The effective teaching profile

Transcript

James Ladwig: “And measurement matters by the way, yea, you like this one, why do you want to do this? I mean why, why would you go through all this effort, well on the one hand you got to worry about trying to convince you know ministries and whatnot that what you’re doing is a good thing, alright, that’s part of the issue. The other part of the issue is you can start asking questions about how these things fit together and that’s where you want to go, alright. If I take a look and just, this is called the scatter plot, on the bottom you’ve got the amount of caring relations, once we add those all up, alright. On the vertical axis, the upward axis you’ve got how much discursive interaction there is in a classroom, but I want you to notice something about the shape of this, alright. Notice that you will see no high levels of discursive interaction when there are low levels of caring relations. It doesn't happen. Having high levels of caring relations doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get discursive practice, alright. So on the one hand you can say those relations are foundations, you’ve got to have them in place, but it’s not enough, if you want to go for the full picture.

“Reality is a lot more complex than that, you know I can take apart two bits and say how they fit together, alright. I just thought you might want to look at this for two reasons. First of all the issue of relations stays pretty central to the picture, but I want to point out a couple feedbacks. And some of the direct effects that you’ll probably have, you’ll actually have conversations about these with teachers, I know it doesn't look like it, but the little e’s by the way are errors which means we don’t know what it is, right. But notice two things, first of all when it comes to engagement, high expectations of behaviour and whether or not you get culturally responsive pedagogy had a direct effect on whether or not kids were engaged, alright. So separate to the larger issue of, um, relations, caring relations, those two things had a direct effect on engagement. Notice that whether or not the pedagogy was culturally appropriate, this is the one at the top, has a direct effect on whether or not you had high levels of discursive interaction, alright. So while you can talk about all sep, altogether as one thing, there are also all these individual direct effects on things that matter at the end of the day.

“Well the reason it matters, aside from the fact it ultimately has an impact on student outcome, is if you had high levels of cognitive demand, challenge, getting kids to think, that had a direct feedback on the cultural responsiveness. Think about the logic of that. If you’re asking students to think and challenge the way they’re thinking and get them to respond, you have to respond to who they’re thinking. So it comes back. If you challenge the way they think it has a direct impact on whether or not you have expectations for higher, higher performance, okay. So cognition sounds like a real technical term, I can give you multiple definitions, but basically if you’re familiar with the classrooms where you sit down in a history lesson and you just be given the facts and you don’t have to think, you have to write down, think about what that does to you as a learner. As compared to when you’re asked whether or not you want to talk about, in Australia you’ll talk about Australia Day, whether or not it is a discovery or a, an invasion. And that debate requires a lot of thinking, asking kids to do their thinking changes the nature of the relationship.”