Guide | Realizing a vision of excellent instruction

The role of cognitive science in international school success

Even the most established schools in the United States (or any country for that matter) struggle to find a cohesive approach to teaching and learning that inspires teacher buy-in and effectively serves an increasingly diverse student body. So it’s no wonder that international schools, with their global and often transient faculty and student populations, face an even greater challenge.

The solution, it turns out, lies not in our differences, but in the similarities cognitive science has revealed about the ways people learn. Creating a shared vision of excellent instruction that leverages the large and growing body of cognitive research gives teachers the tools and confidence they need to help every student succeed.

The unique challenges of a global school community

International schools stand apart because they are made up of students and teachers from diverse cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds. Many of these school community members are outside their home country. Local teachers and students have often traveled widely. This makes for a beautiful but complex school culture, one that holds unique rewards and challenges both for teachers and students.

A far-ranging faculty

Teachers in international schools are a different breed in many respects. They come from a wide variety of training backgrounds, ranging from higher degrees in education or subject disciplines to non-traditional certification, and often adhere to vastly different schools of thought about instruction. They arrive with a suitcase of ideas about how to be a good educator, which may or may not align with the school’s pedagogical approach or the evidence on effective teaching and learning. And, because international teachers are generally a nomadic bunch, schools find themselves in a perpetual cycle of onboarding. Perhaps because of this same transience, international teachers also seem especially apt to view themselves as independent agents in their classrooms rather than part of a wider school team working toward shared goals.

The great news is that international teachers also bring with them an incredible breadth and depth of educational experience, a flexibility of spirit that makes them fast learners, and a commitment to education that has taken them to classrooms around the world!

Nascent global citizens

The student body of international schools is also made up of young people from all over the world. They've often moved into and out of a number of school systems throughout their educational careers, encountering varying levels of rigor and misaligned curricular topics along the way. As many international schools increase local enrollment, there is also often a growing number of students who are learners of the school’s language of instruction. Many international teachers also report that the number of students with behavioral issues and special educational needs has increased significantly over the past decade.

That’s a lot of variables for school leadership to bring into alignment, and it can be hard to see the common denominator. But it’s there — human cognition.

Human cognition is the key to serving diverse student populations

No matter how different you and I might be, our brains — just like our hearts and our kidneys — are products of a shared evolutionary history as humans. We both have significant limits to our attention and working memory, store and retrieve knowledge from interconnected ideas in long term memory, and we forget things over time. In the sea of differences that is an international school, understanding our shared cognitive architecture can be a sturdy anchor.

Cognitive science research into learning has demonstrated that there are reliable similarities in how humans learn. In order to leverage this understanding of human learning, though, we have to capture it in a form that is both concrete and actionable — we need a shared vision of excellent instruction.

Read more >> The review article “Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later” provides a great introduction to and overview of cognitive research around learning.

What is a vision of excellent instruction?

“But,” you might be thinking, “We’ve already documented our school’s vision and beliefs, and we’re still having trouble getting all our teachers on the same page and helping all our students be successful.”

Let’s talk about what I mean when I say “a vision of excellent instruction.” When you hear the word vision, you might be thinking of a typical vision statement that lives very much in the philosophical sphere. It’s often a little soft around the edges. What I’m proposing is different.

A vision of excellent instruction should be a blueprint. It defines exactly what your school considers to be effective instruction both at a theoretical and practical level, and it provides a set of tools to help teachers implement excellent instruction in their classrooms.

Having this concrete joint understanding of what your school agrees excellent instruction looks like helps both teachers and students. It gives teachers shared ground to stand on when they arrive at your school and a robust set of tools that boosts their confidence in the classroom. Most importantly, it empowers them to meet students wherever they are — struggling with knowledge gaps or excelling — boosting student outcomes across the board.

How to build a vision of effective instruction

Every school’s vision of effective instruction will look a little different because every school’s culture, community, and challenges are unique. That said, there are a few elements that you should reliably find in a well-articulated, evidence-led vision of instruction:

A model of learning based in cognitive science

You probably remember learning about food webs in middle school, seeing arrows pointing out how matter cycles and energy flows in an ecosystem. There’s a reason scientists — and teachers — use models to understand and explain complicated, unseeable processes. Models simplify and clarify, and most importantly, they have predictive power in the real world.

