Qualities of Effective Teachers

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Dr. James Strong. Dr. Strong is the Heritage Professor of Education in the School of Education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and he's the President and CEO of Strong & Associates Educational Consulting. His research interests include policy and practice related to teacher quality and effectiveness, teacher and administrator evaluation, and teacher selection. He's worked extensively with state departments of education, school districts, and national and international education organizations to support teacher and leader effectiveness.

[00:45]

And he presents and consults extensively throughout the United States and internationally. He's the author of more than 200 articles and more than 30 books, including Qualities of Effective Teachers, now in its third edition, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:59] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:02] SPEAKER_00:

Dr. Strong, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[01:04] SPEAKER_01:

Hi, Justin. It's a pleasure to be back with you, and please feel free to call me James.

[01:08] SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you, James. I'm excited to talk about the research base and the state of professional knowledge on effective teaching, because certainly this is a book that many thousands of educators have been trained with, have studied from. And I think for practicing educators, I think it's a good touchstone to go back to like, what does the research actually say about effective teaching, especially in a time when we have so many fads, we have so many new things that come out every year that may be pull us in different directions. So let's start with the core of the knowledge base. What does the research tell us about the qualities of effective teachers in the broad strokes?

[01:45] SPEAKER_01:

I think in the broadest sense, Justin, the research tells us people can't walk in off the street and do what a good teacher does. There are a lot of shortcut training programs that to varying degrees are certainly helpful. But as with any profession, it takes a while to become expert in a classroom. For any of us who are involved in education, think back to your first year of teaching. Think back to your first day of teaching. That was a long time ago for me, but it's so vivid in my mind.

[02:18]

i realized pretty quickly that i knew the content area of history i'm a secondary history major but i was assigned to work with seventh graders and i had a homeroom of seventh grade girls it took me about half a day to realize i was incompetent there is a deep knowledge base practice space toolkit that comes into practice Once we acquire those skills and tools over time, and you can't walk into a classroom and do that without that kind of expertise, that is the broadest stroke. When I think about what it means to be a good teacher, it's complicated, complex work. It's rocket science to do this. I've never taught a child to read. How do you teach a five-year-old or a six year old, how to read?

[03:08]

How do you keep middle schoolers attention all day, every day and so forth? So I'm really giving you the justification for why we need to understand more about what is a good teacher. And maybe I'll use that as the opening salvo.

[03:24] SPEAKER_00:

And it's always interesting to hear people who are not educators talk about teaching as if they understand it at a sufficient level of depth because they were students, right? Everybody has been a student and we've seen lots of teaching. We've witnessed lots of teaching, but on the receiving end of it, But there's a lot that is invisible to the student that is really central to teaching. And I like to use the metaphor of the iceberg, that every iceberg has about 10% above the surface of the water, but about 90% is hidden beneath the surface and not visible to necessarily an observer or a student, or at least there are dimensions to it that are going on in the teacher's mind with the teacher's expertise. that are not obvious, that are not apparent to us. So I wonder if we could start with some of those invisible dimensions or at least aspects that are less directly observable.

[04:10]

What are some of those domains of practice that happen either behind the scenes, outside of class time, or in the teacher's mind that really go into successful teaching and are really essential?

[04:21] SPEAKER_01:

I certainly agree with your iceberg metaphor. There is a great deal that teachers must know and be able to do if they're going to be successful when they're with children of any age, graduate students to preschool. There is a lot that has to be known. The Organization of Qualities of Effective Teachers is structured around six domains or what I call qualities in the book. And I think four of them are fairly invisible to the outside observer. The first one that I address is professional knowledge.

[04:58]

And professional knowledge is more than knowing your subject matter. And in the example that I gave when we first started, it isn't enough to know history. You have to know how to teach history. You can't just know math. You have to know how to communicate math, how to help other people, children, young people understand math. So there's a pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, understanding the culture of the school, understanding students.

[05:27]

There is a great deal behind the scene just in that first domain of professional knowledge. And then that's followed by instructional planning. Kids don't see the planning. They see hopefully the result of the planning. But good planning is absolutely necessary for a teacher to walk into the classroom on any given day. It doesn't matter the instructional strategy that's being used, the approach, the group of kids.

[05:55]

Good teachers never walk in with a blank slate and say, what do you think we should do today, boys and girls? They know largely. where they would like to take their classes. And there's a great deal underneath that domain of planning. Assessment is also necessary. The best teachers in the world integrate assessment constantly, almost to the point that it's so fluid that you can't distinguish it from instruction.

