by Rebecca Alber

I remember how, as a new teacher, I would attend a professional development and feel inundated with new strategies. (I wanted to get back to the classroom and try them all!) After the magic of that day wore off, I reflected on the many strategies and would often think, “Lots of great stuff, but I’m not sure it’s worth the time it would take to implement it all.”

We teachers are always looking to innovate, so, yes, it’s essential that we try new things to add to our pedagogical bag of tricks. But it’s important to focus on purpose and intentionality — and not on quantity. So what really matters more than “always trying something new” is the reason behind why we do what we do.

What Research Says

This leads me to educational researcher John Hattie, who wrote Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. Through his research, one of his goals is to aid teachers in seeing and better understanding learning through the eyes of their students.

Hattie has spent more than 15 years researching the influences on achievement of K-12 children. His findings linked student outcomes to several highly effective classroom practices. Here I’d like to highlight five of those practices:

1. Teacher Clarity

When a teacher begins a new unit of study or project with students, she clarifies the purpose and learning goals, and provides explicit criteria on how students can be successful. It’s ideal to also present models or examples to students so they can see what the end product looks like.

2. Classroom Discussion

Teachers need to frequently step offstage and facilitate entire class discussion. This allows students to learn from each other. It’s also a great opportunity for teachers to formatively assess (through observation) how well students are grasping new content and concepts.

3. Feedback

How do learners know they are moving forward without steady, consistent feedback? They often won’t. Along with individual feedback (written or verbal), teachers need to provide whole-group feedback on patterns they see in the collective class’ growth and areas of need. Students also need to be given opportunities to provide feedback to the teacher so that she can adjust the learning process, materials, and instruction accordingly.

4. Formative Assessments

In order to provide students with effective and accurate feedback, teachers need to assess frequently and routinely where students are in relation to the unit of study’s learning goals or end product (summative assessment). Hattie recommends that teachers spend the same amount of time on formative evaluation as they do on summative assessment.

5. Metacognitive Strategies

Students are given opportunities to plan and organize, monitor their own work, direct their own learning, and to self-reflect along the way. When we provide students with time and space to be aware of their own knowledge and their own thinking, student ownership increases. And research shows that metacognition can be taught.

 Collaborating with Colleagues

Great teachers are earnest learners. Spend some time with a colleague, or two or three, and talk about what each of these research-based, best classroom practices looks like in the classroom. Discuss each one in the context of your unique learning environment: who your students are, what they need, what they already know, etc.

The Theory

The theory is called attribution theory. It is about how we explain why other people do what they do. According to the theory, there either are external causes – e.g. the dog ate the homework – or internal causes, something about the individual or the group to which the individual belongs – e.g. he doesn’t get his work done because he’s lazy.

The truth is we often don’t know why someone does something. You should be aware of this theory because the best way to blow up a negotiation or a coaching session or almost any interaction with someone is to impute a negative motivation to something that person has done. Being wrong about it only makes the situation worse.

The Skills

Now that you know what attribution theory is, you know exactly what not to do when delivering feedback or when you are engaged in active listening: do not make attributions. Do not tell someone what he or she is thinking, feeling, or intending. Instead, pay attention to what the individual is saying and doing.

Feedback
The purpose of feedback is to give the feedback recipient information about his or her behavior that he or she can use to decide whether to continue that behavior or to change it in some way. When delivering feedback, instead of beginning with the impact of someone’s behavior and assuming the individual knows exactly what you’re talking about, begin by describing what that person did using specific behavioral language and then identify the impact of the behavior.

The point about language is important because the same behavior can impact different people in different ways. For example, behavior that some would call aggressive might look confident or arrogant to other people. That’s why it’s important to be specific about what the individual is doing. Please note that the words aggressive, confident and arrogant do not describe specific behavior. They describe someone’s interpretation of someone else’s behavior. They are attributions.

Active Listening
Most people think of active listening as going “uh huh” every now and then and paraphrasing. These are techniques intended to encourage the other person and to let them know you’re listening. The techniques work best if they support the actual goal of active listening, which is listening to understand.

Here’s how to become an active listener: Do not assume that your interpretations are their intentions. Do not use attributions. Paraphrase when the other person says something that appears important and then, if it seems appropriate, add on a response or a clarifying question. For example, “As I understand it now, your perspective on this topic is… Mine is different. I view the situation this way…” That gives the other person the opportunity to clarify your understanding of their position and to hear your view.
As with feedback, active listening is useful in most interactions with other people whether those interactions are personal or business related. And both skills are essential for things like negotiating, managing conflict, coaching and managing performance. They are not the only skills you’ll need, but without them, you will be much less effective. That’s why they are among the fundamentals of interpersonal communication.

Source: CEO.COM