David Hopkins and Pasi Sahlberg

The publication of the 10th edition of Models of Teaching is a signal moment in the history of educational discourse. Since its first publication in 1972, Models of Teaching has led the argument and occupied the moral high ground on the nature of teaching and learning and the creation of powerful learning experiences that enable all our students to reach their potential. In so doing, Bruce Joyce and his co-authors across the years, Marsha Weil and Emily Calhoun, have followed a distinguished tradition of educators that, as we shall see, have spanned a number of millennia. This tradition provides pathways to the creation of learning experiences that not only enhance the individual student’s achievement and learning skills but by that token also contribute to the development of society itself.

We are enormously flattered to have been asked to contribute the Foreward to this 10th edition of Models of Teaching. But on reflection, despite us being quirky individuals, perhaps it was not such a bizarre invitation. By nationality, one of us is a Finn and the other a Welshman, but the quirkiness is not so much related simply to our place of birth, but to the fact that as educationalists we have deliberately positioned our careers at the intersection of policy, research, and practice. Very few educators have placed their flags in that contentious terrain, and it has not always been easy to maintain such positioning. Yet as we are committed to both equity and excellence in improving education, we believe fervently that there is no other place to plant ours. The other characteristic that unites us is that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Bruce Joyce for his mentorship and friendship over the years. It was he, who through his example, introduced us to this place. We begin this Foreword by saying a little more personally about our interaction with Models of Teaching and Bruce Joyce over the years before becoming more descriptive and then analytical about the importance of the publication of this 10th edition of Models of Teaching.

Before we do, we should make two key points.

The first as intimated above, is that Models of Teaching is not a contemporary flash in the pan panacea or the ‘next big thing’ in school improvement. Rather as is noted in Chapter One, Models of Teaching, has a distinguished heritage. From the time of the academies in Greece and Rome, teachers have generated and shared innovative approaches to learning and teaching. Succeeding generations have given birth to additional ways of helping students learn. In the Preamble, the authors point out the contributions of Comenius, Rousseau, and Locke--all of whom argued strenuously for equity and democracy as well as breadth and individual achievement. Slightly more contemporaneously, the authors refer to the contribution of John Dewey who too had a powerful vision of society and education. We both are committed to Dewey’s concept of experiential education and see in Models of Teaching tools and scaffolding for achieving such ends. We could go on, the point however is that Models of Teaching follows a rich tradition of educators and social innovators driven by a vision of individual competence and social development.

The second point that we wish to make at the outset is that Models of Teaching is grounded in the solid global evidence base. All the teaching strategies in this book have strong empirical support as to their impact: they are both theoretically rich and demonstrably effective. As our mentor, Bruce was uncompromising in his commitment to empirical rigour and was always challenging us to look at the data and refine our strategies accordingly. We see in the pages that follow the data emanating from a variety of meta-analyses that support the application and utilisation of the variety of Models of Teaching in a range of contexts. We should also note parenthetically, the contribution that our friend and colleague, John Hattie has made to establishing the empirical base to effective teaching and enabling us to be far more discriminating in differentiating between low and high impact approaches. The linking of theory to empirical support is a major strength of Models of Teaching. This is one of the reasons why Richard Elmore’s salutary warning, that he shared with one of us several years ago, that ‘teaching is a profession without a practice’ is gladly becoming increasingly less true.

So let us say a little more individually about our interaction with Models of Teaching and Bruce Joyce over the years.

Models of Teaching and School Improvement

I, David Hopkins, first met Bruce Joyce in San Francisco in the spring of 1979. We met at a US national education conference where Bruce was presenting. At the time I was a graduate student at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, whose research was being supervised by Michael Fullan (OISE) and Marv Wideen (SFU). We had planned a Summer Institute at SFU for 1980 around the emerging theme of school Improvement, and I had been flown down from Vancouver to encourage Bruce to participate. Bruce was characteristically generous in embracing my naivety and agreed to participate. The subsequent six-week Institute on the iconic SFU Burnaby mountain campus had recruited other global leading educational thinkers and activists. We all taught a course in the Summer School, engaged in twice weekly seminars with each other over dinner and made a keynote presentation at the Institute. We subsequently published the keynotes as Chapters in Alternative Perspectives on School Improvement (Hopkins and Wideen 1984).

