What Do We Mean by Teacher Quality?

Transcription

1 This sample chapter appears in "The Highly Qualified Teacher: What Is Teacher Quality and How Do We Measure It?" by Michael Strong Teachers College, Columbia University. For more information, visit 2 What Do We Mean by Teacher Quality? In Chapter 1, we saw that researchers have documented the decline in teacher quality and claimed that teacher quality is the most important school influence on student learning. We may, therefore, be excused for assuming that everyone agrees on what is meant by the term teacher quality. This assumption could not be more wrong. The term quality is inherently value-laden, so that one person s or group s characterization might legitimately differ from another s, with neither one having more or less veracity. Furthermore, the term quality is often used synonymously with other terms such as master or the adjectives good and effective, which themselves may have, under certain conditions, specific and narrower definitions. Characterizations of teacher quality as discussed in the literature vary according the perspectives and interests of the writer. Definitions may be grouped broadly according to whether they focus on the qualifications of the teacher as a reflection of competence (e.g., degree, quality of college, exam scores, certification, subject-matter credential, experience), the personal or psychological qualities of a teacher (such as love of children, honesty, compassion, fairness), the pedagogical standards that a teacher exhibits (use of certain teaching strategies, classroom management skills, establishment of a positive classroom climate), or the teacher s demonstrated ability to raise student learning (successful or effective teaching). TEACHER QUALIFICATIONS Part of President Bush s education act of 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required all states to provide evidence that their schools classrooms were staffed with highly qualified teachers in time for the academic year. It was up to the states to define highly qualified, which they did usually in terms of what Michelle Rhee, a former chancellor of Washington, D.C., Public Schools, calls front-end qualifications. 1 Typically, the evidence that states provided on their teachers qual- 12

2 What Do We Mean by Teacher Quality? 13 ifications was based on their licensure requirements. The interpretation of teacher quality in this context rests on the assumption that teachers with the right kinds of established qualifications will provide high-quality instruction to American children. As David Berliner pointed out, this assumed that the nation s schools were previously employing teachers who were not highly qualified. Berliner contests this assumption, maintaining that the call for highly qualified teachers was largely a political ploy to a) scare the public into thinking that American children were being taught by unqualified teachers, and b) to make it seem as if something was being achieved in the furtherance of public education, when, in reality, no serious problem was being addressed. 2 This position attributes a somewhat cynical motivation to the political purposes behind NCLB and of defining teacher quality in this manner, but as Linda Blanton and colleagues have noted: The role of policy makers at every level national, state, and local cannot be underestimated. 3 PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES One advantage of defining teacher quality in terms of competence as indicated by qualifications, credentials, or experience is that these variables are objective and relatively easy to measure. A focus on psychological or personal attributes often represents a shift into the realm of subjectivity. For example, in a study conducted toward the middle of the last century, Paul Witty reviewed 12,000 letters from children who had been asked to describe the teacher who has helped me most. 4 He found that the children consistently mentioned certain characteristics, the top 12 of which were: 1. Cooperative, democratic attitude 2. Kindliness and consideration for the individual 3. Patience 4. Wide interests 5. Personal appearance and pleasing manner 6. Fairness and impartiality 7. Sense of humor 8. Good disposition and consistent behavior 9. Interest in pupils problems 10. Flexibility 11. Use of recognition and praise 12. Unusual proficiency in teaching a particular subject. Some of these traits, particularly related to warmth and friendliness, have continued to surface in later studies that examine students opinions about good teaching; others relate more to teaching practice and fit better into the category of pedagogical standards. 5 All of them rely on subjective impressions.

