NZ study challenges world on teaching

Exactly - what part of the relationships between "key to effective teaching is the quality of the feedback students get and their interaction with teachers." and the "size of classes" do they NOT get?

I shudder at the new education minister saying that it will 'have a "profound influence" on the future of schooling in New Zealand.'. Please Madam Minister, do not tell me this mean you will increase the size of classes. Hopefully it is just journalistic opportunism ;)

New Study Challenges- To creat Positive relations ship

During my corporate career once, I was at training with one of the reputable institute and teacher was interest to create cross relation ship fast among the participant. He had fixed surrounding A-3 size papers on wall( equal number of participant). Every participant has name plate on shirt/Saree and everybody has to put comment on each other whatever they like on A-3 size paper. Through comments on papers and group discussion we know every group member like we know each other since long. And within a week time of training we learn so much still I personally feels it is right style to create study environment which everybody are in research mood and brings the tremendous positive result.

To all proponents of performance based pay or bonuses. How would you do it? There are just so many variables in teaching and learning between teachers, students, subject matter, resources and support services to name the most obvious.

Given all this how do you identify and compare one teacher's 'performance' with another? Then there's the matter of demotivation of teachers who will feel short changed, and the inevitable erosion of sharing and support that teachers currently have for each other.

After many years of teaching the most important lesson that I've learned is that schools are not businesses as far as teaching and learning is concerned, and business models for this have no place in schools.

What's needed are trust, cooperation and good will from all concerned. Smaller classes (say 20 max), no performance pay (but good basic salaries) and less bureaucratic meddling will all help. Teachers need to be trusted to do their jobs of educating our children.

Thanks to the poster who mentioned Alfie Kohn - very interesting food for thought.

I agree with Paul. Given that the author of the study, Prof John Hattie, has a history of promoting market approaches to education, one can't help but wonder how much of Hattie's own philsophical bias has influenced his findings here. After all, if the other 50,000 odd studies directly supported Hattie's thesis that teacher interaction is the most important thing and this supports introducing performance-based pay for teachers,then surely this would not be a new and exciting concept for us - we'd have heard it before (50,000 studies is a lot of studies). I also support Jack who identifies that most 'good' teachers are already doing the very things Hattie suggests - but most would like an environment more capable of enhancing their practice. It's easier to have a strong interactive relationship with a smaller number of individuals than it is with a larger group.

Yet again the scary news that NZ is leading the world in Education. Dr Hattie again fails to indicate what is an optimum class size. Mrs Tolley likes the price of keeping the class numbers up. Size probably matters little when so much primary school is about fitness. We once had a curriculum and discipline which helped us compete with the best in the world. But then a new fashion was to take the inventors, the humans, out of science. Boyle???s law became ???the pressure-volume relationship???; Charles??? law ???the volume-temperature relationship??? even though laws of nature were won through careful and inspiring work. 99% of air is nitrogen and oxygen; describing the remaining 1% required care and brilliance. One in a million is a very significant amount, when it is the amount of chlorine keeping tap water safe to drink, or the amount of gold in rock being mined for a living. But this is demanding; precise, too hard and deleted from the classroom.

So have intermediate schools which with combined Yr 7&8 classes, because 28 Yr 8 children are too many to face at once.

Muldoon wanted us to believe that we would raise our standard living by devaluing our dollar.

When will we as a nation train teachers who know enough to teach, and show pride in them as they educate our children?

When will NZ exports be the best rather than the cheapest?

Hattie is a psychologist, like Levinson, who gave us the mid-life crisis, following his detailed study of about 36 men, all university teachers. Both men found a Press ready to print them, would either get a man on the moon?

When was the last time that Hattie taught in a NZ classroom?

Wasn't he on that TV Show about Kiwi IQ's.

Looks like he is angling to secure a lucrative Government contract to do more research.

Wasn't he involved with setting up Asstle? A paper based test assessment tool that can take up to 27 pages to complete for a Year 5 student.

Mr Hattie, come clean and tell NZ teachers what your real agenda is! Stop beating up on teachers and start appreciating and acknowledging the positive changes being made in our schools.

Where are the responsibilities of parents in this debate?

I totally agree with Jack in post #1 - how can teachers improve their feedback when we are overwhelmed by trying to give individual help to 30 students per hour? As well as that the amount of (mostly pointless)paper work is increased every time the government decides to introduce some new initiative - thereby increasing teacher's hours of work and stress levels and making it harder for them to be "excellent teachers"

For me class sizes is more about managing workload. With the increasing demands on the classroom from parents, Government policy, new individualised teaching techniques, a wider range and complexity of children within the class (ESOL, ORRS, RTLB & RTLit supported children etc)there is a need to manage the workload and expectations.

If it had been me I would not have introduced Classroom Release Time (CRT) but rather pushed for smaller classes. That's what really helps workload.

What a great insightful article capturing the essence of measurable result driven learning as opposed to the very singular view of preaching or as it is most commonly described in the New Zealand education as "teaching". Along with many other countries the New Zealand education service, whilst very well meaning is simply stuck in the dark ages in its attempt to meet its students and indeed New Zealand's expectations. This article shines a very positive bright light on where New Zealand education needs to head. To focus on just reducing class sizes or increasing teachers pay packets as mentioned in other comments greatly misses the point of this article and is in fact the problem in itself that the education system faces today, a new paradigm needs to be embraced by the teachers, their unions and the government. I wonder if you all in sync understand what profound effect that you have on the greatest resource this country possesses.

In regards to the validity of the study. I want to suggest that such a meta study could possibly have a bias due to the researchers selection strategy, HOWEVER, this should be of minimal concern due to the internationally well respected reputation of Doctor John Hattie.

In regards to the proposed pay scheme, I'm very much in favour of rewarding excelent teachers, even though it would be difficult to administer and calculate. In all four of the schools I've been in, I was surprised at how many overly casual and lazy teachers just doing the basics of their job, picking up their pay cheque, and not really striving to teach well, or even stopping and asking 'how could I teach this better'.

Some sort of performance bonus would at least recognise and encourage those who do so much for the children of this country.