Author:
Pedder, David
Title:
Teachers' responsiveness to pupils' ideas on improving the
quality of classroom teaching and learning
Abstract:
From an early age young people are capable of insightful and
constructive analysis of their experiences of learning in school
and they have a contribution to make to the development of
strategies for improving learning and raising achievement. This
paper reports emergent findings from a research study into how
teachers respond to and use the commentaries and perspectives
of their pupils to improve the quality of classroom teaching and
learning.
Document type:
Paper presented at the British Educational Research
Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September
2000
Quality of teaching and learning
Pupil perspectives
Teachers’ responsiveness
Suggested key terms:
Background to the study
A growing number of studies are consistent in reporting that from an early age young people
are capable of insightful and constructive analysis of their experiences of learning in school
(ie, Rudduck et al., 1996; Nieto, 1994; Soo Hoo, 1993). However, attention is also drawn by
Rudduck et al (1996:173), to the lack of scope provided by existing structures of secondary
schooling for young people to exercise responsibility and take decisions over their school
lives and learning. Here there is a clear imbalance with young peoples’ personal and social
lives outside school where they routinely carry a far higher degree of responsibility and
autonomy,
“… the structures of secondary schooling offer, on the whole, less responsibility and autonomy
than many young people are accustomed to in their lives outside school, and less opportunity for
learning-related tensions to be opened up and explored.”
With regard to the degree of autonomy and responsibility accorded to young people, schools
are out of step with life beyond the school gate, and this represents a serious risk to pupils’
sense of self as learner, their status within the institution of school and their sense of purpose
in learning. As Rudduck argues (1996:173)
“… the conditions of learning that prevail in the majority of secondary schools do not adequately
take account of the maturity of young people, nor of the tensions and pressures that they
experience as they struggle to reconcile the demands of their social and personal development
with the development of their identities as learners.”
And yet there is growing support for the view that should schools attend more to pupils’
views about their learning experiences and preferences as part of school improvement
strategies, this will lead to improvements in pupil achievement (ie Nieto,1994). This view
finds strong support from recent school improvement studies (ie Gray et al, 1999; Sammons
et al, 1997) that suggest that giving more attention to pupils and to their experiences of
teaching, learning and schooling will contribute to improvements in their performance.
Even though teachers already take account of their pupils’ perspectives, interests and needs in
deciding what to do as part of their routine practice during classroom lessons (Cooper and
McIntyre, 1996), the argument is very clearly articulated that secondary school pupils are not
sufficiently consulted by teachers as ‘co-conspirators in creating optimal learning situations’
(Phelan et. al., 1992:704). Nevertheless, as coherent as this argument is, there is a very real
tension between the complexity and individual responsibility of the teacher’s classroom
teaching task on the one hand and the need to treat pupils as partners in their own learning on
the other. McIntyre sums up this tension as follows (1999:18),
“Arguments that secondary school students are not sufficiently treated as partners in their own
learning are highly persuasive, both in terms of their rights to have their perspectives taken into
account and also instrumentally in terms of their commitment to learning. The lack of control
which students generally have over their own lives in institutions which would claim to be serving
their interests can indeed be seen as quite remarkable. Within the context of classroom teaching,
however, the task for the teacher of treating students as partners while continuing to take
responsibility for classroom activities and outcomes cannot but be seen as adding to the
complexity of the teacher’s task.”
The complexity of the teacher’s task in classroom lessons is relevant to the question of
teacher responsiveness to pupils’ ideas. The relevance lies very much in the nature of the
expertise developed by teachers to effectively promote pupils’ learning within the constraints
of the environment of classrooms. Doyle (1986:394-395) has identified six features of the
classroom environment that shape how teachers think and act in lessons. He talks of
classrooms in terms of their:
 multidimensionality;
 simultaneity;
 immediacy;
 unpredictability;
 publicness;
 history.
Thus McIntyre (1999:3-4) argues that the implications of these features for classroom
teachers include the following:
 their choices are never simple
 they must monitor and regulate several different activities at once
 they have little time, in the main, to reflect before acting
 detailed long-term planning is counter-productive and even short-term plans need to be
very flexible
 what they do on any occasion can have important future repercussions
 planning and decision-making needs to take account of a class’s history
As McIntyre (1999:7) notes,
“… the expertise of experienced classroom teachers is well and sophisticatedly geared to the
realities of classroom life”
Teachers have developed a sophisticated expertise well tuned to the classroom environment
that involves inter alia:
 highly intuitive judgements and decision-making
 largely tacit, individual and quite private expert knowledge
 prioritisation and simplification geared to teaching purposes, for example through shortterm perspectives or by simplifying differences among pupils,
Given the nature of the expertise developed and used by teachers and adapted to the
particular challenges of the classroom, what scope then remains for teachers to engage in
critical collaborative reflection with pupils? What is clear is that authentic collaboration
between teachers and pupils requires teachers to take account of additional information in
their classroom teaching. In relation to this, we might ask whether it is realistic to expect
teachers to take account of additional information while maintaining the kind of expertise
which has, to date, served them well in the increasing challenges of the classroom
environment (McIntyre, 1999).
