the apple project: › educol › documents › 00001488.doc · web viewthe unique approach to...

ACTION ON PRINCIPLED PEDAGOGYand

LEARNING EVALUATION

APPLE

A cooperative project of:

Duplin County Schools (North Carolina),Barking and Dagenham Borough Schools (England)

andDonald R. Watson School of Education

University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex at Brighton,

September 2 -5 1999

THE RESEARCH TEAM

Tommy BensonAssistant Superintendent for Personnel and Exceptional ChildrenDuplin County (NC) Public SchoolsHighway 11, NorthKenansville, NC 28349(910)296-1521 phone(910)296-1396 fax

Mary DudleyField-Based Teacher EducatorDuplin County (NC) Public Schools and UNC-WilmingtonHighway 11, NorthKenansville, NC 28349(910)296-1521 phone(910)296-1396 [email protected]

Andrew E. HayesAssociate Professor of EducationDepartment of Specialty Studies, Watson School of EducationUniv. of North Carolina at Wilmington601 South College RoadWilmington, NC 28403(910)962-3353 phone(910)962-3609 [email protected]

Hathia A. HayesAssociate Professor of EducationDepartment of Curricular Studies, Watson School of EducationUniv. of North Carolina at Wilmington601 South College RoadWilmington, NC 28403(910)962-3388 phone(910)962-3609 [email protected]

Philip HegartyDirector of Research and DevelopmentDepartment of Teaching and EducationStudies, RetiredLancaster University (England)

Contact address:Green Meadow, Over KelletCarnforthLancs LA6 1BSEngland01524 733549 phone and [email protected]

Penny HegartySenior Lecturer in Early Years Education, Department of Teaching and Education Studies, RetiredLancaster University (England)

Contact address:Green Meadow, Over KelletCarnforthLancs LA6 1BSEngland01524 733549 phone and [email protected]

Carole J. ThomasHeadteacherManor County Infants SchoolSandringham RoadBarking, Essex, IG11 9AGEngland0208 270 6630 phone0208 270 6627 fax

5/21/23 APPLE Project

5/21/23 3 APPLE Project

Recognition of Participants

The APPLE Project Research Team recognizes the gifts of time, risks of observation, commitment to teaching, and the professional courtesies extended by the teachers from Duplin County North Carolina, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, and a school in Cumbria, England. They invited us into their hearts, minds, and experiences and helped us understand their practice and their vision for teaching. Though we would like to give credit to each teacher by name, we agreed at the outset that their names and schools would not be revealed in any way. We honor this commitment, but extend our collective and individual thanks for involvement and real engagement in the APPLE Research Project.

A focus on the understanding of teaching is not possible without the understanding and support of system level administrators of Duplin County North Carolina and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Their willingness to support school building principals and headteachers in APPLE Project processes, their openness in sharing structures and administrative practices, and their interest and real support in finding the dollars to make this research happen actually made it possible for the project to continue over a three year period. Their belief in us, their support, interest, and enthusiasm is appreciated by the APPLE Research Team.


ACTION ON PRINCIPLED PEDAGOGYand

LEARNING EVALUATION:

Project APPLE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction to the APPLE Project vii

2. The APPLE Project: Abstract ix

3. The APPLE Project: Background and Methods 1

4. The APPLE Project: The Research Foundations for Analyzing Teaching Effectiveness 13

5. The APPLE Project: 16 Dimensions of Teaching 31

6. The APPLE Project: A New Typology of Teaching 87

7. The APPLE Project: Linking Research and Teaching 101

8. Bibliography 117

9. Appendices

Appendix A: Comparison of Duplin County and Barking and Dagenham School Districts

Appendix B: Characteristics of the Teacher Sample

Appendix C: Forms used for Data Collection and Case Documentation

Appendix D: Analysis of Connections Betw een the Attributes of Master Craftsmen and the Criteria for NBC

(NB For technical reasons, appendices are not included in this document. Anyone wishing to receive further information about the appendices should contact either Dr Andrew Hayes or Dr Philip Hegarty).


INTRODUCTION TO THE APPLE PROJECT

Cross-Cultural Connections: ATE-1996, 1999

Two groups of presenters, one from England and one from Duplin County Schools and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) in North Carolina, met at the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) Conference in St. Louis, Missouri in February, 1996. Unknowingly, they had been working, separately and independently, on the use of mentors as coaches in similar pre-service teacher education programs. Each of the groups had been immersed in the development of partnerships between their own universities and school systems. Out of interest, they attended each others’ sessions during the Conference. Brief introductions led to extended face-to-face conversations while there. Several “across the pond” conversations followed. They talked about the teaching practices of mentor-coaches for student teachers, about the effect of mentoring on teaching practices and on student achievement, about the effect of quality instruction on student learning in the classrooms of these, as generally perceived, quite-capable mentor teachers, and about the impact of school-university partnerships on learning.

Over several years Duplin County educators and UNCW teacher-educators had developed a strong relationship and a good model for working with student interns through a Model Clinical Teaching Project (MCTP). That project, and its effects, were presented during the 1996 ATE conference, as one of the finalists for the Distinguished Program Award. Ideas, processes, and relationships among the Duplin and UNCW group served as a nucleus for further discussion among people in those organizations. A great addition to that discussion was the experiences, ideas, and practices of the new colleagues from England.

Both teams wanted to continue working together to explore the critical issues in teacher education, staff development, and school improvement they had identified. Consequently, in October 1996, Duplin County educators invited the educators from UNCW and England for a visit in their community. The purposes of this meeting were:

0to get to know one another better;

1to explore ideas about mentoring or coaching; and

2to discuss the impact project ideas had on the improvement of teaching and learning.

Overviews of the two systems were presented. From those presentations, the similarity of demographic characteristics of the communities became very apparent, even though one was a rural county in North Carolina and the other was a Borough in London. Both systems were characterized as economically depressed. (For details of the characteristics of the two public school systems, see Appendix A). Also apparent were the similar levels of commitment of the respective schools and systems to student learning and support for teachers and students.

Both Duplin County and Barking and Dagenham were focusing on increasing student achievement, had developed many support services for teachers and student learning, and had made and begun implementing extensive plans for improvement by using system-wide approaches. Both systems had a history of working successfully with universities as partners,


with both systems engaged in mentor training and using coaching as a means for supporting student teachers.

Hathia and Andrew Hayes (from UNCW) had worked extensively in the Duplin County system and Phil and Penny Hegarty (Lancaster University) in the Barking and Dagenham system. Both universities had supported the development of partnerships—informal or formal. UNCW is a regional public university about an hour travel time from Duplin County while the University of Lancaster is in the north of England, but had regularly placed student teachers in the Barking and Dagenham system. There was a commitment in both partnerships to common goals and a history and readiness to work together.

The two partnerships decided to continue working together on mutual interests. The project continued, with primary initial focus to improve schools in Duplin County, and, over time, became the APPLE Project. As is often the case in projects that last over time, roles and conditions change and others are added. In this case, Dr. Tommy Benson, who had been a principal in Duplin County, became Assistant Superintendent (and now Superintendent) and a central member of the development team and Penny Hegarty, (Lancaster University, England, Retired) joined the project. The team is continuing with seven members, four from North Carolina and three from England. Current and continuing work is focused on documentation of the project findings and developing applications for various audiences with interests in public education.

The action phase of the project, in which the APPLE analytic process, together with the findings and implications, are being applied to teaching, school and system development is continuing in North Carolina only.

The APPLE Project:


Background and Methods


The APPLE Project: Background and Methods

Abstract

This section of the report describes the background to and rationale for the project and presents a full account of the methods and processes employed. In particular, an innovative approach to the analysis of observation and interview data, that of the critical interrogation of researchers by other members of the inquiry team, is described and claimed to make a substantial contribution to the assurance of authenticity of both data and analysis.

Background

The APPLE Project (Action on Principled Pedagogy and Learning Evaluation) grew out of the mutual interest of a group of English and American educators interested in the related themes of teacher mentoring and teacher thinking. This group, including school system administrators, a headteacher, teachers, and university personnel, were excited by the ways in which teacher mentoring and university partnerships were opening up new perspectives on professional learning, both for new and experienced teachers. Informal conversations led rapidly to the view that American and English systems were moving in similar directions, that there were similarities and differences from which all could learn, and that some of the key issues related to professional learning by teachers could be investigated through a cross cultural study of elementary and primary classrooms in England and in the USA.

Further, in both groups there were particular interests in some of the finer technical details of what might be called the strategies and tactics of school and school system-university partnerships, such as the Professional Development Schools (PDS) and Model Clinical developments in the USA (Hayes, Wetherill, Beamon, and Calhoun, 1996) and advanced mentoring programs in England (Hagger, Burn, and McIntyre, 1993; Wilkin, 1992; Wilkin and Sankey, 1994). Central to the concerns shared among the group were the related themes of teacher talk, teacher conceptualization of practice, and communication among teachers and between teachers and their mentees.

Purposes

It was clear from the beginning that the group wanted to investigate similarities and differences in classroom practice, with a particular emphasis on issues of both quality and how teachers in the two systems do their professional learning, thinking, and communicating. The intention was not to do yet another normative teaching-style or teacher-type study, but rather to begin with principles of effective instruction and their “thinking” underpinnings. The assumption was made that teachers who teach well and also can conceptualize and communicate their practice should be those who have the greatest part to play in both initial teacher training and in the further and advanced education and training of their peers.

To translate that purpose and assumption into a project, a set of general research questions were raised. Those organizing research questions were:


0How closely does instruction by primary or elementary teachers, whose practice is considered at least “sound”, conform to principles of good instruction?

1How have the professional learnings of teachers been formed and influenced?

2How do these teachers articulate and communicate their practices and beliefs?

3How does teaching vary among teachers? What is the nature of teaching variance?

4What differences in teaching practices are there between American and English teachers, and in what ways might these differences be instructive, if they exist?

The advent of schemes that establish the “exemplary teacher”—the National Board Certification (NBC) program in America and the Advanced Skills Teachers (AST) program in England—became relevant to the project, leading to the formulation of a further focus for inquiry, but within the broader questions already posed. For that new interest, the concern was whether the exemplary teacher could be readily identified, what characteristics might identify them, and how might their teaching and thinking differ from those of others.

It was clear to the team that the illumination of these questions had the potential to make a major contribution to understanding of more effective ways for approaching the initial, further, and advanced training and education of teachers.

However, the group was determined that the developing partnership should not be one of “just research”. The location of the project, in the school system of Duplin County, North Carolina, gave the potential for both inquiry and innovation to proceed together. Thus, the emerging findings of the inquiry could be used in the operations of an innovative and ambitious school system, albeit critically and cautiously.

To conduct the study, a sample of schools and teachers was selected from those available to the research team. Sample size was governed by what was logistically possible in the available time and financial frames. The population from which the sample was to be drawn—primary or elementary teachers whose practice is considered at least sound—was defined by the expediency of selecting from those teachers who had acted as mentors or host teachers to trainees on at least one occasion as part of a formal partnership arrangement with a university teacher training program. This sampling expedient was held for all the teachers studied except in one English case (in which illness called for substitution by a teacher recently arrived in the area but who otherwise met the criteria).

Within this broad frame, sample selection was a question of opportunity and logistics. Overall, there was a concern to ensure that all the ages of primary or elementary children were represented and that a comparable number of American and English teachers were studied. The sample was not rigidly stratified; circumstances did not allow for this. However, this was not considered a problem as stratifying with an overall sample size of this order would not, in any case, allow meaningful generalizations from particular analytic cells.

The sample comprised a 46 teachers (and classrooms) of whom 25 were American and 21 English. Details of the sample studied are shown in Appendix B. There was a concern to secure a measure of comparability in the social and economic contexts of the attendance areas for the


schools in North Carolina and England. In general, the schools are located in areas of significant economic stress and relatively high levels of immigration but with some pockets of moderate affluence. The aim was not to match or stratify the sample precisely—which would, in any case, have been nearly impossible—but to secure relative comparability.

Process and Methods

The teaching practices in the sampled classrooms were studied by semi-structured observation and interview, carried out by a pair of researchers (one American, one English). The observation and interview data were then reported by the research pair to the rest of the research team. Through a process of rigorous interrogation of the research pair and scrutiny of the data, the practices in each classroom were ascribed a value, from +2 through -2, on 16 variables, on the criterion of the degree to which that aspect of practice was an asset or barrier to effective teaching.

Data on the 16 variables, or “dimensions of teaching”, were the basic elements of information about teaching that were collected. The 16 variables were distilled from four sets of literature—on teacher effectiveness, on school effectiveness, on instructional-systems development, and on organization theory. Definitions of the 16 variables as they are used in this project are given in a later section of this report (The APPLE Project: 16 Dimensions of Teaching). The content validity of this analytic frame can be judged by both the validity of the individual dimensions and by their collective coverage of the attributes of teaching that determine effectiveness. The sixteen dimensions are:

5Quality of Communications

6Relations with Students

7Management of Classrooms Resources

8Management of Activities

9Management of Relations (with students and colleagues)

10Focus on Tasks

11Focus on Goals

12Match between Goals and Curriculum

13Match between Goals and Students

14Match between Goals and Instruction

15Application of Theory

16Management of Results

17Learning from Practice

18Match between Instruction and the Organization

19Relations with Colleagues

20Passion for Teaching


The interconnectedness of these dimensions, as they are used in the APPLE analysis, is an important attribute of the validity of the model. This interconnectedness is conceived as an ecological interdependency (Doyle, 1979). Thus, for example, quality of communications both affects and is affected by relations with students, and, to a greater or lesser degree, by all the other variables.

The analysis of classrooms in this way demands observation and interview procedures that are both sensitive to complexity and subject to verification. In order to capture the complexity, and as much background information as might be subsequently needed, a “structured but open” observation instrument was developed. Essentially, this is a framework for field notes. More systematic observational strategies such as those derived from Flanders’ (1960) Interaction Analysis System were rejected as being insufficiently sensitive for the purposes here. Although more complex systematic observation systems have been used satisfactorily in many major studies (c.f.; Bennett, 1976; Bennet, Andreae, Hegarty, and Wade, 1980; Fisher, Berliner, Filby, Marliave, Cahen, Dishaw, and Moore, 1978; Galton, Siman, and Croll, 1980), the APPLE team was persuaded by the ability of less structured systems to capture more readily the “real life” of classroom events. It should be stressed that this was not an ideological decision. As McIntyre and Macleod (1978) argue, such claimed superiorities are often suspect. The APPLE choice was one of choosing the best tool for the job. However, it was important that a means of securing reliability be found, of which more is presented later.

The observation instruments, as developed through a process of piloting, training and testing for inter-observer reliability are shown in Appendix C.

Thus, each section of the observation instrument consists of extensive space for field notes along with a series of prompts for the observer. In each case, two observers, one English, one American observed simultaneously in each classroom.

In each case, the teacher had been asked in advance to fill out a simple lesson plan form that was given to the researchers at the start of the visit. This form, shown in Appendix C, served to describe the context of the events to be observed for the researchers and to ensure that the teachers’ meanings and perceptions (of goals, the students’ characteristics, etc.) were included in the data that were collected. Where there was any need to clarify these teacher perspectives, this was done as part of the post-observation interview.

Following the period of classroom observation, which typically was for one to two hours but governed by the criterion of observing “two main instructional events”, the pairs of observers took time to discuss their notes, agree a version (or, occasionally, to disagree for the time being) and, most importantly, to prepare for an interview with the teacher.

The interview had two central purposes—first, for the teacher to explain or elaborate what had been observed and then, and more important, to provide an opportunity to probe the teachers’ perceptions, professional thinking, and knowledge. For this major part of the interview the researchers selected four themes arising from the observed events. Typically, these included themes related to:

3direct instruction


4match and differentiation

5ethos and relationships

6assessment.

However, if other themes suggested themselves as more likely to engage the teacher in extended discourse, the researchers were free to make that choice, and often did. The aim of the interview was to promote as much in-depth conversation with the teacher about his or her practice as was possible. Interviews were planned for a duration of 1 to 1.5 hours, but were never time limited.

This aspect of the inquiry was intended to reveal the teachers’ thinking about their practice and for the researchers to understand their thinking in the teachers’ terms. A phenomenological approach to this part of the interview process was, therefore, adopted (c.f., Schutz, 1962 and Berger and Luckmann, 1967) This classic methodological approach to questioning is intended to reveal the teacher’s understanding of his or her realities, in his or her language; the researchers’ aim is to collect these “first-order constructs” that represent these understandings and to try to reveal where these understandings have come from. The sequence of questions usually adopted, and adopted for this study, are, therefore:

Question: (e.g. “Tell me about the way you were explaining fractions to that group.”)

Elaboration: (Feeding back the last thing said, with rising inflection, to prompt further talk but avoiding directing the conversation.)

Causal Structure: (e.g., “What is it that has led you to that way of teaching fractions...Why do you do it that way...etc?)

Thus, the phenomenological validity, for the interviewee, of the themes discussed, is assured and the language and meanings collected are those of the teacher, to the greatest extent possible, not those of the researchers.

For each teacher in the study the usual procedure for beginning and framing the interview was followed:

7thanking for access to their classroom and for their time

8chatting, calming, relaxing

9explaining purposes of the observation and interview and of the study

10seeking permission to tape record the interview.

And, similarly for the session closure:

11asking if there is anything else the teacher wishes to discuss

12or anything she or he wishes the interviewers had asked about

13thanking and concluding.

In the APPLE study, as with all data collection processes that are based on observations and interviews, there are questions of reliability over cases and time and reliability among observers.


In such studies, the key issue in reliability is one of stability and consistency of the ways in which the instruments and processes are used. Two kinds of assurance were applied in this study. First, the researchers carried out a series of pilot studies of classrooms in which the system for observing and interviewing was tested and refined and, second, the research team adopted an interrogative method that was used by the full team for all cases.

Meanings of pedagogical terms and practices are notoriously open to different interpretations. For example, the place and purposes of closed questions in teaching often elicit different responses from observers. To address those different meanings in the APPLE study, there was pilot testing of the full data-collection, analysis, and interpretation system in two classrooms. This process led to an interrogation process that became central to data interpretation and to the methodological attribute that assured reliability across cases and observers. In that interrogative process, case data are first furnished to all team members, including written descriptions of the teaching, a summary analysis of the classroom and teaching, and a transcript of the interview. After each member reviews the written documentation, the pair of case observers-interviewers give an account of the events of teaching and their analysis of the data for the first analytic variable. Intensive interrogation of the reporters by the full team continued until the team, as a whole, reached a point at which meanings and interpretations were common. This case analysis continued, rigorously repeating the same process for each of the sixteen variables. This process for each case was a long and difficult task, but as a result of using it, a far higher level of reliability was secured than is usually the case in observation-interview studies. Here, all cases were subjected to the same group interrogative process—some more than once—until the whole team was satisfied that meanings and interpretations were consistent and convergence on ratings and key indicators was reached.

