Decomposing decision-making: a cognitive dimension to teacher rehearsal

A significant challenge for teacher educators is how to help large groups of teachers get better. Professional development often fails to cater for individual needs because it’s unlikely that in a room full of teachers everyone is in roughly the same place in terms of knowledge, experience and expertise. Bespoke approaches, such as instructional coaching, might be more effective but are not easily scalable (Coe, 2023). There are also some benefits in engaging in professional development together, such as building relatedness, a key determinant of motivation according to self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2020).

However, it can be challenging to ensure that group provision includes a sufficient number of mechanisms that underpin effective professional development (Sims & Fletcher-Wood, 2021; EEF, 2021). For example, one key mechanism identified is rehearsal which means teachers get to practise performing a new technique or strategy before they get into the classroom and do it for real (aka deliberate practice – see Nick Pointer’s thoughts here on why this is an unhelpful term for us to use). Many schools have really embraced this idea with significant time devoted to rehearsal, even to the point of having the entire staff body practising something like their ‘signal for attention’ together in the hall. But getting teachers to engage in some form of rehearsal en masse is hard, and may not be particularly effective, especially since engineering useful feedback in this context is probably even trickier.

Even if this is possible and done effectively, this approach may suffer two problems. Firstly, that we may be confined to rehearsing only the behavioural aspects of teaching, the visible ‘moves’ that a teacher makes such as how they script their instructions or ask questions to the class. Developing that kind of routine expertise is really useful but has limitations – teachers can find themselves in situations in which they execute a technique with precision only for it not to work, because it wasn’t necessarily the right technique to execute at that moment. Secondly, we encounter the ‘grain size’ problem where knowing just how granular to go in our rehearsals is difficult to judge. The more we zoom in, the more precise we can be, but the further removed from the context of an actual teaching episode it becomes. With respect to both of these problems, an important goal of teacher education is to move teachers towards adaptive expertise where they can make context-dependent decisions, in the moment, and this requires doing more than just learning the moves.

However, professional development doesn’t necessarily have to mean teachers ‘on their feet’ practising a particular routine or technique, we might also want teachers to engage in a more cognitive type of rehearsal. It’s harder to think about how we rehearse the thinking we need to do, and the in-the-moment decisions we need to make. Part of the issue is that so many decisions occur, and many of them without a great deal of conscious consideration. We default to the habits we’ve developed. This is partly a good thing, we draw on our knowledge and experience of similar kinds of situations and repeat the things that worked before. But the other side of this double-edged sword of automaticity (Feldon, 2007) is that we may default to decisions that aren’t actually optimal for the given situation. 

How, then, can we design our professional development to help develop this kind of responsive decision making? One key ingredient is to increase awareness and understanding of the decision-making process itself through decomposition (Grossman et al, 2009) – breaking down a particular situation into a more granular set of decisions. We might look at a specific but common situation that occurs in a classroom, and then consider some of the potential decisions that need to be made, before working out how best to execute whatever we’ve chosen to do. 

For example, consider the very common practice of circulating around a class while they are working on an independent task in order to give live feedback. Done well this is incredibly powerful, and probably one of the strongest examples of responsive teaching in action. But what does doing it well look like? Earlier in my career I remember observing other teachers or being observed and hearing feedback along the lines of ‘they circulated well to support students to complete the task’ but what does this actually mean? This isn’t much more helpful than comments about ‘pace’ or ‘challenge’ without specifying what that entails. Which means it offers nothing to a teacher trying to get better as they don’t know what exactly they’re trying to get better at. The process of circulating and giving live feedback involves many in-the-moment decisions about who might need some intervention, of what type, in what form, and for how many. We might represent some of these decisions visually like this:

We can then model and narrate the thinking process as we consider this situation (building up the layers of decision making bit-by-bit, and animating our graphic organiser to introduce elements one at a time to avoid cognitive overload of course!). Part of that narration might include something a bit like this:

First up we need to determine the extent of the problem – how many students is this affecting? Is it just one or two, in which case individual intervention is likely the best decision, or is it more? If we think it’s most or all of the class then we probably want to pause everyone to give whole-class feedback. But we need to make sure – we don’t want to assume it’s everyone and then give feedback which actually hinders the progress of some students who are getting on fine. Similarly, we don’t want to assume it’s only a couple of students only to find out later that it was much more widespread as we’ll end up just rushing around the room repeating ourselves. 

