Classes exist, not just classrooms. This is important!
I'm reviewing the press release on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measure of Effective Teaching MET program (Educational measures) and a glimpse into what characteristics of teachers, perceivable by students, correlate with successful outcomes. Many of the quoted characteristics overlap with characteristics of successful facilitators of meetings. ( See, for example, Sam Kaners: Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making).
Also, in the last decade, the Institute of Medicine has reviewed factors that improve health care in the USA, and a central finding is that the behavior of "microsystems", small teams of individuals working together, is both correlated with success and is the best intervention point for improving success.
I recall that, at least back in '70's a study of Chinese school systems by Urie Bronfenbrenner showed that they routinely had the more advanced students assisting the less advanced ones -- that is,they turned every student into a potential teacher's aide.
And several years ago I went to a conference of "Self-Determination of Health Behaviors" sponsored by the Knight Foundation on what it was that got people to do what was good for them regarding health. What was startling was that every presenter in this area, the world's experts, talked about how social interventions were more effective than individual interventions. It had more clout to pay a woman's children ten dollars for every pound she lost than to pay her, for one example. At the end of the conference, there was a panel, and I asked whether I was imagining it, or hadn't every single one of them said that social interventions were the more effective than individual interventions? They discussed and agreed. So, I pursued, why did not a single paper they had written include this finding? They conferred again and said it was because they didn't know how to measure social interventions and collaborations, SO THEY LEFT THAT PART OUT OF THEIR PUBLISHED WORK. Basically, they did't know how to compute a "P-value". Despite that, their semisecret findings are intensely relevant to education.
What I am hoping is that the MET program can at least LOOK AT the area of small groups, teams, group cohesion, and in particular "competition versus collaboration" in the environment. In terms of Karl Weick or Harvard's Amy Edmondson's work on "safety culture" -- is the classroom "psychologically safe" for a student to raise her hand and say "I don't understand?" without ridicule and with support?
All of the work I refer to above focuses on the target of the intervention on the TEAM, not on the individual per se. In the real world, TEAMS are what fly airplanes and make business decisions.
It looks to me like the preliminary results released so far support the idea that the best teachers build community in their classrooms, psychologically safe environments to be open within, mutually supportive environments (peer to peer) not just teacher-to-student.
Basically, the published results treat the situation no differently than if a teacher was really simply surrounded by 30 computer consoles, and was multiplexing his or her time tutoring the students at the other end of the computer connection -- the entire social structure of a "classroom", and more precisely, NOT the room, NOT the fixtures, NOT the books, but the OTHER STUDENTS has been left out of the model.
Unless the other students are unruly or disruptive. The other students are viewed simply as a competition on the teacher's time, a drain on resources, something we'd do best if we could simply LIMIT the number of students per classroom and per teacher.
I am strongly suggesting that the best teachers in fact turn their liabilities into assets, turn students into resources, and turn the entire class-worth of social support and approval into an engine that can help each student in that CLASS (and that classroom) learn new material and debug gaps in understanding of prior material.
The measures stated so far are essentially blind to that dimension. I feel this is akin to the disastrous search pulsars, which are strobe-like sources of energy in the sky, second in brightness only to the sun -- but they were totally missed by radio astronomers for decades because everyone knew such things didn't exist, so they short-circuited any data that might reveal them.
Yes there is a teacher, and a student (times N) and a classROOM. But there is also a "class" - a living, breathing, multiperson social composite organism in that space. That is both something to be reckoned with, and a resource, and a potential intervention point.
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