The New Classroom Instruction That Works: The Best Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Brian Goodwin and Chris Rouleau. Brian is President and CEO of MacKrell International, and Chris is Vice President of Learning Services, and they are the co-authors of The New Classroom Instruction That Works. the best research-based strategies for increasing student achievement, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:40] SPEAKER_01:

Chris and Brian, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Great to be here.

[00:42] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks. Well, I'm excited to talk about this book because I have probably both of the previous iterations of it on my bookshelf somewhere. And this is the third take on the idea of classroom instruction that works. There's a first edition and then a second edition, and this is the new classroom instruction that works. What prompted you to put out this new volume on the latest research on classroom instruction?

[01:04] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think a lot of it, Justin, was that the research itself has evolved tremendously in the last 20 years. The Institute of Education Sciences has really been advancing the idea of using scientific design in education research. And so what that simply means is There's a treatment group and there's a control group and they're random assignments. So that way we really know if an intervention is truly having causal effects. Because if you don't do that, you might end up having a classroom that's already poised for growth and they get a strategy and it looks like the strategy is working or maybe vice versa. So we really want to have the scientific design.

[01:40]

I think as educators, that's important for us to know. We should be proud of that because this is a profession, right? Along the same lines of engineering or medicine, we have a scientific research base that guides us. So that's, I think we wanted to make sure we were updating the book because of that. Another thing that we wove into the book was the idea of the science of learning and it's that's been around for decades understanding how our how our brains process information turning into long-term memory however it's not as familiar to teachers and one of the points we make is but it should be right we should know as teachers how the process of learning actually works And why that's important is because then if as a teacher, I understand what's happening in my kids' brains as they're learning, then I know why to do what I'm doing, right? So instead of just simply saying, oh, here's a strategy that works.

[02:28]

Well, if I don't know why it works and when it should actually occur in the learning cycle, it's more difficult for me to apply that. So I think that's the main reason we really wanted to update the research. There's just a lot of good stuff out there that can help us as educators become more precise in our practice.

[02:43] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I love a quote that you have in the book around the idea that the real inflection point in any teacher's professional growth comes when they become intentional in their use of evidence-based strategies, knowing not only what works, but also when and why it works. And that kind of contextual knowledge and knowledge of how to apply it.

[03:02] SPEAKER_02:

It's that aha moment that happens for a lot of teachers. Yeah.

[03:05] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And many of our listeners will be familiar with the idea of effect sizes and understanding that different strategies have different effect sizes. In this book, you've chosen not to combine those effect sizes and say, this strategy has this effect size overall into kind of a single number. And you described that, I love your phrase, kind of a psychometric sausage making that happens when effect sizes get lumped together. What is it that gets lost when effect sizes from different studies are combined? And how should readers think about that?

[03:35] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So typically a study includes, it's an intervention. So, and we found very few interventions that were a single thing. Only a couple that might've said, we're only going to look at goal setting. But usually what you were seeing is researchers saying, we're going to combine goal setting with maybe some strategy instruction and maybe some kind of extended application process for kids. So when you start to combine things in a meta-analysis, you're not quite sure, well, which element of that intervention was the most important thing.

[04:04]

And so it just for, because of the, I think increasing sophistication of the research, it felt to us like it was going to be very disingenuous and probably maybe erroneous to try to combine things that we're not sure, like, was it the, you know, which part of the intervention was most important. So instead, what we said, let's look at a whole bunch of studies. And if we start to see, like, in 14 of them, we're using things like student goal setting, that seems pretty important. And so we wanted to provide the studies. We did it kind of in a deconstructed way. So In the appendix, you can go in and see all the studies that we looked at, what was included in the intervention.

[04:40]

And if you want to draw your own conclusions from that. So I think some of the things that can get lost sometimes too, is that you might see that feedback works really well in certain contexts, but also there are some studies that show negative effects for feedback. So we'd want to know, well, why is that? And so sometimes I think that can get lost when you combine a bunch of studies together, because it sounds like, well, feedback's important and it is, but we have to understand as educators, when is feedback most valuable and how do I deliver it really effectively for my kids?

[05:09] SPEAKER_01:

Good deal. One thing I really appreciate about the book and wanted to highlight is that basically each section or each header is phrased as a claim or as a proposition, and then you share the research that goes into that claim, the studies that support that claim. Just a couple from kind of the middle of the book, cognitively challenging writing tasks support critical thinking. And learning through inquiry enhances long-term memory. Then there's explanation and citations. Another one, inquiry and problem solving are most effective when structured and guided.

