Speaking of evidence about teaching, Adam Grant’s column in the New York Times about K-12 education for once didn’t make me tense up the way that I’d normally expect on reading a Wharton organizational psychologist talking about teaching.
That’s because it describes a seemingly-simple organizational change whose profound effects strike me as plausible (and backed by research that seems substantive compared to a lot of other work in this domain). What Grant suggests is that students are more successful in elementary and middle school when they have the same teacher for more than one year in a row—and he points to a number of European systems that maintain that kind of continuity over even longer intervals.
I immediately thought of the excellent book How College Works by Chambliss and Takacs that argues that educational outcomes for college students are notably improved when they feel strongly connected to at least one professor or mentor, when they are “seen” holistically by that professor. Which is more likely to happen in small, teaching-centered institutions and more likely to happen when a student takes more than one course with the same professor.
If the research Grant cites documents a noticeable difference, then the first part of a fix in that direction is easy to achieve: almost any school could change the way students are assigned to teachers to produce that kind of multi-year continuity.
But there are implications here about scale, depth of engagement and labor too. This is precisely why contingent labor in higher education is so destructive, and why it is important for both universities and K-12 schools to invest in the development of their teachers and the establishment of continuity, and to privilege a sense of community (rather than just treating community as something invoked rhetorically and rubbished substantively).