There was a point in human history when learning was a black box of sorts. We didn’t have enough information about cognitive processes to construct an accurate, predictive model of how learning happens. But today we do! In fact, we have decades of cognitive research on how knowledge is acquired and stored. Including a model of learning that’s built on this body of knowledge in your vision of excellent instruction has two important benefits for teachers and students.

A strong model of learning gives educational leaders the framework to unite their faculty around shared goals. When everyone at your school agrees on the basic mechanisms by which learning occurs, it’s easier to agree on potential approaches in the classroom to achieve the outcomes you want for your students.
Understanding the “how” of the learning process empowers educators to both predict the likely outcomes of certain teacher actions and diagnose what might be going wrong when students aren’t learning as well as you’d like.

Dive deeper >> Dan Willingham’s simple model of memory is a great example of a useful model of learning.

A shared language of instruction

It might sound a bit boring to suggest that your vision of excellent instruction should include a "glossary," but shared vocabulary is a powerful asset to your educational team. And, the lack of one can undermine your whole endeavor.

The words we use carry meaning that’s often tied to our particular body of knowledge, experiences, and ideas in idiosyncratic ways. When I say “explicit instruction,” I’m thinking about a highly interactive style of teaching that involves breaking down concepts, fully modeling processes, asking loads of questions, orchestrating paired talk, using all-response methods like mini-whiteboards to check for understanding, and providing opportunities to practice new skills independently. When someone else uses the term, they may be thinking of students listening passively to a lecture while copying notes.

That natural disconnect can lead to misunderstandings that derail teamwork and a shared understanding of excellent instruction. A well developed lexicon of mutually understood terms with definitions that ground them in the shared context of your model of learning is the antidote to this problem. Once you have a shared vocabulary to use, your conversations around instruction and learning become more nuanced, more meaningful, and more productive.

High-leverage classroom strategies

Linking high-level cognitive science concepts to specific actions in the classroom isn’t an easy task. A strong vision of excellent instruction should make it easier by clearly articulating — in very specific terms — what strategies are “best bets” to maximize learning.

Resources like Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction offer a strong place to start as you think about the specific needs and context of your school. Focusing on a relatively narrow set of classroom strategies will meet the needs of more students and make the targets of professional learning concrete and observable.

As you decide which strategies to include in your vision of excellent instruction, some good questions to ask yourself are:

What are some common challenges we’re noticing across classrooms?
What do students and teachers report they struggle with the most?
What are the biggest deficits we’re seeing in student outcomes?

Finally, it’s crucial that the strategies you choose to focus on are consistent with the model of learning you’ve chosen. Explicitly outlining the link between instructional strategies and how they align with particular aspects of the learning process boosts buy-in and empowers teachers to invent improvements that lead to more learning for more students.

How to achieve school-wide buy-in and alignment

Once your school’s leadership team has adopted a fully-fleshed-out vision of excellent instruction, the next task is to invite in the wider school community. Gaining and maintaining buy-in and bringing classroom-level instruction in line with your vision require an ongoing, school-wide effort. Whether you’re introducing your instructional vision for the first time or presenting it to incoming faculty at the first of the year, whole-group PD and coaching are two of the most powerful tools in your toolkit.

Whole-group professional development

In the journey toward implementing your vision of excellent instruction, whole-group PD is where you can most effectively set the direction, build and maintain momentum, and ensure foundational understandings. Here’s how.

Help teachers understand the why

Teachers want their actions to influence student success. And if you make a compelling case that what you’re proposing will help that to happen, you’ll get more buy in. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to explore the model of learning you’ve established thoroughly with your faculty and to present evidence from credible sources that backs up your approach.

It’s incredibly powerful when teachers realize that your vision of excellent instruction illuminates the reasons for and solutions to the persistent challenges educators face in the classroom. It’s both a stress reliever and a motivator to understand more about the cognitive science of learning and how the strategies you’ve included in your vision can help their students learn better.

Pro tip >> A compelling whole-group PD session might focus on reading and discussing research around a single aspect of your learning model, like working memory vs. longterm memory.

Explain the nuts and bolts of the how

Once you’ve established a shared understanding of and buy-in to a model of learning, the next step is to bring teachers up to speed on the specific strategies you’d like to implement in the classroom to increase student learning.