Through that case-analysis process, a value from +2 to -2 was ascribed on each of the 16 variables to each of the teachers studied. (The form used for documenting this part of the analytic process is shown in Appendix C.) This process, and the resulting profile of ratings, was used as an heuristic device in the initial process for clustering teachers. The profile was not used simplistically, as in a profile-clustering statistical process.

The interrogation processes and the debates ascribing the +2 to -2 values were all taped and transcribed. It was thus possible, from the transcripts, to trace patterns of similarities and differences amongst and between the cases. The research team was then able to move from the 16 attributes of effective practice to detailed descriptions of how teachers were different in their teaching. Gradually, descriptive labels for these differences began to emerge as clusters of teachers were developed and elaborated. Finally, cases that were troublesome in the analytic frame were re-analyzed and the typology for teaching was adapted to the point at which convergence in the research team was reached and prototypic cases could be identified and described. The clusters, or types, were labeled:

14Master Craftsmen

15Serious Contenders

16Good Hires

17Hard Grinders


18Child Minders

19Recipe Teachers

20Odd Socks.

The complete APPLE research and development process is shown in graphic form below.

(A full account of the types is given in a further section of this report, “The APPLE Project; A New Typology of Teaching”.)

Finally, the process for analyzing the implications of the APPLE findings for the initial, further, and advanced training and education of teachers was begun. In a later section of this report, “The APPLE Project: Linking Research and Teaching”, is the first of several sections that explore the implications.

Notes on methods and methodology

It is important to stress that APPLE is an illuminative study. While its methodological starting point, the 16 variables or “dimensions of teaching”, is positivistic, the study draws on a range of methodological traditions. Indeed, selecting appropriate methods for each dimension of the study, rather than adopting a single methodological and ideological frame, is what has driven the process. Thus, when the choice of observational method was made, the option of “semi-structured but open” field notes approach was chosen because it represents the best balance between getting the information required and acknowledging the complexity and interconnectedness of classroom events. Similarly, the choice of an interview questioning technique was made because it was crucial to get to the meanings and beliefs of the “teachers as members ” (of school groups and occupational groups).

As Gill and Johnson (1997) argue, action arises out of the members’ cultures, sub-cultures, and meanings. Therefore, for data collection, the subjective frame of reference (perspective of the “subject”), rather than the objective (perspective of the observer) was used. Thus, the technique for securing elaboration through repeating the interviewee’s last utterance is to avoid direction toward the observer while maintaining focus on the topic (Janckowicz, 1995). This “naturalistic” approach also allows the interviewee to provide useful and interesting directions which the researchers might not have identified (Ely, 1984). The strength of this approach as expressed by Malinowski (1950), is “....to grasp the native’s point of view....to realize his vision of the world” (Psathas, 1972, p. 125).

Likewise, in exploring causal structures, it is helpful to use the phenomenological perspective as developed by Berger and Luckmann (1967), especially when explanations or “causes” relate to institutional factors.

The primary innovative aspect of the methods used in the APPLE study is the process of observer interrogation. Here, the development of descriptive-analytic accounts of the teaching and organizational practices observed and the relevant indicators from the interview data are subject to rigorous interrogation by all the other members of the research team. The same


process applies to the development of the clusters or “types” of teaching. This process contributes to both intra and inter-observer reliability mainly because it delivers a much-enhanced degree of clarity and convergence, across the team, on complex constructs such as “match” and “student independence”. Consistency of interpretation of what has been observed or gleaned from interview data is a post-facto assurance of training and testing of observers and interviewers at the pilot or development stage of a study.

In qualitative and illuminative studies, three kinds of validity are usually addressed: phenomenological validity, external validity, and internal validity. In the APPLE project, phenomenological validity—i.e., the degree to which the meanings and themes of the teachers were “caught” is assured only by the consistent application of the prescribed interview methods. The more usual test of returning to the “members” to test the interpretations developed by the interrogative process was not logistically possible. Internal validity, the degree to which the findings are authentic for the group studied, is assured in APPLE by the thoroughness and openness of the observation-interview processes, by the policy of deploying researchers in pairs, one English and one American, and by the intensive interrogative process. External validity, the degree to which findings can be safely generalized, is more difficult. This hangs crucially on the representativeness of the sample. At this time in development, the reader must be the judge.1 The APPLE sample is relatively large (46 classrooms) and drawn on an opportunity basis from a clearly defined population. However, as with all such studies, the intended contributions are to the illumination of the research questions and to theory and to the production of generalizable findings (Cronbach, 1982).

Overall, as with any piece of educational inquiry, the reader must judge the degree to which methods have been applied authentically and to the genuineness of the findings. Crucial to this process is transparency of reporting. This is particularly important in the case of a study like APPLE, which draws on several methodological traditions.

In a recent paper, Simco and Warin (1997) propose a set of criteria that might stand in place of more traditional tests of reliability and validity. While their work is focused on image-based research, these criteria can be applied equally well to any study in which data are “soft” rather than “hard”. APPLE is in this category. Although the 16 dimensions of teaching are deterministic (and very soundly grounded in theory), the data-collection processes are clearly in the same kind of arena as those addressed by Simco and Warin; they are complex, “soft” and subject to various modes of interpretation. Readers are advised, then, to test APPLE against the criteria those authors stated, which are: completeness, adequacy of interpretation, transparency, self-reflection, and the aggregation of conflicting interpretation.

1 The findings of this study are being applied by the research team during Spring and summer 1999 in a project to develop systems for evaluation of teacher performance in the state of North Carolina. During that development project, the findings are being tested further for generalizability by using them for assessment of teaching in approximately 50 schools in the state. Initial pilot testing in 50 classrooms revealed no instances of disagreement between findings from the analytic process and the considered judgments of teachers and principals who were familiar with the classes and teaching in them.


It is claimed that APPLE meets all these criteria. In particular, though, the innovative technique of observer interrogation has made a significant contribution to securing compliance with these criteria as well as with the usual tests of reliability and validity.


The APPLE Project:

The Research Foundations for Analyzing Teaching Effectiveness


The APPLE Project:The Research Foundations for Analyzing Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract

This section of the report presents a review of the literature that is the foundation for the study of teaching in the APPLE Project. The primary focus of the review is on identification of a set of characteristics of teaching that reflect the consensus of the writers in the several related fields about factors related to teaching effectiveness. From that review, a set of 16 attributes were identified. This section is organized to document each of those variables.

The Research Foundations

An important goal of educational research is to improve society through improving schooling. Given the complexity of the task of improving education, it is hardly surprising that the path of educational research more closely resembles the flight of the bumblebee than that of the arrow (Bennett, 1978).

Research can help improve schooling by providing information to answer important questions relating to schooling. Those questions addressed by educational research can be classified broadly into “what” questions and “how” questions, with the “what” questions being the ones concerned with the nature of society and the role of schooling. Questions of that type have influenced professional discussions in the debates about the intentions or purposes of teaching. The “how” questions have been concerned with the definition of characteristics of effective teaching and determining the factors that influence teaching schooling effectiveness. The answers to both of these types of questions by individual teachers and their colleagues matter to the success of students, teachers, and schools. The first dimension of this complex phenomenon called teaching that must be understood is its purpose.

The Purpose of Teaching

Since schooling is a major public enterprise, it apparently is intended to have one or more important purposes. Therefore, teaching, the task within the schooling enterprise that probably requires most of its resources and receives more attention than most other processes, must also have important purposes. Maxine Green (1973) reflected a view of purposefulness, and posited a view of influences over the purpose perceived by teachers when she stated that, “Teaching is a purposeful action…and (the teachers’) intentions will inevitably be affected by the assumptions they make regarding human nature and human possibility.”

Lyons (1990) elaborated this position further, saying that differences in belief about the purpose of teaching impact teaching practice by producing different perspectives held by teachers, which he named epistemological stance. It is by these orientations, or epistemological stances, that teachers make value judgements related to teaching and general educational issues, confront ethical dilemmas in their work, and interpret all aspects of professional knowledge. (in Stahl and Hayes, 1997, p. 40.) The degree of passion with which teachers hold their beliefs—their degree of commitment to a particular epistemological stance—greatly influences the nature of the classroom and school experience.


However, within education and the society there is not a clear agreement about what assumptions are most important to be made nor about the ultimate purposes of teaching. There are at least four major positions about the purpose of schooling reflected in the seminal educational or philosophical literature from Western countries. Those purposes of schooling—and, therefore, teaching—are: (1) the transmission of the values of society, a position represented by, among others, Herbert, Hirsch, Adler, and Bennett; (2) the teaching of subject matter, represented by such people as Keefe and Jenkins (1989) who state, “Teaching is about learning. Teaching exists only for learning .” (p. 55); (3) the development of the capacity of people, or human development, represented by, among others, Rosseau, Dewey, Piaget, and Holt; and (4) social reconstruction, represented by, Vygotsky, Freire, and Giroux (Stahl and Hayes, 1997, p. 38).

Other writers have elaborated those purposes and attempted to document findings from educational research that support one or more of them. For example, Borman and Levin, (1997, p. 9) address the significance of the teacher and his or her role in the development of students, saying,

“Not only is teaching one of the most complex professions but it is also one where the highest level of responsibility is assumed. The teacher is in a pivotal position to influence significantly the lives of the students with whom he or she works over the course of his or her entire career. Just how significantly this influence can be is readily seen when one considers that the main responsibility of the teacher is to provide for the intellectual, emotional, and physical growth of students.”

Advocacy or interpretive positions taken by philosophers and researchers notwithstanding, the four general purposes listed above are probably all important and expected by society to be served by schooling and teaching. Therefore, it probably is the case that teachers must consider their work to have those multiple purposes. However, focus on those purposes can be given at different points in educational decision-making. For example, issues of social reconstruction should be addressed by strategic planning and general curriculum planning, whereas issues of student learning can be addressed closer to classroom work and within the context of classroom teaching.

The Conceptualization of Teaching: Art, Craft, or Applied Science

Beyond purpose, a second dimension of teaching to be understood is the conceptualization of teaching as a field of practice. The debate within the field of education seems to rest on three perspectives—teaching as art, teaching as craft, and teaching as applied science. The conceptualization of teaching that is adopted probably drives practice by those who hold the positions and also determines their identification of indicators or criteria for effectiveness.

Unfortunately, these three perspectives have labels—art, craft, science—that do not have clear meaning either among people in the general population, the fields with those names2, or within

2 One of the authors once asked a leading writer in the field of fine art, who was chair of a university Department of Fine Art, to define “art”. His definition, “Art is what artists do.” To the next question, “What


education. When “educators” refer to themselves as “professionals”, or speak of teaching as “an art”, the response often seems to be an attempt to attain significance by one who is experiencing difficulty with identity. The labels chosen seem more of an attempt by those persons to exalt a position than to illuminate the nature of the field of practice. For example, “professional” may be used because the person is dedicated, willing, and caring—referring more to the personal qualities than to the position or field.

Definitions of these words provided in a dictionary (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1988) allow for an amount of confusion among the meanings. For example, the first definition of “art”—skill acquired by experience, study, or observation—does little to clarify a difference from “craft”—skill in planning, making, or executing. However, further definitions of “art” include “conscious use of a skill and creative imagination, especially in the production of aesthetic objects”. Unfortunately, a further definition of “craft” includes “an occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill”. 3 Furthermore, the dictionary definitions of “profession” do little to focus thought about a field of practice. The primary one that seems to be useful for applying to teaching is, “A calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation”. However, that definition continues, allowing “a principal calling, vocation, or employment”. So, using that definition, calling teaching a professional practice does little to distinguish it from any other “principal calling, vocation, or employment”.

Those definitional difficulties notwithstanding, fields of study relating to occupations have developed definitions for art, craft, technical, trade, and profession that are unique and that can be used to posit an operational meaning of “teaching” if it is believed to conform to the respective occupational definitions. Attempts have been made to do that, and the results are included in a wide range of literature related to schools, schooling, and teaching.

For example, the notion of teaching as craft is represented by Grimmett and MacKinnon (1992, p. 387), who claim that the craft “consists of pedagogical content and pedagogical learner knowledge derived from considered experience in the practice setting.” They continue, saying that, “…craft knowledge represents teachers’ judgement in apprehending the events of practice from their own perspectives as students of teaching and learning, much as a “glue” that brings all the knowledge bases to bear on the act of teaching.” They claim this “occupational savvy” or “know-how” is a powerful determinant of teachers’ practice. (p. 388). Further, they distinguish their view of teaching from application of science. “Teaching as craft assumes certain skills, proficiencies, and dispositions among accomplished teachers—in brief, it suggests an emphasis on a special kind of pedagogical content and learner know-how, a “teaching sensibility,” rather than a knowledge of propositions.” (p. 393.) And, “Craft knowledge emphasizes judgement…rather than following the maxims of research-generated knowledge. It relies heavily on intuition, care, empathy for pupils. It is steeped in morality and ever critical in its search for meaningful schooling and benefit for pupils.” (p. 429)

is an ‘artist’?”, he replied, “A person who makes art.” Using such circular definition of concepts that are central to a field, there probably can be no objective standards for quality or performance or outcomes.

3 Perhaps considering a common view of schooling depicted by many authors and humorists as “something done to children”, the best definition of craft that applies to teaching is, “skill in deceiving to gain an end”.


Kennedy (1987) elaborated this position further, saying, “Craft knowledge… concerns itself both with teachers’ representations of the declarative knowledge contained in subject matter content and with teachers’ tacit instantiations of procedural ways of dealing rigorously and supportively with learners. As a form of professional expertise, craft knowledge is neither technical skill, the application of theory or general principles to practice, nor critical analysis; rather, it represents the construction of situated, learner-focused, procedural and content-related pedagogical knowledge through “deliberate actions.” (In Grimmett and MacKinnon, p. 393.)

From yet another perspective about teaching-as-craft, teaching may be understood as a set of technical behaviors, learned through apprenticeship and modeling. Therefore, craftsmanship is expert performance driven by a desire for precision and refinement in performance and a passionate wish to learn and deepen knowledge and skill. Costa and Garmston (1994, p. 137) represent this view, and describe craftsmanship:

“To appreciate this state of mind, think of the mindset of expert performance: musicians, artists, teachers, craftspersons, and athletes. They take pride in their work, and consistently strive to improve their current performance. Studies from the League of Professional schools found that in schools where teachers are the most successful, they have the highest dissatisfaction with the results of their work. The drive for elaboration, clarity, refinement, precision—craftsmanship—is the energy source from which persons ceaselessly learn and deepen their knowledge and skill.”

Meir (1995, Foreword) takes this view of drive further, renaming it and saying, “Passionate teaching is the work of learned craftsmanship. And it’s made up of details. Having a wonderful idea is only the start. It is translating passion into craft that good teaching emerges. The source of craftsmanship seems to be understood to be practice. It is enough to be able to do “good teaching”. The explanation of how it is achieved is lost in the minds of the problem-solving teachers.”4

Those people who would argue for teaching-as-craft based on the presumption that learning to be a skillful teacher “comes from practice” probably are arguing that the best knowledge base for establishing principles of good teaching lies in the practices of “good teachers”. Such a position would ignore the large body of technical and theoretical information available to the field of education practice about what teaching might be.

“Good teaching”—even excellent teaching—can be found often in schools (as it was in the APPLE study in both English and American schools). However, there are levels of teaching that are clearly beyond what often is considered “good” and reflected in much of the literature on “effective teaching”. Some teachers understand their work as an applied science and can use codified knowledge bases framed around generalized research findings as well as their teaching

4 It should be noted that “problem-solving” skills, by their very nature, cannot be converted into language that is a complete description of the process. If they could, then the type of skill would be “rule” rather than problem-solving. For elaboration on the nature of types of learning and the types of performance that indicate dependably that a person has acquired a capability of a particular type, see Gagné (1970), especially the descriptions of “intellectual skills”.


experience. Teachers who can think about their work from the perspective of these technical and theoretical principals, using them in planning, reflection-in-practice, and reflection-on-practice, and also develop their skills in teaching to the level of high craft can make sense of their practice so that teaching is “professional”. When teachers can describe teaching using the codified knowledge of the profession and their own craft knowledge to understand and improve their own teaching and in mentoring or supporting fellow teachers, teachers have achieved a new level of practice. This type of teaching—as an applied science—is another concept of teaching. (Grimmett and MacKinnon, 1992.)

For example, some educators compare their work to that of medicine, using medicine as a referent profession. Documenting that conception, Hargreaves (1996, p. 8) outlined the practice of evidence-based medicine. “The practice of evidence-based medicine, says the journal of that title, is a process of life-long problem-based learning in which caring for our patients creates the need for evidence about diagnosis, prognosis, therapy and other clinical and health-care issues. In the evidence-based medicine process we:

21Convert these information needs into answerable questions

22Track down with maximum efficiency the best evidence with which to answer them

23Critically appraise that evidence for its validity…and usefulness

24Apply the results of this appraisal to our clinical practice, and

25Evaluate our performance.”

Following that model in teaching would require application of a significant body of technical standards and principles for practice. A parallel approach in teaching would be compatible with the notion of the teacher as reflective practitioner.

Teaching Effectiveness

Following the purpose and conceptualization of teaching is a third dimension of teaching to be understood—the dimension of effectiveness. As stated above, the “how” questions of research have been concerned with the definition or characteristics of effective teaching and those dimensions of teaching that influence its effectiveness.

The field of teaching-effectiveness research has been through a number of phases, more recently and notably the process–product and process–process phases. In the former phase, studies have attempted to connect teaching processes with learning products–to find the “best-buys” for practice. Process–process studies, on the other hand, have focused more on the task of understanding and explaining the “fine grain” of what happens in classrooms. Both kinds of studies have resulted in a wealth of concepts, ideas and propositions of what effective teaching are. Central to documenting this third dimension of teaching, then, is to identify and elaborate those broad areas or components of teaching that are to believed to be related to effectiveness.

Components of Effective Teaching

The number and names of sub-components of teaching that relate to effectiveness vary from writer-to-writer, but once analyzed to reach the common meaning, there is little argument about


which components are the major ones. For example, Clegg and Billington (1994, p. 33) summarize the list in the findings in England of the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) (1992, 1993):

“What factors are important when considering the effectiveness of primary classrooms?:

26Teachers being confident in the subject they are teaching

27Teachers having appropriate expectations

28The importance of teachers planning their work

29Efficient use of teacher time

30Promoting an appropriate classroom climate

31The importance of assessment in “matching” work to children’s abilities

32The use of a wide range of teaching strategies

33The effective use of talk.”

