Hello and thanks for listening to Teacher magazine, I’m Rebecca Vukovic.
How do you address persistent teaching dilemmas in your classroom? You know those problems I’m talking about – the one that you think about when you’re driving to work in the morning, or when you’re taking a shower or blow drying your hair. My guest today is Professor Brianna Kennedy, joint director of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Transformative Change in Schools. Along with her co-author Amy Murphy, Brianna has written a book that provides teachers with a practical 2-stage process for cracking really challenging problems in the classroom, based on years of research and classroom observations. Brianna is in Australia this month as part of a collaboration with the University of Newcastle’s research centre and I sat down with her to talk about the 2-stage process in detail – how teachers can use it to tackle challenging problems, and the impact it has on student learning and engagement. Let’s jump in.
Rebecca Vukovic: Professor Brianna Kennedy, thanks for joining Teacher magazine.
Brianna Kennedy: I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
RV: First of all, welcome to Australia. How are you enjoying your time here so far?
BK: This is my first trip to Australia and I am just loving it. I'm loving the environment. I'm loving the people. It's been really, really fun so far. I'm very happy to be here.
RV: Fantastic. And of course, we're here today to talk about some of the ideas explored in your book, Frame Shifting for Teachers: Developing a Conscious Approach to Solving Persistent Teaching Dilemmas. Before we get into that though, can you introduce yourself to Teacher listeners by telling us a little bit about yourself and your career?
BK: Yeah. So, I actually grew up in Southern California in the United States and did my teacher training there; I was a teacher myself in Los Angeles for 7 years at the middle school level. So, in the United States, we have a level of schooling that basically includes the final year of primary in Australia and the first 2 years of secondary and we call that ‘middle school’ – the students are between 11 and 14 years old, early adolescents. And I like to say you're either a middle school teacher or you're not. You know, it either really resonates with you to work with early adolescents or not. And I would say I'm definitely a middle school teacher in my bones, although my training was in primary education.
And so, as I was teaching in Los Angeles I was in a very diverse situation with students from different ethnic backgrounds, a lot of students living in poverty and it was a very underserved area. And for part of my career, I also worked with students who had been expelled from school for behaviour; so, they'd been pushed out of the regular school system and I taught in a special school for those students. And so, I found myself thinking quite a lot about how teachers and schools and school systems can best support students who need the most support for a variety of reasons and often don't receive the support that they need from the system itself. And so from there I decided to go back and get my PhD and have been in academia since then.
In terms of my academic career, I began working at a university in Southern California and then moved to Florida and so a lot of the material in the book came from a partnership with schools in Florida, the Florida context, so the southeastern United States. And then from there I moved to the Netherlands. So I worked actually at Utrecht University in the Netherlands for 7 years and have been now at the University of Glasgow for about 18 months. So I'm still kind of adjusting to the cultural context there and learning the school system and getting myself settled.
It's been quite an interesting and windy road with a lot of different contexts and sort of national school systems and a lot of different experiences, and those have fed into my book, and my book actually also is now continuing to shape some of the activities that I'm doing in those different international contexts, which is really exciting.
Professor Brianna Kennedy. Image supplied.
RV: Yeah, and I want to ask you about your book now because it provides teachers with a practical 2-stage process for cracking really challenging problems in the classroom, and it's based on years of research and classroom observations. Of course, we're going to delve into those 2 stages in the episode, but before we do, can you tell me a little bit about the research and those classroom observations that you did for this book? Where did they take place and who was involved?
BK: Yes. So, the book is really kind of a consolidation and a synthesis of multiple different experiences that my co-author Amy Murphy and I have had as teachers and as researchers and as sort of school-based professional development facilitators, folks that oversee field experiences for new pre-service teachers. We've been in these various capacities and have sort of synthesised the different things that we've learned about as we've written this book.
So, in terms of the actual research studies that have fed into the ideas in this book and the classroom observations and the interviews that have gone into that, those have been done in different areas of the US. I started with my own PhD work in Southern California; and in that work really it was from there that I started to develop some of the frameworks that are now appearing in Frame Shifting. But my thinking about that evolved over time as I also continued to do research then in the Southeast with students and teachers there, and those also involved classroom observations and interviews in a range of contexts in that in the southeastern geographical region.
