What makes good teachers good? A cross-case analysis of the connection between teacher effectiveness and student achievement

Stronge, James H., Ward, Thomas J., & Grant, Leslie W. (2011). What makes good teachers good? A cross-case analysis of the connection between teacher effectiveness and student achievement. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(4), 339-355.

This study was strongly reminiscent of the old process-product studies that were prominent in the literature during my early graduate school days in the early and mid-1980s. In those studies, as with this one, researchers determined which children learned the most based on achievement test score gains, and then looked closer at teacher and student behaviors in classrooms through observation studies, comparing what they saw in classrooms where student gains were high with what they saw in classrooms where student gains were not high. The main difference between the study reported here and those 1980s process-product studies is that today we have more sophisticated statistical methods that enable us to achieve a bit better control of possible influencing variables than we did in the past. Other than those advances in statistical methodology for data analysis (which is no small thing), the studies of the past and the present look quite similar. There is a first phase that examines a relatively large sample of standardized test score data using quantitative methods, and based upon those results, there is a more focused observation study of a much smaller subset of participants using rating scales that have been carefully normed across observers and that provide some kind of largely (though not completely) quantitative data. All this occurred in the study here, and did in most of the process-product studies of the 1980s.

In both the studies of yesterday and today, classroom management ability looms large. For anyone who has spent any time in classrooms, that is a no-brainer. It stands to reason that children will learn more in a classroom that is well-managed, and in which there are fewer disruptions. In such a classroom, there will be more time and energy to focus on learning. In a classroom where learning can occur, there will be better relationships between teachers and students, and those relationships will be motivating for both teachers and students. In the study here, classroom management differences were almost the only differences between the classrooms of “effective” and “less effective” (based on expected vs. achieved test score gains) teachers. While I believe those findings make a certain amount of sense, I believe they may over-simplify the situation. I felt the same way about some of the 1980s findings. The authors here do state in their conclusion that there is no “magic bullet” that unequivocally determines teacher effectiveness, though clearly teachers do make a difference.

As a teacher educator, I’d like to go deeper with this. If teachers with well-managed classrooms have students who learn more, then just HOW is that key level of management achieved? What do “effective” teachers do on a day to day basis? Most importantly for my purposes, what knowledge, skills, and perhaps most critically and problematically, what dispositions, do these teachers need to have to be able to make those well-managed classrooms happen? Some teachers are able to meet the challenges of today’s classrooms, and some are not. That is true no matter what kinds of schools and populations that teachers work in: urban, suburban or rural, affluent or economically challenged, public or private. Some teachers have what it takes, and some do not. In my own experience as a teacher educator, I’ve learned that, and furthermore, I’ve learned to be cautious in my predictions of who will succeed in the classroom and who will not. I’ve had seemingly strong students in preservice courses who could not hack it, and students who I thought would be high risks for failure who have succeeded. While some of my “star students” have been “star teachers”, the relationship is far from perfect. It’s good for me to read about the characteristics of effective teachers, but sometimes I feel that we know no more about how specifically and practically to help teachers to develop those characteristics than we did in the 1980s.