Evidence-informed teaching

After 7 years in teaching, I came to realize that in teaching there are always possible areas of improvement. As we know, good teachers will change the lives of our students forever. When teachers teach well, some of the students will only succeed because of her excellent teaching. Then they might go on to get a more advanced qualification and skills.

As a teacher, we are supposed to know how to go about making these improvements on our teaching. For myself, up till now, I am still going about changing what I do. Some teachers may find it uncomfortable, having to step out of their comfort zone (their tested methods) and experiment with new methods. But if all teachers were to keep experimenting, I believed that we teachers will find it rewarding, just so long as we are in control of the change and doing it at a comfortable pace that must include time for reflection.

I think experimenting can be fun, especially when we do it as a team for improving teaching of our students and share our findings with one another. (Will my teachers and ICT Trainers agree with this?) Nevertheless, through this practice, I believe that it can help to keep our own teaching alive, now that we know new methods as well as it been part of our own professional development to do our best for our students. However, I have some reservation regarding the following form of experimenting practice.

Often we have this common experience in school where someone with excellent educational experience will introduce a new method to use. The method was introduced with great enthusiasm by the teacher who fair-mindedly described the advantage and disadvantages of the new approach in terms of the improvements in learning quality that it could bring about. The teacher will persuasively and accurately argue that the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages. Then there is this quotation of some authority or citing some research which the method was tried. This is finally followed with some extortion for all teachers to join in to use the method on the basis of the information provided.

So what reservations do I have with the teacher’s argument? Well, firstly, I am sure that the presented method will have positive effect on learning. But is that the only method that has positive effect on learning? There are many strategies that will improve things for our students, so I think the question is not “Will the new method work?” but “Which of the many methods best works for my students under certain situation?” And considering the limited amount of time, teachers are not able to use all of these methods, so we need to choose the “best” suitable method. When we have decided on the method that works best for his students, then we may need to know why. Without knowing the why, we are unlikely to use them effectively. Hence, I believed that there is a need to seek evidence of the methods we employ so as to better understand the “why” – that is the content and so back up our experiments of the “best” method in order for it to contribute to the learning of our students.