The final report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel was recently released.



This is a crucial report that it's important for all Aussie teachers to be aware of.

So, is it any good?

In this thread, I answer this question, and particularly address:education.gov.au/download/16510… 1. What I’m most excited about from the report
2. Outline (then rebut) one common argument against the report
3. Discuss two challenges to implementation that we face, then
4. Finish with some ideas for how we can all play a role in improving ITE in Aus

Last year I was part of a team who supported our year 12 students to achieve the highest ever results in Further Mathematics.

A thread on what I think was the active ingredient of our success: A collective approach In recent years, we've really focused on aligning our teaching approaches, resources, and assessments. This is a journey that was started by our head of department about five years ago, and it's taken place through shared curriculum documents, success criteria, quizzes and tests.

Sometimes it can be tricky to turn a curriculum standard into a learning intention.

Luckily, Explicit Direct Instruction has some concrete and practical advice to help teachers do this.

Here's what I learnt from John Hollingsworth of @TeachEduceri fame about how to do it... John started out by pointing out what an Explicit Direct Instruction learning intention contains. As John and Silvia write:

'A Learning Objective contains Concepts (big ideas, nouns), Skills (measurable behaviours, verbs), and sometimes Context (restricting conditions)'

Experts have situation-action pairs stored in their long-term memories. A situation-action pair represents an automated response (action) that an expert has to a given scenario (situation).

A 🧵 on the power of scripting in teaching (inc. an audio clip of an example!) This automated response represents an action that has a high probability of producing the desired outcome.

Some examples:

So grateful to have had the opportunity to pick the brains of Instructional Coaching expert @Josh_CPD and be coached by him!

It was a super juicy conversation, covering some of most sensitive areas of coaching and I learnt so much.

5 takeaways 🧵👇

Pod: ollielovell.com/errr/joshgoodr… 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝟏: 𝐑𝐞𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐚 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐭 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: As @mikehobbiss, @DrSamSims, and @profbeckyallen (2021) have written, habits in teaching form fast and are hard to break.

Well worth checking out the recent report by @EvidenceInEdu on the four pillars of assessment.
f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/2366135/…

Here are some snaps of my fave bits. Purpose:

Enjoying reading @SarahAsome 's interview with Learning Disabilities Australia about some of the changes and advancements to literacy instruction at @BentleighWest under Principal @StevenCapp (here: ldaustralia.org/client/documen…). Here's the professional reading diet... (start thread) Which then impacted practice like this..

ATTENTION ALL MATHS TEACHERS! I must commend @MrJohnRowe for his generous creation of an exquisite maths teaching resource! His free ebook, 'Hook, Line and Sinker' includes: a one pager of quality resources for the topics of trig (see image), linear algebra, indices (1/5) quadratics, probability, and sequences & series; A concise page on planning a conceptual approach in the classroom; (2/5)

Here are some of the things that I’ve learnt about mathematical problem solving over the past few years: 1. Fluency in facts, procedures & concepts act as a foundation for problem solving, 2. One main point of consistently asking students the same questions, in order to prompt their thinking, is that they then internalise these these questions and they become part of the students’ natural metacognitive processes whilst problem solving.

Just finished, and thoroughly enjoyed, reading the @OracyCambridge paper 'The development of Oracy skills in school-aged learners' by @profneilmercer and @LynDawesMercer (ht @RethinkingJames). It outlines the 'why' of Oracy, breaks down skills, and... languageresearch.cambridge.org/images/Languag… touches on teaching. It begins with an argument that explicit Oracy instruction provides a crucial 'second chance' for students. And relates the development of speech to the development of thought.

Previously, I've shared the short booklet 'MARGE' by Prof Arthur Shiamura. It's a booklet on memory and learning using an acronym for Motivate, Attend, Relate, Generate, Evaluate. I wanted to share some takeaways, as summarised by @teacherhead in teacherhead.com/2018/10/03/int… Motivate: We need students to focus in order to learn (see 'Attend') and for this we need motivation. We can motivate through Qs 'What do you think? How does it make you feel?' Stories (psychologically privileged). Or framing learning as big Qs (see: ollielovell.com/errr/jaymctigh…)

'10 low impact activities to do less of or or stop alltogether'. To improve, we need to stop teachers doing good things to make time for even better things (quoting @dylanwiliam here). But we can also straight up stop doing bad things too! Via @teacherhead
teacherhead.com/2017/12/01/10-… Caveat, not totally sold on these two points. Purpose of both of them is to stimulate a very valuable process (reflection and detailed planning respectively), in a way that makes the thinking of the reflector/planner visible. That said, reflections much better scaffolded...

Nice reflection by @rhwave2004 on some of the thinking routines in 'Making Thinking Visible', the book by @RonRitchhart. arithmeticplus.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/vis… First thing that I found really interesting was the type of images/stimuli that Rachel finds helpful for see-think-wonder. #ccotonline Next, Rachel offers a good way to scaffold 'I used to think, but now I think' that makes sense to me (Q for @rhwave2004 , What impacts does this kind of a reflection have on your classroom culture/student learning. Any?)

Currently reading @ronritchhart’s ‘Making Thinking Visible’. In it, he outlines a clever study (also by him) in which concept maps were used to elicit students’ understandings of what thinking is, and how it happens. #ccotonline (You'll like this @MandiB17) Their premise was that if students are unable to articulate what makes effective thinking (would be curious to substitute 'thinking' for ‘learning’), it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be employing effective strategies when they’re attempting to make sense of concepts themselves.

You give 36 students sdts a set of worked examples and tell them to start learning. At the end of 25 mins you test them on some near and medium transfer Qs. After controlling for prior knowledge, 1/3 of the group demonstrates significantly more learning than the other 2/3. Why? Alexander Renkl tries to work out what the heck is going on in the minds of these learners, and what’s the difference between the more-successful, and less-successful ones. - Renkl, A. (1997). Learning from worked-out examples: A study on individual differences.

1) I’ve read a bit recently critiquing the approach of the ‘meta-analysis’. So I’m trying to look into it. Stop one, Gene Glass’ 1976 paper ‘Primary, secondary, and meta-analysis of research’. Here’s what he’s saying. pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e990/a41e8f09e… 2) Meta-analyses are necessitated by the sheer volume of research that’s out there now (‘now’ being 1976). And then-current methods weren’t up to scratch. (but note how he himself suggests that combining 500 studies will ‘defy simple summary’)