Teaching and Learning in the Effective School

Alma Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429675133
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1999, this volume attempts to draw the literature on school effectiveness and teacher effectiveness together in one volume. Its central tenet is that classroom effectiveness is central to school effectiveness and that there is much to be gained from integrating the literature on effective schooling and effective teaching. Issues discussed include departments, classroom communication and teacher expectation, motivation and feedback.

1 Effective schools

Introduction

During the past decade there has been an increasing momentum in the UK, as elsewhere, towards the decentralisation of schools. This has been accompanied by an increasing interest in how schools are performing and how schools can improve performance. The publication of comparative tables and regular inspection of all schools not only informs parents and others about schools' achievement but allows success and inadequacy to be identified (Myers and Stoll, 1998). Consequently, school effectiveness is very much on the political, research and teaching agendas.

One common response to the problem or making schools more effective has been to mobilise change effort at the level of the whole organisation. There has been a legacy of interventionist activity which has concentrated upon the restructuring of the school. This type of intervention is premised upon a view that the key to school effectiveness lies in changing management systems, which has led to an emphasis upon the systemics of schooling as the means to achieving school improvement. In practice, this approach has encouraged schools to define and redefine roles and responsibilities, introduce monitoring systems and generally concentrate their efforts upon infrastructural change. This approach has stressed the administrative arrangements rather than the human factors and, it can be argued, has neglected the importance of cultural change in schools.

This chapter looks at the theoretical and methodological basis of the school effectiveness research tradition. It considers how school effectiveness is measured and analyses the strengths and limitations of the field. A first step, however, is to define exactly what is meant by the term 'school effectiveness'.

Defining and measuring school effectiveness

Defining and determining the effectiveness of a school would appear to be a relatively straightforward affair. To enquire into the effectiveness of a school requires asking how well a school is doing relative to some set of standards. Yet, there are many possible bases for generating criteria of effectiveness and many different value positions from which criteria can be generated. For example, what teachers might perceive as important school outcomes may not coincide with the opinions of parents, governors, the local community, government or the media. It is also feasible that any or all of these groups may not agree with each other upon a definition of school effectiveness. Hence, defining school effectiveness is both highly complex and potentially controversial.

One of the problems with the concept of school effectiveness is that defining it in the real world is not only a technical, or scientific problem but an ethical one. Once a word like 'effectiveness' becomes widely used, it gains many shades of meaning and can be so widely used that it loses precision. Another problem relates to the issue of 'effectiveness for whom?'. Even if a definition of effectiveness were agreed, questions of educational value still remain. In educational discussion the term 'effective' is often associated with the quality of education. Some authors give a broader meaning to the word by speaking of the general 'goodness' of an educational organisation. Other concepts that are used as synonyms for effectiveness include efficiency, productivity and the survival of an organisation. Such concepts fit more closely with 'means-end' relationship implicit in judging school effectiveness.

When applied to educational phenomena, effectiveness refers to the degree to which educational means or processes result in the attainment of educational goals or outcomes. In the language of a simple 'input-process-output' systems model of education, effectiveness could be referred to as the translation of inputs by means of processes into desired outputs. In the main, the term 'effective' presupposes that some sort of measurement has been made. Within the school effectiveness literature, the central aim is to judge whether differences in resources, processes and organisational arrangements affect pupil outcomes and if so, in what way. School effectiveness research has chiefly been concerned with the extent to which schools differ from one another and measuring precisely how much difference schools make to pupils' performance.

One of the distinctive features of school effectiveness research is its preoccupation with judging and measuring performance. The whole issue of trying to come to some objective judgement of organisational performance is not without some methodological and ethical difficulty. Increasingly, professionals in education are making statements about the effectiveness of schools/colleges but often the criteria which they are using in making such judgements vary considerably. For most researchers the concept of 'effectiveness' is linked to the measurement of pupil achievements which are aggregated for all the students in the organisation. In school effectiveness studies usually test/exam results are used to gauge and compare pupil performance. These test /exam results have been viewed by some school effectiveness researchers as the most important outcomes of schooling. Other researchers have argued that there are other equally important outcomes not so easily measured.

It would appear there are two interpretations of the measurement of school effectiveness which result in very different approaches. The first pivots round a set of output indicators that are in the public consciousness and which are, therefore, almost bound to surface in any consultation about effectiveness indicators. These are viewed as the 'products' or 'outputs' of the education system. These include raw exam results or test scores which take no account of the previous attainments of students.

