Change is scary and resistance to change can be very strong. It involves emotion that comes from a very sincere place. I’ve seen and felt these emotional responses to change from colleagues.

It usually starts when a teacher is asked to respond to student data. If the data reflects successful students the conversation usually proceeds without contention, though this does not necessarily mean that the conversation yields constructive outcomes.Asked to explain what practices yielded student success many teachers just shrug and defer to the “magic” of teaching.

When a teacher is asked about student data that shows a lack of student success the conversation usually ends up with a defensive teacher deferring to the student as the variable and a complaint that there is more to teaching than data. Both situations reflect a concern that teaching is moving away from teachers relying on their professional intuitions to a more prescribed instructional practice.

Teachers, not all but many, paint themselves into a “teaching as art versus teaching as a science” dichotomy. An article on health care and the theory for evidence-based care that ran in this past Sunday’s New York Times might just dispel the either or notion of teaching.

The article is about Dr. Brent James who is the chief quality officer at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah. I encourage you to read the article on your own and not rely on my interpretation. But the main idea that James has put forward is that in health care practice, we need to rely on empirical evidence to make decisions while at the same time encouraging practitioners to rely on their intuition as they make decisions.

Both approaches have to show results, but the expectation is that you start from a set of defaults.

Protocols for care are established based on evidence and educated guesses. All practitioners are asked to start from the protocol defaults. Practitioners are encouraged to deviate if their intuition says otherwise. In any case the results are carefully monitored.

In the example used in the article, variation was reduced which produced data that isolated aspects of treatment that made a difference. Based on the computer monitoring of patients, teams of practitioners met to “tweak” the initial protocol. They found that the initial protocol was flawed, but because of the fidelity to the protocol by many and the isolated variations used by some, the team was able to improve the protocol.

The result was a healthier patient outcome and a set of successful clinical guidelines. Doctors who continue to vary from the protocols without success
can expect to be pulled aside for a collegial conversation with a supervisor about what they might be doing wrong. Doctors with the best results can expect to be asked what they are doing right.

Doctors in many areas are also eligible for bonuses of up to about $2,500 a year if their outcomes are good.

I believe this approach to health care can work in education. It can work at the teacher level, my caveat being that it only will work if teachers are in professional learning communities which focus on collaboration. It can also work at the school and district level.

Here’s an example at the teacher level. Teaching vocabulary is important; there are two approaches to teaching vocabulary. The first is to teach content specific vocabulary that is necessary for procedural knowledge. The second approach is to teach students how to access vocabulary; teach prefixes, suffixes and affixes.

In the first approach there is ample research to show that students learn content vocabulary through a five-step process established by the well known education researcher Robert Marzano: present students with a brief explanation of the new term or phrase; present students with a nonlinguistic representation of the new term or phrase; ask the students to generate their own explanations or descriptions of the new term or phrase; ask the students to create their own nonlinguistic representation of the term or phrase; and periodically ask students to review the accuracy of their explanations or terms.

So we establish our teaching protocol. We track students through out own formative assessments, our own summative assessments and through outside summative assessments (CSAP, SAT, ACT, etc.). If a teacher varies from the protocol their results are also monitored.

Perhaps the teacher that varied has consistently better results; perhaps she has found that her students do better switching step two and three. If this is the case then the team alters the protocol to reflect this. In any and all cases students are monitored, as well as teachers, in an attempt to locate successful teaching strategies.

I can already hear my colleagues cringing at the thought of lock-step teaching. I do not think this approach can be framed that way. There is still a reliance on intuition. The article makes the point that “Behavioral researchers have come to believe that there is a clear pattern to when intuition works and when it doesn’t. Intuitive Diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback,” says Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics. . .”

Teachers can rely on intuition, as long as it results in success. The other complaint that inevitably comes from discussions like these is that students are not all the same; each student has his or her own needs and concerns that cannot be dealt with by lumping them all together. This is true. The article addresses this, satisfactorily in my mind.

“You cannot write a protocol that perfectly fits any patient. Humans that come to us for care are too variable.” James likes to say that the trained, expert mind of a physician is the most variable resource in medicine. He adds that he is simply trying to focus that resource on the problems where it is most needed: those for which the data does not have an answer.

In the end teaching needs to be done right—with schools monitoring outcomes at every step, quickly sharing that data with teachers and altering the guidelines as necessary. We need to focus on measurement. Teachers, don’t fear the data.

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