[06:21]

Assessment and instruction go on continuously. It's not end of the course, end of the unit, end of the chapter, end of the year assessment. Those count. They're important. but it's constant assessment and adjustment. And then professionalism.

[06:36]

Michael Fullan found in a study with the Chicago Public Schools that if you allow a harmful, disruptive teacher to remain in the school, it not only harms that classroom, it will poison the well for the entire school. So on the professionalism side, teachers have an ethical standard that they have to live by. In fact, there's a legal guideline in many states that put teacher on a pedestal. They can't do on the weekend what a plumber might do and go back to work on Monday morning. they're held to a high level of esteem, of respect. That's both in school and for good or bad, outside of school.

[07:16]

but also with their own professional growth and development and communication. All of those, Justin, essentially are beneath the surface. The two aspects of good teaching that can be seen by an outsider or by a student readily are instructional delivery and learning environment. How does the teacher manage a classroom? How does the teacher organize? Who creates the rules?

[07:41]

How do you abide by rules in the classroom? How do you have a robust positive, dynamic learning environment? What kind of instructional strategies do you use? Do they fit? Do you connect prior learning with the current lesson? Are students engaged in learning?

[07:57]

Is there differentiation in learning? And on and on. Those are the things that kids can see and others, adults, if they're observing in a classroom. But that's not all of teaching. Teaching is complex. Teaching is rocket science.

[08:11] SPEAKER_00:

I understand why we focus on those observable domains, simply because they're observable. We can see the learning environment, we can see instructional delivery. Talk to us about your thinking on how we make inferences about those invisible domains based on what we do see, because in some ways, I feel like we realize when something is lacking in those less visible domains. We see when teachers make content mistakes or don't seem to understand their content. We see when maybe the planning that we didn't witness directly seems to be subpar and that's having consequences in the lesson. We make inferences based on what we do see about those aspects of what we don't see.

[08:50]

Help us think a little bit more systematically about those limitations and how, as instructional leaders, we can work with the full range of competencies that teachers need to have, even though some of them aren't as directly visible. Because I know a lot of your work is centered on teacher evaluation, teacher appraisal, developing teacher evaluation systems. And my sense, when most people start thinking about teacher evaluation, is they concentrate so heavily on what is directly observable that they don't really have a lot of thinking about how to get at those other domains of practice. What's your take on that?

[09:27] SPEAKER_01:

If we're going to support teachers through supervision, evaluation, and in any other form like mentoring and coaching, we have to know that full range of what effective teachers should know and be able to do. The approach that I take is certainly with teacher evaluation or teacher assessment, if you prefer. is in knowing and being able to define as operationally as best we can, what is underneath professional knowledge? What does it look like? How do you know it when you see it? And that helps remove some of the inferencing that occurs.

[10:07]

A lot of judgment for teacher success is highly subjective. There are a lot of flaws in evaluation. We can't make it perfect. but observation for certainly is sort of like Swiss cheese. I mean, it's important, it's valuable, and we need to be in classrooms as educational leaders. We need to be observing, but at the end of the day, we're not going to observe very much.

[10:32]

If I, for example, visit a teacher's classroom five times during the academic year, and I stay a full hour for each of those visits, that's five hours. I will have observed about a half of a percent of actual teaching time. Ninety nine and a half percent of what teachers do will occur when I'm not there. So that's making a huge inference that I caught the teacher on a good day or a bad day or whatever. And then I draw a conclusion on that. That's flawed.

[11:03]

from the get-go. Additionally, a number of these attributes can't readily be observed. How do I fully observe assessment? How do I observe professionalism, instructional planning? All of those aspects need to be accounted for, and that's where a quality teacher evaluation design will come to bear. If there are performance standards and indicators underneath each of these broad categories, like professional knowledge or instructional delivery, then the principal or the instructional leader is in a better position to know what to look for and to know how to give feedback and support the teacher.

[11:45]

So we have to have enough operational definition for these, for them to make sense. And that definition has to come from research. What works?

[11:57] SPEAKER_00:

I'm glad to hear you say that, and I'm glad we share that perspective on those harder to observe domains of practice. Talk to us a little bit about how we can gather insight and evidence about practice beyond just direct observation. What are some other places we can look for evidence?

[12:12] SPEAKER_01:

As long as I've been working with teacher and principal evaluation, superintendent evaluation, one of the key building blocks that I've focused on is using appropriate multiple data sources used appropriately. If observation alone is insufficient, let's not throw it away, but let's supplement it with other ways of knowing. For a teacher, it may be a small, very focused document collection. I wouldn't go as far as calling it a portfolio. Some do. Teacher preparation programs frequently will focus on a portfolio.

