THE EFFECTIVE TEACHER Leo R.

Sandy There are several dimensions taken together in varying levels of degree that embody the effective teacher. Since teachers range from preschool through post secondary levels, and are unique people, no two teachers will have the same combination nor will all of them be present in every excellent teacher. There are also qualities that effective teachers have that may not be included here. I invite others to add to the list. Perhaps the most important quality of an effective teacher is that she be a learner . Paulo Freire refers to this role as "teacher-student" because the teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and reconsiders her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The effective teacher, then, is one who extends a cordial invitation to her "student-teachers" to enter into a dialogic relationship with her and the subject matter. The effective teacher must be a leader who can inspire and influence students through expert and referent power but never coercive power. This teacher knows his subject well and is kind and respectful toward his students. He also has high standards and expectations coexisting with encouragement, support, and flexibility. This teacher empowers students and gets them to do things of which they did not think they were capable. This teacher has students who surpass him. The effective teacher is a provocateur who probes, prods, asks incessant why questions, poses problems, throws curves, plays "devil's advocate", and stimulates frustration and conflict all in an attempt to "bust bubbles and plant seeds" so that tidy and stereotypical explanations are unmasked and discarded. The effective teacher exemplifies what Maxine Green calls teacher as stranger . By keeping students at a healthy emotional distance, this teacher can, through continuous reflection, employ greater objectivity in her ability to balance the needs of individuals with the needs of the class as a whole. This allows the teacher to not only determine what those needs are but also how they can be accommodated to by innovative approaches. The effective teacher models enthusiasm not only for his subject but also for teaching and learning in general. By showing exuberance, a positive attitude, excitement, and passion, the effective teacher makes it clear to his students that he would prefer to be nowhere else. Effective teachers value their craft and project this value to all in their presence. The effective teacher is an innovator who changes strategies, techniques, texts, and materials when better ones are found and/or when existing ones no longer provide a substantive learning experience for her students. This teacher also employs a combination of lecture-discussion, simulation, service learning, cooperative learning, visual media, role-playing, guest speakers, and debates, and whatever is age and grade appropriate in order to accommodate diverse learning styles and to present the subject from different angles to facilitate insights and connections. This teacher values and uses students' ideas about how to enhance their own learning. The effective teacher is a comedian/entertainer who uses humor in the service of learning rather than as a distraction from it. The effective teacher is a coach or guide who helps students to improve on their skills and insights. By neither letting them flounder nor prematurely offering assistance, the effective teacher enables students to own their own successes and to learn from their mistakes. By returning the students' work promptly with constructive comments, and by being available for assistance, the effective teacher helps students to develop responsibility for their own learning, or to become what is known as self-reliant. The effective teacher is a genuine human being or humanist who is able to laugh at herself and the absurdity in the world without being cynical and hopeless. She is a person who can self-disclose so that her students will see both her virtues and imperfections. By being a down-to-earth person, the effective teacher helps her students develop the will, courage and hope to fulfill their own potential as human beings. The effective teacher is a sentinel who provides an environment of intellectual safety in which opposing ideas can be aired without fear of censure or retribution. This teacher can express his opinions and beliefs while taking care to distinguish fact from opinion. His students feel free to express their views with equal ease even if those views are at odds with those of the teacher. The effective teacher is an optimist or idealist who firmly believes that without an ideal or mission, there will be no approximation of it. This teacher sees herself in each of her students and feels that her legacy is what she contributes to their development. This teacher achieves a sense of immortality by the positive influence she has on the lives of her students. The effective teacher is one with others . He is a collaborator who places a high value on collegiality. He shares ideas and materials with others, solicits input and involvement by parents, and seeks help from his fellow teachers when he encounters a problem. The classroom walls in this teacher's room are thin. This teacher is effective because she aspires to all these qualities and more. She values truth more than certainty and the rightness of a cause more than personal popularity. As this teacher attempts to change the world, she transforms herself and others in the process. Thus, the effective teacher is a revolutionary because she knows that, with the exception of parenthood, her role is the most vital one on earth in the preservation of the sanctity of life and its natural outcome - the elevation of humanity . What Characterizes an Effective Teacher? an exclusive interview with Barak Rosenshine May 1, 2002 Share on linkedin

