Effective principals, strong discipline and direct and explicit instruction are the keys to success at Australian schools with disadvantaged students, concludes a study called Overcoming the Odds. Other common factors were data-informed practice, teacher collaboration and professional learning, and comprehensive early reading instruction
Researchers analyzed nine top-performing schools, writes Blaise Joseph of the Centre for Independent Studies.
Direct instruction (involving teachers explicitly teaching new content in structured and sequenced lessons) was a clear common practice across the high-achieving schools. Every principal said direct instruction was a central part of their school’s approach to teaching, especially in literacy and numeracy, and one described it as “absolutely imperative to everything we do.”
. . . “We haven’t got time to muck around for kids to discover things by themselves. We have to actually teach them,” was how one of the principals put it to me.
In addition, successful schools for disadvantaged students set high expectations for students’ behavior and applied rules consistently.
As one principal commented: “Unless you’ve got an orderly environment, you can’t focus on learning. So we worked really hard on that for years. And that works really well now. It gets easier over time.” Individual teachers with effective classroom management, but without principal support, can’t achieve a positive school culture like this; they require support from the school leadership.
“The success stories of the disadvantaged schools in our study show that — given the right set of policies and practices — students from low socio-economic backgrounds can be high achievers, Joseph concludes.
Explicit teaching helps all children learn, but is especially critical for children with learning difficulties, writes Greg Ashman, an Australian teacher who’s working on a doctorate. “Advantaged children who have more resources to draw upon are harmed the least,” he writes. “This may explain why implicit teaching methods are often most celebrated by schools who teach advantaged children. Advantage masks the shortcomings.”
“Explicit teaching is not lecturing,” Ashman argues. “It is not a one-way presentation.”