3 14 The Highly Qualifi ed Teacher A more recent study of this nature was conducted by Robert Walker. 6 Over a period of 15 years at several different institutions, he asked his undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom were education professionals returning to school for advanced degrees, to describe the qualities of teachers who had been most effective in helping them learn and achieve success. The 12 most frequently mentioned characteristics in his study were a mix of personal (e.g., friendliness, compassion, sense of humor) and teaching traits (well prepared, having creative teaching methods). Here is the full list: 1. Came to class prepared 2. Maintained positive attitudes about teaching and about students 3. Held high expectations for all students 4. Showed creativity in teaching the class 5. Treated and graded students fairly 6. Displayed a personal, approachable touch with students 7. Cultivated a sense of belonging in the classroom 8. Dealt with student problems compassionately 9. Had a sense of humor and did not take everything seriously 10. Respected students and did not deliberately embarrass them 11. Were forgiving and did not hold grudges 12. Admitted mistakes Sometimes it is teachers themselves, rather than students, who are polled for their opinions on the characteristics of a quality teacher. Teachers, particularly those who work with younger children, tend to believe that a primary attribute of a good teacher is to be caring and to like or love children. 7 Furthermore, the beliefs of pre-service teachers are well formed before they enter their training programs because of years of experience in the classroom, and they change little over the course of their training programs. 8 Some teacher educators, therefore, see the definition of a good teacher as a combination of personal attributes that have to do with being caring and liking children and with professional attributes related to content and pedagogical knowledge. 9 Terry Hyland, a British teacher educator wrote vigorously against the move toward competency-based educational strategies because they fail to capture the essential epistemological and moral dimensions of the work of professionals. 10 Hyland s view is more aligned with the humanistic approach to teacher education that developed out of the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers in the early 1970s, 11 which focused on personal growth and development of the self. 12 Although humanistic approaches were not widely adopted, we see an emphasis on developing the personal characteristics of teachers in the writings of some British and American educators. These writers refer to the personal qualities of a good teacher such as creativity, trust, care, courage, sen-

4 What Do We Mean by Teacher Quality? 15 sitivity, decisiveness, spontaneity, commitment, and flexibility 13, or core qualities and effective personal behavior to be developed in high-quality teachers through the reflection process. 14 An interesting twist on the definition of teacher quality representing a perspective that bridges the concepts of competence, personal qualities, and practice comes from the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg and his colleague Joseph Horvath. They argue for making a distinction between expert and experienced teachers through the psychological understanding of how experts differ from non-experts. They invoke the work of Eleanor Rosch on prototypes to define the prototypical category of expert. 15 They identify three domains in which expert teachers differ from non-experts: knowledge (experts bring knowledge to bear more effectively within their areas of expertise); efficiency (experts do more in less time within their areas of expertise); and insight (experts are more likely to arrive at novel and appropriate solutions within their areas of expertise). 16 Their approach is a way of thinking about teacher quality that allows for numerous prototypes, and so for different ways of being a high-quality teacher. In their own words, they claim: that by viewing teaching expertise as a prototype, we can distinguish experts from experienced non-experts in a way that acknowledges (a) diversity in the population of expert teachers, and (b) the absence of a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient features of an expert teacher. Thus, a teacher who displays a wealth of highly organized content knowledge and a teacher who is adept at generating insightful solutions to classroom problems may both be categorized as experts, even though their resemblance to one another is weak. 17 The ideas of Sternberg and Horvath have potentially useful implications for the evaluation of teachers and teaching, but have not really caught on among educators. By defining expert teaching as representing the prototype characteristics that experienced educators have seen or heard about, Sternberg and Horvath allow for the expectation of systematic differences in the ways that individuals or groups judge teaching expertise. These differences would be a reflection of the observer s differing experience, thus allowing for the prototypical expert behaviors of an elementary teacher to vary from those of middle or high school instructor, and those of a math teacher to differ from those of an English or a music teacher. Sternberg and Horvath emphasize that their approach gets at the concept of teacher quality through a prototype view rather than a prototype model. In its present form, their view of expert teaching may encourage us to rethink how we conceptualize teacher quality, but does not provide us with a clear way of evaluating a given teacher. In order for this perspective to take hold, it will need to be validated and almost certainly revised. However, this line of thinking offers a new way of approaching the recruitment, training, selection, and assessment of teachers, and has implications for our notions of the necessary and sufficient attributes of an effective teacher.

