Mullingar Community College teachers at Harvard University

By J Kevin Nugent

Harvard University is at the frontier of academic and intellectual discovery, so that educators and scientists and policymakers come here to learn, to conduct research, to teach, work, and grow. I have been fortunate over the years to have met many who have come to the university from countries across the globe, but I have just had the singular pleasure of meeting 12 Irish educators from my own home town of Mullingar.

They came to study the Data Wise Project, with director, Professor Kathryn Boudett. They also invited me to discuss some of my own research in the field of child psychology during their visit.

Led by Joe Rayfus, the team included Sabrina Barry, Sheila Corcoran, Shane Dalton, Chloe Dolphin, Emma Farrell, Kevin Hynes, Debbie Lowe, Jason McKernan, Elvira Zielinska, Colin Whyte and Antoinette Wims. They joined nearly four centuries of students and scholars who come to Harvard in the pursuit of truth, knowledge, and a better world.

Dedication and Commitment

Meeting the Mullingar Community College teachers to discuss core themes in child development and learning, I was forcibly struck by their dedication, their intellectual curiosity, as well as their openness to new ideas. The spirit of service to their students as a motivational force was also palpable. They believe that strong relationships provide a foundation for student engagement, belonging, and, ultimately, learning.

Strong relationships with teachers and school staff can dramatically enhance students’ level of motivation and therefore promote learning. Indeed, research confirms the principle that students who have access to good relationships with teachers are more academically engaged, have stronger social skills, and experience more positive behavior.

Strong relationships between adults and students may include: expressing care, challenging growth, providing support, sharing power, and expanding possibilities. Importantly, these relationship-building actions must be done with an equity lens, one that supports positive racial, cultural, and ethnic identity development. From the point of view of these Mullingar Community College teachers, equity is understood to be central to the work of school improvement.

Teaching as a collaborative process.

The primary goal of their visit to the Harvard Graduate School of Education was to study the Data Wise approach to teaching and learning. They came to explore collaborative education systems designed to improve teaching and learning and, in turn, to reflect on their own education practice. The importance of teachers and staff developing trust in each other and supporting each other at every level is at the heart of the Data Wise approach.

In fact, they planned this mid-term study at Harvard – at their own expense, I later learned – to foster the kind of trust and collegiality that would enable them, as faculty, to improve their teaching and learn through evidence-based analysis. Beyond the didactic sessions at the university, they had the opportunity to visit the Boston school system, allowing them to observe how education is managed and delivered in the United States and how educators are addressing the demand for quality schools, the approaches they are taking, what is working best for them, and why.

One of the core principles of the Data Wise Project approach is that collaboration between teachers is an essential aspect of their professional practice that will drive forward positive change and help transform modern education in order to make it more beneficial for the learners. Working in teams, the goal is not only to use data to improve teaching and learning, but to develop an approach to data-informed decision making that is not overwhelming. Practising wise meeting facilitation and participation with a relentless focus on evidence is central to the work of school improvement.

Beyond Memorisation and Test Scores

I was also impressed by their stance towards learning and how students learn. In my day in Mullingar, we were student consumers of teachers’ knowledge. Classrooms had little to offer by way of encouraging thinking. Instead there were classroom routines designed to keep order, while we, the students, were passive except for the routine question and answer sessions. Rote memorisation and learning by drill dominated classroom practice, while a climate of fear permeated our lives in the classroom. We thought about what the teacher was telling us, we wrote it down, we tried to understand it in the moment or studied it later. Then we were asked to memorise it and apply it to an exam situation.

The Mullingar Community College teachers I met at Harvard value the development of knowledge and skills that go beyond test scores. They believe that intelligence is a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life – the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge. They do not believe that test scores are going to tell much, if anything, about what an individual student needs instructionally in order to learn.

Rather than valorise the multiple-choice, short-answer exam test, that measures only mathematical or linguistic intelligence, these teachers have adopted a more well-rounded understanding of achievement that benefits the child.

Their approach echoes that of Harvard School of education professor, Howard Gardner, who maintains that if we all had exactly the same kind of mind and there was only one kind of intelligence, then we could teach everybody the same thing in the same way and assess them in the same way and that would be fair. But, he goes on to argue that "once we realise that people have very different kinds of minds, different kinds of strengths… then education which treats everybody the same way is actually the most unfair education".

The best that can be said for test scores is that they can become a catalyst for important schoolwide conversations that will enhance the abilities of schools to capture teachers’ knowledge, foster collaboration, identify obstacles to change, and enhance school culture and climate.

The Wise Data approach is not about trying to enable students to get better test scores. "It is fundamentally about making sure that students understand the standards they need to master in order to be successful in this world," said Ms Boudett.

Working in teams, the goal of the Data Wise Approach is not only to use data to improve teaching and learning, but to develop an approach to data-informed decision making that is not overwhelming, but useful, and that is collaborative. It includes a broad range of evidence – student work, conversations with students, projects, oral reports, using all those things together to better understand how to benefit the children – holding all students to high expectations, so that teachers can learn and act and adjust their own instruction in order to give each student what they need. With its focus on observation and objectivity, this approach facilitates rich conversations and minimises the threat of finger-pointing or blame.

Dedication and Commitment

The Mullingar Community College teachers I met here at Harvard earlier this month believe that the most important task for schools today is to foster a culture that explicitly values adult nurturing relationships with students and provides teachers and school staff with the time, space, and occasions to interact repeatedly with individual students, especially those that seem less engaged.

Relationships between teachers and individual children shape children’s development inside and outside schools and in fact, research shows that when students have strong relationships with their teachers, in-class motivation increases the most. In these instances, students are motivated by teachers’ high expectations as well as their own.

A tribute to Mullingar Community College Faculty

In sum, it was a privilege to have met these teachers who work in my home town. I was both touched, proud and inspired by their dedication to learning and by their commitment to their students. The Mullingar Community College students of today are fortunate to have them as teachers and advisors.

J Kevin Nugent, PhD, is director emeritus and founder of the Braselton Institute, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital; emeritus professor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and lecturer, Harvard Medical School.

• childrenshospital.org/research/centers/braselton-institute-research

• newbornbehaviorinternational.org

• drkevinnugent.com