In the United States, the National Board for Professional Teaching has developed five Core Propositions of successful teachers which it uses for recognition of teachers of national quality. Those propositions are:

34Teachers are committed to students and their learning

35Teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach subjects to their students

36Teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning

37Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience

38Teachers are members of learning communities.

OFSTED also places considerable emphasis on the subject matter knowledge of teachers, stating:

“What matters for teacher effectiveness? Research confirms that teacher knowledge of subject matter, student learning and development, and teaching methods are all important elements of teacher effectiveness. Reviews of more than two hundred studies contradict the long-standing myths that “anyone can teach” and that “teachers are born not made.”

This research also makes it clear that teachers need to know much more about the subject matter they teach than merely the information—more than “just the facts”. Some studies appear to show that factual content knowledge of teachers, alone, does not discriminate among teachers on quality of practices. However, teacher knowledge of the principles and methods underlying the content disciplines does appear to discriminate on quality (Wiliam, 1998).

Yet another agency concerned about certification or teaching standards has its own list of criteria for effective teaching or teacher capabilities. The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and


Support Consortium (INTASC) identified 10 principles of effective teacher performance. Those are:

39Understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structure of the disciplines taught, and creates learning experiences to make them meaningful to students

40Understands how children learn and develop; provides learning opportunities that support their development

41Understands how students differ in their approaches to learning; creates instructional opportunities adapted to diverse learners

42Understands and uses variety of instructional strategies

43Creates a learning environment that encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation

44Uses knowledge of communication techniques to foster active inquiry, collaboration, and supportive interaction

45Plans instruction based on knowledge of subject matter, students, the community, and curriculum goals

46Understands and uses formal and informal assessment strategies

47Reflects on teaching

48Fosters relationships with colleagues, parents, and agencies in the larger community.

Danielson, (1996) developed a framework for defining dimensions of teaching that is based on the large-scale project by Educational Testing Service (ETS) to provide a framework for use for making teacher licensing decisions. The testing program based on the ETS studies, Professional Assessment for Beginning Teachers (PRAXIS), is currently being used by many states as a standard for granting the initial teaching license. The Components of Professional Practice that Danielson defined, and named “domains”, are:

49Domain 1: Planning and Preparation

50Domain 2: The Classroom Environment

51Domain 3: Instruction

52Domain 4: Professional Responsibilities.

She developed each of these domains further, identifying components and sub-components and scales for the evaluation of teaching practice.

Many writers dealing with effective teaching have assembled their own lists, usually borrowing from others and preparing some form of synthesis of the factors which they think are most important. For example, Borman and Levine (1997, p. 3) reflect some of the views about factors related to teaching effectiveness that are explicit in the OFSTED, National Board, PRAXIS, and INTASC lists, but add some others, including personality factors and intellect. They state:


“When thinking about what makes a good teacher, three essential abilities come to mind: (1) the ability to manage student behavior and the classroom environment, (2) the ability to plan curriculum over the short and long term, and (3) the ability to carry out instruction through the use of various teaching strategies. It is, however, essential to understand that one’s degree of success in developing skill in these three areas hinges on several key factors that are basic to one’s own character and personality. Training alone does not a good teacher make! Two of the most important among these characteristics are a genuine liking for children and an enthusiasm for life and learning. Other important characteristics include one’s orientation to solving problems, being organized, communicating clearly and thoroughly, being flexible, and being creative.”

Davis and Thomas (1989, p. 152) reported conclusions from the Beginning Teacher Effectiveness Study (BTES), that identify specific teacher characteristics and areas of classroom practice that are correlated with student achievement. Those included:

53organization,

54use of class time

55classroom climate

56classroom management

57teaching practices and habits

58providing feedback.

In that BTES report, it was noted that effective teachers are:

“…more committed to instruction, more knowledgeable, and more active and demanding in their teaching than their less effective peers. Class time is used for instruction, and engagement rates are high. Their instruction is paced to students’ needs. They show good organization, management, and diagnostic skills and use feedback effectively. Warm personal traits create a positive atmosphere and stimulates student attention and cooperation.”

Furthermore, Mitzel (1960) (in Stahl and Hayes, 1997), identified variables that were related to effectiveness of teaching. He organized those variables into sets that are the same as sets in the CIPP (Context, Inputs, Process, and Products) model for evaluation (Stufflebeam, et al., 1971), but used one different label. His sets of variables are:

59Presage (e.g., personal characteristics of teachers, such as their formative experiences, training, attitudes, etc.)

60Context (e.g., school and community characteristics, materials available, ethnicity of students, etc.)

61Process ( e.g., student behavior, teacher-student interactions, etc.)

62Product (e.g., short term learning and attitudes, long-term effects on personality and occupational skills, etc.)


Researchers following Mitzel framed and defined those variables as areas of teacher knowledge. They added two new domains of knowledge as a means of connecting context, process, and product dimensions of teaching, and labeled those domains as:

63Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)—the knowledge of process by which teachers make particular subject matter accessible to students

64Pedagogical learner knowledge (PLK)—the knowledge of learners that teachers use in making teaching decisions (Stahl and Hayes, 1997).

But whatever the literature sources, certain themes and ideas are common to most or all attempts to summarize the teaching factors that are related to effectiveness, and by implication, the knowledge and skills that teachers need to be able to implement “effective” teaching. A summary of those themes and ideas can be expressed as:

(Teachers need) a full repertoire of professional knowledge and skills which includes subject knowledge, curriculum knowledge and pedagogical knowledge together with the intellectual capacity to select and use all of these appropriately.

The areas of subject knowledge and curriculum knowledge are problematic, especially for primary or elementary teachers. There is not only the large range of subject matter in which the teachers need to be sufficiently expert, but also there is the matter that subject (content) knowledge and knowledge of subject for teaching are not the same thing. Shulman’s (1986) concept of PCK helps to explain the complexity and range of content, curricular and pedagogical knowledge that teachers need. All of that knowledge is essential if teachers are to be able to transform curriculum goals (usually mandated) into effective action.

This additional type of knowledge elaborated by Shulman—pedagogical knowledge—is essentially technical knowledge, and includes, for example:

65Knowledge of instructional techniques—knowledge of how best to explain, instruct, question; knowledge of when and how to use different instructional strategies; knowledge of how to give and collect feedback to the learner.

66Knowledge of organizational strategies—knowledge of how best to put children and tasks together, how and for what purpose to use different kinds of groupings and instructional settings, and how best to make the physical environment serve those purposes.

67Knowledge of diagnosis and assessment procedures—knowledge of how best to collect information, interpret it, use it in planning and teaching, and knowledge of how to communicate that information to different audiences, including the learners.

68Knowledge of tasks—knowledge of the variety of kinds of tasks, how tasks can be designed to meet different learning needs and purposes, how to match tasks and learners by finding the levels and demands that are appropriate to different learners at different times.

69Knowledge of the significance of time (for efficiency and effectiveness)—knowledge of how time-on-task influences learning, how time-for-learning can be maximized, how


“evaporated” time can be minimized, and how curriculum time can be most efficiently distributed among subjects and goals.

70Knowledge of how the ethos (social climate) of a classroom can be managed to maximize learning and to serve wider purposes (both social and personal)—Knowledge of the attributes of ethos and the factors affecting ethos, knowledge of the implications of patterns of social and task relations and systems of control in classroom, knowledge of how to engage students with a sense of purpose, worthwhileness, responsibility, cooperativeness and independence.

The formal study of teaching in teacher-education—formal preparation for a position of teacher and formal study of pedagogical content and processes—appears to matter a great deal to effectiveness of teaching practices. Reviews of more that two hundred studies contradict the long-standing myths that “anyone can teach” and that “teachers are born, not made.” In fields ranging from mathematics and science to early childhood, elementary, vocational, and gifted education, teachers who are fully prepared and certified in both their discipline and in education are more highly rated and are more successful with students than are teachers without preparation, and those with greater training in learning, child development, teaching methods and curriculum are found to be more effective that those with less. (Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 8)

Closely linked to formal study of teaching, but developing after beginning practice, is another factor claimed to be important in the current literature on teaching effectiveness. One of the most written-about characteristics is the degree to which the teacher is a reflective practitioner. The need for this type of practice and thinking is described well by Clegg and Billington (1994) when they say, “Whatever research tells us about effective classrooms, if we are as teachers to benefit from it, we must adapt the findings to suit our own particular situations.” (p. 27) They continue, saying that, “Even within individual classrooms and schools, effective practice is not fixed, but is constantly being adapted and refined.” (p. 28) If teachers are to be able to make those types of changes-as-needed or changes-as-desired, then they must have (a) a sound foundational understanding of what is important to think about in reflection, (b) the skills necessary to analyze teaching, learning, and social phenomena, and (c) they must have the information on which to reflect.

Despite these significant bodies of knowledge about factors related to teaching effectiveness, there remain serious questions about whether those factors are known by teachers or used by them in any systematic way. Indeed, there is some significant evidence that teachers mainly use their beliefs about teaching and learning and their philosophy about life to inform those decisions, rather than principles grounded in technical or theoretical frameworks. For example, Cox in (Hargreaves, 1996) pointed to four grounds teachers use to justify their practices:

71Tradition (how it’s always been done)

72Prejudice (how I like it done)

73Dogma (this is the right way to do it)

74Ideology (as required by the current orthodoxy).


Furthermore, Hargreaves (1996, p. 5), in his address to the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) in London, stated:

“There is no vast body of research which, if only it were disseminated and acted upon by teachers, would yield huge benefits in the quality of teaching and learning. One must ask the essential question: just how much research is there which (1) demonstrates conclusively that if teachers change their practice from X to Y there will be a significant and enduring improvement in teaching and learning and (2) has developed an effective method of convincing teachers of the benefits of, and means to, changing from X to Y.”

He goes on to explore the (presently unproductive) relationship between research and practice and proposes much closer formal linkages between the two. The implication that research findings can, or should, drive practice directly, though, is problematic. A common assumption among educators that research should tell them what they should do in a given case is patently unwarranted and inappropriate. If that were the case, then research would be prescriptive rather than predictive. Such an assumption about what constitutes research and research findings leads teaching to become recipe-driven rather than based on application of judgment by one who understands principles of teaching and learning. A more appropriate view of educational research is producing and enriching the language with which teachers do their thinking and decision making. Fenstermacher (1980) described this kind of linkage as “bridging research and practice with schemata” contrasting it with the recipe-based process of “bridging with rules”. The notion of the knowledgeable, reflective, thinking teacher certainly connects best with a view of research which rejects the rules and recipe view of linkage.

Some researchers have attempted to develop overarching models of teacher effectiveness by relating and connecting the variables that have been associated with effectiveness. One such example proposed by Stahl and Hayes (1997, p. 40) is a description of professional practice which has teacher’s in-action knowledge at its center. That model includes these sets of variables in the areas of Students and Community, Curriculum, Academic Discipline, and How To. The authors describe these areas of knowledge as being “bounded and biased by a teachers’ basic orientation to teaching or epistemological stance. Also influencing a teacher’s practice is his or her general knowledge and life perspectives.”

From all these findings and ways of thinking about teaching, teacher skills, and teaching effectiveness, it is apparent that effective teaching is a complex and multi-dimensional performance that depends on many areas of knowledge and expertise. Furthermore, it is apparent that, while there is a great deal in common across the many studies of teaching effectiveness, there is not yet an adopted common language for speaking about teaching and factors relating to its quality.

Teaching Styles

The study of teaching effectiveness also includes focus on teaching as styles. However, there is not a singular approach to definition of styles or even of what dimensions or domains of teaching are important to style. For example, one approach is to consider “style” as based in personality. Ornstein (1990) defined style as, “Teaching style is viewed as a broad dimension or


personality type that encompasses teacher stance, pattern of behavior, mode of performance, and attitude toward self and others.” Similarly, Keefe and Jenkins (1989, p. 35) defined teaching style as, “characteristic instructional behavior reflective of teacher personality and educational philosophy”. Quite differently, Peterson (1979) added elements of teaching practice in the definition, describing the trait and including, “the concept of the teacher’s method of student grouping”. Medley (1979) referred to style as a dimension of classroom climate, while others include the “characterizing emotional relationship between students and teachers” as a component of teaching that determines style.

Some researchers have identified different teaching styles and then attempted to determine which style is more effective in student achievement. For example, Lippitt and White (1943) defined three teaching styles—Authoritarian, Democratic, and Laissez-faire which others have used to suggest that the authoritarian teacher—sometimes called the direct teacher—and the democratic teacher— sometimes called the indirect teacher—are more effective than the laissez-faire teacher (that is sometimes called “unorganized” and “ineffective” teacher, which appears to be rather circular when used in studies of effectiveness). In comparisons of students taught by teachers of different types, Ornstein (1986) and Flanders (1965) found similar patterns of student achievement depending on style. Both of those researchers concluded that in the indirect classrooms students learned more and exhibited more constructive and independent attitudes than students in the direct classrooms. In their studies, all types of students in all types of subject classes learned more working with the “indirect” (more flexible) teachers. Bennett (1976) also agreed that style matters. His work identified three styles that he claimed are more effective than other identified styles.

On the other hand, Galton (1995) concluded for his studies in the ORACLE project (Observational Research and Classroom Learning Evaluation), that whole-class teaching—which others called “direct teaching” or “Authoritarian”— was not, in itself, better than individualized instruction—which others had called “indirect” or “Democratic”. Rather than “style of teaching”, Galton concluded that it was the types of exchanges between the teacher and pupils that mattered. His team began to classify teachers into various types that were defined by their classroom behavior and the apparent effects these types had on pupil attainment. Clegg and Bilinton, 1994, p. 29) found that, “no single teacher style was significantly more successful than all the others, although some types were more successful than some others.”

The APPLE research team concluded that for its study the concept of “style” was not helpful for understanding effective teaching or in clarifying its dimensions. It was an inadequate descriptor of the complex set of attributes of teaching that were determined to be both necessary and sufficient to understand differences in teaching effectiveness. Therefore, the team chose to define differences in teaching mainly by using a set of dimensions, and to use types only as a gross indicator of variance in teaching, irrespective of whether these different types were more-or-less effective.

Teaching Effectiveness and Teacher Expertise

Darling-Hammond (1997, p. 8) reviewed more than two hundred studies of teaching effectiveness and concluded that results contradict the long-standing myths that “anyone can


teach” and that “teachers are born not made.” She continued, saying there is plenty of evidence that technical expertise matters in teaching. She stated:

“Studies discover again and again that teacher expertise is one of the most important factors in determining student achievement, followed by the smaller but generally positive influences of small schools and small class sizes. That is, teachers who know a lot about teaching and learning and who work in environments that allow them to know students well are the critical elements of successful learning.”

In a study of factors related to student reading and mathematics achievement in 900 Texas school districts, Ferguson (1991) found that teachers’ expertise—measured by scores on a licensing examination, holding a master’s degree, and years experience—accounted for about 40% of the measured variance in performance of students in grades 1 through 11. This proportion of variance was more than for any other single factor. A similar pattern of results was found by Ferguson and Ladd (1996) when they replicated the study with slightly different measures in Alabama. Other studies using national data and state studies in Georgia, Michigan, and Virginia have found that students achieve at higher levels and are less likely to drop out when they are taught by teachers with certification in their teaching field, by those with master’s degrees, and by teachers who are enrolled in graduate studies. (c.f., Council for School Performance, 1997; Sanders, Skonie-Hardin, and Phelps, 1994)

Connections Between Research on Teaching Effectiveness and the APPLE Project

The APPLE study of teaching draws from the literature of cognitive psychology, learning theory, social psychology, instructional systems development, and organizational theory. This study draws on these different sets of ideas so teaching can be viewed in a more connected way. Teaching and teaching effectiveness are not viewed as one-dimensional, considering insufficient variables for sufficient analysis, but rather in an ecological way. The unique approach to study of teaching in the APPLE project is to juxtapose the selected variables against each other to form a complex profile, to connect the different sets of theories about teaching and learning within an organizational context, and to define variables at a level of abstraction so as to avoid prescriptions but provide enough operational meaning to support use in thinking-based practice. The project does not intend to provide yet another list of effective teaching behaviors, but to provide insight into the behaviors, beliefs and thoughts that drive effective teaching. It does attempt to show the qualities of effective teaching that are apparent when viewed in a holistic way, yet all the time realizing that the details matter.

From the technical and theoretical frameworks in the fields underlying this project, a set of variables was selected to use in the analysis of teaching. The variables that are selected allow use for analyzing teaching and for describing variance in teaching. The set is complex, representing social, methodological, organizational, purpose, and personal aspects of teaching. The variables are intended to be independent of each other as constructs. However, they are likely to interact in a classroom context. The nature of each variable, its foundations, and its expected relationship to other variables in the set are described in Dimensions of Teaching within this report. The set of dimensions of teaching adopted in Project APPLE are:







26Focus on Tasks

27Focus on Goals










Again, these dimensions are not wholly independent nor necessarily limited to one or two of the themes of effective teaching; they are interconnected—they form a complex web—and need to be understood as such.

The full set of these variables might be described as that comprehensive array of teaching characteristics that are necessary to explain accomplished teaching. Accomplished teachers always display favorable degrees of these traits, but—and this is important—they may not be able to articulate them, and, quite likely, cannot. In other words, their professional thinking may not operate at the level of a technical language or set of conceptualizations of teaching.

Some look askance at the notion that teachers should be conscious of their thinking about teaching. Schon (1983, 1987) uses the term “knowledge-in-action” to describe this kind of professional knowledge. He refers to the “know-how that we reveal in our intelligent action” and asserts “we are characteristically unable to make it verbally explicit.” (1987, p.25) However, the explanatory value of his conceptualizations are not in doubt. “ Knowing-in-action” describes perfectly the practice which is expert but which is not readily explained by the practitioner. Similarly, Schon’s notions of “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action” are powerful descriptors. One does not have to accept the whole of his thesis in order to value his concepts.

It may be that Fenstermacher’s (1988) suggestion that the rational-positivist and the professional creativity-artistry paradigms do not have to be mutually-exclusive, which is most helpful. The fact that, typically, expert teachers do not articulate practice in a rational or empirical way does not mean that they couldn’t, nor that they shouldn’t.


In this sense that teachers cannot or do not have language to explain their work, teaching is “craftsmanlike” rather than “professional”. As teaching, it may be none the worse for that! But, there are other wider implications, especially for the potential roles of the most accomplished teachers in the development of teachers and schools and for the potential power of their own reflection-on-action. It is because of the fascinating problem of how professional knowledge works for teachers and because of these wider implications that the variables:

75Application of theory in practice, and

76Learning from practice

were included in the APPLE study.

