The Evidence Based Education Podcast

On 19th June 2020, Evidence Based Education released the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review – a credible evidence summary of the Elements of great teaching practice.

The review provides a structured point of reference for the things teachers do, know, or believe, which have been found to be related to how well their students learn. The overarching goal here is to help teachers take ownership of their professional learning and to help them enhance their practice for the benefit of students.

In this interview, we speak to the review’s lead author to hear him describe the Dimensions of great teaching and how the evidence informed their development.

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post The Dimensions of Great Teaching: An interview with Rob Coe appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

In June 2020, Evidence Based Education will publish a report authored by Rob Coe. The report will provide a credible evidence summary of the Elements of great teaching practice. This will provide a structured point of reference for the things teachers do, know or believe, which have been found to be related to how well their students learn.

This is the first stage in an ambitious project to provide teachers with evidence-informed guidance and personalised diagnostic feedback for their long-term professional development. It is stage one of developing the Great Teaching Toolkit.

The fundamental goal of everyone that works in education is to improve outcomes for students. While many personal, family, and cultural factors contribute to learners’ academic performance, a large body of research indicates that teachers matter more to their achievement than any other aspect of their education. The quality of teaching is hugely important to the outcomes of students.

We know that expertise develops over time and is an ongoing process. However, in the main, the current model of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is ‘Continuing’ in the sense that it continues to happen over a career, on an ad-hoc basis. It is not continuing in the sense that there is a set of key practices that are constantly developed over time, that you keep getting better at. By ‘better’ we mean more effective at facilitating students’ learning: helping more students to learn more.

If you want to get better (or help your teachers get better) it’s difficult to know where to start. Your resources are precious, you have no time to waste. How should you prioritise your professional development? What are your best bets in terms of making the most difference to your students?

To help facilitate learning, teachers gain an understanding of where their students are at and, with a clear goal in mind, what they need to do next. They illustrate the desired goal state – what it looks like, good and not so good examples. They provide guidance and opportunities for practice, and they provide feedback on progress toward the goal. There is a sad irony in that teachers rarely receive the same support and feedback for their own learning.

We want to try and change that.

A car’s satnav indicates where you are and provides information to help you arrive at your destination. It doesn’t tell you how to drive. You’re in control, but it does provide direction to help you along the way.

In the context of this metaphor, the journey to improving teaching practice starts with a kind of map or model. In this case, it is the forthcoming report – a credible summary of the elements of great teaching practice, the kind that impacts most on learning. Following the publication of this report, we will develop and release a set of instruments to help teachers anonymously assess their strengths and identify their own development priorities. The same tools will provide diagnostic formative feedback as they work on specific goals to improve their practice. Although teaching is an extremely complex set of skills and definitely not just a set of techniques or recipes, taking a specific technique, skill or area of knowledge and practising to a high level of proficiency is a key way to improve overall effectiveness.

Finally, in this endeavor, we aim to identify the kind of professional development that leads to improvement in specific areas of practice. This stage of the project will require a community of thousands of educators like you, working towards a shared aim. Our strong, overarching goal here is to help teachers take ownership of their professional learning and to help them enhance their practice for the benefit of students.

Find out more about the Great Teaching Toolkit

You can find out more about the forthcoming Great Teaching Toolkit evidence review in an interview with Rob Coe, in both video and audio-only versions. Our podcast feed will be updated with the interview too – you can find that by searching for The Evidence Based Education Podcast.

The report will be published mid- to late-June in partnership with Cambridge Assessment International Education. Make sure you’re subscribed to our mailing list or follow us on Twitter for news of the release.

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence review appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

Many schools in South East Asia have recently closed due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, forcing them to move entirely to an online and distance learning environment in a matter of weeks. Those schools are now looking for answers to questions like ‘how do you deliver assessment and feedback in an online context?’

Not knowing how long this situation may last, schools and teachers have had to completely shift the way they’re delivering an education to the students in their care. In recent weeks, we’ve heard several examples of how some have admirably adapted.

Nevertheless, moving from the classroom to online learning presents new challenges. To lend support to schools, we were asked by colleagues at Dulwich College International if we could offer some helpful advice on the kind of assessment and feedback practices you could put to use in an online context.

Here, Professor Stuart Kime, our Director of Education, and Jamie Scott, Director of Partnerships, discuss the challenges, as well as some strategies to help in this challenging predicament. Many of the effective principles of assessment and feedback can still apply to the online learning environment, it’s just that they’re re-framed and applied in this new context. In the podcast we explore how to apply strategies such as retrieval practice, self assessment and using hinge questions, as well as the key ingredients of effective feedback.

All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive, and you can listen to the first episode in this series there too. What’s more, we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars in our Resource Library!

