An Analysis of “Visible Learning” and “Needs of Preservice Teachers” of University College of Education, Osmania University, Hyderabad ()
1. Introduction
The main goal of educational institutions is to make sure that all pupils learn, not only that they are all being taught. Every practice, policy, and procedure that educators use must be evaluated through the lens of student learning. As a result, institution’s mission is to enable every student to reach their full potential. Once at institution, it is important to understand what is happening with each pupil, because the lesson’s goal is to change these thoughts. When asked what they expect from teachers, students expressed a desire for a positive emphasis on learning and a want to discuss how to get better (Hattie, 2012) .
“Visible teaching and learning” take place when learning is the clear, distinct aim, when it is sufficiently arduous, and to what extent the challenging goal is reached. The awesome impact on student learning occurs when both teachers and students take an active role in their own education. As a result, self-regulatory traits appear to be the most desired for students (Hattie, 2012) .
1.1. Visible Learning Inside
Having a positive effect on every student in the class is at the heart of visible learning. Teachers need to have the attitude to promote intellectual demand, challenge, and learning because these are the more effective predictors of interest, engagement, higher level thinking, and conceptual understanding that enable students to want to reinvest in learning. Making education accessible to students so they can learn to become their own teachers is a crucial aspect of lifelong learning and the joy of learning that we want students to appreciate. This is referred to as being “Visible” in this context. Learning is the process by which we come to know and grasp something before acting to improve student learning.
Therefore, it is the responsibility of the teacher to understand the type and extent of his or her influence on students’ learning. What does classroom visible learning look like? It entails influencing students’ enjoyment of learning, encouraging them to continue studying, and identifying ways in which students can improve their positive self-concept, regard for others, and regard for others—in addition to raising achievement. The daily lives of students who are active in learning, as well as the daily lives of teachers who prepare, begin, conduct, and evaluate lessons. When good learning and teaching take place, it is apparent in the classrooms of successful teachers and students as well as in the passion that the learner and teacher exhibit. As a result, the teacher needs to be aware of whether or not learning is taking place, when to experiment and when to use expertise to guide decisions, how to watch, desire for feedback, and supply it, as well as alternate teaching methods when the first ones aren’t working. Then, both learning and teaching are visible to both the student and the teacher.
1.2. Teaching
To ensure that there is a cognitive change in the pupil, the act of teaching necessitates active interventions—awareness about learning intentions, success in attaining them, student’s prior understanding and to provide meaningful and challenging experiences for progressive development. Expert teachers that are able to connect the content of the present lesson to other areas in the curriculum integrate the introduction of new subject information with the students’ past knowledge. By altering, integrating, and adding to preexisting lessons in accordance with the needs of their students and individual learning objectives, expert teachers can also produce lessons that are distinctively their own (Hattie, 2012) . As a result, specialists are fast to identify classroom occurrences in sequence that have an impingement on the topic’s teaching and learning.
Shayer (2003) recommends two fundamental guidelines for educators. Teachers must first pay attention to how pupils are thinking before developing interventions for students with higher thinking levels and putting them into practice during a regular lesson. Second, because learning is collaborative and dialog-based, teachers must pay close attention to all facets of peer-to-peer construction and mediation (especially in whole-class discussions, by fostering and providing spaces for perspectives, exposition, and criticism). Teachers must therefore listen in addition to speaking. Knowing what students already know and how they think will help us move them closer to the lesson’s success criteria.
As a last phase in the lesson planning process, teachers select the instructional strategies and assess their influence on pupils. Therefore, pupils who struggle to learn do not require “more” instruction but rather “different” approaches. Acceleration, reciprocal teaching, problem-solving instruction, and self-verbalization/ self-questioning were the programmes that were most effective. These best practices focus on peer influence, feedback, open communication about learning objectives and success criteria, teaching numerous tactics or applying a variety of strategies, and paying attention to both surface and deep learning. Thus, there are two components to regulate instruction: the first is the strength of teachers cooperating to critique their planning, and the second is the strength of creating and assessing lesson plans (critical learning instructional pathways, CLIPs).
1.3. Learning
What the student already knows has the biggest impact on what they can learn. Confirm this and instruct him appropriately (Ausubel, 1968) . It is true that past performance is a very effective indicator of how well lessons will go. Therefore, challenge, commitment, confidence, high expectations, and conceptual understanding (SOLO taxonomy) are the five fundamental elements of the learning equation as they relate to learning objectives and success criteria.