And so, it was from those research opportunities that we then were able to get involved in a partnership with the school, with teachers, and really try out some of these ideas that then became the book. And so through that partnership we also continued to do observations and interviews, but that was then in the context of really pretty intensive professional development facilitation – so it wasn't only about research as researchers, but we were then working directly with teachers more in a professional development facilitator capacity and that was kind of giving us the specific examples that are then presented in Frame Shifting.
RV: Yeah, and I want to talk about some of those specific examples because we know that teachers face many persistent challenges in the classroom. What are some of the common dilemmas that teachers have shared with you? What are some of the areas that they need some more support in?
BK: So pretty consistently across the different contexts that I've been in, teachers – especially new teachers – tend to struggle a bit at times with classroom management. So, we hear that quite a bit. So, you know, I would say one of the ideas presented in the book is how classroom management also relates to student-teacher relationships and also relates to curriculum and instruction. But if a teacher doesn't feel confident in managing the class, it's hard to get to any of those other dimensions of practice, right? So, we think classroom management is something that a lot of teachers we hear really struggle with or have questions about or challenges with and seems to also change over time as age gaps increase between teachers and students. As teachers go through their career and students become different, that also can be a challenge for teachers.
So, we also hear a lot of teachers talking about student engagement – How do I get the kids engaged in what we're doing in the class? And even post-COVID, how do we get kids to come to school and stay in class? There are a lot of conversations with teachers around students with additional support needs. So that could be due to factors related to poverty, but also learning disabilities or various neurodivergences and differences, and things that teachers are needing to be able to navigate in mainstream classrooms now. So, we're asking teachers to differentiate instruction with a range of different learners, whereas in the past we might be taking those learners out of a regular classroom. And so we hear a lot of teachers really asking about, ‘OK, how do I how do I actually do this? How do I actually create an environment where I've got, you know, my different groups going and I'm able to give every student what they need and do that all at the same time?’ That seems to be a pretty persistent challenge for folks as well.
RV: Yeah, so let's start talking about how they actually tackle these problems in the classroom, because the first stage of the 2-stage process encourages teachers to adopt different ‘habits of mind’. What does this mean exactly? And then also, what does this look like in practice?
BK: Yeah, so the book is really targeting experienced teachers who have a persistent dilemma, right? Something that they think about as they're driving to work in the morning, or they think about it when they're, you know, taking a shower, blow drying their hair, whatever it is that they're doing. It's on their mind, it's with them and they kind of circle back to it at various times and think, ‘oh gosh … how do I deal with this? How do I do this?’ So, we call it a persistent dilemma, and this book is really targeting that situation.
So, we start right away in the book asking teachers to name what that dilemma is and try to make it as specific as possible. And then once teachers have developed this sort of statement or question that they want to answer – you know, ‘how do I engage the students when they when they come into class for the first 10 minutes?’ something like this. This is the example that we use throughout the book and it's actually an example from a teacher that we worked with who we've named in the book Teresa Nash… she's a real teacher and this was her real dilemma and she's still good friend and sort of on board with the work that we're doing now and the way that her story has been portrayed. But she's also a good consultant in terms of helping us think about how to take the work into the next sort of phases.
And so this was her persistent dilemma. So, she phrased this as a driving question, you know, ‘How can I do this? How can I get the students engaged when they come in?’ And then what we have learned through our research and our work – and specifically in the partnership with the school that we were working with from which the book has come – we've learned that having sort of certain dispositions and beliefs are an important first step before tackling the dilemma, and we call those ‘habits of mind’. And we didn't make up the term ‘habits of mind’, that's floating around in various places in the world, people talk about habits of mind in various ways. What we have done with the term though is specifically applied it to 3 sort of ways of thinking that are research-informed and also practice-informed, that are important to have in place before continuing to try to solve the problem using the second stage in the process.
And so there are these 3 habits of mind – my co-author Amy is so much better than I am at making terms accessible and she's laughing at me because we use these terms for the habits of mind that are very academic sounding. And we were under a deadline for the book and we were going around and around … is there another thing we could call these so that they're easier to understand? What could we name them? And finally we kind of just gave up and stuck with the very academic sounding names. So apologies for that, they do have very academic sounding names, but we find that they're also pretty precise and that was important to us as well.