It can be seen then that the issues that form the backdrop to this research study on teachers’
responsiveness to pupils’ ideas about learning are highly complex and full of tensions.
Aims and focus of the study
We have little evidence of how teachers respond to pupil comments on the usefulness of
different aspects of their teaching, or how they use the data to modify practice in order to
improve teaching and learning; nor do we know how teachers’ perception of pupils change as
a result of hearing their views; nor how pupils’ progress and commitment to learning change
as they see their teachers taking account of what they have to say. We do not know,
furthermore, what is involved for teachers or for pupils in changing their classroom practices
so as to make teacher responsiveness an integral part of them. So we were interested in the
range of strategies for consulting pupils that teachers consider worthwhile and manageable
within the routines of everyday teaching.
Research design
Teachers and pupils at three schools from six Year 8 classes (two each of English, Maths and
Science) were involved. We managed to recruit teachers who were experienced and had
expressed an interest in contributing to research on pupil voice and a willingness to
participate in the project. The two English classes were mixed ability. We worked with a top
and bottom set Science class and two middle set Maths classes.
The fieldwork so far completed was carried out between March and July 2000 and comprised
two stages. During the first stage, which consisted of five visits to each teacher and their
pupils between March and May, the focus was on eliciting from pupils their ideas about
classroom teaching and learning in the focal subject, and from the teachers their respective
responses to their pupils’ ideas. From each class six fairly articulate pupils, three boys and
three girls were selected and invited to take part in individual interviews after observed
lessons, three who were doing well and three who seem neither to enjoy the subject nor to be
doing well in it. Interviews focused on what pupils judged to facilitate their learning in their
teacher’s class, what they regarded as unhelpful to their learning, and what alternative
strategies and approaches might their teacher have employed to the benefit of their learning.
In addition, written responses to a questionnaire were elicited from the whole class so that
non selected pupils might contribute their views.
Transcripts of each of the interviews with pupils, together with pupils’ written comments on
the questionnaires were passed on to the respective teachers for their comments and reactions.
Over the course of the first five interviews with teachers during the first stage of the
fieldwork, teachers were encouraged to articulate their thinking and changes to their thinking
in response to the comments of their pupils. They were increasingly asked to focus on
planned changes to their practice in response to pupils’ ideas and comments that they had
read and adjudged to be worthwhile and manageable innovations.
The second stage of the fieldwork took place over the course of the summer term. Interviews
following observed lessons were held with the six target pupils in order to elicit their
judgements of teachers’ modified classroom practice in the light of their ideas and the ways
in which the changes, as they perceived them, influenced their learning. Questionnaires were
also administered to the class as a whole towards the end of the fieldwork to elicit the spread
of different pupils’ views in each of the six classes. Post-lesson teacher interviews focused on
their evaluations of the implementation of planned changes in the context of the observed
lesson and the extent to which they judged the changes to have provided enhanced learning
opportunities for their pupils.
A third stage of fieldwork is planned for the Autumn term. All six teachers have agreed to be
observed and interviewed with their new classes with a view to discovering the tranferability
of what they have learned from the previous year’s experience. Do teachers seek to develop
ways of learning about pupils’ reactions to their teaching as part of their normal teaching and
to use what they learn in shaping their teaching, and are they able to do so?
Illustrative findings
I want briefly and with great caution to put forward the following tentative propositions on
the basis of an initial inspection of the data from the consulting pupils initiative:



Pupils are sometimes capable of identifying constructive alternatives to teaching
strategies.
Pupils are sometimes able to take on the perspective of their teachers in identifying
particular dilemmas they face in the course of their classroom decision-making.
Aspects of what pupils say has sufficient status with teachers to contribute to their
continued professional learning and therefore to changing practice in order to influence
pupils’ learning.
Consulting pupils was perceived by teachers to have an impact on the quality of pupils’
learning. The range of consultation strategies that the six teachers in this study identified as
manageable were questionnaires at the mid-point or at the end of modules of study. They also
considered one-to-one and small group interviews with pupils during the course of lessons on
occasions where the rest of the class were engaged on task. The most radical plan considered
by one teacher is looking at the feasibility of pupil-convened consultation forums as one
possibility in her particular context.
Pupils are sometimes capable of identifying constructive alternatives to teaching strategies.