During that six week period we became our own professional learning community, well before that term became popular. We were excited and stimulated by each other’s research and insights but were also motivated by the awareness that we were laying the intellectual basis for what was becoming the emerging field of school improvement. The year before the Institute, Michael Rutter and his colleagues published their landmark book Fifteen Thousand Hours (Rutter et al. 1979). It was this book that laid the basis of the effective schools movement that generated increasingly sophisticated descriptions of the characteristics of those schools that made a significant difference to the progress of their students, irrespective of socio-economic background. We were galvanised by the thought that we were contributing to a parallel movement. This was becoming known as School Improvement, and its proponents were generating a methodology and developing strategies that enable schools to become increasingly effective.

Bruce Joyce’s contributions to our discussions that summer were seminal. His charisma and personal leadership were pervasive, and he was so much fun to be around. More than that, however, he exerted an intellectual discipline on the group that was both challenging and liberating. For example, he helped me understand that moral purpose and strategic action are the opposite sides of the same coin. If we are to create powerful learning experiences for our students—experiences that are sustained and impact on both equity and excellence-- we need to keep the goals of education in mind whilst at the same time creating increasingly specific strategies for both pedagogy and professional development that will enable the achievement of those goals. The word specific is important here because it implies precision rather than didactism. For as another contributor to the Institute, Lawrence Stenhouse commented in one of our seminars –“Specific, yes; prescriptive, no.” It was Bruce’s focus on a range of specific pedagogies that promote learning, together with his articulation of peer coaching strategies for professional development, that provided the essential infrastructure for the emerging field of school improvement.

We would like to think that our sojourn on Burnaby Mountain that Summer of 1980 was influential not just for the participants in the Institute and the students on the courses we ran, but more widely in helping to shape the development of the school improvement movement. This was particularly the case in terms of under Bruce’s emphasis on Models of Teaching and Peer Coaching. Certainly, our collective presentations and publications influenced the OECD’s International School Improvement Programme and the subsequent Improving School Leadership project. As the global interest in school improvement as the strategy for achieving both equity and excellence has burgeoned, Bruce’s influence through the twin emphasis on Models of Teaching and Professional Development has been transformational.

Since those early beginnings, Bruce and I have remained close professional colleagues and friends. He has contributed to numerous conferences and consultancies over the years, and he has been enormously supportive in terms of the design, contribution of materials and provision of training for our school improvement programmes, particularly Improving the Quality of Education for All (IQEA) and Curiosity and Powerful Learning. Space precludes more detail here, but one vignette is illustrative.

In 1997, when I was Dean of Education at the University of Nottingham, Bruce and Emily visited us to provide professional development for my Faculty staff and the school improvement groups in our IQEA network. As part of the professional and social interactions, Bruce and Emily met the Headteacher of Hempshill Hall Primary School which my two youngest children, Jessica and Dylan attended. The conversation led to a visit and eventually to Emily demonstrating the Picture Word Inductive Model (see Chapter 6) to staff through teaching a series of classes of which Jessica was a member. I still remember Emily’s calm and precise language, her warm positive interaction with the children and the strategic scaffolding she brought to the series of lessons. Subsequently, we wrote up the visit for Educational Leadership and included a more extended case study in The New Structure of School Improvement. The point is that Models of Teaching is no arcane, research-based, add-on to a school’s provision, but is rather the lived reality of how we achieve both equity and excellence through precise concerted professional action. We concluded the chapter on Hempshill Hall in the book referred to earlier in this way:

Hempshill Hall refines aspects of its operation on a continual basis. How? By doing it. The Head has convinced the teachers and parents that school improvement is part of teaching and parenting and has created a climate that matches the vision. A healthy climate for adults becomes a healthy place for children. The mode of continual search for improvement rubs off on the children.

The inquiry continues …

And so it does. Despite the passage of time, Bruce, Emily and I regularly continue our now close to half century long conversation about school improvement.

So that is a precis of the Welshman’s story. Let us now turn to an account of the impact of Models of Teaching in Finland.

