Sowing sustainable instructional improvement in teacher preparation

Five years ago this month, teacher educators from six educator-preparation programs gathered in a hotel conference room in Austin, Texas and puzzled together over a lesson plan about lima beans: A second-grade teacher is contemplating using a lesson in which students plant lima bean seeds, observe them, and craft and decorate “seed booklets” to record their observations. Would the activities in this lesson plan actually help students master the skills in the lesson’s learning goal? Or would students be more focused on skills less relevant to the lesson’s intended focus, like cutting construction paper and gluing booklets?

That session anchored the inaugural convening of the first cohort of DFI’s Learning by Scientific Design Network, or LbSD. Over those two days in 2019, we guided each team of faculty and program leaders to plant seeds of their own as they envisioned how they would redesign their programs to ensure their graduates would teach the way students learn best. When teachers root their practice in the most reliable and time-tested findings in cognitive science, every student benefits. Through convenings, coaching calls, and classroom observations, we spent the next two years walking alongside these teams as they transformed not only their own individual courses, but also the broad arc of coursework and clinical experiences candidates encounter along their path to licensure. 

The fruits (and legumes?) of their efforts have been plentiful.  From that first meeting have grown three cohorts of LbSD, offering more than 8,400 teacher candidates annually across 14 institutions and partner K-12 school districts a firm grounding in the fundamentals of how to teach the way students learn. Additionally, from lessons learned in the first two cohorts, we are now facilitating deep partnerships between educator-preparation programs and K-12 school districts in our third and current cohort. These partnerships enable faculty, mentor teachers, and school leaders to both gain deeper insights into each other’s work and meaningfully facilitate a continuum of instructional support for aspiring teachers to transition successfully into their first few years of teaching.

September 2019 convening of LbSD teacher-educators

Participating teacher candidates in the first two cohorts have increased measurably in their knowledge and skills related to core concepts like attention, memory, and cognitive load, but they are also developing associated mindsets that will serve their students well.

“LbSD really added teeth to our work,” says Chris Joyce, Senior Director of Program at the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators (LRCE). “We’re able to support our practitioners to not just be able to do these teaching skills, but understand why they matter,” he says. 

For Shannon Hammond, Assistant Professor of Special Education at National Louis University in Chicago, incorporating the science of learning drew her students to examine their own beliefs of what a rigorous, equitable, and inclusive education should look like. “My students are saying it’s helped them realize they need to raise their expectations for their students,” she says. “That’s really important for our candidates working with students with disabilities, and I also work with teachers teaching in Chicago public schools in communities who’ve been harmed by low expectations. So my students are now seeing that what’s possible for their students is reliant on the instructional decisions they make.”

Shannon Hammond, National Louis University

Each cohort has built on the lessons of those who came before to accelerate their work, and teams within cohorts often borrow ideas as they collectively progress through each stage of growing their work. With such an array of institutional contexts, teams have pioneered innovative solutions to overcome challenges.

We invited leaders from LbSD’s first two cohorts to reflect on what they’ve learned from their years of work implementing and refining the application of cognitive science principles in teacher preparation. What are they working on now to scale the impact of this work beyond the scope of the network’s formal commitment? Their advice is as hard won as their efforts are creative. 

Here are three ways LbSD teams sow sustainability in their work to make learning science-informed pedagogy a priority in their program:

1. Involve faculty early and often in professional learning

While DFI provided intensive professional learning and feedback to core teams at each institution on the essential principles of learning by scientific design, transforming and sustaining an entire program requires a broader effort.

Many institutions are formalizing onboarding programs to help build ownership and involvement throughout the year with adjunct instructors, clinical supervisors, and full-time faculty who play pivotal roles mentoring candidates. For example, the LRCE has launched an instructional coach fellowship, in which the coaches supporting their practitioners experience all of the same curriculum they will soon be teaching as a part of their training. 

Similarly, American University is for the first time this fall implementing their LbSD curriculum fully across their program’s full arc of courses, and adjunct instructors will be a crucial part of that effort. Jody Hagen-Smith and her colleague Tracy Spesia of American University have spearheaded onboarding for adjunct instructors using curriculum they developed in partnership with DFI. At both institutions, new staff have the chance to practice and get feedback on their new learning the same way they will support their candidates.  New adjuncts and coaches are often relieved to have a high-quality curriculum already available and the personalized support to implement it.

