Improving the quality ofteaching and learning

DAVID HOPKINS

School improvement

The purpose of this special edition of Support for Learningis to demonstrate the essential interrelatedness betweenstudent learning and achievement, teacher knowledge andbehaviour, and school development. The previous articleshave provided a range of examples of how these threecrucial elements of school improvement interact in subtleand creative ways to enhance the learning of students.In this concluding article I intend to stand back a littlefrom the detail of the school-based examples and reflecta little on the links between learning, teaching andschooling.

Let me begin by clarifying what I have called elsewhere‘powerful learning’ (Hopkins 1997). In my opinion, therehas been of late a narrowing of the conventional definitionof effective student learning. Compared with even ten yearsago, ‘effective student learning’ is more commonly equatedwith national test scores or GCSE A–C results, rather thansomething broader. While the shift of focus to studentoutcomes is to be applauded, as schools in particular, andthe system in general, take more responsibility for studentlearning, there are some dangers too. In particular, assuch specific outcome measures increasingly become thepolitical orthodoxy, they are regarded de facto, as a proxymeasure for other aspects of learning. In other words,learning and attainment are becoming too easily equated.This tendency can only result in a reductionist andimpoverished interpretation of what constitutes learning.Powerful learning is more than just exam results and testscores.

To me powerful learning subsumes a range of cognitive andaffective processes and outcomes. What I wish for mychildren, and indeed all children, is that they not only meetand if possible surpass existing educational standards, butthat they also find learning exciting, compelling andintrinsically worthwhile. But not only in an academicsense, as vital as this is. I want more than this for all ofthem. I wish them to appreciate the richness of their ownand each other’s cultures, to understand the importance ofphysical activity to health, and to become competent andsocial beings who have sound, secure and healthy self-conceptsto help them face the challenges that await them in their

lives. While these abilities are not exclusively within thegift of the school, nevertheless, the school has been shownto be the principle determinant of children’s academicself-concepts. As Mel West and I have recently argued,schools should be organised to support a far wider range oflearning than many educational researchers espouse in theirpolitically regulated conceptions of the ‘effective school’(West and Hopkins in press).

There is now a vast array of evidence from practicalexperience and research to suggest that the way in whichthe learning experience is organised can make a big differenceto our students. The impact is not just on test scores andexamination results, but also on the students’ learningcapability and, I suggest, their self-esteem. Powerful learning,therefore, refers to the ability of learners to respondsuccessfully to the tasks they are set, as well as the tasksthey set themselves. In particular, to:

• integrate prior and new knowledge;• acquire and use a range of learning skills;• solve problems individually and in groups;• think carefully about their successes and failures;• evaluate conflicting evidence and to think critically and• accept that learning involves uncertainty and difficulty.

The deployment of such a range of learning strategies hasbeen termed ‘meta-cognition’, which can be described asthe learner’s ability to take control over her/his own learningprocesses.

The important point is that powerful learning, in the waythat I define it, does not occur by accident. It is usually theresult of an effective learning situation created by a skilfulteacher. My vision is of students engaged in compellinglearning situations, created by skilful teachers in schoolsettings designed to promote learning for both of them. AsBruce Joyce and Beverly Showers (1991) put it: ‘Knowingthis is the core of effective teaching, because effectiveteachers are confident that they can make a differenceand that the difference is made by increasing their ownteaching repertoires and the learning repertoires of theirstudents.’

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It is this link – between powerful learning and powerfulteaching – that is at the heart of school improvement. It isthe way in which teachers structure the learning experiencethat ensures that students learn how to learn as well asachieve as well as they can. Put simply, powerful teachersbelieve that all children can learn and that they can teach allchildren. More pertinently, they convey this message totheir students.

I am convinced that the teacher’s task is not simply toteach, but to create powerful contexts for learning. In ournew book Models of Learning – Tools for Teaching (Joyce,Calhoun and Hopkins 1997) we express it like this:‘Learning experiences are composed of content, processand social climate. As teachers we create for and with ourchildren opportunities to explore and build important areasof knowledge, develop powerful tools for learning, and livein humanising social conditions.’

If powerful teaching is about creating powerful learningexperiences for students, there is a major impedimentto achieving powerful learning. It is that here we do nothave a sufficiently robust and sophisticated language forteaching. Language defines us. If we had a more extensivevocabulary, we as teachers could exercise more controlover the learning environments of our students. A keytask for those of us committed to enhancing the learningof pupils, therefore, is to expand the vocabulary ofteaching. It is not just words that we are lacking, but alsothe necessary frameworks and specifications to informaction and reflection. Not only do we need to expand ourvocabulary, but to expand it in a systematic and intelligentway.

