Clinical Teaching Convention

The Trump Foundation’s Theory of Change assumes that if ‘clinical teaching’ is practiced in classrooms, then more students would choose, retain and succeed in the advanced five unit learning track of mathematics and the sciences. Clinical Teaching is defined by the foundation as a student-centered approach to teaching, which relies on diagnosing each student’s capabilities and difficulties and adapting the teaching to their pace and learning mode. It involves a personalized learning plan for each student, a progress monitoring procedure, a learning community of practice and continuous feedback.

The foundation developed a strategy to implement this premise, which is based on practical training and teacher communities, concentrating on evidence of teaching and learning from actual classrooms.  The strategy is implemented via a series of grants to educational organizations that were tasked to develop tools and methodologies and to invite hundreds of teachers to participate and adopt them. The purpose of the effort is that the teachers who participate in the programs would embrace the clinical approach and its methods, and then implement them in their classrooms, so that more students are engaged in effective learning.

A crucial question which immediately arises is if and how the clinical approach is indeed developed by the grantees, how is it introduced to the participating teachers, how do they embrace it and implement it in their classrooms, and does it indeed improve student participation and success. In its discussions in 2014, the foundation’s Advisory Council, emphasized in that regard, that:

The Foundation’s partners, including teachers, grant recipients, researchers, and decision-makers, do not yet understand the exact intentions of the Foundation. They understand the importance of quality teaching, as they perceive it, but are not yet convinced that it is possible to implement student-focused teaching tailored to meeting the needs of each student…therefore, the foundation, in partnership with its grantees, should specify, clarify and demonstrate its conceptual approach…It should ensure that the projects it supports actually focus on the learning and thinking of individual students…and document and disseminate this practical knowledge with the professional community.

So far, the vehicle the foundation uses to answer these questions relies on progress reports from our grantees, and ongoing hands on engagement with them and our partners at the Ministry of Education and the education field. They provided a valuable and thorough perspective on performance and outputs which is of vital importance to them and to the foundation.

However, until now the majority of our programs had not systematically attempted to add to the perspective of the developers and the operators, a viewpoint from teachers and students regarding the outcomes of the programs in their classrooms. In order to address this vacuum, we propose a first step which would be pilot tested on an experimental basis. We suggest to convene a team of fifteen teachers, who would visit the programs and the classrooms, interview teachers and students, and write a professional review.

The team will be comprised of excellent teachers of mathematics and the sciences, representing the diverse communities of Israel and different areas of instructional expertise. It will be led by one of its participants, a master teacher, who excels in clinical teaching practices. The master teacher would be asked to convene the group twice a year and to lead the analysis and editing of the project reports.

The idea is that every three months three grants will be selected and each reviewed by 2-4 teachers. The teachers would visit the program, watch the participating teacher while teaching in their classrooms, and interview them and their students.  Each teacher will be expected to write a detailed report, and the reports on each program will be edited to a final report. The final report would be shared with the grantee as a basis for discussion with the foundation. In addition, we will seek the grantee’s consent to share the final report with the professional community via the foundation’s website.

The primary questions that the team would seek to answer are:

a). what are the clinical teaching tools being implemented in the program?
b). how did the program contributed to the teacher’s ability to implement these tools in their classroom and did they prove to be effective and influence student learning?
c). what is still lacking or requires improvement?

This effort will be carefully performed on an experimental basis, since we need to study its benefits, its operational implications and its influence on our relationship with our grantees. During the year we also expect to receive valuable feedback and critique from grantees and teachers. We hope this feedback would help us identify additional steps we would need to take in order to clarify and specify the foundation’s clinical approach to teaching. The final reports will also be used as input for the documentation and assessment report on clinical teaching we are preparing towards the foundation’s end-to-end review for the Advisory Council meeting in 2016.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 179