Teacher Training

Of course, it could be argued that it isn’t even necessary to attempt to properly differentiate between good and bad teachers, given the exemplary training all of our teachers receive. Said another way, perhaps our teacher-preparatory institutions ensure that all of their graduates perform competently, hence negating the possibility of documenting learning production differences among teachers.

One of the fi rst schooling experiments I ever conducted was, in fact, an indirect test of this proposition. My study was inspired by a very famous educational researcher at the time, W. James Popham (mentioned previously as a critic of value-added teacher assessment), who conducted a series of experiments that were designed to find a way to measure teaching proficiency but inadvertently found instead that neither teacher experience nor training had any effect upon student learning.

The rationale for his studies was innocuous enough. Popham hypothesized that perhaps one reason we cannot differentiate exemplary teachers from abysmally ineffective ones (always defi ned, incidentally, by how much their students learned ) was that our standardized tests simply weren’t sensitive enough to measure teacher performance. Just as today, these large amorphous tests weren’t that closely matched to the school curriculum, so commercial tests themselves didn’t necessarily assess what teachers actually taught in their classrooms.

How then could they be used to measure teaching performance? Especially since up to 60 % of these test scores are due to individual differences in student backgrounds, thereby leaving only 40 % to be explained by other factors (of which teacher differences may account for only a small percentage). So, Popham decided to start from scratch and develop a series of teaching performance tests . First, he designed experimental units based upon discrete instructional objectives, which refl ect small pieces of instruction that can be tested directly such as:

Sample Instructional Objective: “Given any two single digit numbers, the student will be able to supply their sum.”

Then, each instructional objective was accompanied by a test item that assessed its mastery:
Sample Test Item Assessing this Objective: 7 + 4 = ___.)

The use of instructional objectives and tests based upon them accomplished two crucial functions:

1. They ensured that the teachers knew exactly what they were expected to teach, and
2. The resulting tests assessed exactly what the teacher was expected to teach, nothing more and nothing less.

Thus, for our exceedingly simple illustrative instructional objective above (Popham used more complex ones in his studies involving high school students), there are exactly 100 (and only 100) test items that can be generated to assess the degree to which students mastered the objective (and presumably how well the teacher performed her or his job). 

Before advocating the use of his tests as a full-blown measure of teacher profi ciency, however, Popham wisely decided to validate his approach via a technique called the “known-groups” approach. The logic behind this technique involved fi nding two groups of teachers who were “known” to differ on the “thing” being assessed, having them teach the same instructional unit to a comparable classroom, and then seeing if the students taught by the two groups differed in the amount they learned. 

In this case, the “thing” was teacher proficiency in eliciting learning, so the first task was to find two groups of teachers: one of whom was known to be much more proficient than the other. But therein lay a classic Catch. How could anyone identify proficient versus non proficient teachers if a test didn’t yet exist that was capable of rank ordering instructional success? 

No problem for Popham. He simply defined his proficient group as professionally trained, credentialed, experienced teachers and his nonproficient group as individuals who had never had any formal teacher training or teaching experience, such as housewives, electricians, and auto mechanics. (The housewives taught social studies, while the other two groups taught topics in their respective vocations.) 

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Beyond Value-Added Teacher Assessment

One of the problems with the value-added approach to teacher assessment, which is probably also one reason for its failure to identify teachers who are consistently effective or ineffective across time, is its black box approach to the entire process. In other words it employs a strictly statistical strategy for differentiating between teachers without attempting to explain why the students of some teachers seem to learn more than the students of other teachers.

As it happens, however, we already know why . The explanation is found in the truly seminal piece of educational research called the “Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study”. Employing intensive, repeated observations of 25 second- and 25 fifth-grade classrooms, this study found that, on average, 2 hours and 15 minutes of the second-grade school day was devoted to academic activities (which were defi ned as instruction in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies), whereas 55 minutes was devoted to nonacademic activities (such as music and art), and 44 minutes was “wasted” on things such as waiting for assignments and conducting class business.