Adding these strategies to teachers’ repertoires is a process that most effectively starts in whole-group PD sessions where they can gain a broad understanding of strategies together before digging deeper by engaging individually with the research and participating in ongoing job-embedded professional learning (more on that below).

The key here is to tackle new concepts at a digestible pace. You’re asking teachers to reconsider deeply ingrained habits and beliefs around teaching and learning and, in some cases, introducing completely new concepts. Giving teachers the time to poke around the corners of these ideas as a whole faculty builds trust and provides the space for misconceptions to surface and be addressed.

As tempting as it might be to present everything all at once, you’ll get better long-term results if you set an implementation schedule that respects teachers’ cognitive capacity for taking on new information and integrating it into their day-to-day classroom approach.

Instructional coaching

Instruction coaching is most effective once you’ve had a number of solid whole-group PD sessions and have significant buy-in to your vision of excellent instruction. Coaching cycles help teachers bridge the knowing-doing gap. In other words, they make sure that what’s happening in the classroom is aligned with your vision for excellent instruction.

Adults, especially teachers because of the repetitive nature of their work, have well-worn behavioral paths. For a teacher who has performed the same actions over and over for 5 or 10 or even 20 years in the classroom, it can be difficult to shift habits. Coaching provides the environment and the support needed for an educator to examine those habits, and if they decide they’re not helping students learn, change them.

Why coaching?

A recent systematic review evaluated hundreds of professional development programs and developed a theoretical model for why some types of professional development are more likely to have an impact on student achievement. They saw that professional learning was most effective when it incorporated specific and observable “mechanisms.” Instructional coaching incorporates six (see below) of these mechanisms better than any other mode of teacher learning.

When teachers engage in a coaching cycle, they are likely to:

revisit learning from PD sessions;
set and agree on goals;
engage in action planning for their specific context;
examine models of good practice;
have opportunities to rehearse outside the classroom; and
get practical social support and affirmation along the way.

These mechanisms are a big part of what makes coaching such a powerful tool for the teachers who are trying to bring your school's vision of excellent instruction into their classrooms. But it's not the only factor. Coaches also create the type of environment in which classroom shifts can happen. They build relationships of mutual respect, trust, and exploration with teachers so that together they can turn knowledge and experience into positive results for students.

Support your coaches with training and resources

For coaches to be effective at helping teachers implement your vision of excellent instruction, they must be experts in it themselves. The best investment you can make in the success of your implementation process is providing training and resources for your coaches so they can build a deep understanding of the principles and practices in the vision, learn how to diagnose learning challenges, and feel confident supporting teachers in their quest to embed new practices effectively.

Get started >> Schedule a consultation to explore how Open Windows can help you build or grow a science-backed coaching program.

Ensuring student success in the long term

Launching the school’s vision of excellent instruction successfully is a huge achievement! But, like all things in education, ongoing attention and support is the key to successful outcomes. There are several important tools that will help you identify challenges and adapt to needs that surface.

Regular classroom visits

When leaders and coaches are present in classrooms, it sends a powerful message that they are invested in teachers’ success, open to continued dialogue, and aware of the most pressing issues teachers and students face. And, if handled in a way that assures teachers your presence is supportive and not evaluative, classroom visits generate richer conversations about instructional successes and challenges. Teachers feel that they’re part of a team that knows what they are experiencing and is eager to share their triumphs and struggles.

Teacher surveys

Teacher surveys highlight successes, identify barriers to implementation, and reveal professional learning that might need to be revisited.

Are there cultural challenges or issues of trust that are preventing teachers from getting the most out of their learning?
Are there competing initiatives that are time-hungry and less impactful on student learning?
Do teachers feel empowered and supported by leaders and coaches?

The best way to understand what teachers need so that they can focus on their growth is to ask them.

Insights from coaching

Your coaching team can provide valuable quantitative and qualitative insights.

How many teachers are participating in coaching?
What are the common themes that are emerging from coaching?
Are there particular grade-level or subject teams that are more or less engaged?
Are teacher practices shifting in a positive direction?

Uncovering the answers to these questions can give you clarity about where more support is needed and what kind of support might be most helpful.

A vision of excellent instruction is your blueprint for success

Teaching and learning are hard in general and there are added hurdles in international schools. While there is no tool that will solve every challenge, adopting a shared model and language of learning and the strategies to implement them gives your faculty the foundation and tools they need to rise to the demands of an international classroom.