Effective Teaching

Richard Dunne, E.C. Wragg, Prof E C Wragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134838493
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2004. In the nineteenth century, teacher training institutions were called 'normal schools', because it was assumed that there was only one way to teach - the 'norm'. Today there is no single style of teaching endorsed by everyone. How teachers teach depends on factors like the age and ability of the children, their background and needs, the nature of the subject or topic being studied and the resources available. The authors draw on their considerable experience of teacher training and research into classrooms, to explore several dimen­sions of teaching. These include planning and preparation, direct instruction, the management of materials and of behaviour, conversation with children, monitoring, and evaluating learning. They show how teachers can improve their competence and meet their aspirations, both individually and with their colleagues. The book will be very useful to trainee and experienced teachers, heads, teacher trainers and inspectors.

Unit 1
WHAT IS EFFECTIVE TEACHING?

Although it is not always easy to define exactly what different people might mean by the term ‘effective’, teachers have always needed a wide range of subject knowledge and a large repertoire of professional skills. Teaching young children to read and write, to understand the world around them, to grasp and be able to apply fundamental mathematical and scientific principles, to use their developing intelligence and imagination, to live and work harmoniously with others, all require an effective teacher to possess knowledge and understanding of the content of the subjects and topics being taught, as well as the ability to manage a class, explain clearly, ask intelligent and appropriate questions, and monitor and assess learning.

There are many factors which combine to demand from teachers ever higher levels of professional competence. These include the rapid growth in the acquisition of knowledge, the changing nature not only of adult employment, but also of recreation and leisure, the increased public pressure for accountability, the development of new forms of educational and information technology, and the broadening role of the primary teacher. In combination they represent an overwhelming pressure for improvement by all practitioners, even the many who already manifest a high degree of skill in the classroom.

In the nineteenth century, teacher training institutions were known as ‘normal schools’, on the grounds that there was some single ‘norm’ endorsed by society. Today the factors mentioned above require levels of skill, understanding, imagination, and resilience from teachers which go infinitely beyond the rudimentary common sense and mechanical competence fostered by the normal schools of the last century.

The implications for teachers are clear. There is so much to know and understand, so if you cannot know everything, you must know something. Hence the many efforts made either at regional or national level to determine the content of education— what children of a particular age or level of ability ought to learn—or by teachers themselves at local level to shape and implement a coherent curriculum. Secondly, if you cannot know or learn everything, you must be able to find out for yourself, and this is why the process of learning has become important, as well as, though not instead of, the content. Thirdly, since their pupils can acquire only a tiny fraction of the knowledge and skills currently available to humanity, teachers must develop teaching strategies which not only transmit information, but also encourage children to learn independently and as a member of a group.

Citizens in the twenty-first century are more likely to be willing to learn throughout their lives if they have been fired and enthused, rather than rebuffed and demoralised in school. The quality of personal relationships between teacher and taught, therefore, is a direct result of the interpersonal skills of the teacher, who usually sets the tone in a class, or has to take the initiative to improve relationships should they go awry. A notion of effective teaching that embraced only the transmission of knowledge would be a poor one in such a context.

Furthermore in the twenty-first century many people will work in service industries, and others will run small businesses. This shift out of the factory and into closer contact with people, rather than machinery, requires a high degree of imagination, inventiveness, drive and interpersonal skills. Again a sound basis for those qualities can be established in good primary schools, and teachers who nurture them should be greatly valued.

The teacher attempting to teach the topic ‘Insects’ to a primary class fifty years ago would not have been compared with anyone other than another teacher. Today she will be compared with the finest television presenters in the world, whose programmes on insects enjoy multi-million pound budgets and access to the very best of wildlife film available. Even if the quality of teaching improves, it may not improve far or fast enough to match the escalating demands on teachers.

The public debate about teaching effectiveness has too often been over-simplified and caricatured as ‘traditional’ versus ‘progressive’, ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’, ‘phonics’ versus ‘real books’, when the reality of classroom life is that many teachers prefer to use a mixture of methods rather than fill out a single stereotype. In the workbooks on professional skills which we have produced during the Leverhulme Primary Project, such as Class Management (Wragg 1993), Questioning (Brown and Wragg 1993) and Explaining (Wragg and Brown 1993), trainee and experienced teachers are encouraged to analyse and determine their own teaching strategies, rather than merely copy someone else’s preferences.