Taking math and reading as the two primary academic subjects of interest, the researchers found that, on average, the 25 second-grade teachers allocated 2 hours and 6 minutes per day to instruction. Their students were actually engaged in learning for 1 hour and 30 minutes (or 71 % of the time). What was even more telling, however, was the fact that the top 10 % (approximately) of the teachers allocated 50 minutes more to instruction than did the bottom 10 % , and their students were actually engaged in learning these subjects for about the same amount of extra time (50 minutes).

Although this may not sound like a great deal, it means that, in these two crucial subjects, some children could receive 150 hours more instruction during a school year than other students. And, since the average amount of time actually allocated to teaching these subjects was 2 hours and 6 minutes, this means that some children received 71.4 days more instruction than others, or a total of over 14 weeks of extra schooling !

To put all of this in context, the investigators contrast two hypothetically average students, one of whom (Student A) receives a grand total of 4 minutes per day of relevant instruction and one (Student B) who receives 52 minutes. Since these students are average, they would start the year at the 50th percentile on the standardized tests, yet by midyear Student A would decline to the 39th percentile, while Student B would improve to the 66th percentile! The authors go on to justify the feasibility of their analyses as follows:

It may appear that this range from 4 to 52 minutes per day is unrealistically large. However, these times actually occurred in the classes in the study. Furthermore, it is easy to image how either 4 to 52 minutes of reading instruction per day might come about. If 50 minutes of reading instruction per day is allocated to a student (Student A) who pays attention a third of the time, and one-fourth of the students’ reading time is at a high level of success [these authors defined “a high level of success” as instruction administered at an appropriate level of difficulty], the student will experience only about 4 minutes of engaged reading at a high success level. Similarly, if 100 minutes per day is allocated to reading for a student (Student B) who pays attention 85 percent of the time, at a high level of success for almost two-thirds of that time, then she/he will experience 52 minutes of Academic Learning Time per day.

So, the moral here is that massive differences exist in both the amount of instruction that different teachers deliver, as well as in the amount of relevant instruction students receive . (We’ve already mentioned some work 50 that found that the variability in the amount of instruction received by typical students on a school wide basis can be as much as 50 % , which borders upon a criminal offense in my opinion.)

So while I haven’t seen these studies even mentioned in the value-added literature, in my opinion they constitute the only theoretical rationale of which I am aware for why we should be able to differentiate teachers who produce more learning from those who produce less of it. And by simply monitoring classroom instruction by continuously recording it on digital cameras (assuming that provisions were made for constantly identifying opportunities for improvement and then providing sufficient professional development to show teachers how to teach more intensely) we could go a very long way toward either reducing teacher differences in performance or weeding out those teachers who consistently teach less. At the very least we could combine these data with value-added procedures, which in turn might improve the latter’s present woeful ability to identify teacher differences that were consistent over time.
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Value-Added Teacher Assessment

Most commonly associated with William B. Sanders and his colleagues (originally at the University of Tennessee and now at the SAS Institute), one such approach is predicated on the proposition that if enough data on individual students are available over time, then this information can be used to predict these students’ test score gains in the future.

It therefore follows that, if all of any given teacher’s students’ test score gains can be predicted based upon these students’ past performance, then any discrepancies from these predictions represent that teacher’s effectiveness ineffectiveness for that particular year. Called value-added teacher assessment , this approach uses sophisticated longitudinal statistical modeling procedures to generate predictions regarding students’ test score gains for a given year.