Models of Teaching Arrives in Finland

I, Pasi Sahlberg, first heard about Bruce Joyce in 1984 when I had just started my educational journey towards a doctorate degree at the University of Helsinki. That was the time before the Internet and ebooks, when the best way to read a textbook was to line up in the university library and have a hardcopy of a book for a week or two. Mine was the second edition (1980) of Models of Teaching that had clearly been read by many students before me.

The book was made a required reading for anyone who intended completing advanced studies in educational sciences that time. In the late 1980s when I was working on my teaching diploma and further academic studies in education, Finland had experimented a decade of research-based primary and secondary teacher education. Students aiming to teach in Finnish K-12 schools, needed to hold Master’s degree. Models of Teaching was a foundational part of pedagogical literature in most primary teacher education curricula. The philosophy of the power of a diverse repertoire of teaching methods as the bedrock of the teaching profession sat perfectly in the long pedagogical tradition in Finland ranging from Uno Cygnaeus in the 19th century to Mikael Soininen and Matti Koskenniemi during the 20th century.

Models of Teaching arrived in Finland at the right time. The New Comprehensive School that replaced parallel two-pathway 9-year compulsory school system in 1972 was built on ideas of integration and inclusion that brought all Finnish children to be educated in one type of school instead of sorting them based on their, or their parents, academic orientations, and aspirations. This required, first and foremost, that teachers were able to craft their teaching according to much wider range of diverse learners than before. Initial teacher education was recalibrated accordingly. All teachers, including those teaching in primary schools, had to have advanced studies in education that often meant expanding their pedagogical knowledge and practical skills. Teachers were expected to design and choose their teaching methods according to curricula goals and student’s needs. Models of Teaching became an answer to these expectations.

I spent the second half of the 1980s as a teacher in Teacher Training School run by the University of Helsinki. Models of Teaching became my most important reference when supervising new science and mathematics teachers who did their practical training in my school. My colleagues and I were particularly interested in how different teaching methods in that book could serve improving student outcomes in science and mathematics. This gave us an idea to translate some of the most promising and suitable models into Finnish so that all teachers could use them in improving their teaching. Inductive Thinking, Concept Attainment, Inquiry Training, Group Investigation, Synectics, Direct Instruction, and Nondirective Teaching were among those that hundreds of Finnish schools and thousands of teachers experimented in their classrooms and often adopted them as part of their pedagogical practice repertoires.

The core part of the Finnish way of Models of Teaching was an intensive development of teaching methods that would fit in the philosophy of the New Comprehensive School and that would support the emerging culture of teacher professionalism in schools. Two books that included detailed descriptions of 15 teaching methods and tested examples from Finnish classrooms were published in 1988 and 1989. Final single volume updated edition of these teaching methods appeared in 1990 and became a high-demand pedagogical manual across the country (Sahlberg, 1990). The National School Improvement Network that was facilitated by the National Board of (General) Education was an innovation that had an impact on how teachers taught and especially how they thought about knowledge, learning, and teaching.

Since the creation of the New Comprehensive School in 1972, Finland made big investments in teacher and leadership development. Part of that was traditional whole school training days about the national reform, including curriculum, pedagogical development, special education, and so on. An important part of teachers’ and school leaders’ professional learning happened in the national educational training centre in the small town of Heinola, 90 minutes north of Helsinki. Thousands of teachers every year gathered there for week-long courses planned and facilitated by the NBE staff. One of the key policy priorities in these courses was developing teachers’ knowledge and skills in diverse teaching methods that were needed to succeed with the ongoing national school reform. This is where Bruce Joyce comes in.

In 1989 my colleagues and I invited Bruce to speak about Models of Teaching to the group of teacher educators and regional lead teachers in Heinola Training Centre. Bruce generously accepted our invitation just like he did a decade earlier to David’s. But rather than just speak about the teaching methods, he offered to run a week-long master class on what effective teaching methods look like in practice and how teachers best learn to use them in school. This was a game changing opportunity for all of us. We learned about these teaching methods by acquiring these same methods under guidance from Bruce. We explored the Inquiry Training method using inquiry training; we learned about Synectics through synectics; and we practiced Group Investigation through cooperative learning methods. By the end of the week, we were not just filled with deeper understanding of a wide range of teaching methods, but we had learned about necessary conditions to design effective professional learning for other teachers on models of teaching. Bruce left his mark in the science and art of pedagogy that influenced the evolving new era of schooling in Finland in the 1990s.