The second and more broad type of measurement includes data such as truancy rates, staying-on rates in post-16 education (where relevant) and destination data. This latter approach allows for a much more eclectic view of organisational effectiveness. In short, however, all these measures are output indicators in the sense that to some extent they are the result of what happens inside a school. Clearly, there are other types of indicators that institutions might consider. For example, it is possible to consider indicators concerned with processes, e.g. dimensions of teaching and learning, though these are more difficult to develop and use.

Constructing process indicators presents quite a challenge to schools. As noted earlier, it is far easier for schools to use the number of qualifications achieved by students than to construct precise process indicators. Yet, many researchers argue that value-added measures which consider process factors are more valid indicators of organisational effectiveness than raw measures. Indeed, the definition of effectiveness provided by Mortimore (1991) is based upon value-added measurement. This alternative interpretation of an effective school is defined as 'one in which students progress further than might be expected from consideration of that organisation's intake' (Mortimore 1991, p. 9), in other words, 'an effective school adds extra value to student outcomes in comparison with other institutions serving similar intakes' (Sammons et al. 1995, p. 3). It is suggested that this form of measurement allows relative and comparative judgements of school effectiveness to be made.

Consider the following questions within the context of your own school:

• How is the effectiveness of your school judged/measured?
• What criteria are used?
• Who is involved in making such judgements?

Consider the following questions within the context of your own teaching:

• How is the effectiveness of your teaching judged/measured?
• What criteria are used?
• Who do you involve in making such judgements?

Clearly, various criteria of school effectiveness can be applied. Indeed, schools have quite diverse goals once one moves away from a narrow academic focus. It has been shown that important stakeholders like parents tend to have a much broader range of expectations from educational organisations than simply academic achievement. Consequently, many recent studies of effectiveness have added students' behaviour, attendance, delinquency, attitudes and self-concept to information on student attainment in order to arrive at multiple measures of school effectiveness (e.g. Mortimore et al. 1988; Smith and Tomlinson 1989). However, a large number of studies have relied solely on academic measures to identify effective schools.

Prior to the 1970s in the UK there were relatively few studies of effective schools. In the US studies of school effectiveness were similarly in short supply. Yet, there is now a body of international literature and a succession of studies on this particular theme. This interest in school effectiveness is not simply a by-product of the need to raise standards but originates from the fundamental question of whether schools make any difference to pupils' learning outcomes.

The current research on school effectiveness raises several important questions. First, do schools make a difference to the educational outcomes and attainments of pupils? If it is assumed that there are positive answers to this question, the second question is can the difference that schools make be measured? Finally, what do effective schools look like? These three questions will be addressed in the remainder of this chapter.

The context of school effectiveness research

The first of these questions - do schools make a difference? - requires some explanation and contextualisation, particularly because it covers much of the early research work into school effects. This question was first asked in the context of a concern in the 1960s about the effects of schooling on social inequality. Leading American researchers like James Coleman (1966) and Christopher Jencks (1972) enquired whether going to school made any differences to the 'life chances' of children. Both Coleman and Jencks, on the basis of large-scale studies, suggested that schools in fact made very little difference. They concluded that a child's test scores or examination results could be predicted far more accurately from knowing the family background than from knowing which school they went to. This coincided with the dominant view on the part of researchers and sociologists in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. At this time there was substantial emphasis on social class, differences in home environment and parental attitude as explanations for differential student achievement.

To test this view, a wide range of research efforts focused on separating the impact of family background from that of the school, and ascertaining whether some schools were more effective than others and if so, what factors contributed to the positive effects. An early example of school effectiveness research in Britain, was that conducted by Rutter et al. (1979). The Fifteen Thousand Hours study showed that some secondary schools were more effective in promoting academic attainment than others. These findings were subsequently supported by a number of other studies, most notably School Matters (Mortimore et al. 1988), a study of Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) primary schools and 'The School Effect' (Smith and Tomlinson 1989), a study of multi-racial comprehensives.

These 'school effect' studies were replicated in other countries, particularly the US and Australia. More recent work employing more refined statistical techniques has discovered significant differences among schools in their effects on pupil achievements (Sammons et al. 1997). It has also highlighted how schools perform differentially across subject areas and in different socio-economic contexts (Duffield, 1998). In summary, school effectiveness research underlines the existence and variability of the 'school effect'.