[12:49]

But a document log of some kind where the teacher has a voice in providing evidence about what's happening during that 99 and a half percent of the time when the principal or the instructional leader is not present. So a document analysis focused, used as part of a bigger picture can be very helpful. Another good source. is to ask students. Students do no good teaching. There are some very powerful studies that show that kids serve as a better judge of teacher effectiveness than principals or teachers themselves.

[13:26]

There's a very high correlation coefficient between student ratings of teachers and student achievement gains in those classes. And that's true in both reading and math. So using surveys, high stakes or low stakes, can be useful. And then there's another interesting element. What do you do in states or school districts that expect or require that measures of student progress be included? You can't get that through observation.

[13:58]

That's another part of a multi-data source approach using guided SMART goals and looking at the design and the performance of those goals. Looking at growth scores in a variety of means can be used, not as a single source, but as a palette that includes multiple colors. That works best in performance evaluation for anyone.

[14:24] SPEAKER_00:

I think the power of listening to teachers, like it's so interesting that research has validated the accuracy of student ratings. And I remember when the Gates Foundation did the Measures of Effective Teaching project years ago, and they had all of these expensive statistical methods employed to try to assess value add and the teacher's contribution. And it was kind of funny to me and kind of gratifying to me to find that student ratings were the strongest of anything they could possibly come up with, you know, like all of the Statistical firepower in the world could not match the accuracy of students in the classroom all the time. They are able to say how their teachers are doing. And of course, we don't just ask the students to fill out the teacher evaluation and call it a day. It's, as you said, one source of data, one data point.

[15:10]

And certainly kind of a bigger picture. One thing I wanted to ask about that I see is very valuable for getting a sense of kind of where a teacher's thinking is and what their professional judgment is like is conversation. Because if something is truly invisible to us, we can't observe it. There may be some artifacts or some indirect evidence of it. But if it's fundamentally a cognitive process, it seems to me that conversation could be a part of our approach to making inferences about how a teacher is doing, where their thinking is. Where do you see conversation as playing into this process of working with teachers in a supervisory or evaluative context?

[15:48] SPEAKER_01:

I think it's extraordinarily important. You grow when you reflect on what you do. And when you have a partner, the instructional leader, another teacher, someone, even myself looking in the mirror at my own performance will help me get better. And outside of me talking to myself, conversation with others is going to be vital. We have codified that idea of conversation, Justin, into mentoring or coaching. And there are a lot of programs around those.

[16:18]

And they work, not all, and certainly not all at the same level. But in general, when we look across studies on the effect size of, let's say, compared to walking through a classroom and then coaching a teacher, teacher classroom walkthroughs yield an effect size of zero. 0.0. And all a walkthrough is just another form of a short observation. It's data collection.

[16:48]

It's what I do with the data collection that matters. And it has to be good data collection. Am I collecting the right information? Am I collecting information that's insightful, that's research-based, that will guide teacher improvement? But if I simply walk through and do very little with that, it's still not going to help a teacher. I recall a high school principal that was visiting in my office a couple of years or so ago, And he came in after school and he said, this is how many walkthroughs our team has done so far this year.

[17:18]

And it was like November. And it was, I don't know, several hundred. And of course I nodded and said, that's a lot of work, that sort of thing. But what I really thought is that I don't really care. That doesn't matter much. What I really want to know is how many of your teachers have changed.

[17:34]

Until a teacher changes, nothing changes. Reformed happens not at the White House, not at the State House. It happens in the classroom. And that classroom change comes about because of conversations. The effect size compared to walkthrough effect size, the effect size of coaching is about a 0.6.

[17:57]

That's a very high, more than half a standard deviation change of teachers who are getting really good quality coaching in terms of their effectiveness compared to those who are not, but the real catch on that is that principals spend about less than 13% of their time in a day on instructional activities. And of that time of the total day, about 5% is spent on walkthroughs or other observations. That doesn't have much effect. They spend about half a percent of time of their time, 0.5% of their time on coaching and guided conversation, and yet that has a 0.6 effect size.

[18:41]

Why aren't we doing more of that? Don't wait until the end of the year to tell me that I need to get better. Don't wait until some point to fill out a form and tell me, help me today when I can get better. Coach me. Now, why don't we do it? Time is one of the issues.