It then defi nes any observed classroom performance that turns out to be better than predicted on the end-of-year test as the value added by the teacher of said classroom. (Again, what else could it be?) This approach has resulted in some relatively promising findings, especially for mathematics, to a lesser extent for reading, but apparently not so much for other subjects. Before considering these findings in any detail, however, it is worth noting that the model attempts to simulate the situation in which:

• Students are randomly assigned to teachers (which would help to decrease the individual differences in students’ propensity to learn between teachers’ classes that occur when students are assigned on the basis of their likelihood to gain more or less highly on standardized tests — such as occurs when parents request that their children be assigned to a given teacher based upon that teacher’s reputation or when a principal assigns students that he or she believes will prosper more with one teacher than another or when students are grouped/tracked based upon their ability level);
• Students are tested twice per year, once at the beginning of the year and once at the end (because the learning and forgetting that goes on during the summer is not under the control of the next year’s teacher but obviously affects how much children improve from the previous May’s testing to the next May’s testing — which in turn is used to judge that teacher’s effectiveness);
• Subtract the two test scores for each teacher to get a measure of how much his or her students learned during the year;
• Repeat the entire process the next year;
• Compare each teachers’ learning results across the two years after statistically controlling for as many factors not under the teachers’ control as possible (such as the amount of instruction students’ had previously received, and continued to receive, from their home learning environments).

Since these conditions are extremely difficult to implement (and information regarding children’s actual home learning environment is nonexistent) in the real world of schooling, Sanders and colleagues have made a valiant attempt to do the best they can with what is available to them. Their results have generated a great deal of excitement outside education (both President Obama and Malcolm Gladwell are huge fans), but unfortunately, although the value added researchers’ efforts are interpreted as showing that teacher effects are considerable in any given year, the results assessing the consistency of these effects over time are considerably less impressive.
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What Makes A Good Teacher?

What makes a good teacher? Is it warmth, humor, and the ability to care about people? Is it planning, hard work, and self-decipline? What about leadership, enthusiasm, a contagious love of learning, and speaking ability? Most people would agree that all of these qualities are needed to make someone a good teacher, and they would certainly be correct. But these qualities are not enough.

Knowing the Subject Matters (but So Does Teaching Skill)
There is an old iolte that -go es like this:
Qaestion: What do you need to laow to be able to teach a horse?
Answer: More than the horse!

This joke makes the obvious point that the first thing a teacher must have is some knowledge or skills that the learner does not have; teachers must know the subject - matter they expect to teach. But if you think about teaching horses (or children), you will soon realize that although subject matter knowledge is necessary, it is not enough. A rancher may have a good idea of how a horse is supposed to act and what a horse is supposed to be able to do, but if he doesn't have the skills to make an untrained, scared, and unfriendly animal into a good saddle horse, he's going to end up with nothing but broken ribs and teeth marks for his troubles.

Children are a lot smarter and a little more forgiving than horses, but teaching them has this in common with teaching horses: Knowledge of how to transmit information and skills is at least as important as laowledge of the information and slulls themselves. We have all had teachers (most often college professors, unfortunately) who were brilliant and thoroughly knowledgeable in their fields but who could not teach. Ellen Mathis may know as much as Leah Washington about what good writing should be, but she has a lot to learn about how to get third-graders to write well.

For effective teaching, subject matter knowledge is not a question of being a walking encyclopedia. Effective teachers not only laow their subjects, but they can also communicate their knowledge to students. The celebrated high school math teacher Jaime Escalante taught the concept of positive and negative numbers to students in a Los Angeles barrio by explaining that wllen you dig a hole, you might call the pile of dirt +1, the hole -1. What do you get when you put the dirt back in the hole? Zero.

Mastering the Teaching Skills


The link between what the teacher wants students to learn and students' actual learning is called instruction, or pedagogy. Effective instruction is not a simple matter of one person with more knowledge transmitting that lcnowledge to another. If telling were teaching, this boolc would be unnecessary. Rather, effective instruction demands the use of many strategies. For example, suppose Paula Ray wants to teach a lesson on statistics to a diverse class of fourth-graders. To do this, Paula must accomplish many things. She must make sure that the class is orderly and that students lmow what behavior is expected of them. She must find out whether students have the prerequisite slulls; for example, students need to be able to add and divide to find averages.

