Do you think that more teaching experience means better teaching quality? By reviewing the literature and the available evidence, the answer is not straightforward. Some studies show that this mostly applies only for the first years of teaching. This means that the best teachers are not always the most experienced teachers.
Why Experience Isn’t Everything
How is this possible? Maybe it is not just about accumulating practice, but ‘deliberate practice’ towards specific improvements and goals that matter (Ericsson et al., 1993). To put it simply, it is not just practice but practice the right thing!
The Role of Feedback in Professional Development
Ιn order for teachers to find out whether they are practicing the right thing, feedback is crucial. Feedback is what helps teachers to find out whether what they do works well and how to improve! Experienced teachers may not necessarily receive constructive feedback throughout their teaching years.
Feedback vs. Experience: What Drives Improvement?
This means that gaining experience is not enough for improvement. Feedback can support professional improvement. Feedback tools can help any professional collect information about their practice, reflect on the feedback received and plan the next steps for their professional development. In that way, feedback tools can help teachers to identify areas for improvement in their teaching practice. Based on the feedback, teachers could experiment by using new teaching strategies in the selected areas of improvement.
Collecting and Using Feedback Effectively
Teachers could use tools to seek feedback from students (e.g. student surveys) or peers (e.g. observations). What is more, they could use feedback tools to track their progress of the professional learning journey. For example, after trying a new technique for three months, a teacher could ask again for feedback on their new elements of their teaching.
How We’re Supporting Teacher Development
In the Research and Development team at Evidence Based Education, we are currently developing new feedback tools to support teachers gain insights into their practice and improve elements of it. These tools will be released in autumn!
In the meantime, you can get personalised feedback focusing either on your teaching practice overall or on specific elements of it. Start by creating a Great Teaching Toolkit: Starter Account and trying a student survey here.
References
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review ,100(3), 363–406.