So, the first habit of mind is the habit of personal attribution – and what that means is that we ask teachers to think about the problem, the dilemma, in a way that frames it as something that they have control over, right? So we ask them to think about how to make it proximal to them rather than something that's distal to them, something that they can't actually control.
So, an example might be if a teacher says, ‘well, my students are living in poverty and I can't, I can't teach them’. That is a distal problem because teachers cannot solve poverty; no matter how good any particular process might be, that's not going to happen. So, if we then think, OK, how do we then engage this idea of personal attribution? A teacher might then say, ‘well, the students come to school hungry and that's a problem’. And that can then become something that teachers might have, or at least the school at the school level, schools might have more impact over.
So, we try to move from a distal space to a proximal space. With the habit of personal attribution, we also talk about how teachers take personal responsibility for solving the problem – so it's important to also be committed to being the one who's going to make this problem better, and we call that the habit of personal attribution.
And then the second habit of mind is the habit of asset identification. With that habit of mind, teachers are looking for what is strong and good and positive about what students and families and communities bring that they can then build upon. And it's meant to answer to what in research literature we often read about as ‘deficit thinking’ – that tends to be an approach that teachers might go to if they feel like they don't have efficacy to solve a problem. So, things like, you know, ‘the kids don't want to learn’ or ‘the parents don't care about education’. Those are very deficit-oriented claims and they usually come innocently from a space of not feeling like the teacher can do anything about those things. And so that then loops back into the habit of personal attribution, right, so they kind of work together.
But with the habit of asset identification, we offer activities where teachers can really dig into, OK, what are the strengths that the students have? What's the evidence of those strengths? So, when we started to talk with Teresa about the students that were coming into class and not working, and we said, ‘OK, what's actually going on? Tell us more about what's going on’. And she would describe students who were very lively and very vibrant and asking a lot of questions about what they were supposed to do. And that could be very annoying if you feel like you've already said 5 times what the students are supposed to do. But what we then think about with the habit of asset identification is, OK, those students clearly want to succeed because if they didn't, they wouldn't be asking those questions; and that's an asset. So, if you have students that really want to succeed, you can then build on that in a way that allows you to do more than just focusing on what they're not doing or what they're not capable of accomplishing yet.
And then the third habit of mind is the habit of deliberate interpretation. And this one is … we find when we've worked with teachers with the book so far, this is the one that they point out as being the most important to them – which we thought was interesting because we think it's also the most academic and complicated. So, we were thinking, ‘oh, nobody's going to get this. We think this is important, but this is going to be a stretch’, but in fact this is the one that they find to be most useful. In the habit of deliberate interpretation we talk about the sort of chain effect that happens when any of us receive input through our senses, right? So, all day long, all the time we're seeing things, we're hearing things, we're touching things. We're receiving this sort of empirical evidence from the world, and we use it to interpret what's happening. And this process happens all day, every day, for all of us, right? And so, what we do in the habit of deliberate interpretation is we sort of break down that chain of events.
So, when we first started talking to Ms Nash about her dilemma and she was saying to us, ‘the students are unruly. They don't care about learning. They come in and they just, they're just dismissive, they just don't care about what they're doing’. And then we said, ‘OK, but what do you actually observe?’ So, in this habit of deliberate interpretation we separate out observation and interpretation and judgment and then the decision that you make. So we break that into 4 actual steps, which usually happen so fast – you receive information and then you react. But we break that into actually 4 different things.
And so we said to her, ‘OK, well, what do you actually observe?’ She says, ‘well, they come into class and they don't want to learn’. OK, but what do you actually see? What do you actually see? What do you actually hear? And then she started to say, ‘well, they come in and they're talking loudly, and they walk around the room, and they don't walk directly to a desk, but they walk around instead and then they finally sit down. And sometimes they don't have the notebook that they're supposed to have, and sometimes they do. And if they do, then they will look at the screen where the assignment is and they will then say “Miss, what am I supposed to do?” even though the directions are on the screen?’
