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What do we know about effective teaching?
We are currently reading through the literature to find which teaching methods both have been proved to be the most effective and are suitable for our purposes. Here is a preliminary list of learnings from the ongoing review process; we hope to be able to publish a more detailed and sourced overview soon.
What we're mostly sure about so far:
- Wherever possible, confronting students with relevant and tractable open problems they have to solve on their own (or collaboratively), with an emphasis on identifying similarities or differences and generating testable hypotheses, is preferable to presenting explicit solutions or methods beforehand. (Marzano 2001, Hattie 2009)
- Structured feedback, especially after completion of challenging tasks, helps further progress and improves retention. Providing competent feedback is a non-trivial skill that requires training, both for teachers/coaches and for peers providing feedback.
- Short evaluation cycles (including structured feedback for teachers and coaches) improve both teaching and learning.
- Intensive engagement with a topic or skill area over no more than a month at a time is preferable to teaching multiple different subjects in parallel over a longer time. (Summary of related evidence) -- Notable exceptions seem to be foreign languages (best learned through full immersion or Content-Language Integrated Learning over longer periods of time) as well as specialist skills roughy analogous to language learning, such as learning a musical instrument or learning to code.
- Wherever possible, letting students choose which tasks to complete at what time (or in which sequence), and letting them complete tasks at their own pace, is preferable to teaching the same thing at the same time to an entire group. (Today's experimental tablet schools profit mainly from this effect.) (Summary of evidence)
- For courses in which up-front theoretical input is required, short input periods (no more than 35 minutes) followed by longer practice periods (self-organized, with supporting staff present) seem to work best
- For courses in which in-person interaction and collaboration between students is central (e.g. foreign language classes), groups of no more than 12 people should be the norm.
- Peer tutoring (i.e. advanced students helping to teach less advanced students) greatly improves understanding and retention. (Summary of evidence)
- Classes should not start before 9am for 10-14 year-olds, 10am for 15-16 year-olds, and 11am for 17-18 year-olds; and tests, where necessary, should be administered in the early afternoon (between 1 and 3 pm). (Source)
We are particularly grateful for pointers to things we missed, as well as evidence to the contrary on any of these points.
External resources:
- The EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit is the best and most accessible summary of the available evidence we've seen so far.
- Wikipedia on evidence-based education and educational neuroscience
- Best Evidence Encyclopedia (Johns Hopkins University) -- mainly data-based reviews and evaluations of different American teaching programmes, with in-depth reports about what works (and what doesn't) in mathematics, reading and science education.
- Best Evidence in Brief -- the leading newsletter in the field. The archive is a treasure trove of material.
- Evidence Based Teachers Network -- notable for its useful newsletter, but there's plenty of material on the site as well (tab "Evidence").
- AltSchool's Innovation blog offers reports and insights from practice.
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