- Title: Improving educational outcomes in America: Can a low-tech generic teaching practice make a difference?
- Authors: Heward and Wood
- Access the original paper here
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Paper summary
This research article examines the effectiveness of a low-tech teaching practice, choral responding (CR), in improving educational outcomes in America. The authors argue that despite decades of educational reform efforts, explicit, systematic instruction, particularly increasing active student responding (ASR), remains undervalued. They highlight CR’s proven ability to boost ASR, leading to enhanced learning and reduced misbehavior. The study analyzes CR’s impact and cost-effectiveness, emphasizing its compatibility with other evidence-based practices and its potential to address the persistent issue of educational mediocrity. Finally, it addresses common misconceptions about CR and its application.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
The sources highlight several key implications for teachers in the classroom:
- Teachers should strive to increase student responding during instruction. This is one of the most important practices for improving student achievement.
- Active Student Responding (ASR) should be prioritized. ASR occurs when a student makes a detectable, lesson-specific response. The basic measure of ASR is the number of responses a student makes during an observed period of instruction.
- Teachers must effectively manage group instruction. This includes maintaining student attention, giving each student sufficient opportunities to respond, providing feedback for student responses, monitoring student learning, and preventing and dealing with disruptive behavior.
- Choral responding (CR) is a high-leverage practice that all teachers should use. CR is an effective way to increase ASR, provide immediate feedback to students, and reduce disruptive behavior.
- Teachers should use a variety of high-ASR techniques in addition to CR. These techniques include response cards, guided notes, and classwide peer tutoring.
- Teachers should focus on alterable variables, which are factors that make a difference in student learning and that teachers can control. Examples of alterable variables include time allocated for instruction, the sequence of activities within a lesson, the pacing of instruction, the frequency of student responding, and the manner in which errors are corrected.
- Explicit instruction is more effective than roundabout teaching. Explicit instruction is characterized by clearly defined learning objectives, presentation of new material in small steps, frequent opportunities for student response, systematic feedback and error correction, and systematic review of previous lessons.
- Effective teaching practices should be judged by their impact on student learning. The most important question to ask is whether a particular practice helps students learn more and retain it longer.
The sources also provide some specific recommendations for implementing CR effectively:
- Give clear directions and model the activity.
- Provide a brief thinking pause before signaling students to respond.
- Signal students to respond using a clear, consistent auditory and/or visual signal.
- Intersperse individual turns.
- Maintain a lively pace.
By using these recommendations and focusing on increasing student responding during instruction, teachers can make a significant difference in the lives of their students.
Quote
We still have to get a whole lot more skills and knowledge into the skulls of many millions of young people