There is less dissent about what constitutes effective teaching in discussion between people outside the profession than there is in the research and evaluation literature. Good teachers, it is commonly held, are keen and enthusiastic, well organised, firm but fair, stimulating, know their stuff, and are interested in the welfare of their pupils. Few would attempt to defend the converse: that good teachers are unenthusiastic, boring, unfair, ignorant, and do not care about their pupils.

Once the scrutiny of teaching is translated into the more precise terms demanded by the tenets of rigorous systematic enquiry, the easy agreement of casual conversation evaporates. Biddle and Ellena (1964), reporting the Kansas City role studies, found that there was not even clear agreement amongst teachers, parents and administrators about the role teachers should play. However, it is nonetheless well worth considering what appear to be the outcomes of teaching. If a school is effective, then probably most or all the teachers who work in it will be effective also. This raises questions, therefore, like ‘What do children actually learn?’ and ‘What do teachers do that appears to help pupils to learn?’

ACTIVITY 1

1. As an individual or member of a group, write down a list of things that you hope children will learn in your class/school.
2. Look at your own list and put alongside it a word or two which you feel describes the category of learning involved, e.g. ‘Children enjoy coming to school’ (emotions), ‘Children learn to read a range of books’ (reading/language/knowledge), ‘children learn to wait their turn, share and be a positive member of a group’ (relationships/social behaviour).
3. Compare your list with those of others, if possible. Are there common features, or do you disagree amongst yourselves? If so, about what?
4. Select one or two areas where there seems to be some agreement about importance and discuss what individual teachers and the staff as a whole can do to improve effectiveness in these fields.

In the 1970s and 1980s some of the attempts to find a consensus in the research literature were criticised. For example, Gage (1978), summarising research studies which had attempted to relate what teachers did to what pupils actually learned, concluded that in the early years of schooling certain kinds of teacher behaviour did show some consistent relationship to children learning reading and arithmetic. From this he derived a set of prescriptive ‘Teacher should’ statements like Teachers should call on a child by name before asking the question’, ‘Teachers should keep to a minimum such activities as giving directions and organising the class for instruction’, or ‘During reading-group instruction, teachers should give a maximal amount of brief feedback and provide fastpaced activities of the “drill” type.’

Among the criticism of prescriptions based on summaries of recent findings are: the proposition that much American work in particular is based on short-term tests of memory; that formal didactic styles of teaching often show up better on short-term measures and could, therefore, easily be perpetuated; that the ‘gains’ of method A compared with method B are often slight. This last argument is skilfully countered by Gage (1985) in his book Hard Gains in the Soft Sciences. He shows how significant policy decisions, in fields such as medicine and public health, are often made on a degree of statistical ‘superiority’ that would receive little attention in educational research. He quotes examples of trials of beta blockers and low cholesterol diets to reduce the incidence of heart attacks, which showed only 2.5 and 1.7 per cent differences respectively between experimental and control groups’ mortality rates, but which nonetheless led to significant changes in public health policy and practice.

Doyle (1978) observed that reviewers of research into teacher effectiveness ‘have concluded, with remarkable regularity, that few consistent relationships between teacher variables and effectiveness can be established’. The difficulty of identifying and evaluating teaching skills and their effectiveness is neatly illustrated by an interesting experiment at the University of Michigan. Guetzkow et al. (1954) divided first-year students on a general psychology course into three groups. The first group was given a formal lecture course with regular tests, the second and third groups took part in tutorials and discussions. At the end of the course the lecture group out-performed the tutorial discussion groups on the final examination, and the course was also more favourably rated by the students. So far, this represents a victory for lecturing and testing on two commonly used criteria: test performance and student appraisal.

The investigators discovered, however, that the students in the discussion groups scored significantly higher than the lecture groups on a measure of interest in psychology, the subject being studied. They hypothesised that though the lecture-group students gave a favourable rating of the teaching they had received, this may have been because they had less anxiety about grades for the course through their weekly feedback from test scores. It was decided to monitor the subsequent progress of all the groups. Three years later not one student in the lecture group had opted to study the subject further, but fourteen members of the two discussion and tutorial groups had chosen to major in psychology. Thus, on short-term criteria the lecture method was superior, but taking a longer perspective the discussion method appeared to motivate students more powerfully, and ultimately some must have learned a great deal more.