Teaching from Systems Theories

The APPLE dimension of teaching, Match between instruction and organization or school, was included in the set principally because of the importance of organizational support for teaching and learning and because the teaching in one class impacts the students as they go into other classes. It is not reasonable to hold teachers accountable for organizational factors that influence their work but over which they have no control. The building of a “learning community”, the support for teacher development, the coherence of the school system and school curriculum, the identification and coherence of a school program; these are outside the province of the classroom teacher’s direct control, but critical to the success of students and teachers. On the other hand, it is reasonable to hold teachers accountable for what they do that impacts the effectiveness of other classes.5

Teaching must be considered a social process, since interactions of some form between the teacher and students must be occurring. Therefore, classes can be considered as “social systems”, even though they vary markedly in the degree to which certain qualities of social systems are present (for example, student identity with the group). Furthermore, they may be considered as “organizations” because they are a collective which apparently has one or more purposes and some set of methods, materials, rules, or processes for accomplishing those purposes.

Therefore, classes and the primary organizational work within classes—teaching—can be viewed from the perspective of systems or organizational theories. Principles of effective teaching can be drawn from that literature, irrespective of whether the research relates directly to teaching or to classrooms. However, much research done in the context of schooling has dealt directly with general organizational or social-system phenomena while using labels that are particular to classrooms and teaching.

For example, Davis and Thomas, (1989, p. 115) studied the characteristics of effective principals and schools and their relationship to effective teaching, and concluded that such factors as favorable academic atmosphere, high expectations, safe and orderly environment, supervising and training teachers, high engagement rates, monitoring student progress, and good classroom management practices were important. They said that these factors improve student

5 For more elaboration of this point, see the section defining this dimension and its foundations in the section of this report that presents the variables.


achievement, behavior, and attitudes through what teachers do in their classrooms. Likewise, Anderson, Evertson, and Brophy (1979, 1982, in Davis and Thomas, 1989, p. 129) claimed that active engagement and sustained focus on the content, largely through good organization and management and using tasks and questions that are sufficiently clear and easy at a brisk pace are important. All of these factors can be linked directly to their general organizational functions and to the body of literature in organization theory that explains the conditions for effectiveness.

Much recent literature in education contains references to the relationship between effective teachers and effective schools. Frequent references are made about the role of teacher-as-leader and teacher-as-colleague in respect to being an “effective” teacher. These roles and relationships are seen as the means for informing the continual growth of the teacher and school through the development of new vision seen from new roles or perspectives.

Currently educators are thinking and writing about the particulars and specifics of being effective in an highly visible, high-stakes educational arena. At the same time, as members of a field of practice, teachers are reflecting on the quality of the whole of teaching. The effectiveness of public schools is being questioned, and funding is being found through political means for charter schools, voucher plans, for private education, to name just a few controversial responses to the call for improved education.

Standards set for teachers to enter the profession are more rigorous as are standards for teacher-preparation institutions. The role of teacher education is being called to question with much being written on the use of public school partnerships with teacher education institutions for the joint preparation of teachers.

Regarding standards for teaching and preparation of teachers, Knight and Smith, (1989) state that, “Good practice exists, it can be identified, codified and broadcast, and if it can be identified, codified, and broadcast, then standards of teaching and learning can thereby be improved.”

It seems that people in the field of education are serious about understanding what effective teaching is and how teachers can be educated to be effective, building support systems in the organizations in which they work, and creating universities that work collaboratively with school systems in the development of better educated, more competent, and highly dedicated, passionate teachers. The APPLE Project is an attempt to develop a foundation for thinking about how to go about those tasks in an effective way.

Passion for Teaching

Finally, as the APPLE researchers analyzed the teacher observations and transcriptions of the taped discussions, another variable was added to the framework for the analysis of instruction—Passion for Teaching. The pilot case studies left the researchers with the view that the analytic framework was failing to catch something, but that “something” was not readily definable from the initial set of variables. Teachers seemed to vary in the degree of enthusiasm and wholeheatedness they expressed (in action and words) for their work, but it was more complex than that. Apparent energy and enthusiasm were not always efficacious, nor were they of similar kinds. We found, for example, teachers whose motivation derived from socio-political


commitment, a few who spoke passionately about their work and those who expressed simply but powerfully their love of children. Passion for Teaching, then, may be driven by socio-political beliefs, by intellectual (subject or pedagogic) fascination, or by generalized affect. This affective drive seems to range from the mawkishly sentimental to an authentic sense of great value and purpose in bringing about positive change in learners. Worryingly, we found a significant number of teachers whose passion for teaching was essentially self-serving—meeting a personal or social need in themselves, and not particularly focused on serving the goals of the school.


THE APPLE PROJECT:

16 DIMENSIONS OF TEACHING


THE APPLE PROJECT: 16 DIMENSIONS OF TEACHING

Abstract

This section of the report documents the 16 dimensions of teaching demonstrated from the research foundations as important to the effectiveness of teaching. Each of the sections contains a definition of the variable as it is used in the APPLE Project. The definitions are elaborated further with indicators from the findings of this study of teaching.

The Dimensions of an Instructional System

At the core of the study of instruction6 is a delineation of a set of dimensions of instructional systems that is drawn from the fields of teacher, school, and organizational effectiveness, and from instructional-systems development, organization theory, and group theory. Thus, rather than has been the tendency in most studies of teaching, to focus mainly on pedagogical process, the selected set of dimensions draws on a wider range of relevant theories in order to sustain connectedness between pedagogy7 and the contexts in which it is applied.

The study of teacher effectiveness has generated a huge body of literature in which key themes are variously layered and clustered. However, across that literature the identification of these key themes is not much in dispute, even though they may have many names or labels. Those central themes may be defined as:

37Quality of direct instruction (the teaching)—explaining, instructing, demonstrating, questioning, specifying tasks, giving feedback, and gathering feedback;

38Quality of the design of tasks and activities for children—i.e., the degree to which the designs are appropriate for the intended learning and learners and the degree to which they have qualities that cause them to have intrinsic appeal to students;

39Quality of the match of teaching and student tasks to the cognitive and affective states of the pupils—including management of group and individual activities and management of the learning environment;

40Quality of the ethos or social climate of the instructional setting (the classroom)—the informal and formal systems of rules and expectations that govern relationships and behaviors;

41Quality of the management of work within time frames—The effective use of time is a theme that connects pedagogical effectiveness and school and organizational effectiveness, and is often revealed or described at the level of time-on-task, time-on-curriculum, or curriculum balance. In the present conceptualization of themes, time is not

6 As used throughout this document, “instruction” refers to the total set of events, tasks, materials, student work, and relations that are planned, implemented, and coordinated by the teacher for the intended purpose of producing pupil learning. “Teaching” refers to the part of instruction that the teacher actually does-explaining, specifying tasks and directing work, telling, demonstrating, questioning, giving feedback, and gathering feedback, among others.

7 The technical, theoretical, and “scientific” knowledge bases for instruction.


identified as a discrete theme, but as one that is related to all the pedagogical themes. For example, the organizational strategies that teachers use to put children and tasks together carry with them likely costs and benefits in terms of the efficient use of time. Similarly, pupils’ task engagement levels are often useful indications of effectiveness in direct instruction and task engagement.

Thus, there are themes in the literature on teaching effectiveness that deal with communication, task quality, task management, and with the affective and social aspects of classroom life as important dimensions of instruction. While these themes can be delineated as discrete items, it is clear that they are interconnected in a complex web (Doyle, 1979).

These readily-observable pedagogical dimensions of teaching are underpinned by other aspects that are less readily observable—especially those which are curricular. When teachers plan and think, their curriculum content knowledge interacts with their pedagogical knowledge (Calderhead, 1987). In the set of dimensions of instruction defined here, pedagogical components are linked to curriculum components through goals and assessment of the learning that occurs. Therefore, the study of instructional effectiveness must concern itself with both pedagogical and curricular effectiveness, and also with organizational effectiveness.

Furthermore, other factors that are relevant to the study of instructional systems are reflected in the growing work on teacher thinking and on the nature of professional knowledge for teaching. From that area, the items “Application of Theory in Practice” and “Learning from Practice” are included in the set of dimensions used to assess quality.

The rationales above led to identification of a set of 15 dimensions of instruction that can be used for analysis of quality. A 16th dimension, “Passion for Teaching”, was added to differentiate instructional qualities that are apparent from analysis but not being distinguished by the original 15 dimensions. A satisfactory level of Passion for Teaching seems to be a necessary condition for certain other factors to exist to a level for instruction to be effective, but as for all the other dimensions, it is not sufficient to assure high quality.

The order of the dimensions in the section below has nothing to do with their perceived importance in instruction. Rather, they are ordered to correspond to what the research team believes is the best to use in recording classroom observations. In general, the order proceeds from the most easily observed directly to the least easily observed solely from within the classroom. Indeed, some dimensions can be judged only by comparing instruction and work by the teacher to other features of the organization. The first 15 of the dimensions are intended to be characteristics of the instructional system, but the 16th is a characteristic of the teacher that is manifested in the work done by the teacher. The full list of dimensions, as introduced in this section and named and defined below, is:







47Focus on Tasks

48Focus on Goals










1. Quality of Communications

Communication—the transmitting of meaning from one person to another, whether intended or not—is one of the dimensions of the structure8 of an organization. Communications can vary descriptively on their point of origin, purpose, direction, content, or method. However, individual communications also can vary qualitatively on clarity of meaning, pervasiveness, consistency with other messages, and formality. Furthermore, communications can be analyzed in respect to the group whenever they occur in a group context as they do between the teacher and students or among students. In respect to the class, communications can be analyzed in respect to degree of centralization of the origin or direction, uniformity over members, and the coverage of the group members. A commonly-used measure of communications, frequency, rather than being a quality factor or a factor that should be expected to be related to effectiveness of communication, can be used as a way to measure any of the other attributes of communication. For example, one might measure the frequency of teacher-initiated, oral communications that are directed toward students from the position of teacher for the purpose of behavior control.

The classroom communications sub-system greatly determines the nature of the roles and other relationships among class members and it is useful for describing differences among classrooms and their effects. Furthermore, communication occurs through both verbal means—oral and written—and by non-verbal means, which may include any of a variety of “body languages”, proximity, position such as by location of self and others in respect to physical spaces and objects, or by other task structures and specifications. But however and to what effect communications occur, this dimension is an essential dimension of teaching.

8 As used here, structure refers to the patterns of relations among components of the organization. Components related to communication include “positions”, especially teacher and student. However, in some cases, there are positions for adults other than teacher.


The focus of attention for this dimension of instruction, as used here, is on communications that have to do with task performance and student learning. While the primary concern about quality relates to the teacher-to-student communication, in many cases that communication is influenced positively or negatively by the communications initiated by students and directed either to the teacher or to other students. Therefore, the focus of this factor is on the system of task-related communications within the classroom. While the system of person and social-related communications clearly is related to the overall climate or ethos of the group, attention is given in this measure to that system only indirectly to the extent that it has an important impact on the task-related communications.

A satisfactory level of communication quality is required if instruction is to be effective, efficient, and “excellent”. Without that level, it is not likely that critical dimensions of instruction, such as Focus on Task, Focus on Goals, Goals-Student Match, or Goals-Instruction Match, will meet satisfactory standards. On the other hand, it is possible to have a high level of communications quality without meeting satisfactory standards on these other dimensions.

In classrooms with a high level of communications quality, one or more of the following characteristics may be found as distinguishing qualities:

77Specification of tasks is characterized by clarity; identification of tasks is complete; students know what to do and when they are supposed to do it

78Students are skillful in working with their student peers; there is no “slippage” in task engagement or movement among tasks

79Messages are articulate, clear, precise, and appropriate for the the pupils

80Questions are asked skillfully; responses by the teacher are genuine

81There is equal treatment of children

82Communications are genuine, showing caring and respect for others

83The teacher is receptive to views and suggestions of others, allowing for risk-taking in student engagement and role taking; Students are clearly comfortable in the class and in their work, showing no evidence of fear from communications received or initiated

84Routines are established and maintained to get routine work done

85Genuine humor is used to encourage normal thinking and engagement and to encourage acceptance of relationships, every student is honored

86Communications serve whatever purpose is intended; there are no distractions from the messages that are intended

87Quality of teacher-initiated communications encourages clarity and precision of student-initiated communications

2. Relations with Students

Some interpretations of research on teaching effectiveness, and beliefs held by many in the field of education, lead to conclusions that in order to be effective, teachers must meet certain “warm and supportive” personality criteria, irrespective of the relations they have with students as they


go about their work. As used here, however, this variable is intended to focus on the relations with students, irrespective of personality attributes of the teacher or what events or characteristics of person may cause the relations to be the way they are. A class of students and the teacher (and any other adults who are regular parts of the class group) comprise a collectivity of dimensions that have the potential for becoming a social system. However, the extent to which classes do become social systems, and the nature of the systems that develop, is influenced substantially by the teachers and the system of relations established between the teachers and students and the relations among students that are encouraged or supported by the teachers.

Both initially and ultimately, teacher relations with students in the context of a class may range from “the provider of service to an assembled group of recipients” to “member of a social system in which the primary role of teacher happens to be leader.” Relations with students occur in two dimensions—those dealing with the academic or other learning tasks of the class and those dealing with meeting personal or social needs of the class members. A key dimension of this variable is the need for a balance of leader behavior between these two dimensions, depending upon situational factors—particularly, the maturity of the group of students in respect to the particular task at hand. The key dimension of effective teacher relations with students is the authenticity of those relationships as the teacher goes about providing professional and technical services for students.

Teachers who maintain highly effective relations with students are likely to continue to reveal very clear goals (both “academic-learning” goals and “citizenship” goals), to communicate those goals clearly to the students, and to possess a full array of instructional techniques for serving these goals. In effective classrooms, focus on the overall job of student learning is never subordinate to, nor distracted by, teacher behavior or attention that is intended to develop social or personal relations with students. Students perceive the teacher behaviors and motivations to be focused on their learning, and they perceive the behaviors and motivations to be genuine.9 The critical qualitative attribute of the relationship is genuineness, not “warmth”.

In classrooms with a high level of relations with students, one or more of the following characteristics may be found as distinguishing qualities:

88Relationship behaviors that are viewed as authentic. The focus of relationships is on learning and role performance, not on satisfaction of personal or social needs of the teacher or students

89Respect is revealed primarily for the person rather than for the position held by the person

90The position of teacher is clear to all students, but it doesn’t matter in relations. Maintaining the position of teacher is not an issue to the teacher or students

91The teacher and students distinguish person from work-by-person in their views and behaviors

9 Behavior that is viewed as genuine will be perceived as being focused mainly on accomplishment of student learning and not intended to meet some positional, personal, or social needs of the teacher. Both the words “genuine” and “authentic” may be used in this document to refer to the same quality.


92Students and adults feel safe socially; conditions are “pro-risk” for acting or communicating; permission is not needed for interaction

93Relationships that highlight work and focus on tasks and task accomplishment are pervasive in the classroom and uniform across all students. No students are left out of the social or work groups nor placed in the margins of the group.

94There is a sense of calmness, comfort, and unobtrusiveness in the group

3. Management of Classroom Resources

The resources for learning in the classroom may be defined as everything and everyone in the learning environment—the teacher, other adults, furniture, materials, equipment, displays and, perhaps most significant, the students. All of these must be deployed efficiently and purposefully within that most inflexible of all resources—time. One key dimension of resource management is efficiency. For example, teacher time can be used in a variety of roles, such as instructor, guide, facilitator, mediator, or monitor, and with the whole class, with small groups, or with individuals. The most efficient use of teacher time will be that which serves learning purposes best for the most students. Teachers also have the responsibility to manage how students use their time to serve learning purposes.

In an instructional setting, indicators of efficiency include, among other things, accessibility of resources when needed, the degree to which the students are able to operate the systems of the classroom independently, using consistent and clear rules for organization and location of materials and equipment, using clear systems for operating that govern the kinds of activities that happen at each location in the classroom, having clear and appropriate rules for movement and transitions, and having clear expectations about who is responsible for what and when. However, irrespective of efficiency of use, if the use of resources is not appropriate for achieving some important purpose of the classroom, then the use of that resource is difficult to justify.

The management of all the resources in classrooms is part of the strategic planning responsibility of teachers. To be efficient, everything and everyone must be organized and used to best advantage to serve learning purposes. Accomplishing this organization and use requires an underlying clarity about intended learning and professional knowledge about how an effective classroom environment can contribute to that learning. Without adequate management of resources, it is not likely that all other dimensions of instruction, notably Focus on Task and Focus on Goals, will meet standards for highly effective student learning.

In classrooms with a high level of management of classroom resources, one or more of the following characteristics may be found as distinguishing qualities:

95The classroom is a “room for students”. Materials and activities are ready for students when they need them

96The resources that are available are the ones that actually are needed

97The classroom is well-ordered, tidy, well-planned, and aesthetically pleasing


98The teacher knows where everything is and can get it when needed; the students can find everything easily and comfortably—they use the room

99There is efficient use of time, with little slippage among events or within events

100The classroom is set up so students can manage materials and work without dependence on the teacher

101The teacher uses resource staff or parents effectively and efficiently

102The uses of resources match their apparent purposes

4. Management of Activities

Management of activities in classrooms includes distribution of students, tasks, materials and hardware, and teacher and student time and control over the events that occur from those distributions. While there are connections between this variable and the Management of Resources and Focus on Task, this variable refers more to the system of management of events and tasks to make the events successful.

Included among management qualities are the ways that teachers put students and tasks together—whole-class, groups, collaborative groups, and individuals, for examples. Teaching may differ significantly among classrooms with teachers spending time on whole-class instruction, engaging students in higher-order interaction, or adapting teaching to match the students and the particular intended learning. Nevertheless, the critical attributes of management that should be considered in analysis are focus and structure in the activities that are intended to result in student learning.

Using overly-complex systems of instruction with many tasks happening simultaneously or trying to manage several groups at once seem to have the effect of obscuring learning focus, dissipating teacher efforts, reducing the quality of teacher-student interactions and lowering the levels of student attention-to-task. A key message for the effective management of activities in classrooms is that the system should be simple and focussed enough for the teacher to engage with students in interactions and activities that are focused on learning.

In classrooms with a high level of management of activities, one or more of the following characteristics may be found as distinguishing qualities:

A high degree of Management of Relations and Focus on Task

Particular activities operate within an overall instructional strategy

Careful, planned classroom agenda; Children know routines of the class and use them

The structure of tasks matches the structural needs of the group regarding the task—principles of Situational Leadership Theory are used

Smooth, effective transitions among events and seamless, natural flow of activities among people


The management system assures successful implementation; the teacher “sees everything”; Attention is targeted to students when needed—if students need help, they get it; Teaching occurs when it is needed

Events are well-sequenced and well-paced

Norms of the school are used when they serve classroom operational purposes

5. Management of Relations (with Students and Classroom Colleagues)

It is important to make the differences clear between this dimension and Relations with Students and Relations with Colleagues. In Relations with Students the focus is on the nature of the relationship between the teacher and students and the creation of suitable “climates” or “ethos” for learning. For this dimension the concern is more with the degree to which there is management of the social dynamics within the classroom, the relations with and among students, and of roles, expectations, rights, and responsibilities in the class.

