When we describe teaching, we typically describe it as an Art. There is a lot of merit in this in that unlike medical procedures, there are rarely agreed upon prescribed procedures to teach students. Educators need to be able to adjust in the moment, read cues and change direction on the fly. I firmly believe that at its core, teaching is a creative endeavor. 


A concern, however, in thinking of teaching as simply an Art, is that it may lead educator’s to believe that they can only learn through their own practice and that what they feel and believe is all they need and that research or other evidence is not applicable to them. By simply claiming that teaching is an Art, we do not always utilize best practices that are supported by evidence. We go with our gut at the expense of large pools of evidence that we have collected as a larger group. 


As an example of this let’s look at the Collaborative Inquiry cycle which has been shown to be effective in an educational context. As a reminder, Collaborative Inquiry is a learning model where educators come together to identity a problem of practice and create a plan that is designed to improve student achievement. Collaborative Inquiry is essentially a scientific process where we:


There is a lot of science in teaching. Sciences are processes that are informed by observations, experimentation and the gathering of evidence to inform our next decisions. This should be a core component for any good educator. We need to understand the class in front of us and adapt based on that data. Similarly, we ought to be able to leverage educational practices that have been shown to be effective in a wider setting rather than simply take guesses at what might work. So there is a blend of local data collection and analysis, as well as large-scale meta analysis such as the work by John Hattie.


John Hattie in both Visible Learning and the sequel showed that there are some teaching strategies that are more effective than others. Take something as simple as testing. There are those that believe that high stakes testing is necessary for students to learn because it creates a pressure on them to study in order to do well. Others may believe that these are unnecessary since there are a variety of ways to show learning, and outside of academia, high stakes testing is not a part of our lives. 


A closer look into the research shows that there is some merit to both sides here. High stakes testing has been shown to be detrimental to students in the long run. However, testing itself does have a lot of benefit as retrieval practice has been shown to help improve student learning. Rather than thinking of this as an either/or scenario, we can refine our approach to show that testing is good, but if the value of those tests are too high we negate the benefits. As such, a more nuanced approach is the inclusion of lower-stakes testing. This is where teaching moves from being more than a feeling, to an informed approach.  


All this being said, I don’t think that teaching is entirely a scientific progress either. There are no step-by-step procedures to ensure that a diverse class of students all reach the same understanding of photosynthesis or the pythagorean theorem. However, I would argue that teachers who have taught these topics refine their approach overtime when they find methods that work better. Good teachers let their creativity shine. They build strong relationships with their students and with the material they are teaching and that is definitely not something that can be reduced to a science, nor would we want it to be. Teachers need the autonomy to adapt and modify their pedagogy to suit the learners they have right in front of them. 


If we consider teaching to be an Art, then it’s an Art that needs to be informed by Science. Collective evidence of impact, understanding our students, building relationships and staying up to date on emergent evidence supported pedagogy are all key components of being a good educator.