1.4. Learning Intentions
Any lesson’s learning objectives must combine surface, deep, and conceptual learning; the exact mix is up to the teacher’s discretion, which in turn depends on how the lesson fits within the curriculum. The core of formative assessment is the clarity of learning intentions, which define what we want students to learn (Hattie, 2012) .
The requirement to explicitly teach pupils the learning objectives and success criteria is a major problem (Hastie, 2011) . Thus, we need more teachers with mastery approaches.
1.5. Significance of the Study
Steele (2009) claims that when teachers encounter the realities and difficulties found in schools and classrooms, they have four options available to them: quit, disconnect from their students, and perform the role of teacher, develop one’s skills so as to advance in the classroom, or discover the joy of inspired teaching. As a result, educators regularly monitor the type and quality of the impact they are making on each student.
Teachers must see themselves as positive change agents for the kids students and recognize that they have the largest influence on students’ academic success that we can affect. Therefore, visible learning should have solid proof that the majority, if not all, of our strategies, tools, and instruction have a beneficial impact on outcomes.
1.6. Objectives of the Study
The concept of visible learning is applied to teacher education institution and the objectives of the study are:
1) To find whether learning is happening (visible learning inside) in University College of Education, Osmania University, Hyderabad.
2) To know the needs of Preservice Teachers (students) of University College of Education, Osmania University, Hyderabad.
The paper presents the reviews of earlier studies, the methodology adopted for the present study besides discussion. Later, recommendations drawn from the study and conclusions are given.
2. Literature Review
According to Hattie (2012) “any intervention has the potential to influence students’ learning”. If the definition of success is “enhancing achievement”, then “everything works”. Every student improves, and our system doesn’t need to be changed because there is some evidence to support this. As a result, Mansell (2008) realized that the “education grail” was most likely to be located in the increase in student-teacher contact.
The science of learning offers promising principles or practices that may work in our classrooms—motivated learners are better learners; learners must attend to what they are learning; effective learning is best achieved by elaborate encoding; for effective learning to “stick around”, learners must practice retrieving that learning; learners have a limit on their capacity to process learning; productive struggle leads to productive learning; effective learning requires effective feedback (Almarode, Fischer, & Frey, 2021) .
There are a number of big principles that provide us a place to start when encouraging our children to participate in the learning activities and chores in our classrooms, including namely, interest/attitude; learners’ self-efficacy; student effort and expectations to specific outcomes; deep motivation; cooperative learning; prior achievement and success in new learning (Almarode, Fischer, & Frey, 2021) .
The Interactive Classroom (Nash, 2019) offers an edifice for how to affect learning and boost student involvement through sharing—
1) Tested techniques for improving presentation and facilitation abilities.
2) Techniques for kinesthetic, interpersonal, and classroom management.
3) Instructional techniques based on the brain that encourage active learning.
4) Methods of formative assessment and project-based learning that promote a strong learning environment.
To organize and center student learning around concepts and conceptual linkages that foster deep knowledge, teachers can use Concept-Based Inquiry in Action (Marchall & French, 2018) .
According to Hattie and Clinton (2011) , visible teaching refers to teachers acting as learning facilitators, thoughtful change agents, and learning managers. Thus, the teacher-centered teaching and student-centered learning and knowing are combined in the visible teaching and learning approach.
One motivated student at a time, Engagement by Design puts you in charge of managing the success of your classroom and enhancing student learning (Fischer et al., 2017) . Concepts are better understood when learning is more rigorous and exploratory. Learning lasts a lifetime when students participate in The Learning Challenge (Nottingham, 2017) .
The present study is linked to student’s experiences of a study by Nottingham (2017) and Nash (2019) . Author highlights if visible learning occurs in teacher education institutions and the needs of preservice teachers to provide visible teaching learning.
3. Methodology & Methods
3.1. Type of Research
Survey method was adopted for the present study. To know the visible learning inside the institution, the preservice teachers pursuing Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) at University College of Education, Osmania University, Hyderabad were administered a Google Form on their WhatsApp group. The sample consisted of the preservice teachers of the 2018-2020 batch. Among them fifteen were female and nine were male students in the age group of 23 to 31 years. The data was collected at the end of second year examinations during May 2020.