Defining effectiveness in such a way that all would agree, therefore, is not a simple matter. If we were to say that ‘boeing effective’ is, in practice, whatever teachers do to enable children to learn, then most people would rule out intimidation, humiliation, the use of corporal punishment or other forms of teacher behaviour of which they personally happen to disapprove. It is perhaps easier when seeking a definition to describe some of the characteristics of effective teaching which might win some degree of consensus, though not universal agreement.

Teachers are compared with the finest television presentation

The excitement of learning

The first might be that the behaviour concerned ‘facilitates pupils’ learning of something worthwhile’, such as facts, skills, values, concepts, how to live harmoniously with one’s fellows, or some other outcome thought to be desirable. The notion of something being ‘worthwhile’ brings together both content and values in teaching. Skill is not a unidimensional concept. Teaching someone to steal might in one sense be skilfully done but it would attract professional odium rather than admiration. A second feature of effective teaching, therefore, is that the skill concerned is acknowledged to be a skill by those competent to judge, and this might include teachers, teacher trainers, inspectors, advisers and learners themselves.

For them to be a recognised part of a teacher’s professional effectiveness, skills should also be capable of being repeated, not perhaps in exactly the same form, but as a fairly frequent rather than a single chance occurrence. A chimpanzee might randomly produce an attractive colourful shape once in a while, given a brush and some paint, but an artist would produce a skilfully conceived painting on a more regular basis. Teachers who possess professional skills, therefore, should be capable of manifesting these consistently, not on a hit-or-miss basis.

Uncertainty about the proper standing of the notion of effectiveness when applied to teaching is partly explained by the varied nature of the teacher’s job. Pressing the right button on a tape recorder, or writing legibly on the blackboard, require but modest competence, and are things most people could learn with only a little practice. Responding to a disruptive 10-year old, or knowing how to explain a difficult concept to children of different ages and abilities by choosing the right language register, appropriate examples and analogies, and reading the many cues which signal understanding or bewilderment, require years of practice as well as considerable intelligence and insight.

When children learn something, there is often a magical quality about the excitement of discovery, the warmth of regard between teacher and taught, or the novelty to the learner of what is taking place, and the romanticism seems to be destroyed if teaching is seen as too deliberate, calculated, manipulated or over-analysed. However, it is possible for teachers, both individually and as a group of colleagues, to analyse what they are doing in a systematic way, and in the rest of this workbook we explore some of the ways of doing that.

Unit 2
IMPROVING PERSONAL COMPETENCE

The effective teacher needs a wide range of subject knowledge and a large repertoire of professional skills. When we made this statement in Unit 1 it served as a useful reminder of how complicated teaching is, but it still begs many questions. What does it mean, for example, for a primary teacher to ‘know’ a subject? There are difficult problems in specifying this. What a primary teacher can be expected to know about history must be very different from what a historian knows, and probably very different from what a secondary teacher knows. But what does a primary teacher need to know?

What constitutes professional skills? There have been many attempts to define these, but they are usually inadequate to describe what teachers actually do. In any case, if we were able to describe what knowledge and skills teachers require, we still need to work out how to help novices acquire them and how teachers make the most effective use of them. In every area of human activity it is the very skilled performance that makes things look simple. When we watch a skilled sportsperson make a mistake it is very easy to be critical about something we could not even begin to achieve. This is often the case when people see the work, or the results of the work, of a teacher.

It is also the case that skills need a lot of practice. This is accepted in most skilled activities, particularly sport and acting, but is less accepted in the case of teaching. Yet it is equally true of teaching. ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: AIMS AND CONTENTS
• UNIT 1: WHAT IS EFFECTIVE TEACHING?
• UNIT 2: IMPROVING PERSONAL COMPETENCE
• UNIT 3: UNDERSTANDING HOW CHILDREN LEARN
• UNIT 4: CLASSROOM ORGANISATION AND MANAGEMENT
• UNIT 5: INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
• UNIT 6: WHOLE-SCHOOL ISSUES
• APPENDIX: THE NINE DIMENSIONS OF TEACHING
• REFERENCES