INTERACT – quality in classroom interactions

What is INTERACT?

Schools fundamentally rise or fall based on the success of what occurs within their classrooms. Student engagement is a key contributor to school success, yet upper secondary students consistently and increasingly describe themselves as disengaged and bored. Boredom is an important factor associated with intentions to quit. At the same time, there is a lack of teachers, many teachers are exhausted and perceive work overload regardless of the covid-19 pandemic. Can interventions in schools solve both problems? The Interact study aims at answering this question.

The Interact study will investigate how online video-based dialogue can support teacher work on supportive classroom interaction that may increase student engagement and learning. The dialogues between individuals and an expert on classroom interactions will focus on teachers supporting students’ academic learning and support the implementation of key aspects in the new Norwegian curriculum such as problem-solving, metacognition and deeper content understanding. At the same time, the dialogues will focus on interactions that support teachers’ emotional support and classroom organization.
The intervention is piloted in lower and upper secondary schools. Based on the results of the two pilot studies, we will revise the Interact intervention with teachers, experts, and school leaders.

Interact will be evaluated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT), with at least 100 teachers and the classes they are teaching (n = 2,000 students, aged 16–19) in which teachers in treated classrooms (50) will participate in INTERACT the 2022–2023 school year and additional booster sessions in the 2023–2024 school year. Teachers assigned to the control condition (50) will serve as a business as the usual comparison group. They will participate in Interact in the 2024-2025 school year.

Who are invited to participate in INTERACT?

For practical reasons related to the implementation of data collection, it is desirable that a total of approx. ten schools participate.

The following is required to register:

Schools

Schools need to facilitate that the individual teacher can participate by freeing up the time needed. For teachers in the initiative group, this means 35-40 hours during the year for participation in competence development and conducting surveys. For teachers participating in the comparison group, this means 10 hours. The school must participate with a class or group (hereafter class) for each participating teacher. There should be the same number of teachers/classes in initiatives and the comparison group from each school. The initiative and the comparison groups should (in pairs) be as similar as possible. This means, for example, that the same number of teachers from the Study Specialization programme participate in both the initiative group and the comparison group. If a class from Building and Construction Technology programme participate in the initiative group efforts should be made for someone from the same study program to participate in the comparison group. There should be as many classes as teachers participating. This means that the same class cannot participate with several teachers. It will interfere with measuring the effect if some students receive a "double dose" by participating with more than one teacher. Also, a class can not participate if their teacher is both teaching the intervention group and the comparison group. This would make for both receiving the intervention and being in the comparison group.

The school is to contribute to INTERACT material and models not being shared with teachers and classes who are part of the comparison group or with other non-intervention groups. This is important to be able to investigate the effects of the measure. When the documentation of the measure is completed in the spring of 2024, the results from the study, including materials and models, will be made available. The comparison group is offered to participate in the initiative in the school year 2024-2025.

Teachers

The teacher should preferably teach in vg1 or vg2, as the students must also answer the questionnaire years after the intervention has ended. Teachers need to be able to participate in online dialogues with coaches. Furthermore, it is important that the teachers have time to prepare and participate in digital gatherings four times during the year, and use online resources if drawn into the action group. A participating teacher can be both the main contact teacher for the class or another teacher who has the class. Teachers who participate in INTERACT must be given time to participate in their work plan. Teachers who participate in the intervention group must undertake not to share materials and models from INTERACT with teachers/classes in the comparison group or others outside the intervention group. This is important to investigate the effects of INTERACT.

Administrative support

The school need to have a person who has the flexibility to be able to support and assist the teachers in connection with the recruitment of students implementation of data collection in the form of video recordings, questionnaires, facilitation of interviews and the like in the project.

The schools receive compensation for this extra work depending on how many teachers at the school participate. This person will receive training and support from the Learning Environment Center and project manager in the county municipality.

The county municipality's role

Each of the county municipalities has an INTERACT project manager in the county municipality's school administration who is responsible for supporting and coordinating the schools' participation in INTERACT. The school's person responsible for administrative support will collaborate with the county's INTERACT project manager and INTERACT's research administrative manager at the Learning Environment Center.

Teachers lack authority. Could coaching be a solution?

Minister of Education Kari Nessa Nordtun has repeatedly highlighted that teachers must be given more authority in the classroom. Research, political documents and school staff agree with the minister about the need and have done so for several decades.  