[05:40]

Talk to us a little, if you could, and maybe Chris, you want to take this one about, talk to us a little, if you could, about the structure of your writing and why you presented these ideas to your audience in this way.

[05:54] SPEAKER_00:

We've worked really hard to distill a lot of information into really practical guidance. That's one of the things that is sort of a hallmark of who we are as an organization is being able to provide practical guidance that is grounded in research. And the way the book presents really gives this clear guidance to say these are the key points. We want teachers, as Brian said, to understand not just what to do, but why it works and when to do it. And I actually had a teacher just in the last couple of weeks say to me, I'm working on reading it, but I've been able to go through and look at all of the headings and get the gist and realize, oh, there's some bigger things here than I understood.

[06:46]

Because sometimes what you hear is this is the name of a strategy and you can mentally check a box and say, oh, I do that. But then you go through and you look at these assertions that really summarize the research pretty straight in a straightforward way and say, oh, maybe that isn't exactly what I do. I need to read a little bit more and learn a little bit more. So we think the organization of it was a real effort to make this vast amount of research really accessible so that it can be used.

[07:22] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, very well said. I like the acronym ARLO for understanding this problem, the idea of alignment at a rhetorical level only, that sometimes we say we're using a strategy, we say we're following a best practice, but if you get into the nuances, we end up talking about very different things. So I appreciate the clarity and the detail about what the research says and what that means for practice very specifically. So it's not just a label. We don't just say, I'm doing X because X is research-based, but we actually have real clarity on what that practice looks like. So I understand in earlier editions of Classroom Instruction That Works, you had actually a larger number of strategies, and you've significantly raised the bar in this edition as far as the studies that you included.

[08:04]

And you've cut down on the number of strategies you focus on because your standard for what counts as a good enough study was so high, your bar was so high. Talk to us about what your criteria were for the research base, you know, for a strategy to be included in the book.

[08:18] SPEAKER_02:

So we essentially followed the What Works Clearinghouse guidelines. And you can Google What Works Clearinghouse. It's the federally supported clearinghouse of education research supported by the Institute of Education Sciences. And what they look for in those criteria are, is there a scientific design? So was there a treatment group? Was there a control group?

[08:38]

was the selection of those groups randomized. So we're filtering out as many confounding variables as possible. You want to have a large enough sample size to make sure that you're not getting statistical noise because you've got such a small sample. And so really it's those criteria. We have a research team. So I'm not actually the lead researcher on this.

[08:57]

We had a team of researchers who were helping us filter through the studies. Several are already in the Wilbur's Clearinghouse, but then we apply the same criteria to identify the overall set. There was 105 studies that we came up with. Ultimately, we were also wanting to make sure that we were focusing on K-12 because that was the aim here. Most of the studies are from 2000 and after because that's really, I think, when researchers through IES and other guidance were really directed to step up their game. We have a few earlier studies, but for the most part, the studies that are actually being cited are more recent.

[09:32]

The other thing that's important about that, we also wanted to make sure that the studies were in classrooms with diverse learners that look more like today's classrooms. Some of the earlier studies, you could find an entire group of suburban kids, maybe hardly any non-white kids in the classroom. 70% of the studies in this sample are in classrooms where at least 40% of the kids are reflected some form of diverse learners, multilingual kids, kids in poverty, diversity. And so that's also really powerful too, because the findings show, the effect size is that we can lift kids, we can close achievement gaps, we can lift kids across the spectrum and actually really close achievement gaps. So we were also wanting to make sure that the studies themselves reflected what teachers will say, this is what my classroom looks like today in 2023.

[10:16] SPEAKER_00:

And I'll just add to that, that we also wanted to make sure that we had multiple studies that were reinforcing the efficacy of each strategy, of the strategies that we ultimately ended up with, so that we could see it in different contexts across K-12, with different content areas, different groups of students, so that we really could say these strategies lift all learners.

[10:40] SPEAKER_01:

Honestly, I'm impressed that you were able to find that many gold standard studies, because I think 20 years ago, as you said, that was often not the case that there even were any random assignment studies. So you talk a little bit in the book about the difference between random assignment and maybe observational or correlational studies. Why does that matter so much? Why does random assignment to an intervention matter for the quality of the research?

[11:06] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's a good question. It's an important question, too. And we're not saying, by the way, that correlational studies don't provide any guidance or that they're meaningless. But what a causal study does, the random assignment does, is allow us to show cause, right? To show causality, clearly define that this strategy leads to these better outcomes. If you do a correlational study, you know, some examples might be earlier studies that were saying students who engage in more homework have higher outcomes, test outcomes.

