27 Mar 2018
The ability to adapt
is the ability to move forward
Towards an adaptive education system in Australia (November, 2017) by Peter Goss is a discussion paper published by the Grattan Institute. The paper proposes ways that Australia can make its education system more adaptive and thereby improve educational outcomes.
The paper, quite obviously, highlights the importance of teaching in creating student success, stating that in Australia, a student with a teacher in the top ten per cent of teachers in the country can achieve in half a year what a student with a bottom ten per cent teacher achieves in a full year.
Clearly the individual teacher makes a big difference to the rate of a student's learning.
But what makes an effective teacher? What is it about teachers that matters most? Is it their personality? Their IQ? Whether they have a Master's Degree? The best answer is none of the above, instead it is the capacity of a teacher to adapt a complex range of priorities including the needs and abilities of individual students, the availability and quality of resources, the effectiveness of collaboration and mentoring networks with other teachers, the effectiveness and quality of professional development, the type of school leadership and school culture, the diversity of home environments and cultural backgrounds, current educational trends and change, and parent and community expectations.
An effective teacher therefore is one who can effectively calibrate their professional practice so that it is responsive to a wide range of circumstances, and in doing so, maximise student learning and achievement.
An important aspect of being an adaptive teacher is to know which practices to choose, which to keep and which to stop. This is the essence of John Hattie's visible learning theory which is captured in his phrase ‘know thy impact', a call for teachers to track how much their students learn, and use that information to inform their future practice.
It is the job of a school then, to support and encourage teachers to come to a deep knowledge and understanding of the effectiveness of their own professional practice and develop their adaptive capacity. This includes giving teachers:
- access to expert teachers, such as instructional leaders
- time, tools, training, teamwork and trust so that data can be used to inform day-to-day practice
- opportunities for teachers to observe and be observed by others.
It is not necessary nor should it be expected that all teachers will take the same approach within the classroom. However, it is important that all teachers be supported to use evidence-based approaches to track the progress of their students over time in ways that directly inform their teaching, ways that have been shown to be responsive to the context of their own classroom situations.