|
June 27, 2006 -- At a time when the federal government’s
No Child Left Behind legislation is requiring teachers to be
deemed “highly qualified,” University of Virginia
psychology
professor Joseph Allen and education professor Robert
Pianta are going beyond superficial criteria to the heart and soul of the classroom.
With a recently announced $1.25 million grant from
the William T. Grant Foundation, Allen and Pianta are
combining their expertise — Allen’s in adolescent
social
development and Pianta’s in teachers’ professional
development — to pinpoint what the best teachers
know intrinsically: how to reach their students and
make individual, personal connections with them.
“For all the attention that goes into curricula
and standardized testing, surprisingly little has
gone into students’ interactions with their teachers,” said
Allen, director of the Virginia Adolescence Research Group,
where he conducts
long-term studies on teens’ psychosocial development.
The researchers cite several surveys in their
proposal that describe students’ objections to
high school.
“Youth often report a sense of disinterest in the
goals of school and little motivation to perform
academically. They describe school experiences
as irrelevant and lacking appropriate and meaningful
challenges,” the proposal says. “These tendencies
are exacerbated dramatically for youth
attending schools in low-income communities,
rural communities, large schools and for those
with histories of poor achievement or problem
behavior.”
Meanwhile, the high-school dropout rate is
stubbornly sticking at 30 percent, and climbs as
high as 45 percent for some racial and ethnic
minority groups.
What do high-quality teachers do that makes
a difference?
They give teens plenty of chances to be active
in the classroom, allowing them to make choices
and decisions, without giving up their authority
as the teacher. Setting up this environment plays
to teens’ desires for independence and competency.
These teachers also figure out how to convey
relevance and get the students interested
even if the subject seems unrelated to their daily
lives, Allen said. Good teachers also interact with
their students in ways that show them their
teachers know them and care about them. Even
small encounters can make a big difference,
Pianta has found in a
similar study of kindergarten
through fifthgrade
teachers.
All of these elements
help boost students’ motivation,
which is as important for teenagers’
school success as the
ways teachers deliver the
subject matter, according
to Allen.
“One of the most tragically
avoidable errors
that some secondary
school teachers make is
to assume that youth
strivings for autonomy
and self-expression represent
negative forces to
be countered rather
than positive energy to
be harnessed,” he and Pianta wrote in their project
proposal.
The researchers will use a video-based,
one-on-one conference system that Pianta
has field-tested in his other project, called
MyTeachingPartner. The study will comprise
approximately 80 teachers working with about
1,200 students in Virginia public schools.
The two-year program will be geared toward
teachers in their second to fifth year, because this
group has a high rate of leaving the profession.
They will attend an introductory workshop
focusing on adolescent motivation and discuss
how to apply this psychology in the classroom.
Researchers also will have a control group for
comparison.
In the MTP program, teachers learn to
videotape themselves during their classes and then
work with a consultant who reviews their actions
and practices on the tape, giving them feedback.
The consultant also shows the teacher appropriate
video clips of successful teachers in action
and suggests alternate strategies. The MTP consultants
use a detailed assessment in analyzing
the teachers, called the Classroom Assessment
Scoring System, or CLASS, that has been modified
for high schoolers.
“We think we have learned that our approach
to supporting teachers and providing them feedback
about their actual classroom practices has
proven effective with teachers of younger children,” Pianta said, “and
we have every reason to believe that early career teachers in secondary
classrooms will find this approach as or more
helpful. We have received dozens of very positive
reactions from the teachers with whom we have
worked so far and the administrators who also
work with them.”
Provided the study helps the high school
teachers find ways to improve their classroom
environment, it should enrich teen development
in the process.
Since its inception in 1936, the William T. Grant
Foundation has focused on improving the lives
of youth ages 8 to 25 in the United States through
high-quality empirical studies. | 
Joseph Allen 