If any do not, Paula must find a way to teach students those skills. She must engage students in activities that lead them toward an understanding of statistics, such as having students roll dice, play cards, or collect data from experiments; and she must use teaching strategies that help students remember what they have been taught. The lessons should also talce into account the intellectual and social characteristics of students in the fourth grade and the intellectual, social, and cultural characteristics of these particular students. Paula must make sure that students are interested in the lesson and are motivated to learn statistics.

To see whether students are learning what is being taught, she may ask questions or use quizzes or have students demonstrate their understanding by setting up and interpreting experiments, and she must respond appropriately if these assessments show that students are having problems. After the series of lessons on statistics ends, Paula should review this topic from time to time to ensure that it is remembered. These tasks-motivating students, managing the classroom, assessing prior lnowledge, communicating ideas effectively, taking into account the characteristics of the learners, assessing learning outcomes, and reviewing information-must be attended to at all levels of education, in or out of schools.

They apply as much to the training of astronauts as to the teaching of reading. How these taslcs are accomplished, however, differs widely according to the ages of the students, the objectives of instruction, and other factors. What malces a good teacher is the ability to carry out all the tasks involved in effective instruction (Burden & Byrd, 2003). Warmth, enthusiasm, and caring are essential, as is subject matter knowledge. But it is the successful accomplishment of all the tasks of teaching that makes for instructional effectiveness (Shulman, 2000).
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The Intentional Teacher

There is no formula for good teaching, no seven steps to Teacher of the Year. Teaching involves planning and preparation, and then dozens of decisions every hour. Yet one attribute seems to be characteristic of outstanding teachers: intentionality. Intentionality means doing things for a reason, on purpose. Intentional teachers are those who are constantly thinking about the outcomes they want for their students and about how each decision they make moves children toward those outcomes. Intentional teachers know at maximum learning does not happen by chance.

Yes, children do learn in unplanned ways all the time, and many will learn from even the most chaotic lesson. But to really challenge students, to get their best efforts, to help them make conceptual leaps and organize and retain new knowledge, teachers need to be purpose, thought, and flexible, without ever losing sight of their goals for every child. In a word, they need to be intentional.

The idea that teachers should always do things for a reason seems obvious, and in principle it is. Yet in practice, it is d~fficultto constantly make certain that all students are engaged in activities that lead to important learning outcomes. Teachers very frequently fall into strategies that they themselves would recognize, on reflection, as being time fillers rather than instructionally essential activities. For example, an otherwise outstanding third-grade teacher once assigned seatwork to one of her reading groups. The children were given two sheets of paper with words in squares.

Their task was to cut out the squares on one sheet and then paste them onto synonyms on the other. When all the words were pasted correctly, lines on the pasted squares would form an outline of a cat, wlich the children were then to color. Once the children pasted a few squares, the puzzle became clear, so they could paste the remainder without paying any attention to the words themselves. For almost an hour of precious class time, these children happily cut, pasted, and colored-not high-priority skills for third-graders.

The teacher would have said that the objective was for children to learn or practice synonyms, of course; but in fact the activity could not possibly have moved the children forward on that slull. Similarly, many teachers have one child laborio~zslyw ork a problem on the chalkboard while the rest of the class has nothing important to do. Many secondary teachers spend most of the class period going over homework and classwork and end up doing very little teaching of new content.

Again, these may be excellent teachers in other ways, but they sometimes lose sight of what they are trying to achieve and how they are going to achieve it. Intentional teachers are constantly asking themselves what goals they and their students are trying to accomplish. Is each portion of their lesson appropriate to students' background lu~owledge, slulls, and needs? Is each activity or assignment clearly related to a valued outcome? Is each instructional minute used wisely and well?