OK, that is an observation – now we know exactly what the students did. And so if we then break that observation apart from the interpretation that ‘the students don't want to learn’ and the judgment that they don't care enough about education, we can actually start to think about what else might be going on in that situation. So we have this observation; this is what they're doing. But instead of interpreting that they don't want to learn, what else might we interpret from this set of facts? So now we can start to think about, ‘well, do they know where to sit? Is there a seating chart? Do they know where the jotters are? Are they always in the same place? Are they accessible? Are they having trouble finding theirs in the stack? When they sit down and they look at the screen, what's actually on the screen? Might they be legitimately confused, even though you think that the assignment is clear?’ And as we started to ask those kinds of questions and we really looked at the slides that were on the screen, Ms Nash had put so much information on the slides in different colours, with different pictures, using words the students didn't know that we can now start to think about curriculum and instruction as a dimension of classroom management. Rather than the students don't want to learn, the students can't actually access the learning.
And so this habit allows us to create a little bit of space between what we're seeing and hearing and what we're then interpreting and judging to be able to think differently about the dilemma. So the whole process is about getting unstuck, right? And so we're trying to create some space that allows teachers to think differently. And if it's a persistent dilemma and you've been thinking about it in the shower and on your way to work every day, probably you've gone over some of these things in your head. And so, you know, what we're trying to do with this process is to find entry points to then think about that differently, do something different. And so these habits of mind are really what we found very integral into then being able to make different choices and different decisions and see different options with the same dilemma that you've been thinking about over and over for some time.
Coming up, Professor Brianna Kennedy will run us through the second stage of the 2-stage process, and she’ll give an update on what happened next in Ms Nash’s classroom.
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RV: The second stage asks teachers to position their problem within one of 3 domains – relationships, curriculum and instruction, and classroom management. Can you run me through how that works exactly?
BK: Yeah, so these 3 domains, we call them ‘the domains of teaching’ – and there's no magic to them, it's just a framework to describe what happens in classrooms. So, if you walk into basically any classroom anywhere, higher education, right, you take a snapshot of what's happening at that moment – you will see something related to each of these 3 domains: they're all 3 happening, all the time, in any learning context. And so even when I am teaching my preservice teachers and I'm giving a lecture and I talk about this content and I say, OK, if you were to take a snapshot of me giving this lecture right now, we can think about relationships … even in a lecture hall of 80 people, I might not know everybody's name, but do I have rapport with them, right? Have I developed that rapport in specific ways? And in a lecture context in higher education, that might be through humour, or it might be through, you know, just setting up the class in a way that is very user-friendly. These are all ways that that professors can engage students. So that's always happening. There's always some kind of classroom management component, whether that's, you know, in a K-12 setting or in higher education ... so, what are you supposed to do for the week? How are you supposed to do it? And then and then what happens to it? So those classroom management questions. And there's always curriculum (the content of what you're teaching) and there's always instruction (how you're teaching it).
And so, these 3 domains of teaching, there's no magic to them. They're just meant to describe what happens in a classroom. And the reason that we use them in this approach is because often with a persistent dilemma a teacher has probably unknowingly, because we don't walk around talking about the 3 domains of teaching, but they're thinking about it in a particular way that relates to one of these domains.
So for Ms Nash, if we come back to her example, and she's saying, ‘the kids, they come in the class. They're unruly. They don't sit down. They don't care about learning’. OK, well, why is that happening? ‘Well, because, you know, my rules aren't strict enough and they're not quiet. They're not following the rules…’ And so, if you listen to her talk, she's positioning that as a classroom management problem. And so that is the first thing that we ask teachers to do in this second stage. So, after the habits of mind in the first stage, we now move on to ‘OK, which of the 3 domains are you naturally thinking about your dilemma as being as being related to?’
And then the first thing that we do after we've identified which of the domains – and we do this through activities and checklists and tables. So the book is actually meant to walk teachers through the process through interactive activities, and then we have those also available in a free study guide, so teachers can then go and look and have like full-page sized opportunities to fill these out on their own. And so, we offer questions to help them identify which domain they're starting in.
And then what we ask them to do is think about sort of a metaphorical frame with their driving question sort of in the top of the frame (and we use this actual image in the book as well); and think about zooming that frame in so that it just captures that one domain, just looking at classroom management. And we use a diagram, it's a 3-way Venn diagram so it's got each of the domains in one circle and they kind of overlap and intersect. And we think about the frame starts out sort of broad as around all 3 domains and maybe you're not sure how you're thinking about it, and then as we go through this process of asking ‘which domain does this sit in?’, you can imagine it's kind of zooming in and just focusing on one.