Without a doubt, Models of Teaching had significant positive impact in the direction of educational policy and practice in Finland after Bruce’s visit. It certainly changed the way we understood teaching and what is needed to expand teachers’ active teaching repertoires. I soon took these lessons with me to the next chapter of my career. In 1991 I was offered a position as a senior advisor in science education in the newly established national education authority called the National Board of Education (NBE). I continued to support the ongoing experimentation and pedagogical innovation in teaching methods in Finnish schools. Two years later I moved to establish and lead the “Teaching Methods Unit” in the NBE. This unit provided support to schools in their work on models of teaching and researched different aspects of change in schools. That continued until the end of the 1990s.

In my doctoral research project that I designed soon after meeting with Bruce, I investigated the effectiveness of peer coaching in the Finnish context. Just like Bruce had described in Models of Teaching and his other works, we realized that changing the way teachers learn to use different teaching methods effectively in their classrooms requires more than listening to lectures and practicing new skills in workshops. A few years earlier, Bruce had demonstrated in Heinola that the transfer of new skills from staff development to practice must also include opportunities to practice new skills in safe environments, receive feedback from experts and colleagues, and have opportunities to rehearse these new teaching methods in their own classrooms with trusted colleagues. “Researchers, teacher-educators, and policymakers decided to adopt peer coaching as a fundamental principle for the new teacher education and school improvement program nationwide”, as I wrote in FinnishEd Leadership in 2018 (Sahlberg, 2018). Bruce left a permanent mark in Finland’s educational culture by showing Finnish teacher-educators that teachers learn from one another while planning their teaching, developing curriculum, co-teaching shared classes, and exploring together the impact on their students’ learning. Most Finnish education reforms during the 1990s were built on these foundational principles of teacher collaboration and professionalism.

The intriguing question is: What is the role of Models of Teaching in the Finnish educational saga that became well known since the launch of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2000. Finnish 15-year-olds’ achievement was on top among the OECD countries – against all expectations in Finland. It was, and still is, difficult to explain unexpectedly high performance of Finnish students compared to other countries (Sahlberg, 2021). One common theory has been that research-based teacher education has equipped Finnish primary schools with professionals who have advanced capabilities to think about teaching and combine theory and praxis to benefit different learners in their schools. I have argued that it is exactly this fertile professional and pedagogical foundation that gave roots to the Models of Teaching – and learning – to grow in Finnish schools. The verdict? I am confident to conclude that earlier editions of this book you are reading have made Finnish teachers better by expanding their understanding of learning and improving their repertoires of teaching methods.

Having reflected on our personal histories with Bruce Joyce and Models of Teaching, it is important that we now say something further about the concept of a model of teaching and the book itself.

Models of Teaching – an Overview

In Models of Learning Tools for Teaching, we (Joyce, Calhoun, & Hopkins 2002) wrote that:
Learning experiences are composed of content, process and social climate. As teachers we create for and with our children opportunities to explore and build important areas of knowledge, develop powerful tools for learning, and live in humanizing social conditions.

Not only is this a pithy description of what Richard Elmore (City et al 2009) has called the ‘Instructional Core’, it also identifies the crucial characteristic of a Model of Teaching, in that it is also a Model of Learning. Skilled teachers seek to integrate curriculum content, teaching and learning strategies, and school culture. When they do, the effect is to lift their students’ academic achievement and simultaneously extend their learning capability. When teachers add a range of teaching models to their professional repertoire, they then have the skills to enable their students to learn how to learn at the same time as acquiring curriculum content.

How we teach has a large impact on our students’ abilities to educate themselves. Each model of teaching has a core purpose that relates how to organise teaching with ways of learning. So, for example:

• Cooperative group work strategies quicken and deepen learning experiences and generate meta-cognitive moments. At the same time students also learn how to discuss, coach each other, and develop social skills.