An intentional teacher trying to build students' synonym skills during follow-up time might have them work in pairs to master a set of synonyms in preparation for individual quizzes. An intentional teacher might have all children work a given problem while one works at the board, so that all can compare answers and strategies together. An intentional teacher might quicldy give homework answers for students to check themselves, ask for a show of hands for correct answers, and then review and reteach only those exercises missed by many students. An intentional teacher uses a wide variety of instructional methods, experiences, assignments, and materials to be sure that children are achieving all sorts of cognitive objectives, from knowledge to application to creativity, and that at the same time children are learning important affective objectives, such as love of learning, respect for others, and personal responsibility. An intentional teacher constantly reflects on his or her practices and outcomes.

Research finds that one of tile most powerful predictors of a teacher's impact on students is the belief that what he or she does makes a difference. This belief, called teacher efficacy (Henson, 2002; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 200 1 ), is at the heart of what it means to be an intentional teacher. Teachers who believe that success in school is almost entirely due to children's inborn intelligence, home environment, or other factors that teachers cannot influence, are unlikely to teach in the same way as those who believe that their own efforts are the key to children's learning. An intentional teacher, one who has a strong belief in her or his efficacy, is more lilzely to put forth consistent effort, to persist in the face of obstacles, and to lzeep trying relentlessly until every student succeeds (Bandura, 1997). Intentional teachers achieve a sense of efficacy by constantly assessing the results of their instruction (Schmoker, 1999), constantly trying new strategies if their initial instruction didn't work, and constantly seeking ideas from colleagues, books, magazines, workshops, and other sources to enrich and solidify their teaching slulls.

Groups of teachers, such as all teachers in an elementary school or all teachers in a given academic department, can attain collective efficacy by working together to examine their practices and outcomes, seek professional development, and help each other succeed (see Lieberman & Miller, 1999; Sachs, 2000). Collective efficacy can have a particularly strong impact on student achievement (Goddard, Hoy, & Hoy, 2000).

The most important purpose of this book is to give tomorrow's teachers the intellectual grounding in research, theory, and practical wisdom they will need in order to become intentional, effective teachers. To plan and carry out effective lessons, discussions, projects, and other learning experiences, teachers need to know a great deal. Besides knowing their subjects, they need to understand the developmental levels and needs of their children. They need to understand how learning, memory, problem-solving sldl, and creativity are acquired and how to promote their acquisition. They need to know how to set objectives, organize activities designed to help students attain those objectives, and assess students' progress toward them. They need to lulow how to motivate children, how to use class time effectively, and how to respond to individual differences among students.

Like Leah Washington, the teacher in the vignette that opened this chapter, intentional teachers are constantly combining their knowledge of principles of educational psychology, their experience, and their creativity to make instructional decisions and help children become enthusiastic and effective learners. They are continually experimenting with strategies to solve problems of instruction and then observing the results of their actions to see if they were effective (Duck, 2000). This text highlights the ideas that are central to educational psychology and the related research. It also presents many examples of how these ideas apply in practice, emphasizing teaching practices, not just theory or suggestions, that have been evaluated and found to be effective. The text is designed to help you develop critical thinking skills for teaching: a logical and systematic approach to the many dilemmas that are found in practice and research. No text can provide all the right answers for teaching, but this one tries to pose the right questions and to engage you by presenting realistic alternatives and the concepts and research behind them.

Many student have looked at the differences between expert and novice teachers and between more and less effective teachers. One theme comes through these studies: Expert teachers are critical thinkers (Anderson et al., 1995; Hogan, Rabinowitz, & Craven, 2003; Shulman, 2000). Intentional teachers are constantly upgrading and examining their own teaching practices, reading and attending conferences to learn new ideas, and using their own students responses to guide their instructional decisions. There's an old saying to the effect that there are teachers with 20 years of experience and there are teachers with 1 year of experience 20 times. Teachers who get better each year are the ones who are open to new ideas and who look at their own teaching critically. Perhaps the most important goal of tlis book is to get you in the habit of using informed reflection to become one of tomorrow's expert teachers.
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Teaching as Decision Making

The aim of research in educational psychology is to test the various theories that guide the actions of teachers and others involved in education. Here is another example of how a teacher might use educational psychology. Mr. Harris teaches an eighth-grade social studies class. He has a problem with Tom, who frequently misbehaves. Today, Tom makes a paper airplane and flies it across the room when Mr. Harris turns his back, to the delight of the entire class. What should Mr. Harris do?