[18:58]

Another is, do I know enough? to coach? Do I know what to say? It's one thing to diagnose what the problems are. It's another thing to prognose what the solution is. So that requires a very high level of instructional skill on the part of the instructional support staff.

[19:15] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And thinking about those walkthroughs that maybe are measurable, that are, you know, you can check a box and say, I've done this many walkthroughs. One of the things I see people emphasizing is I filled out a form. I went into the classroom, I filled out a form, either paper or electronic. I left some comments, positive and negative, and it shows up in my spreadsheet. and if that is the focus rather than conversation if i know what i think about the teacher's lesson but i have absolutely no idea what the teacher thought about their lesson and we don't talk about their thinking we don't talk about you know the decisions that the teacher made it is not at all surprising to me that there is a zero effect size to that kind of drive by you know here's a form i filled out about you and if i think about like all the time somebody's filled out a form about me had some forms filled out about me you've got employment forms tax forms speeding tickets and there's not a lot of real richness in having a form filled out about you and i feel like if i could eliminate one practice from the repertoire of instructional leaders it would be all the form filling because like it's easy to count it's easy to know that you've done it and it's easy to make sure that you've collected certain information but as you said it's not working there's not any evidence that that is an effective practice and like i even hesitated

[20:23]

initially to call my work at all related to classroom walkthroughs because, yeah, I saw the same thing, that a lot of people are doing things that aren't based in any research, that aren't based in any finding that they're effective practices, but they're just kind of easy for us to focus on.

[20:38] SPEAKER_01:

I get pushback sometimes when I talk about this issue in front of a leader audience about walkthroughs not working. It's so ingrained into practice now that we think we have to do it and we think we're accomplishing something. The problem is we have the wrong metric. The metric should be, do teachers change? Do teachers get better? And if we use that as our guide, kids will get better.

[21:04]

We can walk through constantly, just as you said. And at the end of the year, students won't be any better for that. They will be better when we coach and when teachers get better at what they do. And that's the bottom line.

[21:19] SPEAKER_00:

I think that's such an important distinction to focus on that. Because what I see when I work with groups of leaders and people are often eager to show their chops. Like if we do a little video exercise, people are eager to show how good they are at finding the positives and negatives in a lesson. Like you play a video and any administrator can say, okay, here are five things that were great and 20 things that were terrible. like we place confidence in our ability to find areas for improvement. And we don't realize that noticing possible areas for improvement and actually helping someone improve are two very different tasks.

[21:52]

You know, like the idea I think that a lot of people have in their heads is as long as I can criticize this teacher accurately, um, I have done my job to help them improve.

[22:02] SPEAKER_01:

That's only part of the way to the finish line. That won't work. If the teacher knew how to do better, he or she would already be doing that. The prognosis part becomes very important. If we want...

[22:14]

evaluation, observation, supervision to work, there are about three key steps that we need. Number one is quality data collection. That's being in a classroom. That's looking at artifacts of teacher performance. It's looking at student performance. It's looking at student surveys, for example.

[22:34]

So good data collection. Number two is good feedback. And that's where we fail right now. We're not providing the kind of feedback. And it's not just saying, here's how you need to get better teacher. It's saying, here's what you can do to get better.

[22:47]

And I'm here to support you and help you do that. And then there's a third step that we aren't even thinking about. And that is to verify. Come back into the classroom. Just because I said it one time, don't think that that teacher is going to change. It's hard to change.

[23:06]

Come back and say, I'll be back in a week and we'll work on this lesson together. And I'd like to see how you're doing this in the classroom. Rather than lecturing for 50 minutes, what if we try this? And here's what I'd like you to do. That's the prognosis part. Come back and see what's happening.

[23:26]

And then come back again. Did the teacher change practice? Three steps. Good data collection, number one. Number two, quality feedback. Conversation coaching.

[23:38]

Number three, verify feedback. And if we do those things, teachers can improve.

[23:45] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I know your book, Qualities of Effective Teachers, is frequently used as a course textbook. And it's my hope that principals are also keeping it on their desk and using it as a reference as they work with teachers. And I know you have over a thousand citations to the research on effective teaching. I wanted to ask about something that is not in your book. and get your take on how some of these other things can play into or tend to, but maybe shouldn't play into teacher evaluation. One of the things I've become very concerned about in recent years is our susceptibility to fads that don't have that same research base.

[24:23]

And as administrators, I think we're no exception. I think we fall for fads as well. And certainly there are neuromyths and myths about the kind of things that turn out to not actually have any research behind them. Talk to us, wearing your hat as a researcher and as someone who's had a long view of the profession for a good long time now, how can we make our profession, especially when it comes to teacher evaluation, more resistant to distracting fads?

