How Teachers Teach: Mapping the Terrain of Practice
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How Teachers Teach: Mapping the Terrain of Practice Gary Sykes Educational Testing Service Princeton, NJ Suzanne Wilson University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 2015 Copyright © 2015 Educational Testing Service. All Rights Reserved. ETS and the ETS logo are registered trademarks of Educational Testing Service (ETS). MEASURING THE POWER OF LEARNING is a trademark of ETS. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Acknowledgments The authors appreciate support in reviewing literature and assisting in report preparation provided by Andrew Croft, David Kirui, Yi Qi, Meghan Schramm-Possinger, Melissa Siesputowski, and Margaret Wilson. And we wish to thank a great many colleagues who shared their thoughts, feedback, and critique of this report through several prior versions. A list of these individuals is appended at the end of this report. Their contributions strengthened the report; any further deficiencies are ours. How Teachers Teach: Mapping the Terrain of Practice i Authors’ Note Gary Sykes is a senior research director in the Understanding Teaching Quality Center at Educational Testing Service (ETS). He joined ETS after 25 years on the faculty at Michigan State University (MSU), where he concentrated his scholarly and advocacy-oriented work on teaching, teacher education, and policy directed to teaching. He was active in the launch of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and served as the research director for the Holmes Group, a network of teacher education institutions devoted to the reform of teacher education. His publications include the editorship with Lee Shulman of the Handbook of Teaching and Policy (1983), with Linda Darling-Hammond of Teaching as the Learning Profession (1999), and with Barbara Schneider and David Plank of the Handbook of Education Policy Research (2009). Suzanne Wilson is the NEAG endowed professor of teacher education at the University of Connecticut, which she joined in 2013 after 27 years on the faculty at MSU. She served as chair of the Department of Teacher Education at MSU for 6 years and as a lead researcher on several large-scale projects, including the Education Policy and Practice Study and the National Center for Research on Teacher Education. In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Education. Wilson has published in American Educator, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Elementary School Journal, Journal of Teacher Education, Phi Delta Kappan, Science, and Teaching Education. She is author of California Dreaming: Reforming Mathematics Education (2003) and editor of Lee Shulman’s collection of essays, Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach (2004). ii How Teachers Teach: Mapping the Terrain of Practice Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 A Guide to This Report ...................................................................................................... 2 Rationale ............................................................................................................................ 4 Orienting Assumptions ..................................................................................................... 4 On Competence .............................................................................................................. 6 Warrants for Claims About Competence .................................................................. 8 Affordances and Limitations of the Research on Teaching .................................... 8 Limitations To Be Noted .......................................................................................... 10 On the Purposes of Education..................................................................................... 11 On Principles of Learning ............................................................................................ 13 On the Nature of Teaching .......................................................................................... 14 The Competencies of Teaching ...................................................................................... 18 The Instruction Domain .............................................................................................. 19 Preparing and Planning for High-Quality Instruction........................................... 20 Attending to Relational Aspects of Instruction ..................................................... 39 Establishing and Maintaining the Social and Academic Culture .......................... 45 Interactive Teaching ................................................................................................ 53 Engaging in Instructional Improvement ................................................................ 74 The Professional Role Responsibilities Domain ....................................................... 77 Collaborating With Other Professionals ................................................................ 78 Working With Families and Communities ............................................................. 84 Fulfilling Ethical Responsibilities ........................................................................... 87 Meeting Legal Responsibilities ............................................................................... 93 Concluding Observations ................................................................................................ 96 References ........................................................................................................................ 98 Appendix: Contributors to the Report ......................................................................... 130 How Teachers Teach: Mapping the Terrain of Practice iii Introduction What follows is a framework that sets forth the main competencies involved in responsible, responsive, and effective teaching. Components of competent teaching are set forth at a relatively high level, requiring further detail to demonstrate how they unfold in particular situations as may be influenced by such factors as the subject matter, characteristics of students in the classroom, and others. While these competencies may be taught and learned, their enactment will be influenced not only by what teachers know and know how to do, but also by the conditions of teachers’ work. Competence then is not simply what teachers bring to the contexts in which they work but also what those contexts support or limit. In action, competence is always shaped by persons-in-situations (Kennedy, 2010). Also, while competence may be assessed for various purposes, this account is not limited to what may be measured. The intent here is to express the full range of teaching competence to serve multiple purposes as set forth below. Two important questions about competencies concern what is necessary for safe and responsible practice upon entry into the profession and how competencies develop thereafter—toward expert or master practice. Establishing a standard for entry to teaching is a public and professional judgment informed with reference to a competency framework. The behaviors, knowledge, skills, dispositions, and levels of proficiency novices must demonstrate before being allowed to begin teaching is a matter for standard-setting that can be gauged in relation to the full set of competencies claimed to underlie effective practice. How competence develops in teaching is an empirical question that requires further study. The most prevalent approach uses the research on expert-novice comparisons as the basis for insight, proposing the adaptive expert as the long-term goal (see, e.g., Berliner, 1992, 2001; Ericsson, 1996, 2005, 2007, 2008; Hatano & Inagaki, 1986; Snow, Griffin, & Burns, 2005). Along with other kinds of experts, teachers are thought to develop fluid and automatic routines for aspects of their practice and to acquire problem-finding and solving capabilities that extend their knowledge and improve how they adapt their practice to their students. The account presented here does not propose any developmental sequence or progression through which expertise in teaching emerges and accumulates, but rather focuses on identifying the core competencies of responsible practice for teachers in regular education settings. Making decisions about entry, early career, or expert teaching involves professional judgment, and research on how teachers develop competence over time is an important subject for future inquiry (see Reynolds, 1992, for one early effort to distinguish what beginning teachers must know and know how to do). The report offered here—conceived as a map of competencies in teaching—represents an interpretive synthesis by the authors of main and contemporary currents in the research on How Teachers Teach: Mapping the Terrain of Practice 1 teaching and learning, supplemented with attention to literature on best practices, documents authored by professional organizations setting forth standards for teaching and learning, prominent measures and assessments of teaching such as observation instruments, and expert opinion provided by reviewers of this report (as listed in the appendix). The claims set forth in this report draw to the extent available on results from well conducted studies of teaching, but of necessity extend beyond such warrants to claims that rest on partial or limited support in the research, and to extrapolations from research that