Print Email Charles Dickens created the characters Thomas Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild in his novel Hard Times to satirize schoolteachers who taught "nothing but facts" and regarded students as "little vessels ... ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim." Since education involves the continuing acquisition of organized knowledge, filling young minds with disconnected facts obviously isn't the way to produce an educated child. But do we know if today's student-centered "discovery learning" classrooms perform any better than those of Dickens' day? In fact, we do know a great deal about the effectiveness of different instructional methods, thanks to the work of education psychologist and researcher Barak Rosenshine over the past three decades. Rosenshine first made his mark in research on teacher performance just a 6. Weekly and year after joining the faculty at the University of Illinois at ChampaignMonthly Reviews Urbana in 1971. He and Norma Furst identified the five characteristics of teacher behavior that showed the strongest relationships with measures of Systematic review of previously learned material student achievement: clarity of exposition, teacher enthusiasm, task orientation, varied approaches, and giving the student the opportunity to 5. Independent learn. Since then, these findings have served as a framework for additional Practice (Seatwork) research on teacher performance. Practice until responses are firm, After reviewing additional research studies on teacher performance and the quick, and automatic mechanism of student learning, Rosenshine and Robert Stevens in 1986 developed a six-function teaching model to describe the necessary of 4. Correctives and instructional steps that are involved in having a student learn new skills. Feedback Rosenshine, an accomplished marathon runner, earned an undergraduate Elicit specific responses degree in psychology at the University of Chicago in 1957 and was awarded a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University in 1968. He Monitor and give specific advice was on the faculty at Temple University from 1966 to 1970, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois, where he is now Professor Emeritus 3. Guided Practice in the Department of Educational Psychology. Rosenshine recently spoke Guide student practice initially with School Reform News Managing Editor George Clowes. Obtain response and check for understanding Clowes: How did you become involved in research on learning Achieve a high level of active instruction? practice Rosenshine: I started out as a high school teacher, teaching U.S. history for six years before going to graduate school at Stanford. When I arrived there, in 1963, I came across a book called Handbook of Research on Teaching, and I said, "That's itI want to study how to improve teaching." I took the class that used the book and I've been studying research on teaching ever since. 2. Presentation Start with a brief statement of goals Introduce new material rapidly, but in small steps Demonstrate, illustrate, and provide examples

Clowes: If we're talking about better teaching methods, we need to have some idea of the end result that teaching is intended to achieve. What is the aim of educating a child, and how would you define a satisfactory finished product? 1. Daily Review Rosenshine: Education involves starting with a novice and helping the Review prerequisite skills novice become an expert who has strong, readily accessible background knowledge. It's important that background knowledge be readily accessible,