3.2. Validity of the Tool
The checklist consists of items related to starting the lesson; learning during the lesson; feedback during the lesson; at the end of the lesson; and mind frames of the teachers. This is adopted from the Checklist for “Visible Learning” developed by Hattie J (2012) . It consists of 11 items in section—1 of starting the lesson followed by 9 items in section—2 of learning during the lesson. Section—3, feedback during the lesson has 10 items while 7 items assess how teachers end the lesson. Mindframes of the teachers is section—5 and constitutes 8 items. The last section is open-ended which seek suggestions for improvement of the institution in terms of visible learning. Each item has 6 options—Strongly Disagree (SD), Generally Disagree (GD), Partially Disagree (PD), Partially Agree (PA), Generally Agree (GA), and Strongly Agree (SA). The responses on the checklist are scored as given in Table 1 below.
3.3. Research Questions
Research questions proposed for the study are:
1) How satisfied are the preservice teachers with the starting of the lesson?
2) Are the preservice teachers satisfied with the aspects of learning during the lesson?
3) How satisfied are the preservice teachers with the feedback during the lesson?
4) What is the opinion of preservice teachers regarding the aspects of ending the lesson?
5) How satisfied are the preservice teachers with the “mind frames” of their teachers in University College of Education?
6) What are the suggestions for teachers at University College of Education to practice visible teaching learning?
3.4. Analysis of Data
Out of the 100 students, twenty-four students responded to the google form (checklist) and these were used for analysis. The result tables display the opinion of students for each item along with frequency and percentage of responses to each of the type of opinion. The mean score is calculated for each of the item on a six-point scale. The opinion of students on “starting the lesson” is given in Table 2.
It is evident from Table 2, that 83.3% of the learners had visible learning in the institution and experienced classrooms dominated by dialogue. The mean score for this factor is 6.16 which indicates that the students were engaged in discussion and their opinion mattered in the classroom interaction. Other factors of this area scored less mean score and the least one (3.79) is for the factor dominated by student questions. 54.2% of the student sample had teachers who encouraged student questions.
The Opinion of Preservice teachers on “learning during the lesson” is shown in Table 3.
It is clear from Table 3, that the highest mean (5.08) that is, 95.9% of students is for the factor—teacher using “backward design” during the classroom. The all-other factors have close to the highest mean and the least one (4.37) with 91.7% of the students felt that learning was significant and efficient to all students gaining objectives of the lesson.
Table 4 gives the details of the Opinion of Preservice teachers on “feedback during the lesson”.
The highest mean (5.29) for feedback during the lesson is for awareness of the importance of praise. The lowest mean (5.08) is for the concern of how students receive and interpret feedback (Table 5).
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Table 1. Scores against the responses on the items of the checklist.
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Table 2. Opinion of preservice teachers on “starting the lesson”.
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Table 3. Opinion of Preservice teachers on “learning during the lesson”.
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Table 4. Opinion of Preservice teachers on “feedback during the lesson”.
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Table 5. Opinion of Preservice teachers on “end of the lesson”.
Teachers invitation for students to understand learning intentions to learn effectively and attain success criteria scored highest mean (5.33) while the lowest mean (4.83) is for opportunities for assessment of student learning and use these for future decisions about teaching (Table 6).
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Table 6. Opinion of Preservice teachers on “mind frames”.
Teachers’ belief to develop positive relationships in classrooms secured highest mean (5.37). Recognition of teachers as change agents and enjoy challenge to do their best received lowest mean (5.00).
Suggestions for the improvement of the institution are given below.
1) Prioritize teacher student relationship.
2) Teachers are cooperative for student’s development.
3) Qualitative writing of reports may be encouraged in the Enhancing Professional Competencies (EPC)/project work.
4) More practicality needed rather than the lengthy records which lack authenticity.
5) Proper evaluation methods for practical exams needed specifically for EPCs, and school internship.
6) Classes to be conducted regularly.
7) Encourage teacher trainees and build confidence in them to learn.
8) More coordination between students and teachers.
