On comprehension skills
What I learned the hard way about the teaching of skills to improve comprehension
This year I made the unfortunate choice of applying for Experienced Teacher accreditation through Action Research. I ignored the advice of my peers who also completed this process, a struggle that only a tiny percentage of people take on. Driven by a sense of professional FOMO, I engaged in a year-long struggle through COVID only to discover the inherent flaws in accreditation by ETAR. I didn't cry and COVID actually gave me more opportunities to meet descriptors, with its emphasis on documentation rather than undocumented delivery of lessons. All in all, I don't believe the process measured my effectiveness as a teacher, but it did actually make me a better teacher. My project was not an abject failure in terms of learning outcomes. I made headway in the areas I wanted to improve, but transfer was poor. The value of what I learned was not actually through the data itself but through the process. Here's what ET by action research taught me.
As a novice action researcher, beware of publication bias
The unfortunate problem with accreditation by action research is that the project is approved by the accreditation body very early, after the initial literature review. Action research is meant to be flexible and responsive but the nature of the process means that if you discover something fundamentally problematic, you can't meaningfully change strategy. My literature revealed a lot of voices from the field of linguistics pushing a skills based approach to comprehension. I read this as having great potential. It wasn't until months later that I discovered the existence of publication bias. The literature was all very positive of course. My ongoing professional learning also taught me about experimental design vs educational theory and I realised that the work samples presented as evidence in the literature bore no evidence of improvement or transfer. By this point, my approach was locked in and a looming deadline meant I had to see what I knew would be a failed project through to the end.
There is a cap to the benefit of skills-coaching
Again, a problem with not really being able to be responsive, I discovered what Hirsch has been saying for a while now, that skills in relation to comprehension are often not transferable and their usefulness diminishes after about 10 lessons. I discovered this late in the piece, around the same time as I started to analyse my data, which reflected Hirsch's findings. Students improved in the very specific set of subskills they had been taught but this failed to transfer to new situations - the kinds of situations one might find in, oh I don't know, the HSC. And while my students' results did improve, they only improved when I administered a certain type of test. Originally I designed like tasks to track improvement but this backfired when students were asked to respond to conceptually unbound questions.
Knowledge is (almost) everything
One particular task was of particular lightbulb significance. The middle task of three was an ecology-inspired poem about Trump and the deniers. I taught at an ecology-centred school and several class members were part of Green Teams and the like. Even without that knowledge, I was sure that the poem was simple and the message would be received. I was wrong. Instead, students brought their limited and dichotomous understanding of environmental issues to the poem (man = bad, nature = good) and completely misread the focus on public sentiment in favour of the environment. How I wish I had read Hirsch as part of my literature review! He says that, "A reading test is a test of general knowledge and vocabulary” and he is dead right.
I could focus on the hours (and hours and hours) lost engaging with a project I knew to be a failed endeavour. But honestly, it was the perfect forum to learn from rookie mistakes. It has definitely made me a better teacher. We don't talk enough about opportunity/cost in teaching. Every poor strategy costs valuable learning time. It has also given me a platform to buck the publication bias trend and publish my own failures right here!
Hirsch, E.D. Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.