Thus the focus is more on fundamental and more far-reaching implications of how the teacher exercises social influences on students and classroom colleagues. Classrooms can be seen as mini social systems in which the nature of the system is more-or-less functional or more-or less-dysfunctional. This dimension also deals with management of relations with colleagues in the school. Management of relations with colleagues is important to overall teacher performance because it relates to professional orientations, with authenticity of relationships, and with the capacity of the school to capitalize fully on its collegiate potential.

Instruction with a high level of this trait present probably also will have sufficing levels of Quality of Communications, Focus of Task, Relations with Students, and Relations with Colleagues. It also is likely to have one or more of the following particular characteristics:

103The focus of management and work is on supporting learners and learning

104The students and teacher negotiate any apparent difficulties before they become problematic

105The teacher has and uses an intimate knowledge of each student

106The teacher uses unobtrusive non-verbal means to communicate effectively

107There is a seamless, natural flow of activities among people

108The teacher demonstrates a clear sense of purpose and principles

109Teaching is business-like and “professional”, but the teacher cares about students and they know it

110Students and the teacher work effectively with teacher assistants and other adults

111Special students are integrated into normal class routines and relations; students take a natural role to help in special cases

112Tasks are challenging, but relations remain secure; students and colleagues have confidence in the teacher


113The teacher uses Situational Leadership Theory—the degree of task structure matches that needed by students or colleagues

114Genuine humor is a natural part of relations and work

115Students adopt the responsibility for their relationships and for task success

6. Focus on Task

Instruction varies among classrooms and among instructional sessions for particular classrooms on the focus on the tasks that are planned or that actually occur. Using “task” to mean, “the work assigned to, created for, or coordinated by the teacher for students as part of instruction”, then the variable of concern here is the quality of work being done and not with the quality of the task itself. Although the quality of the task is very important to effectiveness of instruction, that issue relates to other dimensions and is not the concern here.

To learn effectively from instruction, students must attend to their learning tasks and have enough time with the tasks for the learning to occur that the tasks can produce. High task focus, notwithstanding, other factors are critical to determining whether attention to the tasks actually results in important learning. Among those factors are the quality of the task designs, the value (worth) of the intended learning, and the longer-term effects—whether intended or not—on learners from task engagement. High levels of task attention are only “good” if the quality of the task design is high, the intended learning is “good”, and there are no significant unintended “bad” learning consequences.

On the other hand, high-quality task designs will not be effective unless they are implemented well. A high level of Focus on Task means that work that is intended gets done effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, effectiveness and efficiency are required over all the students for whom the task was intended. Therefore, favorable Focus on Task is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for effective instruction. Among other “necessary” factors are favorable conditions on: Focus on Goals, Goals-Student Match, Goals-Instruction Match, and Management of Results.

A high level of Focus on Task means mainly that work that is intended gets done effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, that effectiveness and efficiency covers all the students for whom the task was intended. Descriptions of the instruction in classrooms that should be rated highest on Focus on Task include:

116Tasks include all students in meaningful work

117There is careful choice of materials and activities to match intentions

118The teacher-defined task structure matches the maturity of group re the task

119Students are engaged in their tasks; there is no slippage in the interactions

120Communication of tasks is clear and sophisticated; instructions are articulate and precise

121Students maintain focus without assistance. They accept responsibility for task success

122There is lots to do and pacing is quick, but appropriate for completion


123There is a high level of task structure which students understand; students adopt the task structures and move directly to tasks and remain on task for as long as needed or demanded

124There is a sense of, “Don’t let up”; there is no wasted motion; a high level of energy is reflected and sustained

125The teacher receives and attends to student input about the working of activities

126The teacher uses genuine directing questions and activities to engage students who are not engaged

7. Focus on Goals

Teacher practices and thinking often focus more on instructional processes and activities than on goals. Furthermore, even when goals are clear to teachers, they often do not communicate those goals to students. On the other hand, master teachers focus on academic goals, are careful and explicit in structuring activities, promote high levels of student academic involvement and content coverage, hold students accountable for work, have expectations that they will be successful in helping students learn, and are active in teaching, promoting meaning and purpose for academic work, and monitoring learning. In classrooms, a high level of goal focus should result in students “taking” the goals as their own rather than remaining the teacher’s or the school’s. The primary interest in assessing goal focus is in the degree to which the instruction, as it actually occurs is purposeful and the degree to which that purpose is student learning.

There often is an interpretation of “focus-on-goals” as the “amount of time spent on goals.” As used here, focus-on-goals and the simple notion of time-on-task are entirely different attributes of instruction. Large amounts of clock time might be spent in low-intensity activity or on activity that is not correct for the type of learning intended. On the other hand, highly-focused and intensive instruction may require short clock time for effective learning. As a characteristic of instruction, Focus on Goals should highlight the degree of focus—implying assessment of the degree of intensity of attention to intended learnings and absence of activities or events that detract from the attention to learning.

The classrooms that receive the highest rating on Focus on Goals should have almost no distractions from attention to student learning. Furthermore, these classes should not be “sweat shops” in which students engage reluctantly in work on academic tasks at the expense of a broad range of psyco-social or other learnings. Indeed, just the opposite probably will be true. Students should be engaged, excited, responsive, and responsible—for themselves, for their learning, and for the work of the group. Teaching that is high on Focus on Goals is likely to have one or more of the following distinguishing qualities:

127Students engage in “goal taking”, meaning that they see the goals as their own, not the teacher’s. Motivation for goal achievement is internal, no longer dependent on rewards or sanctions provided by the instruction or setting. Students are, themselves, focused on learning.


128Goals are consistent with formal curricula, covering them fully and often going beyond the curricular items. Nevertheless, the teacher focuses goals on needs and interests of children and relates goals to the interests of students.

129There is no wasted motion between and among activities. High efficiency and effectiveness is generalized to all students. The teacher and students are well prepared. Attention to meaningful events, activities, and communication is relentless. Every interchange is focused on goals.

130There is a high degree of Focus on Task. Planning seems sharp and focused and teaching corresponds to an apparent plan. There is a relentless effort to improve instruction—to improve task effectiveness.

131Events, sequences, activities, and learnings are coherent—there is a high degree of internal consistency and high level of consistency of purpose over time. What is important to accomplish is not subject to change arbitrarily.

132The apparent goals are the ones that are assessed; assessment matches the curriculum.

133The classroom climate is business-like and “professional” for both the students and adults. Events, activities, and communications are highly sophisticated.

134Attention and focus in the classroom is pervasive and uniform across all students. Students don’t “slip through the cracks.”

135The teacher is skillful in using any adult teaching assistant as an aide to teaching—they are not doing “busy” work or clerical work.

136The teacher demonstrates knowledge of goal content and the content sources

137Medium-term goals are well focused but not precise—they provide a beacon for guidance, but are not confining

138Tasks are ideally clarified and put into a meaningful context for the students and curricula—focus on goals is maintained in respect to national or state targets.

8. Match Between Goals and Curriculum

The focus of this dimension of teaching is on the degree to which the learning goals of instruction are consistent with the curricula that are adopted formally by the organization in which the instruction is occurring. In schools, these curricula may have been adopted by either the school, the local education agency, or some agency above that. In England and Wales and in North Carolina the formal curriculum is a “given” —the National Curriculum in England and Wales and the Standard Courses of Study in North Carolina. However, neither of these curricula expresses learning goals at a level of specificity that allows teachers to extract and use them without unpacking, modifying and filing down. The task of framing precise goals for learning from more general statements of aims and expectations, and of fitting the general goals to the particular needs and characteristics of a class of students, is one that requires a significant repertoire of pedagogical insights and skill of the teacher. Among those essential insights and skills are, at least, subject knowledge and curriculum content knowledge. Teachers need to frame goals that are consistent with the formal curricula and that are valid for the students and content


subject. Accomplishing that task requires the teacher to develop the particular curriculum that is both derived from the formal curriculum and a valid representation of it.

Whether goals are consciously specified by a teacher or not, there is clear evidence from research in several fields that if the goals that are actually served by the teaching do not match the organization, there are likely to be learning consequences for the classroom or school or both.

Teaching that is high in Match between Goals and Curriculum is likely to have one or more of the following qualities:

139The standard (adopted) curricula are apparent as organizers for the classroom. The teacher stays on schedule with other teachers who are following those curricula.

140The teacher presses beyond the normal sufficing standards of the curricula. The teacher takes curricular mandates, adopted tests, and other indicators of adopted curricula, and transforms them responsibly into a system of intended learnings that are appropriate for the students.

141The teacher has “the big picture” of the curriculum and maintains a relationship between that view and the particulars of the classroom objectives.

142The teacher maintains a high achievement orientation, with a high level of Focus on Goals and Appropriateness of Instruction for Goals. Instruction gets to the intended learning—students actually learn what was intended in the curricula.

143Goals are highly differentiated for use in the instruction, but remain appropriate to the age and grade or level of the students, and include any essential foundations for the terminal goals. Targets are set precisely and apparent in the instruction.

144The teacher presses beyond what is normally successful for the age, without placing undue stress on the students

145Curricular goals are uniform across the members of the class, yet instructional differentiation allows them to be appropriate for the students.

9. Match between Goals and Students

General curricular and grade-level expectations are mandated through adopted curricula and tend to be outside teachers’ control. In this sense, instructional goals are “givens” which teachers must accept. Nevertheless, a major part of a teacher’s task is to find a match between the general goals that are mandated and the “here-and-now” particulars of student needs, interests and abilities. It is at this fine-grain level of curriculum thinking and planning that decisions by teachers determine the appropriateness of goals for students. Those students vary within classes on, among other things, attitude, ability, interests, background, expectations, self-image, or self-esteem. Somehow teachers need to find ways of making similar goals authentic and achievable by all by some form of differentiation. At its lowest level, this means differentiating expectations of outcome—perhaps being satisfied that some students will achieve a particular goal and others will not. Sometimes expectations of outcomes are rigidly stratified, as when children are placed in “ability” groups and presented with different learning experiences predicated on the assumption of different outcomes. Sometimes, however, differentiation is a much more complex


and sophisticated process with parts and sequences that fit the pathways which match the different learners in the group.

Skilled teachers are adept at using different kinds of tasks to match student differences, perhaps by using more-open or more-closed tasks to suit different learners and different goals, or by using tasks that are open rather than closed or clearly-defined rather than vaguely-defined. Other teachers use the notion of “loose-fit” tasks—ones that will readily match to a variety of learner characteristics. Also significant is the ability of some teachers to generate a classroom ethos which supports and celebrates the taking of responsibility by students; in this climate, open and loose-fit tasks facilitate a degree of management of differentiation by the learners themselves.

Teaching that is high on Match between Goals and Students is likely to have one or more of the following distinguishing characteristics:

146Goals match standard curricula, but are differentiated to match students. Instruction varies to match the students, not the goals.

147There is a high level of Focus on Goals, but attention caters to the range of students in the class.

148The teacher uses the interests of students for developing particular goals and remains very sensitive to individual students and their work needs.

149The teacher structures tasks to match individual and group characteristics—success is achieved by matching task specification to student capabilities. Students are able to engage successfully in all activities.

150Pacing matches what students actually can do rather than depending upon conventional graded or leveled pacing. Instruction often is much faster than normal pace, keeping students working at the upper edge of their ability.

151There is clear attention to “doing the right thing” rather than attending much to “doing things right”.

152The class integrates new students into the group, efficiently inducting them into the class and its work. The teacher knows and uses characteristics of new students in class.

153Normal social interactions—exchanges that might occur in any genuine working context—are interwoven with learning events without disruption or distraction.

10. Match Between Goals and Instruction

There has been general agreement in the field of education since at least the mid 1950s that not all leanings are of the same type and that teaching that is appropriate should be different for the types of learning. The focus of attention in this dimension of teaching is on both the nature of the general teaching system in a classroom and on the minute-by-minute teaching that has some apparent particular learning intention. Key indicators of the goals-instruction match for general learning should be apparent in the overarching curricular focus—what really seems important for students to learn—and the usual types of tasks that are given to students for learning and for assessment of performance. The judgment of minute-by-minute teaching events can be made by


using, among other standards, Gagné’s “conditions for learning”—internal, external, and performance—and the “nine functions of instruction” that were defined from syntheses of research findings on principles of instructional design and delivery.

A fundamental assumption in this current analytic system is that once a particular intended learning is known and characterized by type, standards for teaching are established well enough to judge whether the instruction that actually occurs is appropriate for that intended learning. Various frameworks might be used to characterize types of learning and for defining the related instructional standards. Nevertheless, the overarching framework a teacher might choose may be less important than the choice of using situational and conditional decision-making over “application of recipe” as a way to make instructional choices.

The areas of teacher decisions that relate to the match between goals and instruction include direct instruction tactics, task design, and organizational strategies—the ways of putting students and tasks together. The teacher needs to make the best fit between the intended learnings, the cognitive and affective states of the learners, and the instructional strategies selected.

Teaching that is high on Match between Goals and Instruction is likely to have one or more of the following distinguishing characteristics:

154There are high levels of Focus on Goals and Focus on Tasks

155The tasks used for assessment of performance require use of both the type and particular learning that are intended

156Terminal goals drive the general instructional approach rather than making variations in general approach for short-term goals. General approaches are highly consistent over time, with a year-long (instructional term) match of learning priorities and teaching strategies used.

157Both the content materials and their use in the teaching processes match goals

158A variety of methods and materials is used to match the intended learnings, pupils, and motivational needs—with consistent match between the structural characteristics of the instruction and the intended learning.

159Teaching is adaptable and responsive as situations and condition changes, but it maintains a clear relation to the intended learning.

160When teaching is within an adopted program, that program is clearly followed as designed.

161When other adults are engaged in instruction in the classroom, their work maintains a match between tasks and learnings.

11. Application of Theory

Professional practice should be grounded in ways that allow professionals to draw on ideas and principles to plan, implement, validate, evaluate, solve problems, test and share their practice. Furthermore, the existence of a set of grounds for professional practice should generate a common technical language with which the complex problems of practice can be addressed and,


most importantly, shared. This need for a common language may be best illustrated by the simple point that peers cannot act as collegial professionals unless such a language exists, is shared, and is used.

This dimension of instruction refers to the degree to which the tasks, interactions, and class organization correspond to theories and principles for organizing classrooms, matching tasks and materials to learners, matching tasks and materials with intended learnings, and curriculum definition and organization. Among content areas for theories and principles are:

162Subject Matter: Information related to a subject and the traditional structures of the disciplines related to the subject;

163Subject Pedagogy: How to transfer the subject matter knowledge to teaching situations;

164Curriculum: The schemes, mandates and resources pertaining to specific subjects.

165General Pedagogy: Deals more with issues such as assessment, classroom management and organization, match and differentiation;

166Educational Aims: The philosophical and value frameworks behind educational principles;

167Learners and Learning: How children learn and acquire knowledge and the learning styles of different groups of children.

However, the focus of assessment for this dimension of teaching is on the degree to which the teaching actually corresponds to sound theoretical foundations for methods, curricula, and organization—irrespective of whether the teacher can articulate the theoretical rationale for the teaching. Therefore, assessment of this dimension will require using the objective frame of reference, in which skilled assessors either observe the teaching enough to make judgments or interview teachers or students about the events, tasks, and organization and study artifacts of the teaching and tasks enough to make judgments (Of course, a combination of methods might be used.)

Teaching that is high on Application of Theory is likely to have one or more of the following distinguishing characteristics:

168The teaching is consistent with models of teaching and learning.

169The class is organized as a social group, encouraging member-identity, goal-taking, role-taking, and norm-setting

170There is a high degree of Match Between Goals and Instruction. Learning guidance provided is appropriate for the intended learning—it is provided through questions that match the goals.

171Principles of motivation and learning that are apparent are used consistently to match their appropriate application.

172Task planning and implementation are consistent with Situation Leadership Theory—task structure matches the characteristics of the group.


173Instruction focuses on learnings that have the most value for overall education of pupils; focused on integration of learnings and putting learning into a meaningful context

174The teacher uses assessment to inform planning, with assessment tasks matching the intended learnings.

175The teacher places responsibility for learning on learners, using high demand-high support methods

176The teacher uses objective standards for critiques of teaching and student performance

177The teacher is reflective and self-aware, and always seems aware of the instruction and its effects

12. Management of Results

This dimension of teaching refers to the degree to which a sound classroom information system functions, serving the planning, teaching, communicating, and managing tasks of the teacher. While the most common focus in school results-management systems is on student academic learning, it is important to include other types of “results”. Ultimately, little can be done if one merely knows the degree to which students learned what was intended—if the learning is not satisfactory, there is no way to know what to do about it. Sound results-management systems do provide the information needed for general planning and recycling decisions (summative evaluation), but they also provide information needed to take corrective actions while in practice as needed, and also to capitalize on opportunities that might present themselves (formative). Furthermore, they provide the information about the “context” and “inputs”—information about the school, community, families of students, policy and procedural “givens”, curricula and curricular expectations, and the students in the class, among others.

However, this dimension of teaching includes not only the degree of presence of information that the teacher might use in planning, implementing, and recycling decision-making; but also, includes the degree to which the teacher uses that information to govern teaching and organizing practice. Teachers use different kinds of evidence to make formative judgments. Students’ verbal and non-verbal responses offer clues to both affective and cognitive states; questioning and discussion allow teachers to explore levels of understanding; marking students’ work can reveal much; observation and listening to students talk during task time can be very informative; formal and informal tests are commonly used; the use of collaborative tasks designed to serve an assessment function can sometimes be most productive of all. Skilled teachers use any and every source of information, minute-by-minute, to gather the insights which inform their instructional decisions.

Teaching that is high on Management of Results is likely to have one or more of the following distinguishing characteristics:

178The teacher reflects knowledge of the student tasks and where each student is in respect to the tasks; seems to know what children are going to do before they do it.


The teacher observes the minute-by-minute engagements of students in their tasks and social performance.

179There is continuous assessment for diagnosis, for planning next activities, and for differentiation of instruction. The teacher listens to students’ responses and uses those responses to guide the next interactions .

180The teacher uses a broad range of assessment tools—portfolios, individual records, observations, running records, formal tests—that match the information needs. The teacher keeps and uses careful child records. There is a clear system for obtaining and using information, including a balanced mix of formal and informal methods and information.