and this occurs when knowledge is rehearsed and well-connected and tied to other knowledge. As anyone knows who's studied all night for an exam, that knowledge may not be accessible a month later because it hasn't been sufficiently rehearsed or applied. Experts not only have well-developed knowledge, they also have strong connections between different parts of that knowledge. When experts access one piece of knowledge, they also access all the other related pieces. For example, if you mention one thing about the Civil War to American history experts, they are able to connect that information to the intellectual, the economic, and the political knowledge they have about the Civil War. Not only can they connect, but the connections are firm, and are readily accessible because they have been practiced. These knowledge structures are called schema and experts have well-developed and well-connected schema. Clowes: It sounds as if the computer is modeled after the way the human mind works, with memory for storage of facts and the key being whether you can access them when you need them. Rosenshine: One very promising area of teaching research has been to compare the knowledge structures of experts and novices. For example, the experts might be professors of physiology and the novices might be interns or graduate students. Or the experts could be experienced lawyers and the novices were first-year lawyers. What the researchers consistently found was that the experts had more and better constructed knowledge structures and they had faster access to their background knowledge. These findings occurred in diverse areas such as in chess, in cardiology, chemistry, and law. They also compared expert readers with poor readers and found that the expert readers used better strategies when they were given confusing passages to read. A lot of expert-novice research was done from the mid-1980s until about 1992, but then it stopped. I would have hoped they would have gone on to ask questions such as, "What sort of education should novices go through in order to become like experts?" and "What does creating expert knowledge mean for classroom instruction?" But, unfortunately, the research was never used to develop an instructional package for training experts. It was never used to establish instructional goals for classes to teach all children to be like the experts. Our goal should be to develop experts, and we're not doing it. Clowes: What do we know about the mechanism of learning that would help us develop an instructional method to develop children into experts? Rosenshine: First, there's the notion of teaching new material in small steps so that the learning process isn't overloaded by getting too much at once. In addition, there's structure, with the teacher delivering a well-organized presentation and providing students with models and demonstrations of the new material. Then the children begin to practice and are given sufficient supervised practice until they are consistent. The aim is to have students connect the new material to previous material and to practice until they become fluent, particularly if they're learning skills. Once that is accomplished, the students could go on to experiential learning activities involving inquiry and more complex investigations. We have found that the most effective teachers, those teachers whose classes made the highest yearly gain, provided a good deal of instructional support for the students. They provided this support by teaching new material in manageable amounts, modeling, guiding student practice, helping students when they made errors, and providing for sufficient practice and review. Many of these teachers also went on to experiential, hands-on activities, but they always did the experiential activities after, not before, the basic material was learned. Clowes: You have said that one way to help students learn is to provide them with cognitive strategies. What exactly does that mean? Rosenshine: "Cognitive strategies" refers to specific strategies students can use to provide a support in their initial learning. For example, in teaching writing there is a cognitive strategy called the five-paragraph essay. The format for this essay suggests that students begin with an introductory paragraph containing a main idea supported by three points. These points are elaborated in the next three paragraphs, and then everything is summarized in the final paragraph. Some teachers hate this format. They think it's reducing learning and taking away creativity. Others love it. I once saw an excellent example of this format when I was observing teachers who had been nominated as being "inspiring." The teacher I was observing was teaching the five-step essay to an advanced class in English. The class had learned Macbeth and they were developing an essay to prove a particular point about the play. On the first day, the teacher presented the prompts and modeled how to use it. With the class's help, he modeled the introductory paragraph. He then modeled how you would take each point and develop supporting arguments. Then he modeled the summary. During this instruction he presented the material using small steps. This instruction gave the students a framework within which they could develop their own material. The next day, the students worked in pairs to develop a five-paragraph essay on another issue from Macbeth. Then, on the third day they worked alone. There were three types of support in these lessons: the framework of the five-paragraph essay within which the students could develop their arguments; the modeling by the teacher; and the temporary support of another student as they began to develop those arguments for themselves. The teacher told me he used this same approach with classes of varying abilities and had found that the students in the slower classes hung on to the fivestep method and used it all the time. Students in the middle used the method some of the time and not others, while the brighter students expanded on it and went off on their own. But in all cases, the five-step method served as a scaffold, as a temporary support while the students were developing their abilities. Clowes: It sounds like training wheels on a bike. Rosenshine: That's right. It is training wheels. It's a crutch. But no one walks with a crutch who doesn't need it. These prompts provide needed initial and temporary support. Over the last fifteen years, a number of prompts have been developed which serve to help children learn new materials. For example, prompts have been developed to teach students how to summarize a paragraph. That teaches them to look for the main point and the details. Once children learn to do that, they can become better readers and better writers. It was shown, in a number of studies, that children who were taught these procedures were superior to control students. The State Department of Wisconsin has produced a book of various types of or concrete prompts, prompts that can help students in writing, in reading, and in comprehension. Most of these prompts have been tested in experimental studies. One of the prompts is a story web, which involves mapping a story into a web structure. That teaches students to look for the structure in a story and once they've learned to do that, they become more independent readers. Clowes: You've made the point that it's easier for children to develop misconceptions with student-directed learning as compared to direct instruction. Could you address this issue? Rosenshine: Human beings are logical, and we try to be as logical as we can. But trying to be logical sometimes results in misconceptions. Take the question: Is the Earth closer to the sun in the winter or the summer? It seems logical to believe that the Earth would be closer to the sun in the summer, whereas in truth it's just the opposite. Now, the fact that people are logical can lead to quite different implications for instruction. One implication would be to have discovery learning so that children are put in situations where they can use their logic and figure out their own learning. Another implication would be to avoid putting children in situations where they could develop misconceptions that would have to be corrected later. Jere Brophy noted the possibility, in project-based learning, that some students will have difficulty distinguishing valid content from invalid content. Brophy said that students, particularly less able students, might have difficulty recognizing the signal amid all the noise. In the process of trying to make sense out of what may be a confusing situation, many students may develop quite logical-seeming misconceptions, misconceptions that then are very difficult to change. Ziggy Engelmann also wants to be sure that children don't develop misconceptions when they are learning how to read with his direct instructing method. He knows that beginning readers frequently confuse the letters "b" and "d." He also knows that once they do confuse these two letters, it's very difficult to straighten them out. So Engelmann does not teach them close together, and he emphasizes visual differences between the two letters. But when children learn those two letters in a discovery mode, then the chances of them developing the misconception increase. This is particularly a problem for lower-achieving children. They are more likely to develop misconceptions and they are more likely not to be able to straighten out the misconceptions later. The structured approach to initial learning makes most sense for them. I've been to a number of schools with large proportions of children in the federal Free and Reduced Lunch program where all the children learn how to read and decode in kindergarten, and are reading fluently after a few months in first grade. What I've found at those schools is a strong, basic approach to learning, but with room provided for experiential learning after the children have mastered the basics. In other words, provide the initial instruction by the teacher, be sure the children know what they're doing, and then send them off into the experiential learning. This is exactly what Alex Molnar and John Zahorik reported in the latest study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on the SAGE class-size reduction experiment in Wisconsin. They identified teachers whose students were consistently high-achieving and compared them with teachers whose students were consistently low-achieving. They found the primary teaching method of the higher-achieving teachers is explicit instruction. These teachers also engage their students in experiential learning. But they point out the experiential learning comes after more teacher-centered instruction. In other words, the higher-achieving teachers use explicit teaching first and then use experiential learning onlyafter students have developed a firm grasp of the new knowledge. I used to talk about this years ago as a funnel, where, when you're starting, you do the basic stuff, and then, as the children get better, you expand it and open it up. This study is an example of that. It also has some beautiful examples of teachers who present and model, and do it quickly.

