Standards-Based Instruction and Evaluation Theories

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for standards-based instruction and theories. In today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the following essential questions. What are the elements of Marzano's teacher evaluation and instructional strategies models? And what does John Hattie's work on high-impact versus low-impact strategies and effect size consist of?

We're going to begin by talking specifically about Robert Marzano's teacher evaluation model. His teacher evaluation model includes four domains. And these are supposed to be domains of skills which help the teachers develop. So domain one includes classroom strategies and behaviors. And again, these are the strategies the teacher is using, such as pedagogical strategies, as well as the teacher behaviors that are taking place in the classroom.

Domain two has to do with planning and preparing. This is how the teacher plans and prepares her lessons each day. A good example of a framework they could use for planning and preparing would be Understanding by Design.

Domain three has to do with reflection and teaching. It's believed that in order to be a professional educator, you have to be constantly reflecting. And it doesn't have to be a super formal reflection, although it should almost always be written. One easy thing we can use for reflection is plus minus delta.

And domain four is collegiality and professionalism. So again, this goes to being a professional practitioner, working with your colleagues, doing a peer feedback session, observing other classrooms, et cetera. Marzano also came up with an instructional strategies model. And he came up with nine high-yield strategies. And these are strategies that the teacher can use in the classroom or have the students do in the classroom that will provide high-yield results.

One is identifying similarities and differences. So this is that students are looking at similarities and differences in, say, two pieces of writing that are of different genres but on the same topic. Another is summarizing and note taking. This is a practice that students can do. They could, for example, read a chapter from their history book, summarize that chapter, and take notes on it.

Another is reinforcing effort and providing recognition. And this is something that the teacher can do for the students, reinforce the effort with positive reinforcement. But you don't want to make the students too extrinsically motivated. You want to try to help them remain intrinsically motivated. But you do want to provide recognition for students who do well, for example, putting exemplary papers up on the wall or giving stickers to students who are working really hard.

Homework and practice is another high-yield instructional strategy. And this literally just means assigning meaningful homework that is not necessarily a regurgitation of what happened in class, but practice on what the students learned in class that can help them further their understanding. Then there's nonlinguistic representations of the classwork. So not always necessarily direct instruction, but representing the content in a variety of ways that appeals to a variety of different learners.

Having cooperative learning groups in your classroom is another high-yield instructional strategy. It encourages collaboration. Setting objectives and providing feedback, so having clear objectives that are posted and that the students are aware of and then providing timely feedback to the students on how they're doing in terms of achieving that objective. And then also having students generate and test hypotheses so that they're constantly participating in the scientific method as a way of thinking.

And then also we have questions, cues, and advanced organizers, having the students generate questions about their learning, having cues to help students get back on track, providing students with advanced organizers to organize their thoughts and their learning process. Marzano actually recently published a new book, and it incorporates these learning strategies into a 21st-century classroom and with 21st-century pedagogy. And it's called Enhancing the Art and Science of Teaching with Technology. It was published in 2014. And it's definitely worth your time if you are interested in researching it further.

Now we're going to look at John Hattie's work. And essentially his work just confirms the strategies that Marciano has identified as being high yield. So Hattie tells us that teaching strategies all have an impact on student learning, but some have a high impact, and some have a low impact. So we want to look at the exact impact they have and just use those high-impact strategies.

So we're going to look at a couple of high-impact strategies and a couple of low-impact strategies and discuss those. I've created a chart. Please feel free to pause and review it more closely if you like. But on the far left-hand side, we have what is the influence. In the middle, we have the effect size. And then we have the source of the influence, so who's doing the influencing in this situation.

And the effect size is the effect that this had on student learning. And the higher the number, the more positive effect that we had. So we're going to start with the highest effect size, and that was feedback. And the source of that influence was the teacher. It had an effect size of 1.13, and that's actually the highest affect size in Hattie's study. So it just shows us how important feedback, especially timely feedback, is.

And I'm an English teacher at a high school. So I get hundreds of papers turned in every time there's an assignment. And I have to just really train myself to be diligent in providing feedback. Because if I just hand back a paper with a whole grade on it and no feedback, the students won't learn anything.

And then a student's prior cognitive ability is also very high in effect size. It's a 1.04. Obviously the source of the influence is the student. And this just tells us that their prior knowledge does affect their ability to learn new things.

And the class environment is kind of middle ground here. It has a 0.56 effect. So it is important, not as important as, say, feedback, but it's still important to create a good class environment for your students to be learning and one that's comfortable and safe for them. And this falls into the hands of the teacher to do.

Audio-visual aids has an effect size of 0.16, so it's on the lower end. So it is still important to have these audio-visual aids, but maybe not as important as we once thought it was. And then we have finances and money. So how does the money situation affect student learning?

It actually doesn't affect it as greatly as we thought. It's only a 0.12. It's on the lower end. And this is the school's responsibility. So while it's still really important to have the funds to teach your students, it's, I think, important not to get stuck in the mind frame of, oh, this is a poor district, or this is a poor charter school. We can't do anything because we don't have money, and our kids not have money. Studies actually show that that doesn't matter quite as much as you would think it did.

And then physical attributes of a classroom, such as class size, actually had a negative 0.05 effect. So this isn't so good for teachers who often complain about large class sizes. But it is good to know that you can still have an impact, even though your class size is large.

So basically, this helps us just focus on what is truly important. So for instance, the teacher is on this chart three times. And that's more than both the student and the school. So the teacher probably yields the most impact on the students. So they need to be aware of that.

And then also it helps us prioritize what is actually important and what isn't. Like I said, the physical attribute, we think that that's a super important thing affecting the learning. But this study actually tells us that it's not. So it helps us just get our priorities straight.

Let's reflect. Based on the evidence presented today, do you think you will take into account Marzano and Hattie's work while planning and teaching? To review, today we answered the essential questions of, what are the elements of Marzano's teacher evaluation and instructional strategies models, and what does John Hattie's work on high-impact versus low-impact strategies and effect size consist of?

Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video. The Additional Resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resource you want. Thank you for joining me today, and happy teaching.