The school effect

It is important to note that these effectiveness studies did not demonstrate that the school effect was in any way greater than the home effect, or the effect of previous attainment. It is not possible to establish which has the greater effect because the answer depends upon variations in both. Yet, family background influence is huge and remains so. What these studies show is that the school has an additional effect on top of the home effect. In other words, that schools made a difference not the difference to students' educational achievement.

The question of whether schools have the same effect upon different aspects of pupil development is difficult to answer with precision. Early work on school effectiveness suggested that schools were equally effective across a range of outcomes (Rutter et al. 1979). More recent research, however, suggests that schools may be differentially effective in different areas (Reynolds and Cuttance 1992, p. 5). This is not just the case between academic and social outcomes, but also within academic studies. Mortimore et al. (1988), for example, reported substantial variations between oracy (heavily school-influenced) and reading skills (less heavily school-influenced). Early studies suggested stability in outcomes over a period of years in response to the question of whether schools are consistently 'effective', or 'ineffective' over time.

More recent school effectiveness studies shed some doubt on that conclusion. Nuttall and his colleagues, in their research on ILEA schools' effectiveness found marked differences in school performance during the period 1985-87. The effectiveness of individual schools was not very stable over the three-year period. This analysis gives rise to a note of caution about any study of school effectiveness that relies on measures of outcome in just a single year, or of just a single cohort of students (Nuttall et al. 1989, p. 775).

The differential impact of school effectiveness on sub-groups is a question which interests many in the school effectiveness field. Nuttall (1989) showed large differences for different types of pupil in the relative effectiveness of schools in London. The ILEA research suggested that the difference in experience between able and less able pupils varied markedly from school to school. The performance of schools also varied in the ways they impacted upon boys and girls, and in their effects upon students from different ethnic groups. Some schools narrowed the gap between these different groups over time and other schools widened them in both instances (Reynolds and Cuttance 1992).

In their research report, Nuttall and colleagues noted that some schools were more effective in raising the achievement of students with high attainment at entry than that of those with low attainment at entry. Also, they found that other schools showed the reverse effect, but that it was rare for a school to be particularly effective across all the ability range. They also found that some schools were more effective in raising the achievements of one, or more ethnic minority groups in comparison with other schools. The ILEA research team concluded that:

It is not appropriate to talk of the effectiveness of a single school, as though effectiveness was measured on a single dimension and as though the school was equally effective for all groups of pupils. Rather one must investigate the differential effectiveness of schools. {Nuttall 1989, p. 19]

This is an issue which will be returned to in Chapter 3 when differential departmental performance is discussed. Suffice to say, that recent school effectiveness research is now providing more evidence to suggest that schools need to consider differential performance both between schools and within schools (Sammons et al. 1997; Harris 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Harris et al. 1995b).

Commentary

This chapter has highlighted that defining and measuring school effectiveness is both complex and fraught with methodological difficulties. It has also provided the rationale for the research into the school effect and the need to measure this effect with some accuracy. If schools make a difference, then clearly it is important to know how much difference, over what time period, with which pupils. Furthermore, it is essential to understand how schools became effective and stay effective. The next chapter outlines the key characteristics of effective schools.

2 Characteristics of effective schools

Introduction

As highlighted in the previous chapter, an impressive array of researchers in Britain, in the USA and the Netherlands simultaneously came to the conclusion that schools made a difference. Moreover, these studies produced lists of factors that directly addressed the question of what are the characteristics of effective schools? In 1989, Lezotte produced an often quoted five-factor model of school effectiveness:

1. Attention to the quality of instruction.
2. A pervasive and broadly understood instructional focus.
3. An orderly, safe climate conducive to teaching and learning.
4. Teacher behaviours that convey the expectation that all students are expected to obtain at l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of boxes, figures and tables
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Effective schools
• Chapter 2 Characteristics of effective schools
• Chapter 3 Effective departments
• Chapter 4 Effective teaching
• Chapter 5 Models of teaching
• Chapter 6 Effective classroom management and effective classroom time
• Chapter 7 Effective classroom communication
• Chapter 8 Teacher expectation, motivation and feedback
• Chapter 9 Effective learning
• Chapter 10 Managing effective schools and effective classrooms
• References
• Index