Who is an Effective Teacher?

As states and districts implement new teacher evaluation systems, they will struggle to differentiate between excellent and poor instruction, as well as to define a minimum standard of effectiveness. The task is complicated by the legacy of perfunctory evaluations in K-12 education, in which more than 98 percent of teachers were given the same satisfactory rating. To avoid making effective the new satisfactory, here is an alternative standard to consider: after a probationary period, a teacher is effective if and only if, based on the available evidence (such as from classroom observations, students surveys and student achievement gains), their predicted impact on students exceeds that of the average novice teacher. In other words, if, after a few years in the classroom, a teachers predicted effectiveness is below that of the average novice teacher in their grade level and subject, then he or she would fail to meet the minimum standard of effectiveness required for tenure. Such a definition has two advantages: First, it makes explicit the decision a principal implicitly makes every time he or she retains a non-probationary teacherto forego the opportunity to recruit a novice teacher as a replacement. Would an NFL coach give up a future draft pick for an experienced player he expects to perform worse than the average rookie? Not if he were trying to win. Would a principal promote or retain a teacher with expected performance below that of the average novice? Not if he or she had the students interests at heart. Second, it is a self-correcting standard. If principals were to label an unreasonably large proportion of teachers as exemplary, then the observation score required to achieve effective status would increase. Moreover, if the pipeline of teachers were to dry up, and the quality of new recruits were to decline, then the standard for effectiveness would adjust downward. Likewise, if the quality of teacher preparation programs were to increase, then the standard for tenured teachers would be raised. In their rookie year of teaching, most teachers struggle. Most teachers improve from their first to their second to their third year of teaching. However, a substantial share of teachers will underperform the average rookie in their third year of teaching. For instance, in the typical school district, the average classroom of students assigned to a rookie teacher loses .05 to .10 standard deviations in student achievement relative to students with similar starting points by the end of the year. below that of the average novice. When a teacher fails to demonstrate effectiveness, a principal should retain the ability to offer tenure. But tenure should no longer be the default outcome in such cases. A principal should be willing take additional steps, such as submitting a plan for supporting a teachers development or i nforming the parents in the school. Two additional safeguards would contribute to the fidelity of the evaluation system: First, observers should not only be trained, they should be asked to demonstrate their ability to apply the standards on a set of sample videos (which have been pre-scored by master observers.) For instance, an observer in any district using Charlotte Danielsons Framework for Teaching should demonstrate their ability to recognize what unsatisfactory, basic, proficient and advanced questioning strategies looks like. However, while necessary, such training is unlikely to be a sufficient to prevent score inflation. In the Measures of Effective Teachingproject, we learned that even when principals could apply the standards when observing teachers from outside their schools, they scored their own teachers higher than other observers didgranting a significant home field advantage. Using data from several school districts, about 15 to 30 percent of third year teachers would have predicted effectiveness

