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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren

INTERACT: Enhancing upper secondary students’ engagement and learning through video-based professional development on teaching interactions

Alternative title: INTERACT: Videobasert utvikling av lærar-elev interaksjonar i klasserommet.

Awarded: NOK 20.0 mill.

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 are 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 dialogs can support teachers' work on supportive classroom interactions that may increase student engagement and learning. The dialogs between an individual teacher and an expert on classroom interactions will focus on how teachers support 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 dialogs will focus on interactions that support teachers? emotional support and classroom organization. The intervention is piloted in lower and in upper secondary school. 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 a class 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 usual comparison group. They will participate in Interact in the 2024-2025 school year.

Student engagement is a key contributor to school completion, yet upper secondary students consistently and increasingly describe themselves as disengaged and bored. Our intervention study will investigate how video-based online coaching can support teachers’ competences in teacher-student-interaction (TSI) and thereby improve student engagement and learning. Unlike many individual and family factors, TSI is open to improvement by the school community. The INTERACT online coaching intervention is designed to add to school- and team-based professional development (PD) for teachers. This is the first attempt to take school, team, and individual levels into account in a PD TSI intervention study. Understanding whether and for whom individual coaching adds to school- and team-level intervention will be crucial to improving teacher PD, which may increase student engagement and reduce school non-completion. The INTERACT intervention consists of 1) an online introductory module, 2) data-driven decision making, and 3) a guided video review process using teachers’ own practices as a starting point. Using digital solutions, we will provide teachers with equal opportunities for high-quality competence development in classroom interactions irrespective of their geographic location within the country. The INTERACT intervention is piloted at the upper secondary level. We will conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with at least 100 teachers and their upper secondary students (n = 1350). Teachers in the intervention classrooms will participate in the INTERACT intervention for a year as a supplement to school- and team-based PD. During the full implementation and follow-up, we will conduct an extensive implementation and process evaluation (IPE) to understand the INTERACT intervention’s effect on improvements to TSI and student engagement and learning outcomes. We will develop and validate much needed measurements for the investigation of implementation processes.

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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren