Teachers are bombarded with information about best practice. Advice comes thick and fast on how to solve the daily challenges that are inevitable when working with a group of learners in intensive working environments. But it’s not often teachers get access to a way of conceiving of our practice that is helpful and also clear.

Useful snapshots of complex practice

While numerous frameworks of learning and teaching exist, many of them offer conflicting and vague advice and truisms. Hence my excitement that some models appearing in the Australian educational landscape are seeking to offer a comprehensible snapshot of varied teaching practices. When looked at holistically, such practices work in tandem to meet the challenges of educating our next generation of students. These models are doing a good job of embedding the highest leverage techniques and principles in alignment with the research on how students learn best.

What I love about the new Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0 (Department of Education) and the Australian Educational Research Organisation (AERO) Model of Learning and Teaching are that they offer not just a list of key strategies but an overarching framework for how different practices come together. Both documents emphasise that the list of techniques fit within broader practices that are complimentary and connected to form effective and engaging teaching approaches.

To take the Victorian VTLM 2.0, by separating the elements of teaching into four parts— (1) planning, (2) enabling learning, (3) explicit teaching, and (4) supported application—the model takes the cognitively overwhelming task of educating students and synthesises it into just four main things. What’s more, the ideas and practices that are embedded within this model—whilst appearing to be quite stripped back—are actually powerful and equity-boosting techniques that have the potential to transform our education systems as we know it.

I hope all other education departments and other jurisdictions overseas take note of the guidance like this which is coming out, and undertake similar work to adopt or adapt a shared vision for the components of effective and engaging teaching.

Coherent models are the exception not the norm

In many educational systems around the world, a strong focus has been on simply purchasing curriculum resources, or having a list of approved programs. While these initiatives are important and can help to create clarity around what is and is not supported by the district or department, it doesn’t address the underlying challenge that teachers and schools are operating under vastly different views of what constitutes learning and how best to support it. Having a shared vision for effective instruction, and thus a shared understanding of great teaching is rare, but in my opinion crucial.

Much educational reform can be reduced to the introduction of standardised testing, a prescribed list of programs or curriculum resources, and accountability measures seeking compliance rather than conscious adoption and adaption.

Some accountability measures can shine a spotlight onto whether initiatives are working or not, but I don’t see them as sufficient. Instead we need shared knowledge about teaching in order to bring about whole-scale Instructional and curriculum changes that re-centre teacher work on the intricacies of classroom practice. It is only by prioritising teachers’ classroom expertise can we hope to ‘get our profession back’ (See David McSporran’s comments in the upcoming book).

Zoom in and out of great practice

What I love about a growing number of jurisdictions, in their work on bringing research-informed practice into their schools, is that the focus isn’t just on the ‘strategies’ that must be taught in particular subjects like English and Mathematics. Instead, there are bigger picture ideas around the principles that support good teaching decisions in every classroom every day. In AERO’s model this includes knowledge around:

Attention and focus,
Knowledge and memory,
Retention and recall, and
Mastery and application.

These principles are relevant to the powerful teaching practices and techniques embedded within, and have the potential to optimise the teaching of any subject.

When policy and guidance support and complement

There is more work to do; and this is certainly underway in education systems, including in the other offices of education and Catholic Dioceses in Victoria and interstate. Regardless of the time involved to get there, we are starting to see a connection between educational policy and actionable practice within classrooms, and I just hope that this process continues. The work of teachers should always be at the forefront of such conversations. This should allow the big ideas from research to connect to real practices that can be refined and brought in to our schools to support all learners with all aspects of learning.

Image from Siddharth Grover via LinkedIn

All models are wrong?

It’s beholden on me to provide a strong caveat that no model is perfect. In fact, as the title of this blog post alludes to, a famous aphorism posits that all models are necessarily wrong, but that some are useful.

We should not expect such models of teaching and learning to capture everything and anything as all models require a distillation of key ideas.

As the likely criticisms of certain models eventually come to the surface, we should remember this very sage advice from George E. P. Box (1976): that it is unreasonable to expect a model to represent everything. There is a necessary simplification involved in representing the complexity of reality — such as that captured in models of teaching/learning. Box emphasised that a model’s measure should be its utility not its ability to represent truth in its entirety. That feat is impossible.

So long as these models provide support for teachers to understand a much more complex phenomenon, and have actionable guidance that aligns to the research, then it will support better decisions we can make in our classrooms. These models can have incredible power.

I hope we can continue this renaissance in education, where we focus on the work of classroom teachers, and the practices and principles that can help reshape the education system—one classroom at a time.

Where to next?

I would love to hear what you think about the value of models and frameworks for your work, and how these can support your practice, as well as any gaps you foresee. Stay in touch!

Some models are useful