Many good measures and initiatives have been implemented. So what is the next move if we have not succeeded well enough so far? The minister hasn’t really said much about this. 
 

Easy on paper, difficult in practice 

Classroom management and relationships between teachers and pupils play a key role regarding teachers’ authority. The Norwegian school system has made efforts and developed practices in these areas that have yielded results – results that are utilised. 

Studies show that as a group, Norwegian teachers are among the most skilled in the world in these areas. This is thanks to the efforts that the Norwegian school system has put in over several decades. We have succeeded to a large extent, but not well enough. Tasks can be difficult to implement in practice. 

Digital meetings between teachers and coaches provide the potential to train coaches and reach teachers across the country 

“We will listen to the teachers,” says the Minister of Education. We have already done that, and we have listened to the pupils. Since the mid-1990s, the Centre for Learning Environment has asked teachers and pupils about teacher leadership in the classroom and their experiences regarding authority. Together with tens of thousands of teachers and pupils in primary and secondary schools, we have gathered knowledge about teacher authority through various research projects.  

Classroom management has been key. This has provided Norwegian schools and municipalities with an unusually solid platform of knowledge for establishing authority. Together with school staff and municipalities, we have developed and tested the effects of practices to strengthen the authority of teachers.  

However, it has not been enough. Despite the fact that Norwegian teachers as a group are very skilled, there is too much variation between classrooms. 

Two priority areas in particular that need to be focused on 

The extensive research identifies two areas where we have not succeeded well enough: We need more differentiated professional development for teachers. In addition, we need more expertise on implementation, specifically how to work systematically and purposefully so that research-based initiatives produce the intended results. 

Over the course of four decades, the typical efforts to strengthen teachers’ classroom management and authority have included initiatives involving the entire school staff, such as professional development seminars and/or work in small groups. School-wide initiatives have been rooted in the need for competence among all teachers.  

These initiatives have provided us with teachers who have the best competence as a group, but they have not been sufficient in developing good practices in all classrooms. If we want to succeed in strengthening authority, we need to supplement these efforts with individual teacher support and measures that are based on specific classroom environments. One example of additional measures is coaching. 

A great need for coaching 

With support from the Research Council of Norway, we are now testing individual video-based coaching together with 100 teachers and their pupils at 12 upper secondary schools in Rogaland and Møre og Romsdal as part of the INTERACT research project. The aim of the coaching is to strengthen emotional support, classroom organisation and academic support, all of which are key areas for experiencing authority.  

The feedback from teachers is unanimously positive. The teachers are very satisfied with the discussions they have with the coaches they work with throughout the school year. We have met a need among teachers for support in addressing specific challenges in their own classrooms. 

Digital meetings between teachers and coaches provide the potential to educate coaches and reach teachers across the country. This provides teachers on an island in Finnmark with the same opportunities for professional development as teachers living near universities in larger cities.  

The offer can be included in existing national support schemes for professional development in the education sector. As a result, there is no need for new and expensive support schemes. It involves working a little differently, not necessarily more. 

The best of both worlds 

Coaching should not replace, but rather supplement and complement school-wide initiatives; for teachers with a special interest in the topic, for newly educated teachers, for teachers who, despite years of success, face a new class that challenges their authority, or for teachers who want to further develop their own practice for other reasons.  

The measure itself might be excellent and effective, but if its implementation is not good enough, it will fail to produce results. 

A coach can function much like a trainer in athletics or ski jumping, where video recordings are made to identify areas that can be perfected. This is not because one is unable to master things, but because one wants to continue developing. This offer is currently not available to most teachers. 

Inadequate knowledge about implementation 

The challenge with coaching, and all other initiatives in schools, is to work purposefully and systematically to a sufficient degree over a long enough period so as to establish lasting competence. It is all about the implementation. Simply put: the measure itself might be excellent and effective, but if its implementation is not good enough, it will fail to produce results.  

National and international research shows that this is one of the biggest challenges in schools. Even though this is slowly but surely changing, we still don’t have enough competence in schools on how to succeed with the initiatives we implement. 

How bad can it get? Really bad. Being a teacher is a tough job at many schools around the country, but we have still succeeded to a large extent. In order to be even more successful, we must innovate without discarding the good work that has already been done. Then things can get (even) better.

Text: Sigrun Ertesvåg