So now we're focusing on classroom management in the case of Ms Nash, and we dive into that more deeply before we think about the other 2, and we consider what other aspects of that original domain might she not be thinking about yet? So, it might be clear that she sees the students are not, you know, sitting in their seats. But sometimes it's a very obvious question to ask something like, ‘well, is there a seating chart? Are you consistent about the seating chart?’ And it could be that the teacher says, ‘well, actually, yeah, there's a seating chart, but I'm not very consistent about it and so the students are allowed to sit anywhere’, ‘Well, OK, so we can think more about if you don't want them to sit anywhere, then maybe that's something to explore’.
But the real shift tends to happen when we then ask teachers to move the frame – sort of now metaphorically again, right – move the frame from classroom management to one of the other domains of teaching. So now, after we've talked about the one that's more obvious to the teacher because they're naturally thinking about it from that domain, now we move to another one.
So now with Ms Nash, let's move the frame over to contain this sort of … Venn diagram circle of relationships, right? So now let's think about relationships. So now your frame is focused in on relationships. ‘OK, they don't come in. They don't sit down and get to work. But how well do you know them? How well do you know them as people? How well do you know about what they care about outside of class? Do you know their families? How well do you know their families? Have you connected with their families at all? Might that be something that's worth exploring?’ So, we start to ask questions about relationships. We also ask about students’ relationships with each other, right? So, if the students are talking to each other and you don't want them to be when they come into class, ‘do they have appropriate sort of activities that are social in nature (especially with early adolescents), that allow them to interact with each other and is that structured in a way that makes everyone feel safe and like they belong?’. So, we start to ask questions like that because then we can think about how the relationships in the classroom might be coming to bear on the dilemma that we used to think was only about classroom management.
And then we do the same thing with the third domain, and in this example it's curriculum and instruction. And so now we focus in, the same driving question – the driving question is still ‘the students don't come in and get to work’, right? But now we're going to think about this domain of curriculum and instruction. So, ‘what are you asking the students to learn about the curriculum? Is it something that relates to their lives? Is it something that they understand the meaning for? Do they know how they're going to use this in the future? Do they know how it connects to what they learned last week and what they're going to learn in the future? Are there ways that you could tighten that up maybe that might help them to find reasons and ways to focus in when they come in the class?’
And then we can talk about instruction as well. So, in this example, the instruction being used is sort of a warm-up activity where students are meant to come in and independently interact with something that's on the screen that's projected for them, which in Ms Nash's case was a quick question that they then answered. We can then ask about, ‘well, does the question that you're asking connect to the next activity that you're going to do? Do the students from day-to-day see a reason why they do this warm-up activity in terms of what they're going to learn? Do you give them feedback about what they learn, right? Is there a natural reason for them to complete this that they understand? And do you incorporate that into the other activities that you do with them?’ Whether that's through formative assessment or summative assessment or even just, you know, short conversations they're meant to have with each other after a certain period of time when they've engaged with the question you've asked, ‘how does the instructional piece fit into the overall dilemma that you've brought to the table?’
And so, it’s by moving your frame around across these 3 domains that teachers start to think a bit differently about the dilemma as they had originally posed it. And that's the frame shifting approach. It's the habits of mind and the moving through the 3 domains. And you can probably imagine how as we're moving through those 3 domains it can be the case that a teacher might then kind of go back to the idea ‘well, yeah, the students just, they just don't, they don't want to interact with each other. They don't know how to do that’. And we can slip back into a deficit perspective where the teacher feels like they don't have the power or the efficacy to control what's happening. And then we cycle back through the habits of mind and say, ‘OK, let's look at this activity again that we did when we were developing these dispositions because it's going to be important for you to then build upon as you're thinking about how to then take some action based on what you're learning as you shift across these 3 domains of teaching’.
RV: Yeah, Brianna, cause that's exactly what I was going to ask you next. In fact, my question's 2-pronged. So firstly, can this same 2-stage process be applied to all types of dilemmas in the classroom? But then exactly what you just said, once they have cracked that problem or that dilemma, do teachers need to revisit the process to ensure the problem doesn't creep back in?