• Inductive teaching moves from the presentation of data to having students sort and classify data and to think deeply about collecting and sifting information. Working in this way not only helps students generate hypotheses but also to think in a logical way.

• The Synectics teaching model assists students in generating creative solutions to problems and in so doing develops their creative capacity across the curriculum.

• Direct Instruction is the most ubiquitous teaching model, widely referred to as Whole Class Teaching. It has significant positive impact on student achievement and can also enhance the student’s ability to extract information and concepts from lectures and presentations.

In this 10th edition of Models of Teaching, Joyce and Calhoun identify and describe close to two dozen different models of teaching that have a variety of both precise pedagogic (for the teacher) and learning effects (for the student). The authors divide this collection of models into four different families that each reflect a distinct learning focus.

Basic Information-Processing Models of Teaching The models in this family assist students to acquire information, organize it, and explain it. For teachers, these models have a broad range of pedagogic purposes, including designing lessons, units, courses, and distance offerings. They also fit well and can deliver across a range of national and local curriculum frameworks as well as teaching students the methods of the disciplines underlying them. These models include the Inductive, Scientific Inquiry, Concept Attainment, and the Picture Word Inductive Model.

Special Purpose Information-Processing Models The more specialised models are designed specifically to assist students to use analogies to think divergently (Synectics), to learn how to memorise more effectively (Mnemonics), and design presentations (Advance Organiser).

The Social Family of Models of Teaching Working together can enhance the learning of students dramatically. The social family expands what students can do together and generates the creation of democratic relationships in venues large and small. These models include Partners in Learning, Group Investigation, and Role Playing.

The Personal Family of Models When teachers engage with students, it is to help them learn. The challenge is how to give the learner centrality whilst trying to get them to grow and respond to tasks that will enhance growth? It is here that the Non-directive and Inquiry Training models play a vital role.

The Behavioural Family of Models The study of how behaviour is acquired has led to a wide variety of approaches to training and learning. In this section the authors describe some of the most useful behavioural models, such as: Explicit Instruction and Metacognition when teaching reading comprehension, Mastery Learning, and Direct Instruction itself.

In the final section--The Conditions of Learning and Educators as Curriculum Developers, Learners, and Leaders of School Renewal--the authors focus on the school level architecture necessary to support the adoption of models of teaching. They first focus “on how learning new things requires us to make a place for that learning, integrate it with our current concepts and skills, and cope with the inevitable discomfort that even joyful learning produces”. They also discuss the application of Robert Gagne’s work to developing curriculum and designing instruction. And finally, they reprise their seminal work on how teachers learn new models and how collaborative study, peer coaching, helps ensure that this learning is embedded and can be used in the long haul.

These sections and chapters, although theoretically grounded and empirically evidenced, are no dry research summaries. Each model has its own distinctive pedagogy described in a series of phases, or syntax to use the author’s word, that are laid out clearly in a succinct and operational way. The Appendix includes a sample of peer coaching guides that complement the models and serve as professional development tools that can be used in a formative professional relationship to aid implementation and refine skill development for teachers and students. These are essentially professional development tools that enable teachers, in collaboration, learn about and add individual models to their burgeoning professional repertoires.

Models of Teaching for Equity

Teaching to the success for all is not easy. Teaching is difficult because students are different. They have different interests; their life circumstances are not the same; and their brains are wired differently to process information and make meanings of the world around them. Around the world, schools have become more diverse compared to what they used to be in the 20th century. And yet, the overall goals of education are often built around achieving both excellence and equity simultaneously.

Until the end of 2000s, quality of educational outcomes remained the primary, and often the only, goal that schools and education systems pursued. Since then, as the OECD (2019) and other international agencies have noted, equity of learning outcomes has become an integral element of great schools and high performing education systems. In plain terms, equity in education is about fairness--that means that personal or social circumstances such as gender, ethnic origin, or family background are not obstacles to achieving educational potential--and inclusion that ensures that all children in school reach at least a basic minimum level of education. More equitable education means that differences in student achievement in school are not the result of differences in family’s wealth, income, power, or possessions—in other words, home background.