As an intentional teacher, Mr. Harris considers a range of options for solving this problem, each of which comes from a theory about why Tom is misbehaving and what will motivate him to behave more appropriately. Some actions Mr. Harris might take, and the theories on which they are based, are as follows:

Action

1. Reprimand Tom.
2. Ignore Tom.
3. Send Tom to the office.
4. Tell the class that it is everyone's responsibility to maintain a good learning environment and that if any student misbehaves, 5 minutes will be subtracted from recess. 
5. Explain to the class that Tom's behavior is interfering with lessons that all students need to know and that his behavior goes against the rules the class set for itself at the beginning of the year.

Theory

1. A reprimand is a form of punishment. Tom will behave to avoid punishment.
2. Attention may be rewarding to Tom. Ignoring him would deprive him of this reward.
3. Being sent to the office is punishing. It also deprives Tom of the (apparent) support of his classmates.
4. Tom is misbehaving to get his classmates' attention. If the whole class loses out when he misbehaves, the class will keep him in line.
5. The class holds standards of behavior that conflict with both Tom's behavior
6. in class and the class's reaction to it. By reminding the class of its own needs (to learn the lesson) and its own rules set at the beginning of the year, the teacher might make Tom see that the class does not really support his behavior.

Each of these actions is a common response to misbehavior. But which theory (and therefore which action) is correct? The key might be in the fact that his classmates laugh when Tom misbehaves. Ths response is a clue that Tom is seelung their attention. If Mr. Harris scolds Tom, this might increase Tom's status in the eyes of his peers and may reward his behavior. Ignoring misbehavior might be a good idea if a student were acting up to get the teacher's attention, but in this case it is apparently the class's attention that Tom is seeking. Sending Tom to the office does deprive him of his classmates' attention and therefore may be effective. But what if Tom is looking for a way to get out of class to avoid worlc? What if he struts out to confront the powers that be, to the obvious approval of his classmates? Malung the entire class responsible for each student's behavior is likely to deprive Tom of his classmates' support and to improve his behavior; but some students may think that it is unfair to punish them for another student's misbehavior. 

Finally, reminding the class (and Tom) of its own interest in learning and its usual standards of behavior might worlc if the class does, in fact, value academic achevement and good behavior. Research in education and psychology bears directly on the decision Mr. Harris must make. Developmental research indicates that as students enter adolescence, the peer group becomes all-important to them, and they try to establish their independence from adult control, often by flouting or ignoring rules. 

Basic research on behavioral learning theories shows that when a behavior is repeated many times, some reward must be encouraging the behavior, and that if the behavior is to be eliminated, the reward must first be identified and removed. This research would also suggest that Mr. Harris consider problems with the use of punishment (such as scolding) to stop undesirable behavior. Research on specific classroom management strategies has identified effective methods to use both to prevent a student lilce Tom from misbehaving in the fist place and to deal with his misbehavior when it does occur. 

Finally, research on rule setting and classroom standards indicates that student participation in setting rules can help convince each student that the class as a whole values academic achievement and appropriate behavior, and that this belief can help keep individual students in line. Armed with this information, Mr. Harris can choose a response to Tom's behavior that is based on an understandng of why Tom is doing what he is doing and what strategies are available to deal with the situation. He may or may not make the right choice; but because he lznows several theories that could explain Tom's behavior, he will be able to observe the outcomes of his strategy and, if it is ineffective, to learn from that and try something else that will work.

Research does not give Mr. Harris a specific solution; that requires his own experience and judgment. But research does give Mr. Harris basic concepts of human behavior to help him understand Tom's motivations and an array of proven methods that might solve the problem. And using research to help him make teaching decisions is one way Mr. Harris can achieve a sense of his own efficacy as a teacher.

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