Art and Science

The Teacher Effectiveness Rubric is attempting an incredibly difficult task.  Think about trying to list all the factors that go into “good teaching.”  Any list you might start would soon get lengthy, and the various items on the list are likely to overlap and influence each other.  You can see this happen with just a quick run-through of rubric we are using.

One way to look at what the TER is trying to do is to think about the dichotomy of good teaching:  Teaching is both an art and a science.

The Science

The science of teaching is about being intentional and reflective.  Educational research is clear that not all instructional strategies are equal when it comes to student learning.  There are what Robert Marzano calls “high-yield” strategies, and others equally respected in the field talk about “best practices.”  The Teacher Effectiveness Rubric calls these instructional strategies “Effective” or “Highly Effective” instruction.  By any name, these are strategies that do not come with guarantees.  When used well, however, the research—the science—shows the chances of student learning is significantly increased. 

For example, we know from educational research the value of increasing student engagement, how quality formative assessments result in achievement gains, and that building background knowledge will improve student retention of new concepts.  We have seen the research on meeting the needs of English Language Learners and how regular collaboration results in improvement in both student achievement and teacher satisfaction.

The science of teaching is about taking what we learn from the experts in the field, experimenting with strategies, and adapting this learning to our school, our classes, and our students.  It calls for us to be constant learners and experimenters. 

On one hand, we all should strive to be educational scientists.

The Art

If teaching was all science, anyone could do it.  Teachers could plug a strategy into a lesson, follow the recipe, and recreate the experiment using perfect scientific methodology.  In fact, this seems to be the understanding behind some of the latest initiatives, both state and national, to open the field of teaching to all comers.

Those of us who remember what it’s like to be a student and those of us who know what it is like to teach probably have different perspectives on this concept.  When dealing with people, especially young people, controlling the variables is impossible.  This is where teaching becomes an art.

The art of teaching is about the literally thousands of decisions you make every day inside and outside a classroom.  It is about knowing your students well enough to know which instructional strategy will work in one class and not in another.  It is about how you read body language and adjust lessons on the fly.  It is about knowing when to ask the right question and about sequencing questions to push the students to the next level.  It is about knowing when to scaffold and when to let students stand on their own.  It is about intuition and creativity, nuance and perception, perseverance and passion.

So on the other hand, we should all strive to be educational artists.

The Journey

The fact that teaching is an art and a science is not a new revelation to most of you, but naming the twin aspects of good teaching might help provide another way to think about what we do each day and about what is measured by the Teacher Effectiveness Rubric.  The reality is that the better we get in both the art and in the science of teaching, the more effective we will be at helping students learn at higher levels.  This constant improvement is at the heart of our journey at Hamilton Southeastern High School.

Take up the beaker and Bunsen burner.  Take up the brush and clay.  It’s a great week to be an educational scientist, an educational artist, and a Royal.

Enjoy the journey, HSE.

Phil