181There is a sophisticated use of tests in the classroom—teaching is not “driven by test scores”, but rather by an understanding of the need for them and for appropriate interpretations and uses of them.

182The teacher uses data provided by school and system information systems

183Students know what they have learned and how they perform.

184The teacher knows and uses knowledge of student groups and their performances.

185The teacher interacts frequently with each student and uses question-answer interactions throughout the classes.

13. Learning from Practice

A great deal of attention has been given in literature on teacher education and staff development to the importance of “reflective practice” and to teachers as members of a “learning community”. However, these slogans often seem to be more “banners” to wave than actual ways of operating as teacher. If teachers are to be effective and efficient in learning from their practice, they must be skillful observers of personal and social events, have a sound understanding of their purposes and the methods attempted to achieve those purposes, have a sound understanding of personal and social phenomena and consequences, and have a sound understanding of content and pedagogical knowledge. Furthermore, the teachers must have a language to use for thinking about their practice and its consequences. No small matter! Nevertheless, in order to “reflect” on practice, the practitioners must know what the practices are and they must know what to reflect about.

Therefore, this dimension of teaching practice deals with the degree to which practices and consequences are apparent to the teachers and the degree to which those consequences are reflected in subsequent actions. The notion here is akin to the view of practice in Total Quality Management as “continuous process improvement”. Teaching processes should be purposive, and the degree to which those purposes are served should be know to the teacher. (A high level of Management of Results). The teacher, then, translates that knowledge of results into changes in practice. The critical attribute of this practice-reflect-change cycle for this dimension is that the result also develops the understandings of practice and consequences. Assessment of this dimension should address the degree to which the systems of meaning held by the teachers change as a result of reflection on practice and consequences. Collection of dependable data


probably will require using the subjective frame of reference and interview techniques such as those used in this project.

In classrooms that are high on Learning From Practice, the teacher is likely to demonstrate one or more of the following characteristics:

186Using objective ways to observe and analyze personal performance, including using student work and performance

187Using reflective processes deliberately; demonstrating “reflection in action”

188Engaging in active problem-solving and investigative processes, sometimes with other teachers; seeking out learning experiences

189Using thoughtful consideration of students

190Studying practices of others and adopting the best of them that match the adopted system of instruction.

191Reaching a point of confidence in own practices

192Continuously assessing needs and interests of children and reflecting on teaching performance in respect to those needs and interests.

193Working to optimize the teaching and learning situation in the classroom

194Being an analytic thinker; recognizing and using sound technical and theoretical models for instruction, personal and social development, and systems functioning.

14. Match Between Instruction and the Organization

This dimension of instruction addresses the degree to which any attributes of the instruction and classroom processes interact, either with positive or negative effects, with other instruction, processes, or norms in the school or system. The rating will not correspond to an objective quality of teaching within the particular classroom, but to the correspondence with other instruction in the school or system that students might experience at another time. Therefore, in a sense, this dimension is a measure of the effects of interaction of teaching in a classroom with that in others within a school.

Ratings of this dimension are not ratings of quality, per se. Nevertheless, they do have significance in terms of the continuity and cohesiveness of students’ learning experiences over time. It is important to note that a teacher who, for example, scores +2s and +1s on other items may score -1 or -2 on this trait in schools where the practice of colleagues is markedly deficient or inferior. Therefore, instruction may receive a high rating on this dimension, indicating high quality instruction throughout the school, or a high rating indicating a general low quality of instruction throughout the school.

In classrooms in which the teaching is highly consistent with that of the school, and with apparent positive effects, one or more of the following distinguishing qualities may be found:

195There are no inconsistencies between instruction in this class and in other classes that are apparent to the students.


196Students in this class learn how to lead and excel in other classes and in school, both now and later.

197The teacher is highly attuned to the school philosophy and articulates it to others.

198Planning for instruction reflects full consideration of work by and approaches of other teachers. Instructional approaches match those in grades or levels before and after this one.

199Other teachers do as this teacher does, and this teacher fits into the group without stress. The teacher is viewed as a resource by colleagues.

200If the teacher is a member of a teacher team, the teacher adopts goals and uses instructional approaches adopted by the team; management of learning in classes is consistent with team plans.

201When instructional programs are adopted by the school or segment in which the teacher is a member, the programs clearly are implemented as designed.

202The teacher participates in system-level planning

203An established culture of school is translated into systems of instruction and expectations in the classroom.

In classrooms in which the teaching is consistent with part or all of what is in the school (whether of high quality or not), and with apparent negative or potentially-problematic effects, one or more of the following distinguishing conditions may be found:

204In this classroom and others, there is a high focus on end-of-grade, end-of-course, or other “high-stakes” tests rather than on adopted curricula and learning.

205The school and this class have a tradition of teacher-centered, recipe instruction.

206The focus of instruction on “activity” replaces any attention to real goals; there is little or no real focus on what is being learned from participating in the activities.

207There are two factions in the school, and this teacher has a clear match with one.

208The teacher is part of “teacher underground” in school that focuses on high expectations and student achievement (or, with the remainder that does not).

209The classroom is consistent with the school and what is expected at this age level, but there is a mismatch with grades or levels before or after this level.

15. Relations with Colleagues

Relationships among colleagues may be grounded in either a focus on tasks and task accomplishment or on establishing or maintaining personal relationships. While it may make the work-day more enjoyable for some teachers to have a degree of personal or social relations with other teachers, it is not essential for teachers to have either personal or social friendships with others in their group to yield high levels of task accomplishments and favorable social climate. On the other hand, for the organization to function effectively in group or team work, the members must have the skills needed for effective work with colleagues on common tasks, and they must apply those skills through genuine behaviors.


The relationships between teachers and other adults may occur within their classrooms or outside them. When other adults are in roles that are essentially supportive to the teacher, the efficacy and efficiency of the arrangements are dependent on, among other things, the degree of clarity of role definitions and the sense of worth, belonging, and purpose of the adults that are fostered by the teacher. In a sense, as with any other leadership position, the teacher’s skill and performance as leader and communicator define the roles and govern the effectiveness of the “helpers”. Effective teachers not only use other adults to promote learning, but they also match individuals to roles, manage degrees of openness and clarity of task definitions, and support, value, and manage the work of these others, providing leadership for others to perform successfully.

The attribute of Relationships with Colleagues that is of central concern in assessment is the degree to which the relations act as barriers or assets to effective work by either the teacher, colleagues, or other adults in the setting. These relationships can be analyzed in respect to two key dimensions—the degree to which they support coherence, consistency, and progression of student learning and the degree to which they support continuing professional learning of teachers and general organizational effectiveness. This support of organizational effectiveness can be judged by the extent to which the teacher acts as a collaborative professional, sharing concerns and problems, finding solutions, initiating innovations, evaluating teaching and results, thinking about teaching, and questioning what they do.

Teachers who should be judged most favorably on relationships with colleagues should show no effect of attempting to use the relationships to satisfy any personal or social needs—they should never appear to be self-serving. Except in those instances in which relationships are intended for personal or social purposes, the focus of relations should be on accomplishment of some task that is important to the teacher or group. Characteristics that are likely to be found in teachers who are high on this dimension are:

210The teacher is recognized as a leader within the school, and is sought out by others who want help or guidance—is trusted by others, a good mentor for new staff.

211The teacher is respected for being capable and regarded highly by other teachers as being knowledgeable.

212Behaviors or actions by the teacher are perceived by others as genuine. The teacher is a “member” of the group and is a “team player”.

213The teacher has no personality traits or behavior patterns that get in the way of group effectiveness; the teacher is confident, but not dogmatic.

214The teacher balances attention to social and work relations with other teachers.

215The teacher is “professional” in dealing with tasks and relations—timely, competent, and objective.

216The teacher is easy and confident with parents of children in classes.

217The teacher is attuned to the school philosophy (in cases in which the overall school approach is goal-focused).

218The teacher is skillful in group tasks and processes

16. Passion for Teaching


Teaching is emotionally, intellectually and physically demanding: a love or passion for it is an essential ingredient of excellent teaching. This dimension is intended to define the degree to which a teacher has the emotional commitment to the work to be able to perform at the levels required for effectiveness. A high degree of Passion for Teaching may be derived from, perhaps among other sources, personal or social needs satisfaction, a commitment to the ideals of a field—a calling—, or from a genuine interest in the work associated with a position. This latter source of passion for teaching probably is the state of passion that is the most positive in its effects—there is no evidence of engagement in the work because it serves some personal or social need. For effectiveness, the critical attribute of passion, therefore, is not intensity, but rather, genuineness. When there is any evidence to the students or colleagues that passion is intended to serve personal or social needs, especially if it is at the expense of the class or school, then high intensity may be negative in its effects on learning and on the ethos of the school.

The themes of wholeheartedness, intellectual enjoyment, focus on students and their learning, the sense of moral purpose and importance and the expression of these in classroom practice with students add up to a kind of commitment that is, above all, professional and unselfish.

Passion for Teaching, then, may be driven by socio-political beliefs, by intellectual (subject or pedagogic) fascination, or by generalized affect. This affective drive seems to range from the mawkishly sentimental to an authentic sense of great value and purpose in bringing about positive change in learners. Worryingly, a significant number of teachers in the APPLE sample demonstrated passion for teaching that had gone awry and seemed to be essentially self-serving—meeting a need in themselves.

Teachers who are high on Passion for Teaching, with no apparent need-related symptoms:

219Are high in Relations with Students, Focus on Task, and Focus on Goals

220Show no attention to meeting personal needs from teaching; maintain a learning focus in the classroom environment

221Match theory and practice for learning and meeting needs of children

222Have a high commitment to all children and to their learning; show love for children while maintaining focus on task and student learning and not on satisfaction of personal needs

223Are “total professionals”, businesslike, have no “lovey-dovey” relations with students.

224Take the job of teaching seriously; act consistently on their belief that “Children should succeed”; care deeply that children learn.

225Constantly work to improve; see themselves as “a teacher”, see their job as “Steward of the Profession”.

226Maintain high, but realistic, expectations for themselves and others; give lots of physical energy to work, but maintain high level of mental energy

227 “Work with the hand that is dealt”


228Have no particular concern for personal importance; have a strong sense of humility; are genuine

Teachers who are high on Passion for Teaching, but with apparent need-related symptoms, may demonstrate one or more of the following characteristics:

229Identify strongly with students, but are uncertain about their position in school

230May focus on their content field and have a high commitment to that field; view education in that field as important—hold a high level of subject identity: “I teach math.”

231View teaching as “a calling”; demonstrate pride in being a “professional expert”

232May base teaching on personal needs that are derived from experiences in their own childhood; ground teaching in personal background and recognition of the need for favorable self esteem

233See teaching as a family tradition; tending to serve a personal and social need to be a teacher

234Are very “value-driven”; doing the “right thing” and getting children to “do the right things”


THE APPLE PROJECT:

A NEW TYPOLOGY OF TEACHING


THE APPLE PROJECT: A NEW TYPOLOGY OF TEACHING

Abstract

The teachers in the sample were used as examples to define types of teaching. From the study, six types were identified and defined based on quality and characteristics of teaching. Three of these types—Master Craftsmen, Serious Contenders, and Good Hires—represent a hierarchy on quality defined by the best theoretical and technical principles. The remaining three types—Child Minders, Recipe Teachers, and Hard Grinders—represent teaching that merely is significantly different from the aforementioned types, but in different ways. Furthermore, these latter three types are at a lower level of quality that either of those in the former group. Another type was defined—Odd Socks—, not based on similarity within the set, but rather because the examples represent unique teaching that is neither consistent with other types nor, usually, with other teaching within the school where these teachers work. This section of the report describes each of these types of teaching and gives an illustrative set of attributes obtained from this empirical study.

Introduction

The instruction in each classroom may vary from that in other classrooms on any of the 16 attributes in the framework for analysis used here. With that many factors, the number of combinations determined by profile differences would be so large that attempting to explain variance in teaching by describing variable differences would be difficult or impossible to comprehend. Therefore, a holistic approach to describing variance in teaching was adopted, wherein types of teaching were defined. The resulting definitions represent clusters of classrooms found in the study. All classrooms fit into only one of these types without forcing a match. However, as with any typing system, there is variance among cases within the type, but that variance is far less than that between the types.

Special Point to be Made: Readers are encouraged to remember that the purpose for defining the types was to facilitate the description of variance in teaching. The process of defining types included sorting instructional examples. Those examples were most easily identified by the name of the main teacher of the class—this is Ms. Jones’s class and this cluster is comprised of Jones, Simpson, Barns, … The most comfortable language to use for the labels for the types of teaching was to refer to the teachers whose classes represent the type of teaching. Therefore, we have named the types of teaching by using referents to the teacher. We do not intend for these types to be used as characteristics of the teacher, as if they were personality types. We always intend to describe variance in teaching. Nevertheless, we do think that any given teacher is likely to demonstrate enough consistency of practices over time so that the pattern of teaching can be characterized by one of the types.

Six types of teaching were defined through the clustering process. In addition, a separate group of classrooms remained that did not fit any of the six types, but were not, themselves, homogeneous in any significant ways except that they were outliers when compared to the other classrooms in the sample or, for the most part, in their schools. This group was named and treated as a type, however, because it can be considered separately for planning or policy


decisions regarding improvement of performance or school change. These seven types are described below by giving a general description and then listing critical attributes of instruction of the particular type.

In general, these types are not defined to be hierarchical on quality10 or any other single attribute. However, there are clear differences in quality among the types. Furthermore, three of the types—Master Craftsmen, Serious Contenders, and Good Hires—represent the highest quality, and in that order. Hard Grinders, Child Minders, and Recipe Teachers, almost without exception, represent a level of quality that is below that of the aforementioned three types, but they are not in any particular order. At any given time the Odd Socks may represent any level of quality from among the highest to among the lowest, depending on the conditions represented by the particular classroom. (See the figure on the previous page for an illustration of the relationships among the types and between the types and teaching quality.)

The Master Craftsmen

The instruction found in these classes is outstanding in every respect. However, the teachers do not consciously ground their practice in a body of theoretical and technical knowledge. The rationale they give for their practices and choices include “common sense”, “trial-and-error”, or “just from my experience”. Nevertheless, when analyzed objectively by applying theoretical models, instruction is principled and entirely consistent with some of the best theoretical models from organizations, groups, instructional systems development, and pedagogy. Even so, teachers in this group may expressly reject “theory” as being useful and say, “You really can’t learn to teach except by teaching.” Therefore, the name, Master Craftsmen, was selected to distinguish the instruction found in these classrooms from professional practice, which would require conscious use of technical and theoretical knowledge and principles in decision-making.

These teachers demonstrate in every sense that they are “master teachers.” They are skillful as teachers and have developed their skills to a high craft. They seem to reach the “master” status in teaching the same way master craftsmen in other fields achieve that status, and the quality of their practice corresponds to that which we usually attribute to masters within a field. Yet they tend to be very critical of their own practice, and seldom reveal any recognition of “how good they really are”. Even if they should recognize how good they are, that does not seem to matter to them—meeting some personal or social need is not their reason for teaching. In these classrooms, there is absolute clarity of purpose, and that purpose is student learning.

Master Craftsmen hold and demonstrate high expectations for students and self, corresponding with high demand for performance within an instructional system that provides a high level of focus on tasks and goals. The behavior of the teacher is authentic, with no evidence of action that is based on satisfaction of any personal or social needs, other than task accomplishment. In these classrooms, students take the role of student-as-learner, including taking the responsibility

10 As used here, quality refers to the characteristics of teaching as indicated by the 16 dimensions of teaching defined and used for analysis in the APPLE Project. The highest quality teaching would have a rating of +2 on all of those dimensions.


for the success of instructional processes. Roles in the class are highly fluid, with students and teachers changing roles as appropriate to the goal and task. Students are taught the skills, roles, and relations they need in order to work effectively in all aspects of the class. In addition to standard academic and development content, a focus of the curriculum is learning how to learn, independence, and self-reliance.

These teachers have a large repertoire of means for matching instruction to the students. They have a high level of knowledge of their content areas, including clear understandings of the structures and traditional methods for knowing in those areas. There is no evidence of a struggle to differentiate instruction (on task, time, or goal) whenever or however needed to facilitate student learning. “Loose-fit” tasks are often the key to differentiation in whole-class instruction, and when used, whole class instruction is teacher-led and highly interactive with all students engaged. Intended learnings are made meaningful or “real” to the students by such means as using real problems or selecting content or tasks that reflect the student interests. The teachers have a high level of enthusiasm and energy, and the students adopt comparable levels. The teachers are fascinated with teaching and learning and students adopt that fascination.

Attributes of Instruction of Master Craftsmen:

58There is absolute clarity of purpose, and the purpose is student learning

59The adopted curricula are the central focus of the class, but there is always a press to take children to the highest or most enriched levels they can achieve without apparent stress.

60The teachers plan and manage tasks to match the maturity of the group for the task—a “textbook example” of the application of Situational Leadership Theory (Hersey and Blanchard, 1972)

61The organization for work matches the task. Processes are clear, coherent, and consistent across the students

62The instruction precisely matches the principles of instruction for types and conditions of learning and functions of instruction (Gagné and Briggs, 1979)

63The teachers hold and demonstrate high expectations for students and selves, corresponding with high demand for performance within an instructional system that provides a high level of focus on tasks and goals

64The teachers are critically aware of the classroom and instruction and they judge proposed or alternative approaches critically to determine whether they fit. There is no tendency to “latch onto the method of the month”

65The teachers are active and constant learners

66The behavior of teachers is authentic. There is no evidence of action that is based on satisfaction of any personal or social needs, other than task accomplishment

67Students take the role of student-as-learner, including taking the responsibility for the success of instructional processes


68The teachers are students of their class, and constantly use knowledge of the students and program purposes for assessment, planning, and instruction.

69Roles in the class are highly fluid, with students and teachers changing roles as appropriate to the goal and task.

70The positions of teacher and student are clear to all in the classes, but those positions never “get in the way” of the work of the class. Positional status is never an issue in relations.

71Students are taught the skills, roles, and relations that they need in order to work effectively in all aspects of the class. Student capability to work as a member of the group is not left to chance.

72There is a highly efficient and complex structure directing class work. All of the class structural aspects are designed and managed by the teachers and operate to assure task success and goal accomplishment. The class structures never get in the way of work, relations, or goal achievement.

73The systems of pupil control are only apparent to a skilled observer. They are never obtrusive. In fact, “pupil control” is not an issue in the classes. Students show no indications of being aware of external systems of control—they have taken the roles and goals of their class.

74The teachers have a large repertoire of means for matching instruction to the children. There is no evidence of struggle to differentiate instruction (on task, time, or goal) whenever or however needed to facilitate student learning. “Loose-fit” tasks are often the key to differentiation in whole-class instruction.