BK: Yeah. I mean, it would be a very bold statement to say, ‘this 2-stage approach can solve any dilemma that you have at any time, at any stage of your career’. So, I won't be so bold as to make that audacious claim. But I will say that I do think that any classroom dilemma – so something that relates specifically to what's happening between teacher and students in the classroom – that there's something here that can improve that dilemma, I do think that that's the case, if we're talking about what's happening in the 3 domains of teaching, right? So, if we're talking about something that maybe pertains to a different aspect of what's happening in school, then we would have to think beyond this 2-stage approach. But anything that's happening as part of the teaching process between teacher and student in the class, I think yes, I think there's something that could be had here that would speak to a teacher who has a dilemma related to that and help them to be able to make shifts.
I see this 2-stage process as being very powerfully coupled with an inquiry cycle where teachers are also collecting some evidence of the dilemma that they have and then seeing how that evidence might change as they are selecting particular ‘teacher moves’ to address what they're seeing. And we don't write specifically about teacher inquiry in the book, but that's a very powerful combination that we think will then indeed sort of prevent a creep kind of situation. Because teachers are then in a position to collect their own evidence sort of pre- and post-, which is very powerful and likely to continue to be able to fuel future practice.
I don't think this process is necessarily like you're never going to have another teaching dilemma ever in your life, right? But I do think it provides some disposition – so these habits of mind are stances that teachers then take that are likely to prevent certain other types of problems in the future. So, I do think that it can be useful to go back through at any stage in your career things that you've learned before that you know you might have forgotten about that you can use again. But I also think that sort of integrating some of these ways of thinking into practice can provide long-term approaches that will prevent some future dilemmas from occurring.
RV: So, Brianna, what happened to Ms Nash?
BK: Yeah, so Ms Nash … so now we've walked through the 2 stages of the frame shifting approach and we focused on each of these different domains. And what we did with Frame Shifting is we actually wrote the book that we wished we had when we were actually working with Ms Nash. And so, in the book – in the middle of the book, the second part – we actually offer a synthesis of current research that identifies different ‘teacher moves’, different things teachers can actually do that are that are evidence based, that address some of these common dilemmas that we've heard teachers talk about. And so, we didn't have that second part when we were working with Ms Nash, but we did include what we learned from Ms Nash as we looked at the literature and as we wrote that section.
And so as we talked with Ms Nash about which kind of moves we thought might make sense, and we were looking at some specific research with her then, which is when we realised we actually needed the synthesis (that we then wrote later), she identified different moves in each of the 3 domains and then we had to kind of talk about: OK, does it make sense to try to do all of these at the same time? Some of them might go together or do we want to maybe start one at a time? And so, some of the teacher moves that she selected … In the domain of relationships, she decided that she would stand outside her door when the students came in because that was the time in the class when she was experiencing her dilemma. It kind of had a 2-pronged effect – she was then greeting the students one by one, which developed her relationships with them, and also helped her to remind them about what they were to do next. And so there was a classroom management piece that was also involved and so that standing by the door greeting students, sort of set the students up through their interaction with her, not only to continue to develop their bond with her, which was motivating in terms of engagement, but also to remind them about what they needed to do when they came in the classroom. So that was one move that she did.
She also realised as we were sort of talking through different aspects of the domain of relationships that she didn't know their families very well, and that when she called home, it was only with bad news – it was only with something that the child hadn't done right, or it was only with something that was a behaviour issue. And so, she kind of came to the conclusion herself that, well, actually, probably that's not great. Like, probably the parents actually want to know the good things that are happening, and probably the kids would appreciate that as well. And so, she decided to rotate through a list of students and just each week call 5 parents with good news – one observation of something positive that had happened. And she noticed a change almost immediately in terms of the student’s engagement. So, by communicating with their parents about the good things that were happening, the parents were more receptive to hearing from her – because it wasn't always bad news, which was important – and she sort of shortened the distance right between school and home, which also had the impact of having students be more focused when they came in. So that was something in the domain of relationships that also came to bear on the dilemma.
In terms of classroom management, we talked a bit about it a bit earlier in terms of like making sure that the seating chart was solid. She also realised that the students had an indefinite amount of time to complete the warm up – so that was a classroom management piece that she hadn't thought about. So, she introduced explicit timing … she just used a timer, and the students had a certain amount of time to complete, and they were aware of how much time that was because they could see it visually and so that helped them to manage their own engagement with the question.
