If you're a teacher or preparing to be one and want to be sure you're using evidence-based practices with your students, you could do a literature search and pore through hundreds of studies for relevant information. But now you don't have to: A new report from APA does that work for you. Top 20 Principles from Psychology for PreK–12 Teaching and Learning lays out the most useful psychological concepts for elementary and secondary school educators (see "The top 20 teaching and learning principles") and offers tips for putting them to use in the classroom.
"The whole idea is to take research from psychological science and translate it for use by practitioners," says Joan Lucariello, PhD, the immediate past chair of an APA-supported group called the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education, which developed the report.
The report includes sections on how students think and learn; what motives them; how social context, relationships and emotional well-being affect learning; how to manage a classroom and how to assess students' progress. For each of the principles, the report summarizes the scientific evidence, explains how educators can apply that science and offers a list of references for those who want to learn more.
The report is aimed at both teaching candidates and those already teaching. Coaches, counselors, principals, other school leaders and parents will also find it useful, says Lucariello.
"Generally, when teachers are prepared in schools of education, they might have just one or two psychology courses, if that," she says.
In addition, she says, the timing of those courses makes them less helpful than they could be, since they're typically offered at the beginning of training, well before students get into a classroom. "Teacher candidates are not getting the key information from psychological science when it might be very useful, that is, while they're in the field doing their student teaching," says Lucariello.
Putting the principles into practice
To develop the principles, the coalition — a diverse group of psychologists with expertise in applying psychological science to early childhood, elementary, secondary and special education (see sidebar) — used a consensus panel approach.
"We started off with a thought experiment by asking coalition members, if they could share only two psychological principles with teachers, what would they be?" says Rena Subotnik, PhD, who directs APA's Center for Psychology in Schools and Education. "The members come from different traditions and specialties, so by limiting their choices, we wanted to free them from having to represent their own tradition or specialty."
The result was a list of what Subotnik calls the "drop-dead psychology principles teachers need to know to be effective."
Educators are already putting the principles to use.
Among them is the Fairfax County, Virginia, school system, which uses the principles in professional development for teachers and principals, says Carol V. Horn, EdD, who coordinates the system's advanced academics program.
Fairfax County's curriculum already draws on best practices in teaching and learning, but the principles are helping to reinforce the idea, says Horn. In a series of workshops, Horn asks teachers and principals to break into groups, with each group reviewing one of the principles, summarizing the key points and explaining how they use that principle in their work.
"Even though we all know what the research-based practice is, the principles help teachers, principals and other stakeholders understand the why," says Horn. "And because it was created by experts and quotes the research on which the principles are based, it has great credibility in the field."
Teacher preparation programs are also using the principles. At George Mason University, for example, faculty in the master's-level program in educational psychology are using the document to ensure that courses are aligned with the program's standards and sequenced properly.
"Now that the Top 20 Principles have come out, we see that we're already teaching them within our classes, but now we're able to identify exactly what principles are taught in each class," says Erin Peters-Burton, PhD, an associate professor of education at George Mason. In the past, the annual review of courses had been more free-form, with faculty checking the courses against the program's own standards, says Peters-Burton. "With 20 of them, it gets into a level of detail we haven't had before."
Faculty are also using the principles to assess students. The program uses the principles to outline what students should know, measuring their progress at the beginning and end of classes. "The principles are a good foundation for building a baseline and looking for improvement," says Peters-Burton.
The principles may be especially helpful to those outside psychology, says Jamilia Blake, PhD, an associate professor of school psychology at Texas A&M University. In fact, she has already noticed a colleague from the geography department promoting the principles on a faculty Listserv.
"The principles are very useful for those in higher education who don't have a background or training in psychology or education," says Blake, adding that the report's suggestions for K–12 teaching and learning also apply to first-year college students in large, introductory classes.
To help spread the word, Blake plans to send the report to K–12 principals and supervisors at schools in her area. She also plans to share it with Texas A&M's Center for Teaching Excellence and urge staff there to incorporate the principles into its professional development activities.
Teachers already in the classroom can use the principles not just for their own professional development but also to assess the quality of in-service trainings, says Rob McEntarffer, PhD, an assessment and evaluation specialist at Lincoln Southeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Unfortunately, says McEntarffer, in-service professional development for PreK–12 teachers too often consists of speakers presenting information of doubtful quality. At one high school, for example, a speaker brought in for professional development claimed that students remember only 10 percent of what they hear, 20 percent of what they read and 30 percent of what they see and urged teachers to base their teaching on this so-called learning pyramid.
"The speaker was making the claim as if this was a research-based fact about teaching and learning," says McEntarffer. "A teacher with the ‘Top 20 Principles' could quickly double-check this claim and figure out that it's an absolute myth with no basis in reality."