75When used, whole class instruction is teacher-led and highly interactive. All students are engaged in the interactions.

76The teachers want all students to achieve as much as they can. Those desires and expectations are communicated to students through authentic means, including high levels of task focus, learning guidance, and differentiation. Intended learnings are made meaningful or “real” to the students, by such means as using real problems or selecting content or tasks that reflect the student interests.

77The teachers approach instruction as problem-solving—finding solutions for whatever problems are encountered and then putting the solutions into the class agenda.

78The teachers tend not to be comfortable with whatever they are doing and always want to do better but they are not scared by other factors in the school or system. School conditions are simply boundaries within which the work of these classes occur.

79The teachers pick up efforts by the school or system to improve and work with the effort—typically going much beyond either the intent or achievement of others.

80The teachers have high levels of enthusiasm and energy and the students adopt comparable levels. The teachers are fascinated with teaching and students adopt that fascination.

The Serious Contenders


Instruction in classrooms directed by Serious Contenders can be understood best by comparing it to the Master Craftsmen and thinking about some form of “slight slippage” from the masterly instruction. These teachers are not as relentless in their pursuit of student learning as the Master Craftsmen. The point should be clear, however, that this instruction remains clearly superior to most other instruction in schools where these teachers work. Usually their high-quality performance is recognized by their colleagues and within the schools. They are technically competent and generally are viewed by their colleagues as “professionals”.

Instructional and other professional behaviors by Serious Contenders are completely authentic. Relations with students, colleagues, and parents are genuine and comfortable. Learning is always apparent as the focus of classroom work, reflecting a high level of personal commitment to teaching and to students and their learning. Students in these classrooms are busy, and they enjoy work and learning.

Attributes of Instruction of Serious Contenders:

General high quality notwithstanding, in these classrooms “slippage” can be found as a pattern in instruction. One or more of the following examples of slippage can be found in Serious Contender instruction:

81The teacher tolerates lower achievement than maximum.

82Instruction is principled, but does not serve all functions completely, or does not reflect some overarching theory or analytic framework.

83Implementation is not precise, especially when the teacher is not the adult directly engaged in the work with the students.

84Control over learning is mainly centralized, with students not taking full responsibility for the success of the work of the groups, and sometimes not of their own work.

85Students are not wholly past dependence on the teacher or other external motivations for learning.

86Task design and task monitoring allow for some disengagement or “lost motion”.

87Students engage in enough personal or social interactions to become an issue in the effectiveness of their work groups, and these behaviors may engage the teacher in actions to manage pupil behavior that are apparent.

88The teacher attends to personal relations with and among students, distracting from complete attention to learning tasks.

The Good Hires

Instruction by this type of teachers differs significantly from that of Master Craftsmen and Serious Contenders in that some dimension is flawed enough to result in some form of significant dysfunction, disorganization, or reduction in student learning, at least for part of the class if not all. Nevertheless, the instruction would still be considered by most observers to be generally high in quality. Most parents would be pleased to have their children in these classes and most school leaders and faculty would consider themselves fortunate to have such a teacher


on the staff. Having said that, there are opportunities within these classes to make significant improvements in instruction and student learning.

The Good Hires represent a form of instruction that probably would be considered in most settings as good, and maybe even exemplary. However, such a view would probably be only in respect to “typical” instruction—a normative view. When compared to technical standards and theoretical foundations for what instruction might be, this instruction has important technical flaws that should not be overlooked merely because it is better than most in many schools.

In general, the design of instruction by Good Hires is technically competent, and both the design and implementation are principled. The teacher tends to be the center of the class, and primary learning depends on work that is actually done by the teacher with the students rather than on the work that might have been planned. The teacher usually is “in tune” with the students and seldom demonstrates stress in relationships with them. Students and colleagues generally are aware that these teachers genuinely care about students and their learning. Students usually enjoy these classes and the learning they attain from them.

Attributes of Instruction by Good Hires

Nevertheless, significant flaws can be found in the instruction directed by Good Hires. One or more—but usually one—of the following flaws might be found in the instruction:

1. Students in work groups other than the one working directly with the teacher are disengaged or merely engaged in “busy work” to hold them until the teacher comes to the group.

2. The entire class is seldom covered at any one time by instruction that is highly focused on task and learning.

3. Whole-group instruction often misses its mark by loosing students at the group margins—those who are less mature, those who are not as capable, or those who have already learned whatever the teacher is attempting to teach, for example.

4. Whole group instruction is not differentiated to cover the range of member characteristics.

5. Transitions between or among activities are not smooth or “seamless”, resulting in loss of time or disruption of work. These distractions from learning usually result from some flaw in directions, communications, or task design.

6. Troubles that occur in the class may feed into other troubles rather than being resolved as they occur. However, the fundamental base of relationships in the class keep the system together. The system does not become non-productive.

7. The teacher acts harshly or unusually sharply toward one or more students, resulting in embarrassment or temporary strained relationships between the teacher and students or between the student and other students. When this occurs,


it usually is distracting from the learning focus and encourages disengagement among the students. However, the fundamental relations between the teacher and students and among the students keep these events from having long-term negative effects on relations. (This flaw would be found only rarely for this type, however.)

The Hard Grinders

Hard Grinders should not be considered as different from Master Craftsmen, Serious Contenders, and Good Hires by some increment along a quality continuum. Hard Grinders are significantly different from those types and others, but in complex ways that should not be interpreted as along some single continuum. Teachers who are Hard Grinders work hard and want to do well. They seem to demonstrate the notion that “If I just try harder, the students will learn”. They tend to have high expectations for themselves and others; however, they tend to overestimate their own ability and effectiveness—most tend to be unconscious of the flaws and unable to recognize the scope of the slippage in quality of their work. However, some may be aware of the low quality of their work and frustrated by that awareness. After all, they do mean well.

Hard Grinders usually have and maintain relationships with students that are perceived by the students as good. Students tend “to like” the teacher. Indeed, these teachers are often viewed by other teachers, parents, or principals as among the best teachers in the school. Furthermore, in schools and systems that are “standards-focused” or “test-driven”, some of the attributes of Hard Grinders are ones stressed as important to be adopted by all teachers and the schools. Nevertheless, when instruction in classrooms taught by Hard Grinders is compared to the best theoretical and technical standards for what instruction might be, there are major gaps. Furthermore, when the instruction is compared to that of Master Craftsmen, there are major gaps in what might be reasonable to expect as student outcomes. Unfortunately, some of those differences are not reflected in what is measured by many large-scale testing programs, so the real differences in student learning may not be assessed and then compared.

Attributes of Instruction by Hard Grinders

1. The teachers have and maintain relationships with students that they perceive to be good. Students tend “to like” the teacher.

2. The teachers may “hop on every fad that comes along”. They tend to be “solution seekers” rather than “problem-solvers”, and often are not as critical of “programs” as they should be. Instruction is similar to that described by Galton (1980) in his reference to Habitual Changes.

3. The curriculum for the class is planned and probably a literal adoption of the curriculum of the school or system.

4. There are lots of assignments and activities, but the focus of instruction is “activity” or “content” rather than learning.


5. There is a high focus on preparing for assessments—the class is likely to be “test driven”, often with a distracting attention to national or state exams, especially if these are “high-stakes” exams.

6. The classroom systems and frameworks (rules, structures, routines) are not clear, efficient, or particularly effective.

7. The teachers are the center of the class and have an over-investment in “being right”, accompanied by anxiety about how their work is perceived by others. Maintaining the positional status of teacher may be an issue in the class.

8. There is a general “fuzziness” in the design of tasks and specification of goals, and there usually is a lack of clarity of communications with and among students.

9. Teacher-thinking tends to be literal and concrete, claiming no ownership of theory and denying its value. There is a general confusion of principles and practices, and not a high level of “horsepower” on the part of the teacher.

10. There is a high focus on values and “doing the right thing”. The teachers may appear to be “Salvation Seekers”.

The Child Minders

Child Minders should not be considered as different from Master Craftsmen, Serious Contenders, and Good Hires by some increment along a quality continuum. Child Minders are significantly different from those types and others, but in complex ways that should not be interpreted as along some single continuum of quality. Teachers who are Child Minders focus on activity, not learning—successful teaching is successful activity. Furthermore, they tend to focus on maintaining the position of teacher, and that position is always apparent in the class. Child Minders are doing little or nothing to be or to become learners, and when they do learn, the level tends to be concrete and literal. Indeed, these teachers may not have either enough capability, energy, or willingness to perform differently. They seem to be “going through the motions” of teaching, often tending to have a negotiated relationship with students—”don’t cause me any trouble, and I won’t cause you any”. They tend to be lazy, and perhaps even “retired but still in the position”.

Unfortunately, the Child Minders are often good members and followers of their school faculty, especially when the group is one in which it takes less to get by than in others. Also, many parents think of Child Minders as the way teachers and schools are “supposed to be”, especially parents who believe it is important to “make children mind” or “make them learn to follow rules”.

Attributes of Instruction by Teachers who are Child Minders

In classrooms with Child-Minder teachers, distinguishing attributes of instruction are likely to be:


1. Teachers’ performance is inauthentic, often within a setting that reflects in-authenticity.

2. Teacher activities and communications appear to be a “random walk” with little apparent purpose or focus.

3. Instruction tends to focus on the “good” students, often leaving others to fall aside.

4. Teacher work is mainly habitual and routine, and the tasks for students are mainly ritualistic and routine.

5. Learnings that actually occur from activities are seldom related to any meaningful context.

6. Instruction tends to be mere activity, “doing stuff”, with little differentiation of any form.

7. There is an apparent focus on behavior management and a high level of teacher energy is spent on student or group management. Behavior management gets in the way of meaning, attention to tasks, goals, or authentic relations.

8. Students and teachers are “in school, doing school” with little satisfaction from accomplishments.

9. The instruction may be based on some “recipe”, but if so, it is poorly followed.

10. There is seldom a match between goals and pedagogy—the instruction is an exemplar of “flabbiness”.

The Recipe Teachers

Recipe Teachers should not be considered as different from Master Craftsmen, Serious Contenders, and Good Hires by some increment along a quality continuum. Recipe Teachers are significantly different from those types and others, but in complex ways that should not be interpreted as along some single continuum of quality.

A common public view of teaching represented by a number of recent public-policy initiatives is that learning of students would be improved if “effective recipes” were adopted. Indeed, some of the adopted systems for evaluation of teacher performance check to determine the degree to which an adopted “teaching recipe” is in place. However, at some level, any effective “recipe” for instruction must include application of judgment by the teacher to the particular situation that is encountered. That application of judgment, almost by definition, cannot be routinized to the point of a prescription for what to do in any circumstances. Recipe Teachers do treat instruction as a routine, however. The “recipe” may be some “package” that has been adopted by the school, or it may simply be “what the teacher has adopted as the way to teach”. While these “packages” often were not intended by their designers to be “recipes”, they may be adopted as such by teachers.

In many schools, Recipe Teaching is expected as the standard. This may be especially true in schools that are driven by high-stakes tests or by a focus on “basic skills”. Indeed, the teachers


who are viewed as “the best teachers” in these schools may be the best of the Recipe Teachers. Furthermore, students in these classes may perform quite well on the tests and on measures of “basic skills”. Many parents will view these teachers as the ones they want their children to have because they “teach the basics”. This view by parents may be especially pervasive since so many of them experienced “recipe teaching”, and think “that’s the way it’s supposed to be”—high focus on “drill” or repetition, clear routines, everyone knows what to expect, the same for everyone.

The best Recipe Teachers in a school may be the standard by which other teachers are judged, especially because the children may perform well in large-scale testing programs. Furthermore, much research on “effective teaching” has used the better Recipe Teachers as their referents for high-performing teachers, with many of the findings about effective instruction leading to recommendations to adopt these recipe methods. However, these studies usually assessed normative quality and not quality that might have occurred if the best principles and theories of instruction had been applied, such as in classrooms taught by Master Craftsmen, Serious Contenders, or even Good Hires. Furthermore, since most tests used in large-scale testing programs assess learnings that can be produced for a majority of students by using a good recipe, the differences in real learning between groups of students taught by Recipe Teachers and Master Craftsmen may not be assessed or recognized in evaluation systems—the tests simply do not measure real differences in student capability that exist.

Attributes of Instruction by Recipe Teachers

1. Instruction is both goal-oriented and efficient, but goals focus on “basic” skills.

2. The instruction may be effective, but it lacks “luster”, depth, meaningfulness, or extension beyond “basic”.

3. Instruction follows formulas, routines, or prescriptions. Principles are applied mechanically and literally, if even recognized at all.

4. The instruction is focused toward the whole group, with little differentiation. Children at the margins of the class generally are not successful in learning.

5. Instruction reflects the view that teaching is “following routines”, not “solving problems”. Even so, it may be competent.

6. While usually efficient in a normative sense, whole-group activities often go awry with lots going wrong and lots of dysfunctional activity.

7. The classroom energy level is “laid back”. The classroom generally matches the personality of the teacher—routine, methodical, plodding.

8. There usually is a willingness by the teachers to do the work needed.

9. The teachers normally have good relations with students, and students are generally willing to engage in the classroom activities.

The Odd Socks


Odd Socks represent a class with few common characteristics except that for any of a variety of reasons they are, as teachers or persons, problematic for themselves or their school, or both. This type should not be considered as homogeneous in any respect. This is simply a group of “outliers” within schools who should be considered as unique cases rather than as members of a particular type. In some cases these teachers are outstandingly successful in producing student learning for any given class of students. In other cases they are ineffective and dysfunctional for themselves, their students, or even the school. However, even in classes where teaching is effective and high in quality, there should be concern for the consistency of quality over time because of such factors as volatility of the personal conditions of the teacher or mismatches between the classroom and the school. Among the conditions illustrated by cases in the study are:

1. Incompetent performance—just poor quality performance, that may be based on either lack of skills or unwillingness to do the work needed, or both.

2. Poor or unpredictable performance because of personal crises.

3. Teachers who are usury—using the position of teacher for some personal or social advantage or gain.

4. Teachers who are disengaged from their work and school, or “burned-out”

5. Teachers who are “switched-off” emotionally—disengaged from the world around them

6. Competent teachers who believe, wrongly, that they are Master Craftsmen. They may have become tired, but see their troubles as directly a function of organization problems rather than of their own.

7. Teachers who know their performance is poor but who are not willing to do anything about it.

8. Teachers who are frightened—of students, of their position, among other sources.

9. Teachers who are highly capable and who have a high level of commitment to teaching, students, and learning who are working in a school that generally does not conform to those standards.

10. Teachers who have powerful, charismatic personalities who engage in teaching with a high level of passion and with high quality infused with their personality, but who also identify with their classes of students as people and promote identity of students with them as people—students develop allegiance to the teacher, not to the school or to internally-motivated learning.


THE APPLE PROJECT:

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS


THE APPLE PROJECT—IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Abstract

The purpose of this section is to address the particular implications of the APPLE project findings for the development of the whole system of education. These implications relate to a larger, overarching theme to which APPLE findings make important contributions—the professionalization of teaching. This section contains an introduction that describes how these findings can contribute to understanding the field of teaching and how they can be used to frame the issue of the professionalization of teaching. Following that introduction are sections addressing the separate themes for which implications were determined. Those particular themes, addressed in the separate sections that follow, are:

235teacher and teacher-educator development (the individual);

236school and school system development;

237pre-service teacher education and training, including partnership, mentoring and related issues;

238advanced certification and qualification;

239research on teaching; and

240policy and governance (including test score panic).

Introduction—A Case for the Professionalization of Teaching

The authors claim that the APPLE project made some particularly-significant contributions to the field of study of teaching. First, the project has developed and proposed a properly-grounded and interrelated set of criteria for excellent teaching based on “knowledge for now”11 about teaching effectiveness, school effectiveness, and system effectiveness. These criteria—the sixteen APPLE variables and their related conceptual and operational definitions—aim to be comprehensive, complex, and sensitive, while being resistant to ideology and recipe, while being open to differences in context and to situationally-specific applications. These variables and their

11 The idea of “knowledge for now” intended by the authors refers to their conviction that significant bodies of technical and theoretical knowledge exist now that can support teaching practice and can serve to establish standards for quality of practices. The authors think that these foundations should be treated as any other body of scientific knowledge—it is a work in progress. We should think of how this knowledge base will be developed, refined, extended, or enhanced over time as a result of further research, and we should not spend time or energy attempting to find “the right” foundations—the “best” method. We know enough now to adopt these knowledge bases as the foundations for our thinking about teaching, for teaching practice, and for planning and conducting research on teaching. Of course they will be improved over time—that is the very nature of science and theory!


definitions are criterion-based, not normative in meaning, and they are focused on what teaching might be, not on what it is. Second, the APPLE typology of teaching, derived from the application of the sixteen variables to the study of 46 classrooms in North Carolina and England, offers a new structure for analyzing the ways in which teaching varies, both in methods and quality. Third, the APPLE typology can be used, in addition to the variables, as a standard for understanding further what teaching might be and how present practice varies in complex ways. Finally, the APPLE study of teaching identified those school and school-system variables that impact the successful performance of teaching. The APPLE researchers think that if the professionalization of teaching is to be realized, it is critical to address the several themes that emerged from the APPLE project.

The notion of teaching as a profession is problematic. As delineated by Squires (1999), the literature in the field of teaching is of three kinds: that concerned with the sociology of professions (history, development, relations with state, relations with clients and control of access, training and certification); that concerned with pre-service and further professional education and training; and that concerned with “professional” action—how teachers “do what they do”. All three kinds of information contribute to an understanding of where teaching is situated in the hierarchy of occupations and to a sense of the ways in which teaching fits, or does not fit, with definitions of professional activity. While the APPLE findings contribute in a variety of ways to all three types of information, the principle concern of the project is more particular. An important purpose was to define a professional knowledge base for teaching, to document the ability of teachers to articulate their practice in a way that reflects such a knowledge base, and to propose a clear framework for understanding how teaching might be and made to be better than it is—a key concern was to provide a foundation for professional growth and improvement for teachers.

What follows in this section might be read as being critical of teachers. That is not the intention. Rather it is to urge recognition of the significant barriers to genuine professionalization of teaching and to assert that real emancipation can only emerge from rigorous analysis of the state of the “profession” as it is. Teachers, typically, are “professionally oriented” and hard working. Nevertheless, actual development of teaching to the point of being a genuine profession, and to authentic emancipation of teachers, remains a long journey from where we are now. But we need to be clear about where we are now in order to plan the route. No blame should be attached to teachers, individually or collectively, for the current state of the field; placing blame is, at best, dysfunctional. An important need for the field of teaching is systemic change that can release the energies, enthusiasms and commitment of professional teachers for the benefit of their students, their colleagues, and for society at large.