[11:34]

Well, Was it the homework or was there something else that precedes that? Maybe they have parents who are bird-dogging them more and that might have an overall effect. on their achievements. So what we were really looking at this time, and this is why actually, by the way, we don't talk about homework anymore. We talk about practice strategies, because what we can see is that when students engage in certain kinds of practice, we have higher effects. And so I think part of the danger of correlational studies is that you don't know which way the causality could run.

[12:03]

It could be symbiotic, or it could be that there's something else here that's maybe a confounding variable that's not yet evident in the study itself.

[12:12] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I have to say, I've been reading a number of studies, especially around school discipline practices lately. And I think I probably underestimated how many studies are done by economists based on secondary data analysis, just with whatever data is available as kind of a convenience sample. And I get that as a grad student, you don't have a huge budget to work with. And if there's data, great, use it. But those existing data sets often do not allow you to draw causal inferences.

[12:41]

And the claims that people make in many studies, even in the title, I've come across many studies that use the word causality in the title and then proceed to use correlational data to support the conclusions. So you really have to look closely. And I admire the work you've done to find a hundred some studies that actually do meet that gold standard of random design, because yeah, that evidence just was not there a generation or two ago. Right, right. Let's talk about some of core findings. I love the way you've got them organized into the table that readers will find on page nine.

[13:15]

And Brian, I know this builds on your earlier book, learning that sticks. You take people through six learning phases from become interested to commit to learning, focus on new learning, make sense of learning, practice and reflect and extend and apply. Talk to us a little bit about that sequencing and why you've ordered the strategies in this book in that same manner.

[13:36] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So that sequencing, as you mentioned, we first shared that in Learning That Sticks. That really comes from cognitive science, thinking about what cognitive scientists call it, the information processing model. How do our brains take information, turn it into long-term memory? And what we try to do is create a simpler model of what that could look like. So it's six phases that you just listed there.

[13:57]

Now, the adage, every model is inaccurate. Some are useful. So I'm sure a cognitive scientist would say, no, there's actually 72 phases of learning. That's not so helpful for us as educators. But why we wanted to do that, it gets down to this, what Chris had mentioned earlier about intentionality. If you understand, like, when would I use cooperative learning?

[14:16]

And that's why we actually changed the term to peer-assisted consolidation of learning. Because we have seen examples of teachers, you know, basically starting a lesson, kids are in groups and they're like reading textbooks together. Well, that's not really what the process of peer assistant consolidation is about, right? It's usually it follows. We've taught something directly. And now it's time for kids to pause and process together.

[14:38]

And so the six phases we found were really helpful so that teachers can design and deliver better learning instructions or better learning opportunities for kids. Because if I don't know when to use a strategy, I might try to use it, you know, in the wrong sequence as opposed to understanding. Now is the time that I want to do this. Some direct instruction, for example, several of our strategies really reflect what some would call direct instruction. But we also point out when we talk about extension application, there's extended apply activities, that their students ultimately need to engage in some more student guided instruction so they get the deeper, richer neural connections. And so the reason we wanted to, like I said, map it out onto the six phases is so that teachers can become more intentional with their practices.

[15:22]

Chris may have something to add there too.

[15:24] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I think from my perspective and a lot of the teachers who have been introduced to this, it's the alignment of the strategies with the six phases that is the game changer with this edition of the book. It's what really... Not only did we approach...

[15:42]

looking at the studies and look at the research with a new lens but the other thing that makes it new is that we have this model and that really helps teachers understand better how kids learn and if when you connect that to what we know about memory and the roles of curiosity and motivation all tied into there are the ultimate goal is for kid for the learning to get to long-term memory So what are the things we do along the way that incite curiosity in kids and make them want to learn and say, you know, I'm going to engage in this process. And then the cyclic piece that teachers are so good at, which is do some teaching and help kids make sense of it, more teaching and make sense of it. But it's that last piece then that says, okay, how do we push it over the finish line and get it to long-term memory?

[16:34]

And when we frame it in that way, and it's not 14 strategies, but it's about how do we plan for student learning in this really purposeful way that takes into account what we know about kids, what we know about learning, what we know about memory, curiosity, all of it. Now, let me choose the things that are the right match for the kids in front of me right now, given what we're trying to accomplish. It's kind of a big deal.

