Peter Atkinson: Moving from Teaching to Learning

Book Review: 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t be Wrong

by John V. Antonetti & James R. Garver

17,124 classroom visits have convinced John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver of the need to write a guide for assisting teachers in developing learning-focused plans in order to shift the focus in classrooms from teaching to learning. Their learning walks revealed too many classrooms in which the instruction was teacher-directed and the levels of student thinking and engagement generally low. Hence, their book presents “strategies and tools … [for] moving classrooms toward deeper thinking, more engaging work, and higher levels of student achievement.” (17)

The design of 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong is tailor-made for teacher book clubs and PLCs as each chapter presents a specific part of the lesson planning process. Components of each chapter include data collected from the authors’ learning walks, relevant research, practical strategies, school success stories, dialogues and debates between the authors, and a closure activity for teachers and school leaders.

The authors begin Chapter 3, “Thinking and The Brain”, with sobering data accumulated from their classroom visits with respect to the lack of attention given to higher level thinking skills development: 87% of the instruction they observed was focused on knowledge and comprehension – the 2 lowest levels of thinking. The authors maintain that “The key to raising thinking in a meaningful way [in the classroom] is to focus on the middle two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, application and analysis.” (31) They suggest that authentic application skills development occurs when students can call up from memory, for use in appropriate situations, appropriate strategies, ideas, and information. For authentic learning opportunities related to analysis, they recommend Zip it and Flip it!, whereby students are presented with examples, and then are encouraged to find for themselves the pattern(s) in the examples. The teacher’s role is to remain silent and not give the pattern(s) away.

In Chapter 4, “Learning Targets”, the authors emphasize that it is not enough that teachers simply post learning goals and success criteria; instead, students must be able to articulate them and make them their own. Unfortunately, the data from their learning walks indicate that only 33% of students they encountered were able to articulate the learning goals, and a miniscule 4% of them could explain what success “looks like”. (52)

“Know Your Learners” is the title of Chapter 5. What teachers should come to know about their students includes:

their cultural background;
their experiences (vast or limited);
their working vocabulary (extensive or limited); and,
their interactions and opportunities

The teacher’s task is to adapt the learning opportunities based on the specific profiles of the students, including compensating for areas of deficit and meeting their specific needs. From their classroom visits, the authors concluded that most teachers feel that written responses by students, followed by whole-class discussions, is an effective way to get to know their students and develop relationships with them. They add that “it’s also important for our learners to know who we [their teachers] are.” (73)

Chapter 6 opens with “horrifying” data on engagement levels drawn from the 17,124 classroom visits: Only 6% of students were found to be engaged. The authors make an important distinction between the many students who were observed to be merely on-task and those truly engaged. Eight “engaging work qualities” they identify are as follows:

personal response;
clear/modeled expectations;
emotional/intellectual safety;
learning with others;
clear sense of audience;
choice;
novelty/variety; and,
authenticity (real-world connections).

Chapter 7 explores effective instructional strategies. The authors list 9 categories of strategies identified in Classroom Instruction That Works, including cooperative learning; cues, questions, and advanced organizers; nonlinguistic representations; identifying similarities and differences; and generating and testing hypotheses. (98) The bad news is that their data indicate that strategies in these categories were seen in classrooms only between 4% and 12% of the time.

Antonetti and Garver offer their own commentary for many of the 9 categories of instructional strategies. For instance, they argue that graphic organizers (a type of nonlinguistic representation) are far more effective when the "elements of personal response and middle level thinking are part of the activity.” (106) They also conclude that generating & testing hypotheses is the strategy that most demands that teachers shift from teacher-directed to student-centred learning. When it comes to cues, questions, & advanced organizers, they caution that they must always precede posting of the learning goal; otherwise, the depth of student thinking will be compromised.

Classroom Instruction That Works offers 9 categories of
learning strategiesn

Differentiation is the theme of Chapter 8. The authors begin by pointing out that differentiation will inevitably occur in classrooms in which there has been a shift from teaching to learning. The problem is, though, that there is little opportunity for student-focused learning to occur when between 70% and 81% of classroom time, according to their data, is spent listening, watching, and completing identical seat work. The authors elaborate on 2 of Tomlinson’s 4 classroom elements that allow for differentiation – process and product. With respect to the former, they support Marian Small’s idea of parallel tasks for students. Differentiation of product allows students to personalize the evidence of their learning.

In Chapter 9, “Learning Pathways”, a graphic organizer is provided showing the possible pathways students may follow once an initial assessment is made of the progress toward a learning goal. Those who demonstrate mastery take an extension or enrichment path, while those well below standard move to intervention. Those near standard follow a guided and independent practice route.

The authors, in Chapter 10, define closure for the learning-centred classroom as students as “active agents … summarizing and analyzing what they have just learned.” (141) Noting that they observed closure activities in the classrooms they observed less than 1% of the time, they provide several closure strategies, including:

· Exit Ticket – Students post a short note explaining the main idea of the day’s lesson and a personal connection to it

· Post Card to an Absent Student – Students explain to the absent student what they learned

· I Used to Think/Now I think

· Tweet Me – Students, like a Tweet, use only 140 characters to comment on or react to what they learned