Jody Hagen-Smith and Tracy Spesia, American University

2. Prioritize building a common language to build a common commitment

For an adjunct instructor, clinical supervisor or faculty member learning about learning science principles for the first time, the amount to learn may feel daunting or the motivation to engage with it unclear. Starting small by encouraging newcomers to use common language is a helpful first step. If students are hearing concepts like attention to meaning, effortful thinking, or examples and non-examples reinforced in even courses that aren’t directly implementing LbSD curriculum, that coherence supports their learning.

It’s also a helpful scaffold for faculty while they deepen their own understanding of those concepts and see how candidates understand and use them. “The academic vocabulary was a little different than we were used to at first,” says Joyce of LRCE, “but at the heart of it, all of these were aligned to the best teaching practices that we had already experienced ourselves. We just didn't necessarily know why it all worked the way that it did. The common terms DFI gave us helped reinforce why.”

Chris Joyce, Louisiana Resource Center for Educators

For Doug Cost and his colleagues at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, the concrete language DFI offered on how instructional choices either engage all learners or leave some behind offered an entry point around the department’s shared value of equity. “The extra value added LbSD brought us was that it wasn’t just me or someone else up on the pulpit saying ‘we need to include all learners!’ It was about how to actually do it. [DFI] gave not only the criteria for engaging all learners for each teacher action, but protocols, procedures, strategies, and scenarios we could all reference.” The sooner folks get to engage with a specific example to anchor their learning, the better.

Doug Cost, University of Alaska-Fairbanks

3. Actively engage and build the buy-in of K-12 partners

Mentor teachers play a crucial role in preparing teachers for the classroom, offering feedback and entrusting their classrooms to teacher candidates during their clinical experience, yet coordinating with mentors across the many placement schools institutions work with can be challenging.

LRCE is pioneering two new approaches to involve more than 200 mentor teachers spread across as many schools across the state. They are developing a mentor teacher cohort among districts where they have the highest percentage placement of teachers, a voluntary opportunity for mentor teachers to further their own practice through LbSD professional learning. This pilot cohort would be able to collaborate and engage regularly to further their understanding of how to support their student teachers in enacting the LbSD principles, as well as deepen their own enactment of them. 

LRCE has also applied to become a state licensing agency for mentor teachers. While there are a handful of organizations offering mentor training statewide, those programs are exclusively asynchronous courses with a culminating assessment. “The way we’re going to do it is to offer an individual touch with feedback and support,” says Joyce. “So if you have a proven track record of success in the classroom, this is an attractive way to build instructional leadership skills with that learning science core in addition to the competencies the state is asking for,” Joyce says. Mentor teachers will be able to use their new skills to support not only their resident LRCE teachers, but also apply their learning to benefit their students through their own teaching.

The University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL) has also taken a creative approach to blend research and practice as they expand their reach to their K-12 partner schools to sustain their work.  Through a local grant, they match three newly hired postdoctoral researchers on two-year fellowships with expertise in learning science with pilot schools that host, and often hire, UMSL student teachers. Each school works with their fellow on a site-based problem of practice related to instruction, weaving in lessons from LbSD along the way.

For example, according to Natalie Bolton, an associate professor at UMSL and the lead for the fellows project, one school realized that their teachers were writing lesson plans over the summer using a new curriculum but were rarely implementing them as written during the school year. With the support of their fellow’s expertise, the school’s leadership team implemented a streamlined, LbSD-focused lesson planning template and PLCs with grade-level teams to edit lessons together throughout the year to ensure they included the LbSD teacher actions. The grant will support seventeen fellows embedded in host schools, creating a continuity for UMSL graduates as well as an opportunity to formalize LbSD work across those partner schools.

Natalie Bolton, University of Missouri-St. Louis

“We’re going to be placing or have candidates hired in these schools, so we want to make sure they get the full loop of learning [of LbSD practices],” says Bolton, “and that our teachers are seeing those same practices at their school and leadership is supporting and promoting them, too.”

These pioneering teams of dedicated leaders have tended carefully to the often slow but generative process of growing LbSD into a sustainable source of graduates who know and do great teaching. Their students, too, will learn and grow as a result.

Sarah Montana is a current doctoral student at University of Maryland and a former DFI team member.

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