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post Assessment and feedback in an online context appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

In this latest episode, ‘is teaching becoming more evidence-informed?’, Sir Kevan Collins, the departing chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is interviewed by Evidence Based Education’s Jamie Scott about his eight years in the role – taking the EEF from a small start-up with three employees (“and a decent bank balance”) to becoming a global leader in generating and using evidence to improve educational outcomes for children and young people.

Sir Kevan Collins discusses the appetite for such research among teachers and policy makers, the EEF’s successes and challenges, and identifies the top five changes he’d make as education secretary.

All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive and we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars in our Resource Library!

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post ‘Exit Interview’ with Sir Kevan Collins – is teaching becoming more evidence-informed? appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

New Trialled and Tested podcast looks at improving Social and Emotional Learning.

Effective social and emotional learning (SEL) can increase positive pupil behaviour, mental health and well-being, and academic performance.

Indeed, evidence from the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective SEL can lead to learning gains of +4 months over the course of a year. However, despite being seen as one of their top priorities by almost all primary schools, only just over one-third say that dedicated planning for SEL is central to their practice.

The recent EEF guidance report, Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary Schools, reviewed the best available research and offered school leaders six practical recommendations to support good SEL for all children.

In this episode of our podcast series, Trialled and Tested, EBE’s Jamie Scott speaks to Jean Gross CBE, one of the authors of the guidance report, Liz Robinson, who sat on the advisory panel, and headteacher Mari Palmer for her views on implementing SEL strategies.

Although the guidance is aimed at Primary Schools, both the guidance and the podcast is just as relevant to parents of young children.

‘Trialled and Tested’ is produced in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation.

For more podcasts be sure to check out our podcast archive! 

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post Improving Social and Emotional Learning appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

In this episode of the Trialled and Tested podcast we explore working memory and its importance to teaching and learning; what it is, why it’s important for teachers to know about it and how an understanding of working memory can inform the way teachers teach.

Working memory is the ability to hold and manipulate information in your mind while you use it to finish a task. For example, this could be how many numbers you can keep in your mind at the same time to complete a mental arithmetic task. Research has suggested that working memory is a reliable predictor of numeracy outcomes. But why is it important to learning? What do teachers need to know about it and how can they attend to it in their daily working practices?

In this podcast, we hear from a psychologist and leading expert, Dr Tracy Alloway, as well as conversation with Alex Quigley from the EEF and Julie Watson from Huntington Research School.

You can read about the Education Endowment Trust’s project focused on improving working memory for pupils age seven and eight here.

For more podcasts, be sure to check out our podcast archive. We also have a collection of eBooks, videos and webinars in our Resource Library, which is free to join!

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post Trialled and Tested: Working Memory appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

“Teaching should start from where the student is, not from where we would like them to be.” says education professor Dylan Wiliam. In this episode of Trialled and Tested: Embedding Formative Assessment, we introduce how formative assessment strategies can be used in the classroom.

Dylan is the co-developer of a professional development programme, Embedding Formative Assessment, which supports teachers to use real-time knowledge of their pupils’ strengths and weaknesses to adapt their practice. The programme builds on existing evidence that formative assessment can improve students’ learning. Many schools already prioritise formative assessment, but it can be challenging to implement. An independent evaluation funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) recently found that pupils in schools following the Embedding Formative Assessment programme made the equivalent of +2 months’ additional progress in their Attainment 8 GCSE score.

Find out more, as Evidence Based Education’s Jamie Scott spoke to some of the people behind the programme – Dylan Wiliam, Emily Yeomans, Corinne Settle and Claire Taylor – and its evaluation to find out what it is all about. Tune in to hear from:

Full length: 38m

You can read about the Education Endowment Trust’s Embedding Formative Assessment project in full here.

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post Trialled and Tested: Embedding Formative Assessment appeared first on Evidence Based Education.

In this episode of Trialled and Tested: Improving secondary science, Jamie Scott from Evidence Based Education speaks to Emily Yeomans (EEF Head of Programme Strategy), Sir John Holman (Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of York) and Dr Niki Kaiser (Chemistry Teacher and Research Lead at Norwich Research School) to explore some of the evidence-informed strategies teachers can adopt or focus on to enhance the teaching and learning of science at Key Stages 3 and 4.

Emily Yeomans and Sir John Holman: Start to 31:35

Dr Niki Kaiser: 31:35 to end

The recommendations discussed in the podcast, as well as many others, feature in the EEF Improving Secondary Science guidance report which you can download here: Improving secondary science guidance report and Summary of recommendations.

All of our podcasts, including the Trialled and Tested podcast series, can be found in our resources section.

Or listen here on Apple Podcasts.

The post Improving secondary science appeared first on Evidence Based Education.