5 16 The Highly Qualifi ed Teacher PEDAGOGICAL SKILLS AND PRACTICES Those interested in reforming education tend to think of teacher quality solely in terms of classroom practice rather than of the front-end qualifications or personal attributes that a teacher may possess. Several organizations have issued curriculum standards and guidelines that direct reform-minded practice and indicate what constitutes quality teaching from their perspectives. 18 These organizations define quality teachers as conducting instruction that engages students as active participants in their own learning and enhances the development of complex cognitive skills and processes. For mathematics, this view is described most clearly in documents produced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), whose vision of mathematics curriculum emphasizes problem-solving, communication, reasoning, and mathematical connections. 19 These four standards are included at every grade level, along with content standards that vary by grade. The proposed curricula reform is accompanied by five major shifts in the nature of classroom instruction. 20 Reform teachers: 1. view classrooms as mathematical communities rather than collections of individuals; 2. use logic and mathematical evidence to verify results rather than relying on the teacher as the authority; 3. emphasize mathematical reasoning rather than memorizing procedures; 4. focus on conjecture, inventing, and problem-solving rather than mechanical answer finding; and 5. make connections among the ideas and applications of mathematics rather than seeing them as isolated concepts and procedures. These changes in instruction should be evident in the mathematical tasks that teachers select, the roles of teachers and students in mathematical discourse, the tools that are used to enhance classroom discourse, the classroom learning environment, and teachers analysis of teaching and learning. Although endorsed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Education, the NCTM standards have been heavily criticized in some corners (a controversy often referred to as the math wars ), resulting in parental revolts and the formation of some anti-reform organizations that promote memorization of basic skills and facts, and that have succeeded in causing textbooks to be replaced in some parts of the United States. 21 TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS The final group of teacher quality definitions refers to effective or successful teaching as measured by student outcome measures. In their analysis of the concept of

6 What Do We Mean by Teacher Quality? 17 quality in teaching, Gary Fenstermacher and Virginia Richardson draw attention to the important distinction between good teaching (the worthiness of the activity) and successful teaching (the realization of intended outcomes), then go on to make the point that quality teaching encompasses both good and successful teaching. 22 They conclude that an assessment of quality teaching requires that, in addition to focusing on the teacher, one take into account contextual factors such as the state of the learners, the character of the social surroundings, and the availability and extent of the opportunity to teach and learn. Thus, the nature of teacher quality, to their way of thinking, is elusive and contested, yet there are still those who profess to know how to evaluate it: [This] has not stopped others from asserting that they know quality teaching when they see it, they know how to determine whether it is occurring or not, and they know this across schools, districts, states, and nations. Many such claims lack not only a good understanding of teaching but also a humility for the challenge of appraising anything so complex as the nature and consequences of human relationships, particularly between adults and children in the otherwise unworldly setting of the schools of the early 21st century. 23 We will get to a deeper discussion of the problems of assessing and evaluating quality teaching in Chapter 4. Today, those who view teacher quality as synonymous with effective teaching as defined by student outcomes commonly use a statistical procedure known as value-added modeling (VAM) to assess effectiveness. VAM refers to a collection of statistical techniques that use multiple years of student test-score data to estimate the effects of individual schools or teachers on student achievement. 24 However, in spite of the widespread attention paid to standardized test scores as a measure of school and teacher effectiveness in the United States, there are other kinds of student outcomes advocated by many parents and educators. These might include increased motivation to learn or love of learning, 25 dropout or graduation rates, 26 participation in advanced courses 27 and college acceptance rates, or other social, behavioral, or intellectual outcomes Some of these outcomes are often linked to broader notions of school or educational effectiveness as opposed to teacher effectiveness. There is a recent movement in some circles toward generalizing the definition of effectiveness outcomes to include, for example, moral and social value formation, in addition to the cognitive outcomes of the classroom performance of teachers. 28 Also, it is suggested that, rather than attempting to identify a single set of characteristics of teacher effectiveness that apply in all teaching situations, one should adopt a differentiated model that allows for different indicators of effectiveness in different teaching settings. This might include a teacher s work outside the classroom, 29 as well as differences in curriculum or subject matter, grade level, and student socioeconomic or linguistic status. 30 This idea harkens back to the work of Sternberg and Horvath on experts and prototypes, which also offers a differentiated view of high-quality teaching. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. Teachers College Press Teachers College, Columbia University 1234 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY