How Much We Teach Matters More Than How We Teach
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that curriculum coverage has a bigger impact on student learning than instructional methodology.
Key Takeaways
- Coverage trumps method - Students who are exposed to more content learn more, regardless of the teaching method used
- Pacing matters enormously - How much material students cover in a year has a larger effect than whether the teacher uses direct instruction or group work
- Don't sacrifice content for pedagogy - Spending too long on teaching methods while falling behind on content hurts students
Transcript
This is gonna sound backwards, but I think how much we teach matters a lot more than how we teach.
I think we have this backwards thinking that says quality matters a lot more than quantity, but that's not quite logical if you really think about it.
Quality is a property of stuff that actually happens, right?
Stuff that doesn't happen has zero quality, like it doesn't exist, it's not relevant.
And we can't really worry about the quality of something that we don't teach at all that we're supposed to teach.
So I think we've got to pay a lot more attention to quantity and to speed and to efficiency in education.
The reality is we're not getting to a lot of what we need to get to.
There are state standards in every state that we say we can't get to.
We don't have time to get to all these standards.
And I think there's an argument to be made that in a lot of cases, standards are cluttered.
There's too much in them.
They're, you know, they're too crowded for the length of the school year, but let's give it a try.
We've been saying this for a long time and we've been teaching slower and we've been teaching less in an attempt to teach better.
And I'm not sure that really pays off.
I'm not sure quality really gains that much from reducing quantity.
And my supervisor, when I was a principal, told me a story about this from her time as a principal.
She was a principal in the 80s, and that was the era of Madeline Hunter and mastery learning.
And she was very big on mastery learning, and it was all on board with that.
And she told her teachers, hey, in math, we're going to get to 80% mastery before we move on.
Do not move on to the next unit until you have 80% mastery.
And her teacher said, okay.
They did it, and at the end of the year, their test scores tanked.
And the reason they tanked, they sat down and explained this to their principal, is they didn't get to everything.
They only finished half of the units.
And if you only finish half of the units, what do you think that is going to do to your students' learning that they were supposed to have accomplished for that year?
to prepare them for the following year?
What do you think is going to happen to your test scores if you only get through half of the units?
Well, of course, your percent mastery on something you don't get to at all is pretty close to zero.
And we're so concerned with quality, you know, like we might in some cases, this is kind of abstract, but, you know, we might be trying to get from 70 to 80 percent quality.
And in exchange, we're getting the quantity down such that some of the stuff that we should have gotten to is a zero.
We're just not getting to it at all.
I think if we look at the reasons that people say they're bored in school, the reasons people say their kids are not being challenged, the reasons people say they're not pleased with the academic progress of their kids in schools and they think they should be challenged more, I think a lot of that comes down to the quantity of stuff we are teaching.
And again, I'm not supposed to say this.
This is not a popular thing in education.
We're supposed to only care about quality and not care about efficiency.
But we've got to pay attention to how much we are actually teaching because whatever we don't hold ourselves to, the quality goes out the window, right?
If you're not teaching it at all, the quality of that doesn't matter.
Let me know what you think.