UNDERSTANDING OUR WORK RESEARCH IN PRACTICE ‘Teaching is largely moral and ethical’


In the seventh in our series discussing the question, ‘Teaching: art, craft or science?’, Geoff Petty argues that it is none of these – teachers make human civilisation possible, and, in turn, make art, craft and science possible.


I believe teaching is not an art, a craft or a science. Teaching is a largely moral or ethical activity. I certainly believe there is a ‘science of teaching’, but this does not mean teaching is a science. Let me explain. What I mean by the ‘science of teaching’ is that you can study teaching from the point of view of psychology, sociology, even neurology, and also in terms of its effectiveness. According to Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, and the less well-known philosophers that have built on their philosophies of science, the defining characteristic of science is that it develops theories that describe reality in a useful way but, crucially, these theories can be tested and ultimately falsified by experiment, or by some other empirical data. We should never forget the need for testing our understanding against reality. How does the science of teaching test its findings? Cognitive science has done much of its work in controlled experiments, often using psychology students as its subjects. Careful experiments have discovered a great deal about what goes on when people learn, remember, or forget. This has given rise to a huge body of knowledge about learning that has suggested how we might teach, and shown us which teaching strategies are likely not to work. Others have experimented in classrooms to create a more direct science of teaching. There are hundreds of thousands of experiments where a teaching method


REFERENCES


• Hattie, J. A. C. (2008). Visible Learning: a Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge.


• Hattie, J. A. C. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. Routledge.


• Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions, The University of Chicago Press.


16 ISSUE 36 • SUMMER 2019 inTUITION


• Marzano, R. Pickering, D. Pollock, J. (2001). ‘Classroom Instruction that works’, Alexandria: ASCD. (I still prefer the first edition of this classic, well described by its title.)


• Marzano, R. et al. (2001). Nine Essential Instructional Strategies (free online, and adapted from ‘Classroom Instruction


that works’, Alexandria: ASCD).


• Petty, G. (2009). Evidence Based Teaching. Oxford University Press: Oxford.


• Petty, G. (2018). How to Teach Even Better: an Evidence-based Approach. Oxford University Press: Oxford.


has been trialled in a rigorous way, using real teachers


and students in real classrooms and workshops.


John Hattie and Robert Marzano


have independently summarised the findings from reviews of such research in their publications, Hattie (2008) and Marzano (2001). I have tried too: Petty (2009) and (2018). The conclusion is that we can make some generalisations about what does and does not work in teaching and learning, and these can help both students and teachers. So there is a science of teaching, and


there is even a science of how to improve teaching, though most people would use the word ‘research’ rather than ‘science’. But this does not mean that teaching itself is a science. Why is this? When a teacher plans a lesson, they set their sights on what they hope to achieve in that lesson. For example, a geography teacher might strive to get their students to be able to recall and explain ‘the


water cycle’. Then comes the tricky bit. There is an infinite set of instructional procedures that could lead to this outcome. What methods, and what combination or sequence of methods, should the teacher use?


The science of teaching can help


here, suggesting which teaching methods, on average, work best. But there is no ‘scientifically perfect’ lesson to teach the water cycle. The teacher,


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