Naomi Flynn reports on the findings relating to changes in teachers’ practice following their professional learning with The Enduring Principles of Learning.

It’s been a while since we reported any activity with our TRT project, but data analysis is now in and we have some interesting findings to share with you. If you are new to our blogs and our project you can find out more about this talk rich approach to teaching by reading earlier blogs and supporting information on our project website. In this blog I am reporting on how the teachers involved in the project responded to their professional learning with The Enduring Principles of Learning (EPL). Aniqa will report on the impact of the project on multilingual children’s language and literacy outcomes in a separate blog.

We set out with three questions:
1.  Can the EPL approach to professional learning and practice translate from the US and to the UK ?
2.  Does teachers’ practice for their multilingual pupils change ?
3.  Does teachers’ mindset towards their multilingual pupils change ?

By way of a summary, we worked with five schools over 6 months from January to July 2022: three experimental schools, one control and one training school. The training school is one that has worked with me since 2019 and has embedded the EPL as part of their whole school approach to teaching their 95% EAL learners. Teachers in the experimental schools received monthly whole staff professional learning events from me. Four individual teachers – 2 x Year 1 (age 5 – 6) (teachers A & L) and 2 x Year 4 (age 8 – 9) (teachers S & J) – had five observations and coaching conversations with me. They were also supported by a coach from our training school. Within each teacher pair there was one early career teacher (no more than two years since training) and one teacher with at least 7 years of teaching experience.

Measuring teachers’ changes in practice

We saw measurable improvements in experimental teachers’ practice using the EPL rubric for scoring. There was almost no change, perhaps predictably, in the scores for the teachers in the control school. The chart below shows the scores for each experimental teacher pre-project. We can see that there were already some elements of the EPL where teachers were scoring 2 (developing) or 3 (enacting), and this tells us the practice was already to some extent dialogic.

Chart showing scores for experimental teachers’ pre-project lesson

	S	J	A	L
JPA	2	2	3	2
LLD	2	2	1	1
CTX	4	3	2	2
CA	4	2	1	2
IC	1	1	1	1
CS	1	1	1	1
M	4	2	3	2
Total	14	13	12	11

 

The following chart shows the improvement in these scores as observed in the best lesson (of 5) for each teacher. We took the ‘best lesson’ scores, rather than the scores related to the final lesson, because we observed, over time, that progress was not linear and that teachers had varying levels of success when teaching different subjects. Indeed, a key finding of this project is that it likely takes time – longer than the six months we had available – to embed talk-rich teaching approaches.

Chart showing scores for experimental teachers’ best lesson

	S	J	A	L
JPA	2	4	2	2
LLD	4	4	4	4
CTX	4	4	4	4
CA	4	4	4	4
IC	2	2	2	2
CS	2	1	2	1
M	4	4	4	4
Total	22	23	22	21

The Year 4 teachers (age 8-9)

In Teacher S’s best lesson, a shared writing lesson, her growth in the principle of Language and Literacy Development was very noticeable. Children worked in pairs with a book they had been studying over several weeks (Varjak Paw by S.F.Said). Conversations were intentionally focused on engaging with new and complex vocabulary. In her post-lesson reflection she commented:

I’ve been more mindful about how much they talk and how much of the vocabulary we talk about… They really like the sharing of ideas in small groups now.

Teacher J’s best lesson was one of the few lessons observed where the principle of ‘Joint Productive Activity’ was at integrating level. This was a Design Technology lesson where children were assessing the functionality of a set of bags. Very detailed modelling and prior experience of the type of activity scaffolded the conversations that this teacher had with his intentionally grouped multilingual learners:

Working in this way gave them freedom to discuss, and me more opportunity to hear what they have to say and to react with them to their ideas. It worked well to give them that freedom within an activity with which they were familiar.

The Year 1 teachers (age 5-6)

Teacher A did demonstrate progress across lessons and her scores are taken from her final observation; an English lesson focussed on using personal pronoun ‘I’ in descriptive sentences about minibeasts. On the surface the learning intention sounds pretty dry, but the lesson was alive with opportunities for talk that led to very well-articulated sentences about a range of insects in a set of pictures the children held. In her post-lesson conversation this teacher reflected on her success with the Enduring Principles as a vehicle for getting her class of 100% multilingual learners talking confidently with each other:

Being in the project has meant that we are consciously planning for more talk and more modelling (I do, we do, you do). I have really worked on trying to wait more time for responses and on working with the one group while the others work independently.

Finally, Teacher L’s best lesson -the least experienced of the four – showed measureable improvement across several principles. This, her third lesson, was a maths lesson in which children were ordering two-digit numbers in their written form. As with the other participants, Teacher L had worked at allowing children more time to work in small groups; more time to say more at carpet time while she tried to say less. The lesson had a tight focus on accurate use of vocabulary and on allowing children time to give extended answers; something which she admitted she found very difficult to do.

I have been working on talking less and it definitely paid off because they are talking more!…  (Child name) at the end of the lesson, just kept going with his explanation whereas previously he might not have had the confidence to do that. I noticed how he was literally working out what to say while he was talking.

Do the Enduring Principles of Learning translate from the US to the UK?

Our answer to this one is ‘yes’ but in an adapted form. The discussion below details what these adaptations might be.

Does working with the Enduring Principles of Learning change teachers’ practice and mindset?

There were certainly changes to teachers’ practice, and improved scores in some principles, as evidence by the discussion of their best lessons. Post lesson reflections and post project interviews showed that teachers welcomed these changes and thought that their children benefited directly from them. It was noticeable that our English teachers, more commonly used to whole class teaching, found moving to the ‘at least 10 minutes’ of teacher time with small groups challenging. Because of this, the principles of Joint Productive Activity and Instructional Conversation could potentially need adaptation to the whole class teaching context.

Important food for thought is that the principle of Critical Stance was the least developed across our participants, and this mirrors findings from the US. Thus, changes to teacher mindset, whereby lessons critically engage with asking ‘why?’, and children are given agency to explore such questions within their own community and beyond, seems to be harder won.

That said, all our participants demonstrated a noticeable positive shift in their attitude to planning for the multilingual learners. In their pre-project interviews, they largely described their practice as ‘practice for all learners’, but in their post-lesson reflections and interviews they all talked of specific practices that were geared towards the language and literacy development of multilinguals.  There was no question that they were driven by a commitment to these children’s futures.

More research is needed on how the EPL can be used to nurture teachers’ positive orientations to diversity in more than classroom activity design. This might start, for example, with using home languages and home experiences more intentionally in the classroom and embracing multilinguals’ funds of knowledge with an asset-based mindset. Such practice is already evolving in our training school.

In conclusion

There is much more to say about these teachers and their commitment to changing their practice for their multilingual learners, and we will be exploring this in related publications.   We know that we needed longer, and we know that some outcomes/ impact will still be evolving. Such findings are consistent with other studies using a dialogic approach to teaching such as that from the Education Endowment Fund (2017), and our findings contribute a multilingual teaching dimension to what is already known.  Our next steps will be to work with a wider number of schools to see how the researcher-led changes wrought small-scale in the talk-rich teaching project can become school-driven sustainable change that improves the school experiences of a wider number of multilingual learners.

Watch this space for Aniqa’s blog on the findings related to pupils’ progress in response to their teachers’ changes. Coming soon!