We can pause at various points through the process to discuss with teachers why they might choose one decision over another in a given situation, pose hypothetical scenarios to be discussed, or ask teachers to reflect on the decisions they have made in a recent lesson or plan what they might do in a future lesson. These activities then help to support the kinds of cognitive rehearsal discussed above, although there are still some limitations in terms of really personalising some of those discussions outside of a much smaller group or one-to-one setting.

For many teachers this decision-making might be a fairly intuitive process, but stopping to think hard about the range and complexity of decisions involved can be really helpful. And this brings us back to the earlier point about catering for different needs. Careful decomposition of decision making in this fashion is useful for teachers of any level of experience or expertise. 

• For more novice teachers, this is helping to model the thinking of expert teachers by exposing the decision making that they go through. One of the reasons why simply going to observe another teacher often fails to improve someone’s practice is because there isn’t the accompanying decomposition of what happened in the classroom, with a dissection of all of the decisions the teacher made. Furthermore, more novice teachers may not have necessarily considered either the range of decisions that need to be made in a given situation, nor the range of options we might choose from for any given decision. Therefore  decomposition of decision-making may help to build their own mental model, increasing their knowledge and understanding of what good teaching looks like. 

• For more experienced teachers (not necessarily expert, but probably more competent) this process is useful too. They are likely to know a range of possibilities, but still may be unaware of some approaches or strategies; many teachers will draw on the repertoire of classroom strategies developed in their first few years of teaching and so may not be aware of alternatives, or will have made the decision not to try and adopt new practices for some reason (see more on this here). Therefore this decomposition may help to draw attention to some alternatives, and consider more carefully whether their habitual practices are necessarily optimal ones.

• More expert teachers still have much to gain from this approach too. Teaching, as Dylan Wiliam notes, “is so hard that one lifetime isn’t enough to master it.” There are always things we can reflect upon and refine and a really expert teacher is very likely fully on board with this view or it’s unlikely they would have developed such expertise in the first place! For these teachers, it’s about really delving into the nuances of the decision-making process. Exactly when and where would this choice be better than that one? With which class and for which topics? Decomposing these decisions also helps more expert or experienced teacher to support less expert or experienced colleagues. Simply saying “come and watch me do this” is unlikely to help (as outlined above) but being able to refer to a shared model of the decision making process can make it easier to share expertise.

A final consideration that supports the kind of adaptive expertise we want teachers to develop is the addition of recomposition. That is, recombining specific elements of a particular practice into a different sequence (eg Janssen et al, 2015). A recent study by Sims et al (2024) showed that decomposition followed by recomposition may increase the likelihood that teachers can transfer the application of teaching techniques to novel scenarios. This means allowing teachers to learn not how to just get better at something they’ve already done, but how to adapt that to future situations they might encounter. To paraphrase Dylan Wiliam, this provides support to improve the teacher, not just the lesson.

Conclusion

A lot of the discourse around professional development has focused on the importance of rehearsal and some of the objections to the widespread adoption of PD practices that incorporate rehearsal are that it becomes too performative, with teachers only only learning visible ‘moves’. If we want teachers to develop expertise then we need to ensure they get to rehearse their thinking too; decomposing the decision making process as part of PD is one way we can support this.

References

Coe, R. (2023). Why aren’t we doing instructional coaching even though everyone else seems to be? Evidence Based Education blog.

EEF (2021). Effective Professional Development: Guidance Report. Education Endowment Foundation. Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/effective-professional-development

Feldon (2007) Cognitive Load and Classroom Teaching: The Double-Edged Sword of Automaticity. Educational Psychologist.

Grossman, Compton, Igra, Ronfeldt, Shahan & Williamson (2009): Teaching Practice: A cross-professional perspective. Teachers College Record.

Janssen, Grossman & Westbroek (2015). Facilitating decomposition and recomposition in practice-based teacher education: The power of modularity. Teaching & Teacher Education.

Ryan & Deci (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary educational psychology, 61, 101860.

Sims & Fletcher-Wood (2021). Identifying the characteristics of effective teacher professional development: a critical review. School effectiveness and school improvement.

Sims, Banks & Curran (2024). Decomposition and recomposition: effects on novice teachers’ enactment and transfer of behaviour management practices. Ambition Institute.

Wiliam (2012). Every Teacher Can Improve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqRcpA5rYTE