My own attempt to contribute to such a framework andlanguage for teaching revolves around three aspects ofteaching that are often regarded as being contradictoryrather than complementary:

• Teaching skills• Teaching models• ‘Artistry’ of teaching

Teaching skills There is an extensive research literatureon teaching effects. Consistently high levels of correlationare achieved between student achievement scores andclassroom processes. One general conclusion, however,stands out: ‘The most consistently replicated findings linkachievement to the quantity and pacing of instruction’(Brophy and Good 1986). It is naive to assume, however,that the amount of time spent teaching is in itself asufficient condition for student achievement. The literatureon teaching effects is replete with descriptions of thewide range of behaviours necessary for effective teaching.These are the basic skills that teachers use on a day-to-daybasis to maintain classroom control and to ensure anorderly environment for learning. They provide thenecessary, but not the sufficient, condition for powerfulteaching.

Teaching models Despite the impressive gains associatedin the research literature of the teaching skills describedabove, they can in no way be regarded as a panacea. Thereis a further and equally strong body of research andpractice that suggests that student achievement can befurther enhanced by the consistent and strategic use ofspecific teaching models (Joyce and Weil 1996, Joyce,Calhoun and Hopkins 1997). There are many powerfulmodels of teaching, each with its own ‘syntax’, phases andguidelines, that are designed to bring about particular kindsof learning and to help students become more effectivelearners. As I implied earlier, models of teaching are reallymodels of learning. As students acquire information, ideas,skills, values, ways of thinking, and means of expressingthemselves, they are also learning how to learn.

In Models for Learning – Tools for Teaching (Joyce,Calhoun and Hopkins 1997) we describe, with examples,eight contrasting and complementary teaching strategiesdrawn from Joyce’s original four families of teachingmodels, viz. the information-processing, the social, thepersonal and the behavioural families. The ‘toolbox’we describe in the book contains a selection of themodels of teaching, actually models for learning, thatsimultaneously define the nature of the content, thelearning strategies, and the arrangements for socialinteraction that create the learning environments of ourstudents. For example, in powerful classrooms studentslearn models for:

• extracting information and ideas from lectures andpresentations;

• memorising information;• building hypotheses and theories;• attaining concepts and how to invent them;• using metaphors to think creatively and• working effectively with others to initiate and carry out

co-operative tasks.

When these models and strategies are combined, they haveeven greater potential for improving student learning. Thus,imagine a classroom where the learning environmentcontains a variety of models of teaching that are not onlyintended to accomplish a range of curriculum goals, but arealso designed to help students increase their competence aslearners. In such a classroom, the students learn models formemorising information, how to attain concepts and how toinvent them. They practice building hypotheses and theoriesand using the tools of science to test them. They learn howto extract information and ideas from lectures andpresentations, how to study social issues and how toanalyse their own social values. These students also knowhow to profit from training and how to train themselves inathletics, performing arts, mathematics and social skills.They know how to make their writing and problem solvingmore lucid and creative. Perhaps most importantly, theyknow how to take initiative in planning personal study, andthey know how to work with others to initiate and carry outco-operative tasks. As students master information andskills, the result of each learning experience is not only the

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content they learn, but the greater ability they acquire toapproach future learning tasks and to create learningenvironments for themselves.

‘Artistry’ of teaching There is another set of factorsthat characterise quality teaching that are less technicaland related to the teachers’ ‘artistry’. For me, the ‘artistry’of teaching lies in the teacher’s ability to generate andsustain an authentic relationship with her students. Forexample, the teacher ‘who made a difference’ is a commontopic of conversation following one’s admission that‘I am a teacher’. To many educators, a prime indicator ofthe effective school is one in which a high proportion ofpupils have a good or vital relationship with one or moreteachers.

These three perspectives on high-quality teaching are notexclusive, although it may be that critical systematicreflection is a necessary condition for quality teaching. Butthis is not reflection for reflection’s sake, but in order tocontinue to develop a mastery of one’s chosen craft. Thereare no ceilings on the performance of quality teachers: theytake individual and collective responsibility to base theirteaching on the best knowledge and practice available. Butthey then take those ideas and strategies and criticallyreflect on them through practice in their own and eachother’s classrooms. It is through reflection that the teacherharmonises, integrates and transcends the necessaryclassroom management skills, the acquisition of arepertoire of models of teaching and learning and thepersonal aspects of her teaching into a strategy that hasmeaning for her students.

To summarise, powerful teaching reflects the teacher’sability to create powerful learning experiences for herstudents. Successful teachers are not simply charismatic,persuasive and expert presenters; rather, they presentpowerful cognitive and social tasks to their students andteach the students how to make productive use of them.However important this all this, it still ignores LawrenceDowney’s memorable dictum that ‘A school teaches inthree ways: by what it teaches, by how it teaches, andby the kind of place it is.’ It is to a consideration of thekind of place a powerful school is, that I should now brieflyturn.

