Do we need an aligned vision of exemplary instruction?

By Paul Powell and Kathryn Perkins

Earlier this month, I was one of the nearly 125 million people who tuned into the Super Bowl. Though I consider myself a sports fan, football isn’t an area of particular interest for me – typically, the Super Bowl is my three-hour foray into the sport for the year. Still, as the night unfolded, I came to a somewhat surprising realization: despite the limited time I’ve spent immersed in the sport, I am somewhat proficient in watching and talking about it. Take passing, for instance. I recognize that a successful throw begins with a perpendicular stance to your target and one’s fingers on the laces. That you open your body forward as you throw to create some rotation and the desired “spiral” shape to the football. That your back foot pivots up onto its ball as the pass is released.

While I’m confident any expert would tell me there’s much more to it, that’s a decent level of knowledge and technical detail. And, based on my level of expertise in the sport, if I know this much, it’s reasonable to assume the vast majority of the American public does as well. 

This made the educator in me indignant. If, apparently, we all have a vision of excellence in football, why are we so far from that in teaching? If you asked three experts what moves constitute excellent classroom management, for example, I doubt you’d get the same level of alignment you’d get in asking three random citizens off the street what makes up an excellent football pass.

And this lack of vision matters significantly for the success of our field.

Not all instructional practices are equal. 

Research has long demonstrated that certain instructional practices have a greater impact on student outcomes than others. Arguably most famous, John Hattie’s Visible Learning compiled and compared effect sizes from 800 education meta-analyses (eventually expanded to over 2,100) to determine what works best toward student outcomes. At the top of instructional practices? Integrating new learning with prior knowledge, offering opportunities for deliberate practice, and giving feedback to student work. Lower down? Teaching test-taking skills and discovery-based learning. 

And Hattie isn’t the only one. Other researchers have taken on similar work, and time and again, certain instructional practices — explicit instruction, error analysis, building knowledge — come out, with certainty, on top.

Alignment in vision and language is key.

Of course, there’s nuance within each of these practices that research, which operates, by design, at 40,000 feet, does not capture. 

In order to develop others in these proven research practices, systems and school leaders must get beyond a headline like “give feedback to student work,” and instead offer a clear vision and shared language describing effective elements of teacher feedback. Without a clear vision and language, room is left for interpretation – a teacher could hear that “offering students feedback on their work” is effective, and still not understand the how – that effective feedback should:

To reach this level of clinical specificity, one can venture into the individual studies themselves (which often do things, for example, like differentiating between types of feedback) or look to proven clinical practice from world-class codifiers like Teach Like a Champion. Here at FCI, we also offer a proposed teaching trajectory that offers research-backed practice in the language of clinical practice based on our experience observing teacher development across hundreds of teachers in many different school contexts. 

So, I challenge us educators to buy into the premise of instructional best practice, then relentlessly study and learn from the best that research and clinical practice have to offer. Only when we do can we successfully discuss, analyze, debate, and grow great teaching – and with it, raise the bar for student achievement.