Too much Knowledge Might Lead to Ineffective Teaching
A lesson based off the article "Not What you Know But How it's Taught" by Catherine Woulfe
- Read the article that is posted below. As you progress, click on the smiley faces to gain more information, insight, and understanding of the material you are reading.
- I have provided you with questions to guide your reading as well as my answers to those questions, which can be viewed by clicking the MY ANSWER link.
- I hope that you learn from this site as well as are able to apply the process of analysis to other claims in the field of educational psychology.
- Best Luck!
Student at North Central College
email: ahsmith@noctrl.edu
"Not What you Know But How it's Taught"
A TEACHER'S knowledge of their subject makes very little difference to how well their students do, a major study has found that a teacher who knows too much could actually damage their students' chances of success.
University of Auckland professor John Hattie says this is the most surprising finding of his 15-year Visible Learning research project, which the Sunday Star-Times outlined last week.
His work is being hailed in the United Kingdom as "teaching's Holy Grail," and last week Education Minister Anne Tolley told the Star-Times it would have a "profound influence" on teaching in New Zealand.
Hattie says of all the surprising findings in his research, he was most stunned to find that teachers' subject matter knowledge ranked so low 125th out of 138 aspects of schooling. He is bracing himself for fallout from teachers' unions, but says the evidence is clear.
However, "it worries the heck out of me, because I don't understand it. Of all the matters we need to worry about in education, it appears that teachers' subject matter knowledge is very low on the totem pole... It's a very embarrassing finding for our [teaching] profession... You've hit a very sore Achilles heel.
"A lot will come out, with great umbrage, that it is not true. But my argument is simply that it is true."
Hattie, an internationally respected education expert, is now working with an American colleague to find an explanation for the finding.
The Visible Learning research is an analysis of 800 previous analyzes that had looked at 52,637 student achievement studies.
Using these results, Hattie ranked interactive teaching and good feedback at the top of a table of 138 aspects of schooling. But things that parents might think would help including smaller class size, homework, type of school, exposure to reading and ability streaming were found to be relatively ineffective.
Teacher subject matter knowledge ranked even lower than these strategies and scored a lowly 0.09 rating.
Hattie deemed all strategies that scored less than 0.4 to be "in need of consideration"; those below 0.15 "can be considered potentially harmful and probably should not be implemented".
Does this mean that a mathematics guru would actually be a worse maths teacher than someone who knew just enough about the subject to teach it? "Unfortunately, that's an implication. Putting my hand on my heart, I can't say that we have got any evidence to counter that."
...Union spokespeople could not be reached for comment yesterday. But on Friday the NZEI released a statement on the research, saying "getting the best out of teachers and students is a complex issue which needs a multi-faceted approach and sector-wide discussions. There are no quick fix or Holy Grail type answers."
Kate Gainsford of the PPTA said people in universities often studied those in classrooms but there was no "silver bullet" way to improve teaching. She said many teachers already use the interactive methods championed by Hattie's study and stressed any change in teaching techniques needed to be backed with policies, resources and training.