[16:58] SPEAKER_01:

It is a big deal. And I appreciate the cycle aspect. There's a learning cycle of getting, you know, and we've had lots of different ways of, you know, designing lesson plans and planning for that entire sequence of, you know, getting students attention and interest and, you know, bringing them into a new unit of instruction all the way through the end of that unit. So, yeah, I would really encourage people to check out that figure on page nine just to get a good sense of the overview. You know, one of the things that strikes me as I look at the entire list of strategies is the striking lack of fads. None of this seems like it was invented last week in a garage, and I have to feel like that's probably intentional.

[17:40] SPEAKER_02:

You're saying that because, I mean, that that is what research is, is it is it's like this is what we know actually works. And I don't think teachers will look at any of those 14 strategies and say, where have you been hiding this one from me? I mean, we've known these things for a long time. You know, the power of cognitive writing, engaging kids and extended learning and writing tasks. We've known that for a long time. What this can allow us to do is better articulate and have a shared vocabulary.

[18:06]

Like, oh, these are the things that are really important. And yeah, and there's nothing faddish about it. I would add this though, but Chris made the point too about, it starts with student curiosity, cognitive engagement, cognitive interest cues. And I think ultimately though, every teacher wants to have their kids engaged and excited to learn. And that for me, that's the other takeaway. It's like, when we do this right, when we design learning that better reflects how our kids' brains work, it becomes a joyful experience for them.

[18:31]

It's easier for them. It better maps what their brains are good at doing. It's easier and more joyful for them. And also for us as educators too. So while it may seem like pretty straightforward, putting it all together, there's a new magic in doing all of that.

[18:45] SPEAKER_00:

I was just reflecting on One of the things we've learned is that those first two phases, getting learners interested and committed to learning, it takes some time to learn it and get good at it. And it feels like it should be really simple. But the part of it that is so kind of eye-opening for folks is that getting students interested and committed is as much about saying, here's what we're going to learn, as it is saying, Here's why this is important to you as a learner. And that relevance piece that then makes me curious and want to learn more. But it's about relevance to learners, not what the teacher believes makes it relevant. And when we step back and say, okay, really, who are the kids in my classroom?

[19:31]

What have they had learned before? What's life outside of school like for them? Why should they care? Once we can figure that out and get kids really hooked and wanting to learn, I think the rest of it falls into place. The same is true, by the way, in designing teacher professional learning. I was talking with a group of principals last week, and we were talking about the principals, what we've known from Joyce and Showers for more than 20 years, and the elements of effective professional learning.

[20:03]

And it all connects to why is this important to me? How am I going to use it? How am I going to get feedback on it? It's 100% aligned to what we know about how people learn.

[20:13] SPEAKER_02:

I think it's hard sometimes for us as teachers. We teach a particular subject area because we loved it. I taught English. I loved it. But then looking back, I was the one kid on my freshman floor who was like, I've got a five-paragraph essay to do. I love that.

[20:27]

Or you love math and you want to teach math, but it's not about what you find interesting. It's Chris's point. What would kids find interesting about this? And getting those first two phases right, I think that can be transformative in so many ways too. Yeah.

[20:40] SPEAKER_01:

That idea of getting students interested in and committed to learning really touches on the idea of culturally responsive teaching and of being aware of our students and what they're interested in and what their background knowledge is. Because you say something on page eight under links to the science of learning that I think is relevant to this. You say, because the science of learning reflects how every human brain works, regardless of cultural context or background, It offers insights that are valid for all students. And I think this is something that's difficult for us to think about when it comes to culturally responsive teaching, that every student's brain has the same fundamentals. Learning fundamentally works the same for all students. So this idea of learning styles or this idea that students from different backgrounds have different brains, of course, is pseudoscience.

[21:29]

But the idea of culturally responsive and understanding what our students are interested in and what they bring to the table does matter so much. Talk to us a little bit about that and maybe take us into some of the strategies for reaching our students, knowing that they may have different backgrounds from us.

[21:46] SPEAKER_00:

You know, I think what you just said about the science of how human cognition works is really important to understand. But there's this piece that we always talk about the art and science of teaching and learning, right? We know the science. We have the science of learning. We've got learning science. We've got biology.

[22:05]

cognitive science the art of it is about knowing who your students are and it's about knowing where they've been it's about those relationships a strategy that we you can't study by the way using a good scientifically designed research study because you don't want to say these kids don't get a good relationship but these kids do But we know relationships matter. But developing those relationships, inviting student voice into the classroom, we think about even in phase two, the core strategy is student goal setting. How do students set their own goals? It takes a lot of scaffolding, right? We start with learning objectives and success criteria, but they're not written for the teacher. They're written for students.