Teaching methods in this book have been tested and researched in a wide range of educational settings. Since these methods lead to different kinds of learning processes, their impacts on students’ cognitive, social, and behavioural outcomes also vary depending on the context in which they are used. The chapters of this book make it evident that when used appropriately and according to their initial design, these models of teaching can significantly ensure student achievement. An intriguing question is, how these teaching methods serve the growing need of making teaching in schools improve learning of all students?

Equity of education outcomes is fundamentally about crafting teaching to meet the needs of different learners in classroom. Our own lived experiences in schools, just like those of other teachers, confirm that teaching methods that suit one student don’t necessarily work for other students. The art and science of good teaching is about knowledge and skills to use different teaching methods in harmony to offer all students better opportunities to achieve their learning goals. Different models of teaching, when used purposefully, can enhance students’ models of learning that allow them to understand and better regulate their own learning.

Achieving better equity in education requires much more than different pedagogy or powerful teaching. Research has made it clear that out-of-school factors account for about 60 percent of the variance in student-measured achievement in school while the influence of teachers and other in-school factors is responsible for about 40 percent of the variance. We also know that teachers are the most important in-school element influencing student achievement, and that school’s resources and instructional support can make a big difference in the equity of these outcomes. Diversity of teaching methods used in school can make an additional boost to achievement of different learners.

A Final Word

We have just mentioned the phrase “the art and science of good teaching”. A brief reprise on this theme and the role that Models of Teaching plays in achieving this union is probably a good place to conclude this Foreward. One of the enduring myths in education is that teaching is either an art or a science. Our response is that it is neither one, nor the other - it is both. And Models of Teaching, as we have been arguing, enables teachers to do just that.

Let us put it simply:

Teaching is a science in so far as there are strategies and practices that a body of research has shown to be effective in enhancing learning. Just like doctors and other professionals, teachers should use research to inform and understand their practice. Models of Teaching provides such a rich set of evidence-based protocols.

Teaching is an art in so far as teachers must bring themselves fully into their teaching – their values, passion and joie de vivre. But they must also expand their personal repertoire of practices so that through a process of reflection they discover how to construct the most powerful learning experiences for their students. Models of Teaching are specifications, not prescriptions that teachers can internalise into their repertoires to enhance their personal professional practice.

Teaching is an art and a science when teachers are first (science) continually observing their students in order to see how they learn best; and then (art) using their collective professional judgement – akin to surgeons operating on a patient or actors performing in a play – to adapt their teaching practice(s) to fit the learning needs of their students. Models of Teaching not only provide teachers with guides of how to do this, but through using the peer coaching guides establish professional learning communities in the school to enhance collective practice.

This is the power of Models of Teaching, and we commend this 10th edition to you warmly. There is much wisdom, inspiration and joy in the pages that follow. By using these Models of Teaching judiciously, as we saw in the quote from earlier, you will have tools for creating with your students’ opportunities to explore and build important areas of knowledge, develop powerful tools for learning, and live in humanizing social conditions.

This is the essence of achieving equity through excellence and Models of Teaching helps us make that aspiration possible.

References
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Joyce, B., Calhoun, E., & Hopkins, D. (1999). The new structure of school improvement. Open University Press.

Hopkins D. (Ed.). (1987). Improving the quality of schooling. Falmer.

Hopkins, D., & Wideen, M. (Eds). (1984). Alternative perspectives on school improvement. Falmer.

Pont, B., Nusche D., & Hopkins D. (Eds). (2008). Improving school leadership, Volume 2: Case studies on system leadership. Paris: OECD / SSAT.

Rutter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimore, P., & Ouston, J., with Smith, A. (1979). Fifteen thousand hours. London: Open Books.

OECD (2019). PISA 2018: Insights and interpretations. Paris: OECD.

Sahlberg, P. (Ed.). (1990). Luonnontieteiden opetuksen työtapoja. Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus.

Sahlberg, P. (2018). FinnishEd leadership: Four big, inexpensive ideas to transform education. Corwin.

Sahlberg, P. (2021). Finnish Lessons. What can the world learn from educational change in Finland. New York: Teachers College Press