Another acronym rejoice! Yes, okay, all snark aside, the concepts behind this term are very interesting. High-Leverage Teaching Practices (HLTP) are also called high-leverage practices, core practices or simply practice. HLTPs are “teaching practices in which the proficient enactment by a teacher is likely to lead to comparatively large advances in student learning”. Such practice must impact learning of all students, be very common in teaching, and be learnable by novice teachers. Kristan Davin and Francis Troyan report in 2015 on four student teachers’ implementation of two HLTPs.

The first HLTP was increasing interaction and target language comprehensibility (I-TLC) and the second was questioning to build and assess student understanding. The first core practice was derived from the well supported case for both comprehensible input and interaction. The second core practice of questioning reflects its fundamental role in the language classroom.

Before continuing the summary of the study a short note about the background to practice based teacher development. A practice based approach is distinguished from a best practice approach in that space is given for trainees to rehearse deeply a limited but useful set of practices whereas usually best practice approaches offer an extensive but shallow coverage. The idea of HLTPs was imported from mathematics education (Hlas & Hlas, 2012).

Method
Context
Two teacher training courses in the USA, one for graduate students in a large, public university and one for undergraduate students in a medium-sized, private university. At both universities the authors carried out their study in the second of two methods courses. In one university both the methods course and classroom practice were held at the same place in an assigned high school whereas this was split into two different locations at the other university.
Both teacher programs followed similar syllabuses. For the practices the cycle consisted of 5 classes of demonstration & deconstruction of practice (class 1 & 2); then rehearsal and coaching (class 3); then implementation & feedback (class 4); and lastly guided reflection (class 5).
Participants
4 participants, 2 from each university. These trainees were picked for being true novices, i.e. none had any previous teaching experience and were also picked because their foreign language matched the researchers.
Data Collection & Coding
Lesson videos recorded by each participant which they thought best represented each HLTP. The two tables below show each core practice with its descriptors. The researchers selected a 10-minute part of the videos that best highlighted the implementation of the teaching practice. Each descriptor was given a score on a scale from 1 (practice missing) to 2 (practice partially present) to 3 (practice fully present).

To illustrate the scoring, if a participant asked a follow-up question two times they would be given a score of 2 while a candidate who asked follow-up questions throughout the 10-min video sample would get a 3 score. The researchers compared scores and got an inter-rater reliability of 94% for I-TLC and 92% for questioning.

Data Analysis
Maximum score of 12 and minimum score of 4, so descriptors rated 9 or more labelled “proficient”, between 6 and 8 labelled “partially proficient”, 5 or lower rated “not proficient”.

Results

• I-TLC – An example of “proficient” was candidates use of visuals and props – all 4 trainees used Power-Points containing pictures and/or video. An example of “partially proficient” included clearly conveying lesson topic and objective before input. An example of “not proficient” was in use of examples to define new words.
• Questioning – Trainees were rated “proficient” in for example in use of questions that utilize simple syntax, “partially proficient” in things such as use of follow-up questions to elicit elaborations and “not proficient” in for example natural reaction to students’ responses.

Discussion
The authors conclude that some parts of practice develop faster than others. These parts were the ones that could be anticipated, planned and practiced before hand such as visuals in power-points. Whereas the teacher candidates were rated as “not proficient” on descriptors that were more context dependent such as responding naturally to students.

Limitations of the study include the fact that it did not assess the relative level of importance trainees may have given to the descriptors. So the participants may have considered use of visual props as more critical than use of examples to define new words. The authors point out that although the theoretical arguments from sociocultural theory are strong, research in HLTP is still at an early stage with a lot of work to be done.

The paper recommends that teacher educators could assign the practice descriptors according to two dimensions of difficulty and importance. Thus, for example, use of meaningful and purposeful context would be placed in the more difficult and more important quadrant whilst clearly conveying lesson topic and objective before input would be placed in the less difficult and less important quadrant. It is also crucial for teachers to understand the background knowledge of their students or what Daniel Willingham, 2017, calls the teacher’s mental model of the learner.

So what?

Reading ELT Research Bites is fine as far as it goes but knowledge about teaching or reflection on teaching is no substitute for enacting teaching. That is, for us as teachers to rehearse core practices and bring them under our conscious control. The research on high-leverage teaching practices holds promise for partly bridging the research-practice divide.

References