Second, states and districts should compare the distribution of ratings in different schools or districts and study the correlation between observation ratings and other measures such as student growth measures or student surveys. We have learned a lot in recent years about what those relationships should look like. Outliers should be investigated. However, if every principal were inflating their scores similarly, it would be impossible to recognize. The logic behind the better than the average novice threshold reflects the decision that principals implicitly make when they retain a teacher and forego hiring a new teacher. Moreover, the standard is responsive to factors such as score inflation and the supply of teachers. A teacher should not be labeled effective unless he or she is outperforming the average novice teacher.

Effective Teaching Strategies: Six Keys to Classroom Excellence

This particular list of teaching characteristics appears in an excellent book that is all but unknown in the states, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, by noted scholar Paul Ramsden. In the case of what makes teaching effective, he writes, a great deal is known about the characteristics of effective university teaching. It is undoubtedly a complicated matter; there is no indication of one best way, but our understanding of its essential nature is both broad and deep. (p . 88-89). He organizes that essential knowledge into these six principles, unique for the way he relates them to students experiences. 1: Interest and explanation When our interest is aroused in something, whether it is an academic subject or a hobby, we enjoy working hard at it. We come to feel that we can in some way own it and use it to make sense of the world around us. (p. 98). Coupled with the need to establish the relevance of content, instructors need to craft explanations that enable students to understand the material. This involves knowing what students understand and then forging connections between what is known and what is new. 2: Concern and respect for students and student learning Ramsden starts with the negative about which he is assertive and unequivocal. Truly awful teaching in higher education is most often revealed by a sheer lack of interest in and compassion for students and student learning. It repeatedly displays the classic symptom of making a subject seem more demanding than it actually is. Some people may get pleasure from this kind of masquerade. They are teaching very badly if they do. Good teaching is nothing to do with making things hard. It is nothing to do with frightening students. It is everything to do with benevolence and humility; it always tries to help students feel that a subject can be mastered; it encourages them to try things out for themselves and succeed at something quickly. (p. 98) 3: Appropriate assessment and feedback This principle involves using a variety of assessment techniques and allowing students to demonstrate their mastery of the material in different ways. It avoids those assessment methods that encourage students to memorize and regurgitate. It recognizes the power of feedback to motivate more effort to learn.

For more teaching strategies, download Effective Strategies for Improving College Teaching and Learning. This FREE report features 11 articles pulled from the pages of The Teaching Professor. 4: Clear goals and intellectual challenge Effective teachers set high standards for students. They also articulate clear goals. Students should know up front what they will learn and what they will be expected to do with what they know. 5: Independence, control and active engagement Good teaching fosters [a] sense of student control over learning and interest in the subject matter. (p. 100). Good teachers create learning tasks appropriate to the students level of understanding. They also recognize the uniqueness of individual learn ers and avoid the temptation to impose mass production standards that treat all learners as if they were exactly the same. It is worth stressing that we know that students who experience teaching of the kind that permits control by the learner not only learn better, but that they enjoy learning more. (p. 102) 6: Learning from students Effective teaching refuses to take its effect on students for granted. It sees the relation between teaching and learning as problematic, uncertain and relative. Good teaching is open to change: it involves constantly trying to find out what the effects of instruction are on learning, and modifying the instruction in the light of the evidence collected. (p. 102) Reference: Ramsden, P. (1992). Learning to Teach in Higher Education. New York: Routledge.