What is teaching?

Can we agree a useful definition or is it already blindingly obvious?

Almost everyone who’s grown up in a developed country will have spent a lot of time with teachers and, presumably, a corresponding amount of time being taught. So is it obvious that teaching is just what teachers do?

I ask this because when I give talks at conferences or as part of a school’s professional development programme, I make it clear that what I’m doing is categorically not teaching. One of the lines I often use is that if you’re not assessing you’re not teaching. And, as I have no real mechanism for working out whether an audience is paying attention, making sense of what I’m telling them and getting better at the things I’d like them to improve at, I’m not assessing and therefore not teaching. I routinely offer to either teach a class on stage, or beamed through from a classroom elsewhere in the school, in order to help distinguish between how I’m presenting and what I’m suggesting teachers do in their classrooms.

This feels like a reasonably simple formula: teaching = assessing what students are doing and acting on the feedback we receive in order to improve the impact of what we’re doing. But, as I’m sure everyone who’s ever been in a classroom knows, ‘teaching’ isn’t always (or even usually) like this.

Last year, I visited a school and spent an hour in which I popped into every English teacher’s classroom to get a sense of where they were and how I could shape any advice I might offer. In that hour I didn’t see a single teacher ask a single question. This may or may not have been typical of these teachers, but I was quite surprised. They spent their time telling the students things and setting up activities for them do but at no point did any of the teachers check whether any of their students understood anything that was going on. When I asked a variety of students if they’d understood what had been said or whether they knew what to do it was clear that a significant minority did not know. This might be an extreme example but it is, I think, fairly normal for teachers not to know whether students are passengers in lessons or actively involved in the process of education.

Is this teaching? On one level, of course it is. Most people would understand teaching to be a teacher telling kids stuff and giving them things to do. Our use of the word does not imply anything about the quality of the process. That said, it’s probably not what anyone wants for children for whom they have any degree of affection or responsibility. It seems useful to draw a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teaching.

So, I think a useful precondition for ‘good teaching’ is that the teacher tries to find out whether their instruction was effective. Sometimes, in our efforts to be a ‘good teacher’ we’ll find out that what we just did wasn’t very effective. But, as I argue on a previous post it’s always better to know.

Or maybe we can come up with other terms. Very much in vogue currently is the term ‘adaptive teaching’. Google’s scary AI’s overview, which digs through lots of different sources, suggests this definition:

Adaptive teaching involves continually assessing student needs and adjusting instruction in real-time to ensure all learners can meet expectations and achieve their learning goals.

That feels much more like what I think teachers should be doing.

Are there downsides to using this term and with this definition? Well, no doubt there will be folk who find a way to misinterpret and misunderstand what it means to ‘continually assess’. For the record, it does not mean giving kids endless formal texts. What it means is to be constantly performing checks for attention, meaning and mastery and then acting on that information.

On his blog, Matthew Evans observes that ‘adaptive teaching’ is being increasingly conflated with ‘differentiation. This came as something of a surprise because, back in 2017, I wrote a post asking What do teachers think differentiation is? In it I reported on my discovery that (according to a highly rigorous Twitter poll) a majority of teachers believed that differentiation was adapting teaching to children’s needs. But maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions?

In Matthew’s post he notices the following:

1. Many teachers believe that adaptive teaching is differentiation re-named.

2. Adaptive teaching is being so broadly defined that it is indistinguishable from inclusive teaching, or even from just teaching!

3. ‘In the lesson’ adaptations are taking second place to ‘between lessons’ adaptations in discourse and in practice.

4. Whole-class adaptive teaching is being over-shadowed by the desire to adapt to individual need.

This matters because, as ED Hirsch Jr points out:

When a teacher is attending to the individual needs of one student in a class of twenty, nineteen are not receiving the teacher’s attention. all sorts of techniques conspire to obscure that fact – group work, isolated seatwork on boring work sheets, and ‘independent study’ with choice of books from the leveled-reader bin.

Why Knowledge Matters p. 72

Anytime spent with an individual student is time that cannot be spent with the rest of the class. It seems reasonable to suggest that teaching will be most effective when teachers spend as much time as possible with as many students as possible. Indeed, as I argue here, this is a matter of equity.

So, Matthew argues for a more precise definition of adaptive teaching and settles on this:

where the teacher actively and frequently seeks feedback on the impact of their teaching on all pupils during the lesson and then adapts their instruction accordingly to meet the emerging needs of pupils.

[emphasis in original]

For me, this is what teaching should always be. I like the emphais on ‘actively and frequently,’ ‘all pupils,’ ‘during the lesson,’ and meeting ‘emerging needs'.’ At the same time, I can accept that over time we need to move towards students gaining greater independence and so, in the later stages of an instructional sequence, the search for feedback on the impact of teaching becomes less frequent but other than that, this is what all teachers should aim to do every lesson.

I’m not sure it matters whether we want to call this teaching, good teaching, adaptive teaching or responsive teaching. What matters is the definition. Are we taking steps to find out how all students are doing and then reacting to what we discover?

If you’re interested in how to do this, I’ve written a series of posts that address various aspects of how we can “actively and frequently” seek feedback on the impact of our teaching on all students.

How do I know all students are making sense of what has been taught?

How do I know all students are making sense of what has been taught?

How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn?

How can we teach so that all students experience success?