Teaching Effectiveness

RAND Corporation, in partnership with the American Institutes for Research, evaluated implementation of key elements of the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching in three public school districts and four charter management organizations.

Work takes up a major share of everyone’s life since it is necessary for an individual’s livelihood. In today’s modern world a large chunk of people’s life is spent at work. People spend around one third of their life at their work place. This enormous part of life time spent at work should give satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment for having worked purposefully, constructively, and fruitfully. Working is a critical activity for the preservation of personal health and is important for human beings. It also serves as an energizer for personal identity and boosts the self-esteem of men and women as they take up meaningful work. It also develops a sense of identity, dignity, and worth. Achievement of a meaningful result assists an individual in growing and actualizing his full potential. It improves the conditions of life of a community. While working, an individual is exerting an effort in order to make something, to achieve something, or to produce a desired effect. For human beings, “to be able to do something” means to make it visible that “I”, as the subject, is active in the world, that “I” exist. Working is a meaningful way to prove one’s existence, and hopefully, that it is worth to be lived.

Originally published in 1984, the field of research on teaching had expanded dramatically in the 15 years covered by this bibliography, 1965 to 1980. The expansion had included studies conducted for many purposes. This bibliography contains relevant citations to the research which has been conducted for the purposes of increasing our understanding of the science, art and craft of teaching. The existence of research publications has been documented with relevant reference information and brief annotations; there has been no attempt to evaluate the quality of the studies. A brief perusal of the bibliography provides an indication of the range of topics addressed by these studies and also of the variety of studies within a single topic.

Research surrounding teacher quality and teacher effectiveness has continued to grow and become even more prominent as teaching has become more professionalized globally and countries have invested more comprehensively in teacher education, certification, and professional development. To better understand teacher effectiveness, it is important to have a global viewpoint to truly understand how beliefs and practices vary in each country and can lead to different characterizations of what makes an effective teacher. This includes both cross-cultural commonalities and unique differences in conceptualization of teacher effectiveness and practices. With this comprehensive, international understanding of teacher effectiveness, a better understanding of best practices, teacher models, philosophies, and more will be developed. International Beliefs and Practices That Characterize Teacher Effectiveness identifies, shares, and explores the predominant conceptual understandings of beliefs and practices that characterize effective teachers in different countries. This book provides international and cross-cultural perspectives on teacher effectiveness and examines the prominent philosophies of teaching and pedagogical practices that characterize teachers in selected countries. Each chapter includes a background, such as history and undergirding philosophy within each country, effective teacher models, prominent applications of teacher effectiveness practices, and special or unique features of teaching in the specific countries mentioned. This book is essential for practicing educators in various countries, teacher educators, faculty, and students within schools and colleges, researchers in international comparative studies, organizations engaged in international education, and administrators, practitioners, and academicians interested in how teacher effectiveness is characterized in different countries and regions across the world.

How can we really evaluate teacher effectiveness? Systems of teacher appraisal and evaluation are being created across the world in order to monitor and assess teacher performance. But do the models used really give a fair evaluation? Based on international research, the authors argue that teacher effectiveness is too narrowly conceptualised and methods of measuring it are not attuned to the real contexts in which teachers work. They propose a model of differential teacher effectiveness which takes into account that: * teachers may be more effective with some categories of students than with others * teachers may be more effective with some teaching contexts than others * teachers may be more effective with some subjects or components than with others. Building on and developing previous research on models of teacher effectiveness and current theories, the authors open up possible new debates which will be of interest to academics and researchers working in this area throughout the world.

Most developed nations measure the performance of teachers in audit evaluations of school productivity. Accountability metrics such as "teacher effectiveness" and "teacher quality" dominate evaluations of student outcomes and shape education policy. The Metrics of Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Quality Research explores how these metrics distort analyses of student achievement, sideline broader contextual and systemic influences on learning, reinforce input-output analysis of schooling, and skew the educational debate. Focusing on recent phases of school education policy reform, this book utilizes qualitative data from classroom teacher participants to examine how and why issues of teacher effectiveness and teacher quality figure so prominently in policy reform and why pressing matters of social class, school funding, and broader contextual influences are downplayed. The authors use this information to suggest how teachers can develop their role as pedagogic experts in a highly scrutinized environment. This book will be of great interest to education academics and postgraduate students specializing in teacher performance, accountability and governance.