The PLATO observation manual
Professor Grossman has produced a number of seminal studies of teaching, teacher education and teachers’ professional learning. Of particular importance for QUINT has been Grossman’s work in developing the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO) observation manual, which represents a novel approach to studying the Language Arts. Rather than looking solely into specific domains of LA teaching, such as speaking, listening, writing and reading, the PLATO manual draws from seminal research on education to describe what characterizes high quality teaching.
The theory underlying PLATO articulates the importance of rigorous content and intellectually challenging tasks, the centrality of classroom discussion in the development of students’ understanding of content, and the critical role teachers play in providing instructional scaffolding for students to help them succeed.
The benefits of the PLATO manual include its capacity to decompose teaching into different components. This provides a ground-floor for a common technical vocabulary for describing teaching and instruction, allowing for the comparison of quality of instruction across classrooms.
Contribution to QUINT research
The PLATO observation manual serves as Linking Instruction and Student Achievement (LISA)-Nordic project, a large-scale video observation project studying state of teaching quality in the Nordic countries. The project’s researchers have adapted the manual so that it can be used to study Mathematics and Social Science lessons, as well as Language Arts.
The PLATO manual is also used in the Video to support excellence in teaching (VIST) project, which works with teachers directly to reflect on the ways that they provide instructional scaffolding to their students. Teachers are video recorded giving their regular lesions, and then the lesions are analysed using the PLATO manual.
PLATO is also used in a number of QUINT PhD projects.
Research on core practices
Dr. Grossman has also been one of the driving forces in the field of research on core practices, which holds significance for studies of teaching and teacher education. The highly cited article “Redefining teaching, re-imagining teacher education” (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009) argued for a major shift in teaching and teacher education, from a focus on the knowledge that teachers need in order to teach, to a focus on how teachers use that knowledge in practice.
Grossman and colleagues underscored how teaching is a complex, partially improvisational, and thus uncertain practice, but that it nevertheless is possible to identify specific core practices that occur with high frequency in teaching. This conceptualisation of teaching is visible throughout the studies produced at the QUINT Centre.
Working towards a common language for teaching
Since 2012, Grossman has been part of a teacher educator consortium that works to select and define the core practices of teaching, and teacher education practices. This is an important contribution to the much-needed work of creating a common language in the field of education.
Professor Grossman will hold an open lecture at the University of Oslo on the 2nd of September titled "The Dream of a Common Language: Core Practices for Teaching" where she will explore both the promise and challenges of identifying and teaching core practices.
Watch Pamela Grossman's keynote at the QUINT Conference 2022
Honorary doctorate lecture at University of Oslo
Friday 2 September 2022, University of Oslo/Blindern & streaming