Teachers Do Not Have the Greatest Within-School Impact on Student Achievement A/Prof John Clark
School of Educational Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North – j.a.clark@massey.ac.nz
There is a widely held view that teachers have the greatest watching what a child is performing in physical education. At the within-school impact on student achievement. It is an idea other end, it may be complex and rather formal, such as NCEA promoted by politicians, policy makers, teachers and academics examinations or international testing such as PIRLS, PISA and alike. It is an article of faith, beyond question, for it seems so self- TIMMS. Between, somewhere, are the various achievements evidently true. But is it? No, it is not. A compelling argument can which collectively are cashed out as National Standards, as be made which refutes the idea which is so patently false. And reported by the Ministry of Education. Since all of this is so doing so raises anew just how we ought to go about locating the familiar to teachers, nothing more need be said about student causes of the inequality of school achievement and generating achievement. viable solutions to this, our biggest education problem. What causes, or brings about, student achievement is quite The argument is a simple one and such another matter altogether and is where an obvious one. It is so simple and so What causes, or brings about, deep conceptual misunderstanding obvious that it is a puzzle why so many arises. What students do, their ignore it while, by embracing received student achievement performances such as giving an wisdom, they defend the indefensible. oral answer to a teacher’s question Some clear thinking should help to is quite another matter through to writing an answer to an sweep away the conceptual confusion altogether and is where examination question, doesn’t just surrounding this most intractable arrive spontaneously from nowhere: and troublesome challenge. If we take deep conceptual it comes from somewhere. Where it student achievement as our starting comes from is the brain, pure and point, and then work back from there, misunderstanding arises. simple. The brain in all its complexity we will begin to make some progress in is the repository of all of a child’s sorting out the whole matter in a much more rational manner. learning and what it contains is drawn upon to generate the Student achievement is the public display of children’s learning. multitude of school achievements each child displays. If the brain It lies on a continuum. At one end, it may be quite simple and contains what is required to exhibit a certain achievement, such informal, being no more than a teacher having a conversation as completing a mathematical equation, then it is likely that the with a child about some aspect of what the child is doing or child will do so successfully (but not always since there can be
QUALITY BOARDS FOR QUALITY EDUCATION
Available nationwide Custom sizes available
Whiteboards
Pinboards
Combination
Cabinet
Mobile + relocatable
Contact us today – 0800 POTTERS | www.potters.co.nz | info@potters.co.nz
all sorts of reasons why a child may not perform to expectations on particular occasions, including illness, lack of interest, peer pressure and the like). On the other hand, for a child who lacks the requisite content then the only achievement outcome possible is underachievement (barring the luck of just by chance selecting the right answer, but this is hardly a good strategy for on-going success in achievement). The brain does two things fundamental to school achievement. First, it is where learning occurs, and second it is where learning is stored in memory for future use. Put simply, the 100 billion neurons with their up to 1000 trillion synaptic connections form a complex neural network which makes possible the initial processing of information received from our senses and filters that which is retained in memory from that which is pruned. Synaptic connections come and go in the process of learning as well as being the result of other events, such as brain damage and brain disease. It is this neural plasticity which permits new learning to be retained in memory and also lost forever. To illustrate with a simple and familiar example. The very first time a child hears a teacher say “Two plus two equals four”, while processed by the brain the equation is quickly forgotten. Many repetitions later, through the chanting of the favoured method of rote learning, the equation is so locked into memory that it is never forgotten until Alzheimer’s Disease ravages the brain. Now, if the brain is the only source of learned information for subsequent student achievement then it is the only thing which has a direct impact on student achievement. When children come to school and engage in observable student achievement activities (as distinct from unobservable student learning which takes place in the brain) then the one thing they bring with them is their brain and with it all of the neural content which is so critical to successful student achievement. In which case it is simply false that the greatest within-school factor influencing student achievement is the teacher. The brain is. That this is so simple and so obvious should be self-evident to all but somehow it passes us by when irrational ideology trumps logic and science. This brings us to what has the greatest impact on student learning, taken in its most expansive sense. All that is processed by a student’s brain and saved in memory to be drawn upon at a later time for displays of student achievement, is acquired from sources both within and without the school. Some student achievement may rely on learning largely acquired outside of the school; including family, friends, print media, digital technology, social media and peers amongst other things. Other student achievement may be much more finely focussed on classroom learning of a kind rarely found in out of school sources and where the teacher’s influence is more keenly felt. In short, what children learn and how they learn it is contained within a vast flux of experience which is so complex that it is not easily unravelled to identify the contributing factors. But one thing is certain, the within-school factors are far outweighed by the beyond school factors. However good a teacher might be, a child who comes to school ill or hungry or cold because the parents are too poor to pay for a doctor’s visit or buy food for breakfast and lunch or have the money to provide shoes is unlikely to learn and more likely to underachieve. This is not to deny that within-school factors are important, for they are; but it is to assert that in the scheme of things they are of less importance than beyond school forces. Placing this to one side, we are still left with the problem of determining what within-school factors are at play in student learning and which ones are to be accorded the greatest weight.
If we stop for a moment and think of a child in a classroom, any child in any classroom, then we can ask what do they learn between 9am and 3pm each week day at school and where do they learn it and from whom do they learn it? If the teacher’s only pedagogical method was of direct instruction and nothing else conveyed within the confines of a strict regime of discipline then we might concede that the teacher is the principal if not the only factor impacting on student learning. But modern New Zealand classrooms, certainly in primary schools, are not like this at all. They are vibrant social communities at the best of times even if strict regimentation does occur from time to time. What influences are at play? There are many: books, computers, digital devices such as iPads and e-books, radio and television, other children and, of course, the teacher. In the day to day life of the child, the lived moment so to speak, there may be more immediate factors of greater influence than the teacher. Talking with other children who sit in the same group, watching a programme on TV, reading new information downloaded from the internet and the like may be far more powerful stimulants of learning than the teacher. Whether the teacher is the most powerful influence on student achievement is an empirical matter and it may turn out that the teacher is far less important than is often thought. To be sure, the teacher may control the classroom to ensure student behaviour is of a kind that makes good learning possible, but this is not the same as actually being a cause of student learning. The teacher may say things to students which focus the student back onto the task at hand, but this too is not the cause of new learning. In short, many if not most of the things a teacher does is to facilitate the conditions for learning but these things do not, in and of themselves, actually constitute a direct influence on students learning this, that or the other. Over the course of a normal school day, a teacher has far less direct and immediate impact on student learning than some other forces. A high-achieving child sitting next to a lowachieving child may have a far greater influence than the teacher. The information gleaned from an internet search may be of far greater significance for student learning than that information passed on by the teacher. And we could go on with countless other examples. In which case, why should it be thought that the teacher has the greatest single within-school impact on student achievement. To do so is to succumb, once more, to an ideology rather than be persuaded by the empirical evidence which lies around us in every classroom. So, to conclude. We need to dispel two common myths peddled as if they were self-evidently true. First: teachers are not the single most important determinant of student achievement; achievement is dependent on that which the brain learns and remembers which is drawn upon for later achievement. Second: teachers do influence student learning but more often than not this influence is of less significance than other within-school influences. Once politicians, policymakers, teachers and academics accept this simple truth and look more critically, rigorously and systematically at where the causes of student learning lie then the greater the chances that subsequent student achievement will be raised.