[24:52] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a really interesting question, Justin, and something I think about sometimes. And the answer for myself is to be skeptical. When there's something new being written about, I have a very serious skepticism about it until I can see the evidence. It's like medicine or a health fad or something that you read. How many diets are there? And do any of them really genuinely work well?

[25:20]

What do you have to do to make them work? I remember Going to a national school board association conference in San Diego several years ago, where I was making a presentation and I took a little bit of time to walk through the exhibit hall. And in about 15 or 20 minutes, I remember counting more than 10 different ways of how to teach children to read. And every one of those commercial vendors claim to have the truth. This is the way to teach reading. I don't know how you teach a child to read.

[25:51]

but I don't think they're all correct and they're faddish. So much of what we see in our profession is based on very thin evidence or no evidence. We just give something a new title and try it out again and we don't stop to look at the end results did something good happen as a result researchers are prone to do that and so our school practitioners principals and teachers do that we heard it we read it enough so we think it's the truth i'll give you one specific example i've been doing over the last decade plus years, a lot of research comparing teachers internationally, especially in China and in the US and most recently with teachers in independent international schools and looking at what they do.

[26:43]

There's an exceptionally strong belief in our profession that the teacher has to be the guide on the side. It's called different things, but it's embedded in clinical supervision. It's embedded in so much of our literature and our talking. I found our research team, Leslie Grant, another professor at William & Mary, and I especially have done a lot of this, We have found over and over that's simply not the truth. Just for sort of catchy terms, it's don't be a sage on the stage, be a guide on the side. Neither of them are exactly what the best teachers do.

[27:22]

And yet we are so convinced of this fallacy that teachers are afraid to use direct instruction. Direct instruction done well has one of the highest effect sizes of any instructional strategy. And yet we won't do it. We have to have a good sense of caution with what we're doing. And then I think a second point is look at the evidence. Is there research to support what we're doing?

[27:49]

And then there's a third element that I would put in to deal with this. Look at end results. We don't evaluate. Is this working? We have a summer school program. Does it help for kids to spend six weeks in summer school?

[28:00]

Does it make a difference? Does this program work? Does this, whatever it is that we've had in place for so long, is it making any difference? To be a true profession, we really need to tackle your question.

[28:12] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I think about what you said about the medical profession. Like if we invent a new wonder drug, we really want it to work, right? We want to help people. We want to, you know, get that validation that this is an effective thing. And if you ever look at the standards of evidence for new drugs, I mean, the bar is so high.

[28:30]

You have to do a double-blind placebo test. study where the doctors don't know which medication their patient got, and only after you collect all the data can you really say, yes, this truly worked. And that's a far higher standard than we tend to employ in education. And of course, there are lots of differences, but that skepticism of ideas that do not have that research base i think is you know runs counter to our desire to be innovative to our counter runs counter to our desire to belong you know like i want to be at the cool kids table who are trying the new innovative things and i don't want to be a stick in the mud who thinks you know you know it makes it makes us feel like we're being stubborn or obstinate to say this new thing everybody's talking about like show me the show me the evidence But I think that patience and that caution about jumping on every new bandwagon would serve us well as a profession because we've just, you know, since I've been a principal and author, I think we're probably on our fourth or fifth wave of profession-wide fads that have kind of come and gone.

[29:32]

And those are all the things that are not in your book. I mean, that's kind of my takeaway is like, go back to what is actually... you know, in, you know, in the books that not get published opportunistically when a new fad pops up, but your book is in the third edition. And there's a reason that the stuff that has made it to the third edition has made it to the third edition.

[29:51] SPEAKER_01:

Stick with what works. I am very anti faddish and it concerns me as a profession to see us doing all of those various things just because they're new and different. Those are the wrong reasons to do something new and different. And we're malpracticing on kids when we're doing that. And that's not what any good profession will do. Medicine makes mistakes.

[30:20]

Some things get through the FDA, get through the approval process and still have really bad side effects. But there is a lot of quality control to protect against it and to implement new practices. That is the standard that we should take as educators and we need I don't know if education in terms of research is too much in an infancy to be more sophisticated, but we really do need to change to what works.

[30:53] SPEAKER_00:

Very well said. So the book is Qualities of Effective Teachers, now in its third edition and available wherever books are sold. Dr. Strong, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.

[31:04] SPEAKER_01:

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[31:07] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.