The learning and teaching engagements I have justdescribed are commonplace in schools that have a culturecharacterised by high expectations, collaboration andinnovation. The effort to understand the relationshipbetween student learning, classroom practice and schoolorganisation has occurred, as was seen in the introductorypaper, within the context of our collaborative schoolimprovement project known as Improving the Quality ofEducation for All (IQEA). The IQEA research hasdemonstrated that without an equal focus on the developmentcapacity or internal conditions of the school, innovativework quickly becomes marginalised (Hopkins, Ainscowand West 1994). Conditions, as we saw previously, are theinternal features of the school, the ‘arrangements’ that

enable it to get work done. They have to be worked on atthe same time as the curriculum or other priorities theschool has set itself.

One way of understanding the relationship between theconditions and the school’s developmental priorities, or thelink between powerful teaching and powerful schools, is toconsider Joyce’s analysis of the characteristics of effectivelarge-scale school-improvement initiatives (Joyce, Wolfand Calhoun 1993), in so far as these have tended to:

• focus on specific outcomes which can be related to studentlearning, rather than adopt laudable but non-specificgoals such as ‘improve exam results’;

• draw on theory, research into practice and the teachers’own experience in formulating strategies, so that a rationalefor the required changes is established in the minds ofthose expected to bring them about;

• target staff development, since it is unlikely thatdevelopments in student learning will occur withoutdevelopments in teachers’ practice;

• monitor the impact of policy on practice early andregularly, rather than rely on post hoc evaluation.

These characteristics are highly consistent with the IQEAframework for school improvement (Hopkins, West andAinscow 1996). They illustrate how powerful learning (thefirst point) is contingent on powerful teaching (the secondpoint), which is set within the context of the organisationalconditions of the powerful school (the final two points).This marriage is a vital component of sustainableimprovement efforts.

Figure 1: The ‘Layers of School Improvement’

One way of expressing this argument within the context ofschool improvement is found in figure 1. The centre of theseries of concentric rings is powerful learning – theachievement and progress of students. The next ring is

164 Support for Learning Vol. 12 No. 4 (1997)© NASEN 1997.

Natio

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comprised of the essential ingredients of powerful teaching– the mix of teaching strategy, curriculum content and theassessed learning needs of students. Powerful learning andpowerful teaching are found in powerful schools – that is,schools that have organisational conditions supportive ofhigh levels of teaching and learning. Some of the keyelements of these conditions are found in the next ring –collaborative planning that focuses on student outcomes,staff development that is committed to the improvement ofclassroom practice, regular enquiry and reflection on theprogress of students and the evolution of classroompractice and the involvement of pupils and the communityin learning. All of this activity takes place within, of course,the context of the national reform agenda – the outer ring.When all the rings are pulling in the same direction, thenpowerful learning is likely to be the result. All need to existin a reciprocal relationship if student achievement is to beenhanced.

I conclude by re-affirming that one of the characteristics ofsuccessful schools is that teachers talk to each other aboutteaching. School-improvement strategies should thereforehelp teachers create a discourse about, and language for,teaching. On the basis of the evidence contained in thearticles in this special edition and the IQEA experience ingeneral, this is best achieved through (Hopkins, West andAinscow 1996):

• teachers discussing with each other the nature of teachingstrategies and their application to classroom practice andschemes of work;

• establishing specifications or guidelines for the chosenteaching strategies;

• agreeing on standards used to assess student progress asa result of employing a range of teaching methods;

• mutual observation and partnership teaching in theclassroom.

It is in this way, as Judith Little once remarked, that ‘teachersteach each other the practice of teaching’.

References

BROPHY, J. and GOOD, T. (1986) Teacher behaviour and studentachievement. In M. Wittrock (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching(3rd edn.). New York: Macmillan.

HOPKINS, D. (1997) Powerful Learning, Powerful Teaching andPowerful Schools. Inaugural Lecture, Centre for Teacher and SchoolDevelopment, Nottingham: University of Nottingham, School ofEducation, 25 February.

HOPKINS, D., AINSCOW, M. and WEST, M. (1994) SchoolImprovement in an Era of Change. London: Cassell.

HOPKINS, D., WEST, M. and AINSCOW, M. (1996) Improving theQuality of Education for All. London: David Fulton Publishers.

JOYCE, B. and SHOWERS, B. (1991) Information Processing Models ofTeaching. Aptos, Calif.: Booksend Laboratories.

JOYCE, B. and WEIL, M. (1996) Models of Teaching (5th edn).Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.

JOYCE, B., CALHOUN, E. and HOPKINS, D. (1997) Models ofLearning – Tools for Teaching. Buckingham: Open University Press.

JOYCE, B., WOLF, J. and CALHOUN, E. (1993) The Self RenewingSchool. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD.

WEST, M. and HOPKINS, D. (in press) School effectiveness and schoolimprovement: Towards a reconceptualisation. School Effectivenessand School Improvement.

CorrespondenceDavid HopkinsCentre for Teacher and School DevelopmentSchool of EducationThe University of NottinghamNottingham NE7 2RD

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