For example one student argues that in science lessons her learning would be helped by
greater involvement and participation in experimentation work. Instead of passively
observing her teacher demonstrate experiments and then copying the teachers’ conclusions
from the board, this pupils suggests that her understanding would be enhanced by having
pupils carry out their own experiments and write their own results and conclusions. This way
the generation of different results and conclusions arising from the different experimental
procedures followed by different pupils becomes an opportunity for enhancing
understanding,
“And then we’d write down what we saw not just what he thinks that should have happened. And
then we’d all have our own conclusions and we could discuss them in that class. I think that
might be quite good. .. I think then it’s like you can see what other people had done with their
experiments and then you could ask cos Mr. Jackson’s a scientist person, he would know what’s
actually supposed to happen. ... And then erm we can work out whose like done it right. Whose
done it correctly. .. And then … that person will be like setting examples … and I thought a good
way of doing it was like everyone would be sitting in their seats and he would ask people if they
had anything… I think he could say like what… like in all the labs and stuff, what would happen
usually if they’d done it. And then he could ask people to put their hands up if they had any
comments on that or questions or whether they had anything different to what he said. And then
they’d like go into how that person did it and find out what went wrong or if something happened.”
CVC:SG
Pupils are sometimes able to take on the perspective of their teachers in identifying
particular dilemmas they face in the course of their classroom decision-making.
Here a student discusses a common dilemma faced by teachers when some pupils complete a
task while others are still busily engaged. Talking of a pairwork interactive task in English,
this pupil and her partner would have preferred to have been given more time to complete
their task. Nonetheless, taking on the perspective of her teacher, she shows some degree of
insight into why her teacher took the decision to stop everyone instead,
I Were there any things do you think that Miss Foster could have done more of in that lesson?
So stuff that she was already doing but you’d have liked more of, more time on something or for
her to have done more of something, just thinking about this morning.
P I would have liked more time to discuss the partner work, you know, the partner. ...‘Cos we
only got three of the five questions done and we needed a little bit more time so....
I Oh right. Have you any idea why the time wasn’t given for those final two questions of the pair
work?
P Because she had to explain the homework and we had to start on our questionnaire so that’s
why.
I Can you sympathise with that decision to cut the pair work short or do you think on balance it
would still have been better to continue on the pair work?
P No, I think it would have been better if she’d have carried on like she did because other people
were finished and they would have got bored so.... Yes.
SI:MC
Aspects of what pupils say has sufficient status with teachers to contribute to their continued
professional learning and therefore to changing practice in order to influence pupils’
learning.
Participating teachers reported that the opportunity provided by the project for gaining access
to their pupils’ insights and ideas, which they evaluated as constructive, represented a
positive step in their continuing professional learning.
“Really useful. Surprisingly useful. Surprisingly much more useful than I expected it to be! Erm I
always feel anything like this, where people have got time to actually talk to children, are bound
to help and improve on people’s professionalism if they’ve got time to talk and listen to children.”
AMVC:LW
Consulting pupils was perceived by teachers to have an impact on the quality of pupils’
learning.
Teachers reported changes in levels of motivation and interest as pupils recognised
innovations in their teacher’s classroom practice linked to the ideas they had been articulating
in interview. Common themes in pupils’ accounts across the three subject areas of the study
had been the desire for greater independence and prominence for pupil talk in relation to
their classroom learning experiences.
“Erm certainly I think it’s had an impact on their motivation, their interests, their own engagement
within the lesson. I think it’s helped there. … Erm and I think they also come on in terms of their
ability to work more independently and require at times less kind of teacher input, direction and
guidance.”
CVC:MC
The range of strategies that the six teachers in this study identified as manageable were
questionnaires at the mid-point or at the end of modules of study. They also considered oneto-one and small group interviews with pupils during the course of lessons on occasions
where the rest of the class were engaged on task. The most radical plan considered by one
teacher is looking at the feasibility of pupil-convened consultation forums as one possibility
in her particular context.
Concluding note
Preliminary analysis of the pupil interview data clearly demonstrates that pupils, when
consulted, have sophisticated and serious things to say about classroom teaching and learning
and how their classroom experiences might be enhanced. Moreover some pupils, in
identifying decision dilemmas faced by their teacher, revealed the capacity to take on the
perspectives of their teacher in discussing the events of a recently completed lesson. It also
appears that aspects of what pupils say have sufficient status with teachers to contribute to
their continued professional learning and therefore to changing practice in order to influence
pupils’ learning. Nevertheless, constraints inherent in the classroom teaching system as
currently constituted, together with the increasing demands being made on teachers in their
classrooms, not least in the form of external prescriptions for the curriculum or for
examination and testing requirements, make it unlikely that they will have the scope to
respond to the ideas of their pupils in ways that represent radical departures from their
current, skilful and highly adapted professional classroom practice.
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