.34, and that's where the whole school all
teachers believe that they are making a big difference in children's lives
and that they are being effective.
Teacher clarity, teacher credibility, and teacher estimates of achievement
as I have already mentioned.
I want to single out teacher clarity at 0.85.
Which relates to organization, explanation, examples and guided
practice, and assessment of student learning and that can involve clearly
communicating the learning intentions of the lesson and the success criteria.
Clear learning intentions,
describe the skills, the knowledge, the attitudes and the values
that the students need to learn.
And this all sounds so basic.
It's what good effective teachers do all the time.
It involves being organized because no one works well in chaos.
Knowing what you're teaching.
Communicating it really clearly modeling it, and holding them to high expectations.
There is so much in the news about how poorly our children are doing at school.
And then there's always this debate about whether it's the
curriculum or teacher competency.
There are a lot of external factors too, things like technology use and parenting
styles that are not within our control.
There's nothing we can do about the curriculum or what
goes on in children's homes.
But we do have control over the strategies we use in the
classroom and our own pedagogy.
We've seen today just what the big influences are.
And we need to start taking responsibility for our part and our own shortcomings
and do better if we need to.
For us as teachers to be really effective.
It starts with the right mindset.
An inquiry mindset, a growth mindset, a positive attitude,
putting your game face on.
How many of us stop to think.
Not just about what we're doing.
But why we're doing it.
This is not just for educators.
It's just about being aware of what you're doing as a human.
And when it comes to trying new strategies, because perhaps you finally
come to realize that what you're doing, isn't working too well, that perhaps
not all the children are engaged as they should be, or perhaps there's a lot of
sloppy work and messy stuff and kids are falling short of their full potential.
Trying new strategies can be scary and you're going to mess up and
you're going to make mistakes.
And there might even be a little bit of chaos for awhile.
But learning from our mistakes and sharing that with the students or sharing with
them that you'll be trying something new, and outline the process and your thinking
and together, embarking on this journey.
And when things go wrong, you talk about it.
Because it helps children see that mistakes are a normal part
of learning and they learn grit and perseverance by watching how
we handle failures and setbacks.
I wrote about this kind of thinking of trying new things and allowing our
children and students to see us fail,
and the lessons we learned from this in my weekly newsletter,
Get Curious, to my subscribers.
And if you want to Get Curious and receive more of these types of
insights in directly into your mailbox you should subscribe so go to
resources.bloomingcurious.com/getcurious.
I'll put the link in the show notes and sign up there to
be part of this community.
I think we can conclude that it's not just one strategy, that's the be all
and end all, but that we need a whole quiver of strategies when it comes
to effective teaching and learning.
But for me, inquiry based learning when well done covers a multitude of
factors that influence learning and that ultimately it's, it's only through inquiry
based strategies that we get kids to think and become independent learners.
And ultimately for me, that's real learning.
If getting started with inquiry is something you're interested in.
And you want to start dipping your toes in, because perhaps you've been
listening to Blooming Curious for awhile.
Or perhaps you've had a PD with an inquiry teaching specialist or an
inquiry consultant, and, and you really want to integrate inquiry into
your classroom, but you're afraid,
you're just not sure how to start.
You're unsure about what, what what's going to happen in the classroom?
Is there going to be chaos?
How do you actually structure it?
Well, I have a little step-by-step guide for you called inquiry 1 0 1
that takes you through the steps of beginning inquiry in your classroom.
You go to resources.bloomingcurious.com/inquiry101
and I'll link it in the show notes, and you can go and get it there and
start to integrate inquiry into your existing lessons, because remember,
you're not giving up what you're doing.
You're actually adding a lens to it because inquiry isn't a separate subject,
it's a way of thinking and teaching.
It's a pedagogy and a strategy that is used across all subjects.
And once it becomes part of your fabric, neither you, nor your
students will ever look back.
So follow the link and check out the guide.
And I'll also leave a link to Blooming Curious my newly
updated website and blog too.
So check out all the information there on curiosity and inquiry.
This has been a bit of an episode.
Hasn't it?
I just want to thank you for being here.
I really appreciate you being here.
And if you like my content, then the ultimate compliment
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I can't wait to see your reviews and hopefully I'll be in your inbox too.
So go Get Curious by subscribing and until next week, stay blooming curious.