And then, in terms of the curriculum and instruction, we asked questions about whether the warm up could be something that the students knew more about than what she was asking them. So, we looked at her early slides and when we first started working with her. It was really interesting because one of the first warm-up questions she had was about Antarctica Day (which I didn't know there was such a thing as Antarctica Day, but apparently there was), the subject she was teaching was Earth Science. So, the question was about Antarctica Day and the 5 minerals that you could find in Antarctica, and could you please rate them 1-5 from, you know, 1 being your favourite? And the students were like, ‘What? What is this about?’ And so, the content was so far removed from what they understood or what was naturally motivating that we just worked with her to find things that were more relatable and also things that were then going to connect with what they were going to do that day. We also saw that the questions she was asking in the warm up had nothing to do with what the lesson was going to be. And these were not things she had thought at all about in terms of her dilemma. And so, she made those changes and that also had a big impact.
So, we started to sort of work with her on simplifying the amount of information that was on the slide, making sure that the words were accessible and also making sure that she was making a connection between what was being asked of them at the beginning and what she was going to move into. And then she started to offer more feedback through the journals, and so the kids started to know like ‘she's going to look at this and what I'm going to do matters…’. And so those are some teacher moves that she then implemented that started to then shift her dilemma and help her to solve it. So, it was very gratifying and she's still, even to this day, it's been quite some years now, she's still quite excited about this work. So, we were very proud.
RV: Yeah, I think there's a lot of practical strategies in there that teachers can apply to their own practice. But Brianna, before I let you go, I understand that you're here in Australia to work with the University of Newcastle and to see their Quality Teaching Rounds in action. I'm wondering, what have you learned so far about the education research landscape here in Australia that you plan to take with you to Scotland?
BK: So, I'm pretty early in my trip – I'm actually excited because I still get to go to another city later in the week to witness the Quality Teaching Rounds and so I'm super excited about what I'm going to learn there. In terms of my impressions so far, I find some commonalities across the various contexts that I have worked and where I have colleagues, which I think is very interesting.
One of the things that stands out is – those of us that are working with teachers and supporting teachers and thinking about teacher learning – how we can really empower teachers as agents and professionals who are needing to make moment to moment decisions for the benefit of the kids that are in front of them … teachers find themselves in these contexts where they need to make sense of this sort of constantly evolving landscape, where policies might change, where materials might change, but teachers need to be empowered to be able to make decisions about which instructional approach they need to use at a particular moment, which part of policy is going to be relevant at a particular time with a particular kid. And really the drive to help teachers be professionals and be prepared to be professionals and work with policy makers to think about how to provide teachers the time and autonomy to do that.
I've really seen that be a core question and a core dilemma across different international contexts that I think is pretty important for us to take up. So, I've been thinking a lot about that in my time here so far and I'm curious to see what we might be able to think about across contexts as well in terms of addressing that, because that's something that teachers in Scotland are also thinking about.
RV: Yeah, fantastic. Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip. It's been so lovely chatting with you today. Professor Brianna Kennedy, thanks for sharing your work and your insights with Teacher magazine.
BK: Thank you very much. Thanks again.
That’s all for this episode. The links to the study guide and the book mentioned in today’s episode are linked in the transcript over at our website, teachermagazine.com. You can find out more about Brianna’s work over on Instagram – the handle to search for is @solveteachingdilemmas. Please remember to hit the follow button to make sure you don’t miss out on any new episodes, and please leave a rating or a review while you’re there because it helps other people to find the podcast.
References
Kennedy, B. L., & Murphy, A. S. (2024). Frame Shifting for Teachers: Developing a Conscious Approach to Solving Persistent Teaching Dilemmas. Routledge.
Kennedy, B. L., & Murphy, A. S. (2024). Study Guide for Frame Shifting for Teachers: Developing a Conscious Approach to Solving Persistent Teaching Dilemmas. Routledge. https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod/9781032281568/Study%20Guide_Frame%20Shifting%20for%20Teachers.pdf
How do you currently approach challenging problems in your classroom? On your own or with a group of colleagues, identify a persistent dilemma that you keep circling back to.
Thinking about the 2-stage process outlined by Brianna Kennedy, how could this help you in approaching the challenge in a different way?