4. Discussion
The analysis of data revealed two aspects. First, the classrooms are dominated by dialogue; students opined that moving from success criteria to learning intentions and activities; praise is significant in teaching-learning process; students understood learning intentions and success criteria for effective learning; and teachers role in developing positive relationships in classrooms. Second, students felt that classrooms are dominated by student questions; teachers provided differentiation to ensure learning by all students; teachers are concerned with how students receive and interpret feedback; teachers created opportunities in student learning and use these interpretations for future decisions on teaching; and teachers are change agents and enjoyed the challenge to do their best in teaching-learning process.
Connections with Already Published Literature
The present study significantly contributes to the existing literature. It connects to the study by:
1) Mansell (2008) with the level of student interaction with the domination of the classrooms by dialogue.
2) Almarode, Fisher, Frey (2021) on effective feedback connects with the present sample’s teachers receiving and interpreting feedback.
3) Nash (2019) on proven teaching strategies connects with creating opportunities for student learning.
4) Fischer et al. (2017) on teacher’s role in classroom’s success and increasing student learning supports the success criteria to learning intentions and activities of the finding of the present study.
5) Nottingham (2017) presents student’s learning challenge, while in the present study teachers face a real challenge which they (teachers) enjoy in doing their best in teaching-learning process.
6) Hattie & Clinton (2011) relate teachers as deliberate change agents connects teachers as change agents in the present study.
5. Findings
The findings of the study are presented below:
1) Starting of the lesson: Classrooms are dominated by dialogue between teachers and students and more precisely with student’s questions.
2) Learning during the lesson: Teachers designed learning experiences and instructional techniques to achieve specific learning goals. Here, all students are ensured to attain learning intentions through differentiation technique.
3) Feedback during the lesson: Teachers are able to differentiate praise and feedback and also how they receive and interpret from the students.
4) End of the lesson: Teachers received all students very well with respect, trust and optimism to learn effectively and attain success criteria. They use interpretation from students assessment for future decisions on learning interactions with students.
5) Mind frames: Teachers developed positive relationships in the classroom and recognized that they (teachers) are responsible for the success/failure in student learning. While doing so, teachers enjoyed the challenge and did their best.
6) Suggestions: Suggestions for visible learning in University College of Education are to minimize the writing (record) work with more practicality and establish authenticity with proper assessment procedures for these practicum records.
6. Suggestions
The study of visible learning can be experimented in high schools with a true experimental design with the purpose of how lessons are planned, student teacher interactions and assessment procedures. This should be followed by collecting the opinion of students about the “mind frames” of teachers.
This study on visible learning will go in a long way to provide student’s achievement motivation and promote self-learning (self-directed learners), that is, the highest level of significant learning experiences domain (Fink, 2013) . The policy may be made for District Education Officers (DEOs) or Principals to scrutinize teacher’s lesson plans, learning experiences of students and assessment procedures to ensure effective learning.
7. Conclusion
The study concludes the following:
1) Classrooms are dominated by dialogue and student questions.
2) Backward design—success criteria are established for learning intentions and classroom activities.
3) Practice differentiation to ensure learning.
4) Praise is distinguished from feedback.
5) Teachers showed concern for how students receive and interpret feedback.
6) Students have clarity on learning intentions for effective learning.
7) Teachers recognize their role to develop positive relationships in classrooms.
8) Teachers created opportunities and use these interpretations for future decisions on teaching.
9) Teachers are change agents and they enjoyed the challenge to do their best in teaching-learning activities.
The dominant scenario of the institution is that the learning is happening (visible learning) inside by way of effective planning of teaching-learning processes for learning intentions, success criteria, differentiated learning strategies, significant praise and interpretation of feedback, engagement to learn, developing positive relationships in classrooms.
However, the institution is concerned about reducing the paperwork, recording authentic experiences by students and innovative strategies for assessing practicum.
Therefore, professional interaction and dedication help teachers better comprehend their impact on their pupils. They also help teachers build an evaluation mindset that will enable them to join the elite group of highly effective teachers, to which we should all be motivated.
The participants of the study are preservice teachers (students pursuing Bachelor of Education programme) at University College of Education, Osmania University, Hyderabad. The readily available tool from Hattie’s Visible Learning Inside is adopted for the study instead of devising own tool by the author.
Acknowledgements
Authors thank the support and services of teacher educators in ensuring effective learning in the University College of Education. We are also thankful to the preservice teachers for their prompt and honest responses to the aspects on the visible learning tool.