[22:46]

And it is about understanding how kids work, what their interest is, how they might use this outside of school. I worked with a group of educators who were thinking about how do we make learning relevant to our students? We're looking at It was a grade 1 through 12 school, an international school, actually. And they were in the primary grades, they were talking about the water cycle. In the upper grades, they were doing environmental science. They realized the thing that was tying all of these kids together is that where they live, fresh water availability is a very real thing.

[23:18]

And it meant something to these kids because their families were talking about it and it was in the news and it was reality. And so I said, so how does studying the water cycle and how does this environmental science connect to this real life thing for them? And all of a sudden, you are absolutely right. We need to make these connections. So overall, as a school, they started making these really fascinating connections to fresh water availability that was relevant at different points in their grade levels, based on what they were studying. And so I think part of it is about knowing kids.

[23:55]

It's also about understanding the context in which those students live, what their real community situations are.

[24:04] SPEAKER_02:

One of the reasons, as you noted earlier, Justin, that we pointed out, we have guiding principles for each of the strategies. If you understand, for example, a key principle of why we ask high-level questions is we want students to think about what they're learning. That's the key thing. And then I might say, well, there may be some cultural context where students having a fast and loose interplay with their teachers, that's not culturally sensitive. But if I understand that I should still be asking my students questions so they think about their learning, then I might say, well, in this cultural context, I'm going to allow that to happen but perhaps individually or in a peer-assisted consolidation of learning and then come back to the larger group. So that is also why we built on those guiding principles because we want fidelity to the principles more than just a practice or kind of the rhetoric, as you mentioned earlier.

[24:54] SPEAKER_01:

I love it. Yeah, and I think we've touched on this earlier, but I just want to emphasize how much of a kind of a review, but also kind of an organizing system people can get from just flipping through the book and reading the headers. This is just such a, you know, in many cases, we went through our teacher training, you know, decades ago, and it's easy to forget some of the fundamentals of learning science. So I think you've done just a tremendous job of organizing everything, as well as giving very practical suggestions for implementing these approaches in the classroom. So we've talked quite a bit about how the book is designed and what the book contains. Tell me if you would a little bit about your hopes for how people will use the book and specifically how leaders will use the book with their staff.

[25:39] SPEAKER_00:

One thing that as folks are looking at the book and thinking about starting to implement some of these strategies in their school, my advice is take it slow. This is not a charge in and do all 14 strategies in one year, but really assess where you are, why you want to work on this. What's the current problem of practice that you believe adopting some new instructional practices is going to help address? What are we trying to do here? And then get really focused understand the piece about how students learn get into that foundational piece of phases one and two and then maybe pick you know two other strategies to work on throughout the course of the year because even though as you said we look at these things and say they don't look all that different i know the names of these Brian often will say, you know, it's sort of like plain vanilla.

[26:32]

Those are the things that make the most change, but we have to implement with intentionality and consistency and see what a difference it makes for our learners and trying to do too many things at one time. Not only does it come from that, but teachers don't need to take on 14 new things this year. Doing a couple of things really well will make a difference.

[26:56] SPEAKER_02:

I would really love to see us truly treat education as a profession, professionalize the profession. And I've made this point to my daughter. She teaches second grade that honestly, there's never been a better time to be a teacher. And it's because we know more about how the process of learning works, about how to design learning experiences that are joyful and engaging for kids than at any point in human history. And so I think that makes, I would want kids going into college going, being a teacher is exciting. There's so much information now that we know, and we can do this so effectively and, Gosh, I wish I had known these things when I was a teacher, frankly.

[27:29]

So even though they may seem like they've been around a while, when you put them together in the right sequence, they can be really powerful.

[27:35] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The New Classroom Instruction That Works, The Best Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. And if people would like to learn more about the book or learn more about working with McGrell, what are some of the things that they can do to get in contact with you?

[27:52] SPEAKER_02:

visit our website, www.mcrowell.org. There's lots of free resources there too. There's white papers folks can download to get more of this information as well. And there you can reach out to us and reach out to either Chris or I.

[28:04]

As you can tell, we both love talking about this stuff. We'd be happy just even to engage in a conversation about what it could look like in teachers' classrooms and in a school. And ideally, creating that kind of common and shared vocabulary across the school so we can operate as true professionals having that shared knowledge with us too.

[28:24] Announcer:

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