The basic issue facing teaching, simply put, is; whatever else might be among the conditions for being “professional”, the need for a clear and shared technical and theoretical knowledge base on which decisions and practices are based is surely beyond argument. The APPLE evidence indicates that significant numbers of teachers—irrespective of the quality of their teaching—lack such a knowledge base. Therefore, on this criterion of shared technical and theoretical knowledge base, teaching does not measure up as a profession. Other criteria for an occupation to be a professions might also be applied to teaching:


241any professional knowledge base might reasonably be expected to have clear connections to theory and research. Teachers typically do not consciously use theory or research to inform their thinking about their work, and researchers typically do not write for teachers;

242any professional might reasonably be expected to be able to articulate the purposes of their work and the knowledge foundations for it in a clear and precise technical language. Few teachers can do this;

243any profession might reasonably be expected to recognize masterly expression of its “craft-in-action”. Teaching may meet this standard, but it lacks the strategies and language for sharing these standards to the advantage of the field as a whole;

244any profession might reasonably be expected to apply what is known about its practice to the design of initial, further, and advanced education and training strategies. In teaching there is not much sophistication or precision in the understanding of how both knowledge and competence can be developed in the initial, further, and advanced training of teachers;

245any profession might reasonably be expected to organize itself in a way that enables its voice to be heard by its clients and its political masters. Teaching has a history of fragmented organization and has not yet found a common voice; legislators find it difficult to discern the “collective wisdom” of the “profession”;

246any member of a profession might reasonably be expected to be up to date, knowledgeable, and familiar with recent research in the field and, at times, to engage in research as a participant (not a subject). Typically, teachers and their trainers or mentors aren’t and don’t;

247professionals might reasonably be expected to have their work and related responsibilities managed in such a way that they are encouraged and enabled to engage in regular and substantial professional development which secures currency and the maintenance of professional standards. Teachers do participate in a variety of training and staff-development events and programs, but only minimally in respect to their needs and the demands of a profession. Provision for professional development is patchy, insufficient, poorly resourced—and often based on “fix-it-quick” responses to new recipes from their organizations;12

248professionals should expect to have their performances reviewed and assessed in ways that are well-grounded, authentic, and fair. Teachers’ performances surely are assessed; the well-groundedness, authenticity, and fairness of these processes, though, is not secure—in many cases they are politically motivated and coercive in nature, even if well-intended;

12 Furthermore, a recent joke making the e-mail exchange illustrates a common view of “in-service.” It seems that a teacher reached the place in heaven reserved for teachers, but no one was there. The teacher asked, “Don't many teachers make it to heaven? I don't see anyone else here?” The response by the guide was, “Sure, we get lots of teachers. Don't worry they'll all be here tomorrow. They're just down in hell for another inservice.”


249professionals are usually expected to be intellectually able, and professions act in a way to secure that gate-keeping assures minimum standards for entry. It is clear that teachers need to be intellectually able, but the systems do not always ensure that all of those who enter, are. Standards are neither stable nor consistent.

If the APPLE analytic process using “assets and barriers” is applied, the above are all “barriers” to professionalization. However, the field of teaching has assets, too. Among important ones of these are:

250the existence of a knowledge base that is at least good enough for now;

251the levels of energy, enthusiasm, commitment and passion which, though sometimes misdirected, are often remarkably high;

252the “professional” attitudes are often impressive—most teachers want very much to do the best they possibly can for their students.

However, the authors claim that teaching needs, as a minimum, to attend to the shortcomings identified above. If it did, then it might reasonably aspire to be considered a professional occupation; it might also then aspire to gaining a measure of control over its own destiny in respect to standards for recruitment, certification, selection, and retention of members, and to the assurance of standards of work quality.

The aim of professionalization of teaching is surely a worthy one, especially for those of us who are within that field. That status cannot be attained, though, unless all aspects of the management of the “profession” are attended to. The implications of the APPLE project are relevant to achieving that status. The following sections describe those implications for the several components of the field.

Implications for development of teachers and teacher educators

The professionalization of teaching, even if all the standards referred to above are met, will rise and fall with the quality of its vision for and implementation of programs and processes for the professional development of teachers. The teacher’s ability, desire and competence to serve the learning needs of students will signal “professional” to clients, both within the lay public and among educators. But, what characterizes a sound system for development in professions, and what can the findings from the APPLE Project contribute to that system?

First, what do professions demand for the growth and development of their members? Professions offer:

89opportunities to collaborate and reflect on practice with colleagues;

90opportunities for continued professional growth and 3) monitoring and enforcing of professional discipline;

91a common basic body of knowledge, understandings, and terminology;

92high levels of reasoning and language skills;

93a collective service ethic and professional pride;


94the proper evaluations and measurement of teaching performance; and

95the autonomy to make client-based decisions (Olson, 1996).

It is with this understanding that most learned societies in education have set standards for teachers that call for reflection and continual professional development and for contribution to the field of knowledge. Squires (1999, p. 129-130.) stated that it is important to recognize that these abilities require professional expertise in at least 6 areas:

96the general frameworks for teaching

97specific knowledge about all the different aspects of teaching

98skills of teaching that are routinized to the point that tasks can be accomplished competently and efficiently

99skills for reading and judging conditions moment-to-moment and deciding what to do depending on those conditions (contingency analysis)

100taking action, or actual teaching

101reflection in and on teaching.

But, how is this competence developed? What characterizes development in professions, and how do the APPLE Project findings support, extend, or enrich those ideas? The answers to these questions suggest the importance of recognizing the complexity of teaching and schools. If teaching is to improve, the content and process of professional development must be constructed in such a way that it addresses the:

253status and needs of teachers;

254status and needs of the schools and school systems;

255expectations reflected in the current state and national policies.

These criteria can be juxtaposed with the most pressing needs for teacher development identified by the APPLE project, which are to:

256establish a secure and shared knowledge base for teacher thinking and practice;

257develop the ability of teachers to articulate practice professionally, using a precise technical language;

258develop and implement differentiated approaches for development;

259create and maintain a professional culture within the school system and school;

260create the expectation that research and sound evidence of successful practice be used as the primary basis to inform improvement of teaching and learning.

Responding to only the first two of these needs is congruent with addressing both the status and needs of teachers and schools and school systems. Furthermore, meeting those needs may also be effective in both influencing and responding to the expectations of governments and systems as a whole. Essentially, the APPLE findings indicate a need for “agreement-for-now” about


collective “knowledge-for-now” about effective teaching practice. Without this agreement, the “profession” probably will be condemned forever to Schon’s “swampy lowlands”.

The APPLE team concluded that if educators are to understand, adopt, and use a common set of professional language for thinking and talking about teaching, there needs to be a meaningful “back and forth” among teachers regarding their practice. Closely related to this need for common language content is a critical need to rethink the usual focus and approach for observing, evaluating, and critiquing teaching. Whereas the current tendency is to judge the quality of teaching (it’s good or it’s bad), there is a critical need to be more analytic. Educators tend to be so quick to judge and then to “fix it” that they typically do not determine fully just what it is that “needs to be fixed”. If the field of education is serious about professional development, this tendency to “judge and fix” needs to change. Educators can begin that change by focusing their talking and thinking on teaching; not on “good” and “bad” teachers. Those changes might results, also, in a change in the relationships between and among teachers so that “judging people” no longer occurs as a substitute for judging quality of practices. Thus, the emancipation of teaching depends upon its recognition of the need for and the adoption of a technical and theoretical knowledge base and the language which goes with it.

However, professional development that is likely to be successful in deepening professional understanding must also include strategies for developing objectivity and the means for communicating in a professional manner. The APPLE researchers were often impressed by the passion and emotional commitment of the teachers in their sample, but found that passion and effectiveness are connected in very complex ways. A sufficient measure of passion for teaching appeared to be a necessary condition for effectiveness, but a high degree of passion was also found alongside practice that was seriously wanting in quality. The place of passion and emotional commitment in teaching need to be acknowledged in the strategies for development—developing sufficient commitment and belief in the central importance of the endeavor are both inevitable and essential. However, these qualities must not be confused with, nor substituted for, the needs to know and to do with greater understanding and precision.

The need for a highly differentiated approach to professional development is indicated by the APPLE typology of teaching. Teachers whose practices are consistent with one of these types differ so markedly in their practice, understandings, and knowledge from those in other types that it must be clear that one size for development does not fit all. Time and again APPLE researchers realized how complex teaching is, how individual each teacher’s schema for teaching are, and how unique each teacher’s interpretation of “doing teaching” is. Critical to developing this notion, though, is the assessment and diagnosis of need. It is important that the roles in development of manager, expert and professional teacher are clearly understood and that large elements of self assessment and self diagnosis are present.

The means of professional development of teachers can and must take whatever forms are appropriate to the intended learning of those teachers. That is, just as there is a need to differentiate instruction to “meet the needs of learners in classrooms”, so the programs of professional development must be differentiated. Toward serving that need, several APPLE processes proved highly productive; the interview, the interrogation, the Knowledge V, and the creation of the summary analysis. The APPLE team does not offer these processes as a panacea, and certainly not as a recipe, but it does present them as examples of processes that demand the


highest levels of professional engagement, usage of the best theories with an understanding of practice, and the skills of communicating in reflective, respectful and informed ways.

In summary, personal and professional growth should be characterized by:

102personal assessment and reflection

103differentiated response focused to teacher needs

104placing within a context of school and organization goals

105use of co-operative or collaborative means of reflection

106respect, objectiveness, and openness

107recognition of the centrality of professional knowledge—having something to reflect with, as well as on.

The APPLE goal is that professional development be provided so that teachers are confident in their knowledge of excellence in practice, trust their knowledge of articulated, principled practice, and have an appropriate degree of ownership in and responsibility for improving their teaching with the support and challenge of others as they, also, seek to improve their teaching.

Though it is easy to focus on teachers, the culture for professional development is the joint responsibility of all positions in educational systems—the superintendent, principal, and staff, in partnership with training institutions and government. The development of educators is enhanced and the system benefited when the professional development of teachers “fits” or also serves the school and the school system goals for improvement. Successful development conforms to the principle that “the whole is more than the sum of the parts”. Nevertheless, it is likely that the importance of connecting the personal and professional development of teachers to school development will be realized only when genuine communities of learners are created within learning-focused schools.

It is interesting to note that few schools and systems studied seemed to tap the expertise from college or university faculties to provide the reviews of research or literature related to problems of practice. Often universities reach out to schools that exhibit strong practices, but the reverse service was found only occasionally.

Additionally, in both England and USA, there is great tension about how to provide a climate and process of improvement for teachers within the context of mandated curricula along with high-stakes testing programs. The tendency to provide in-service on adopted programs was noted. However, even within these pressure contexts, there were a few schools that continued to focus on students and their learning and on the design of systems that supported teachers in their development.

To conclude this section, it may be instructive to identify some practices for school and teacher development that were found in project schools that appeared to support the professional development of teachers. Among those practices were:

108the principal or head teacher was clearly the “lead learner” ( Also noted by Day, 1999, p. 83.)


109use of one or more lead teachers in each area of curriculum and instruction

110use of peer teachers to help in problem-solving

111demonstrating a clear mission and a clear vision of what the school expected to be

112team planning for curriculum definition or teaching

113both opportunities for and encouragement of professional talk

114high focus individual and group learning

115use of curriculum or instructional change projects or action-learning projects

116authentic mentoring of beginning teachers

117creation of new roles for teachers; i. e., site coordinators and partnership teachers

118design of staff development focused to school and school system goals

119teacher engagement in decision-making about development needs

120provision for strong mechanisms to support teacher work.

121individual reflection and group talk about teaching and learning.

The APPLE research team concluded that these practices, used within the context of a shared and secure knowledge base and its associated precise technical language, have the potential for contributing to the change of teaching into a profession. It is comparatively easy to design a system for curriculum leadership and management, but unless those who lead and manage have the requisite professional knowledge and the ability to articulate it and connect it to practice, the venture probably will be pointless. Similarly, everyone seems to be in favor of “reflection”, but unless there is both something to reflect with (i.e., real professional knowledge) and a clear understanding of what to reflect on, the activity may be worse than useless; it may simply reinforce normative quality, not improve understanding or practices.

To summarize, collegiality, collaboration, involvement and “professional” respect are crucial parts or qualities of the process of education, but will achieve nothing unless a shared professional knowledge and its technical language are secured within an organizational system of support and challenge for personal and organizational growth and development.

Implications for the development of schools and school systems

The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future recommends that schools should be organized for both student and teacher learning. (Darling-Hammond, 1997). Apparently, many are not. The developments and findings from the APPLE project have implications for both of these learning purposes derived from the developments relating to the ways in which schools and school systems conceive of and organize for development. It should be stressed that, while the focus of the project and recommendations are on developing the capacity of teachers, there are important implications also for the leadership and management approaches to the task of teacher development.


Based on the assumption that organization development occurs through development of individual and group capacity and through the development of the system for optimum support task accomplishment, the APPLE implications for school and school system development can be organized around the same three themes that apply to development of teachers. Those are:

122the need for a secure and shared knowledge base for teaching;

123the APPLE finding that, even among the most able teachers, the ability to articulate professional knowledge and practice is rare;

124the implication of the APPLE typology of teaching that different teachers have different development needs—one size does not fit all.

A further assumption for development of schools and school systems is ethical in nature, and must be accepted if one is to agree with much of the claimed APPLE implications for development. That assumption is that teachers, schools and school systems are responsible for doing the best they can to help students learn. It follows from that assumption that it is the responsibility of the organization—whether defined as the school or the school system—to adopt the best technology available for meeting its purposes. Once adopted, it is the organization’s responsibility to create and maintain the organizational conditions that are needed to support optimally the implementation of the technical system based on that technology. For teacher development, that means the organization has a responsibility to adopt the best technology for developing the capacity of teachers to the highest possible level. In APPLE terms, that means, ultimately (and for teachers with the capacity), to the point of mastercraftsmenship and beyond—master teachers who do have the ability to articulate their professional knowledge and practice. It follows from those assumptions that schools and school systems need to develop and maintain organizational patterns that support both the acquisition and use of such professional learnings.

The need for a shared professional knowledge base for teaching has been argued elsewhere in this book. It is sufficient here to say that such a knowledge base has not yet been adopted in most schools and systems, and that it needs to be. The knowledge base—whether the APPLE sixteen variables and their related knowledge bases, or something else—is the foundational learning, the basis of the “technology” that needs to be adopted. The APPLE evidence suggests that significant numbers of teachers lack significant parts of a professional knowledge base (however defined); action on this is needed.

It has also been argued elsewhere in this book that the inability of even the best teachers to articulate their practice. Although this inability may not be a problem for their own teaching of their students, it is a problem for their organizations and beyond. Furthermore, that lack of knowledge probably is a significant barrier to the efficiency of their own problem-solving and improvement efforts. These master teachers are a valuable resource potential whose value cannot be tapped by the organization for the benefit of other teachers and the school or school system as a whole. The claim here, then, is that the organizations need to find and adopt strategies that will develop the capacity to articulate knowledge and practice. Although this is probably most important in respect to the mastercraftsmen, it applies to all teachers—developing collegiate capacity is one of the goals of a learning-centered organization. Furthermore, it seems self evident that the ability to articulate professional knowledge and practice is a requirement for


effective discharge of mentoring duties, whether with pre-service, new, or more experienced colleagues. The organization’s need is for teachers who are knowledgeable about what they teach, knowledgeable about how they teach, and skilled in doing teaching and in helping others. Such teachers need to have not only the ability to teach well, but also the knowledge and strategies for engaging in reflective and shared analyses of teaching. For professional reasons, teachers need to share that expertise with others.

It is too simplistic to think that all of the complexities of teaching are understood fully and can be articulated at any moment in time by any single individual. Professional teachers will always be learning and always be helping others learn, or being assisted by others in their own learning. Schools and school systems need this type of condition to exist and they must find meaningful ways to support teacher development. The organization leaders need to recognize and support different kinds of staff development and then celebrate the successes in individual and collective growth.

It would be optimal (if not idealistic) if the whole process of professional learning were established in pre-service teacher education and training. It would be optimal, too, if pre-service programs could develop skills in reflection and critical thinking as well as collaborative learning. Even if these conditions were uniformly achieved, it would not suffice for the needs of teaching as a profession. Contexts change, roles change, expectations change, and new learning is required. Teachers who have already embarked on their careers, newly-educated teachers, and teachers who are placed in the role, but not educated to teaching, work together in schools to support the learning of students. How can schools and school systems provide for the development of all of these teachers to the level of professional?

First, the organization needs to adopt the ( or “a” ) knowledge base. Second, it needs to design and adopt strategies that will develop the capacities of teachers to know and to use that knowledge base. And third, the organization needs to maintain the system in a way that professionalization is celebrated and rewarded—this professionalization is likely to be almost self sustaining once adopted authentically.

Recognizing and endorsing a knowledge base is easy, once the need is recognized and the choice made. Designing, developing, and adopting the strategies to put those knowledge bases into the thinking structures of teachers and teacher groups is much more difficult. The early stages of the APPLE Action project may cast some light on this. Here, the US school system involved in the project is pilot testing the adoption of the APPLE framework and methods as, respectively, the knowledge base and the initial technology for teacher and school development.

The first task has been to introduce teachers and principals to the knowledge base and methods developed in the APPLE project, using the following process:

125introduction, explanation, instruction;

126trying out their use in simulated, video-based conferences; testing it in selected classrooms by exploring the use of APPLE processes;

127reviewing to check for shared understanding, meanings, misunderstandings, and misconceptions;


128trying out again in another selected classroom; getting more sophisticated, clarifying what is and is not known and understood;

129beginning to develop “slickness” and confidence in using the system by participating in analyses of classes beyond ones for which they have direct observational experience.

So far, the indications are that principals and teachers can and will adopt the knowledge base and commit to using it—at least to the degree that they understand it. There are, of course, areas in which individual and collective knowledge and understanding need significant development before they can understand and use some of the precision components of the system. Therefore, differentiated support from and engagement with the other “professionals” is essential. It is already clear that engaging in the rigorous process develops the capacity to articulate thoughts about teaching, and intensive engagement in the process of interrogation guided by “experts”, develops the capacity of individuals to analyze practice with far more precision, using a clear framework of professional knowledge, than was possible at the beginning of the pilot testing.

It was instructive to the APPLE team to recognize that one of the barriers to successful adoption of the process is a “humanistic” reluctance of teachers to score performance negatively on the dimensions (i.e. –1 or –2 in the APPLE system), and to recognize that it takes significant time to accommodate to this scoring system. It is difficult for the teachers and principals to acquire the understanding that it is teaching not teachers that is being scored, and to come to the understanding that only honest and rigorous analysis can be truly emancipatory and effective in developing the professional system. Comfort with rigorous analysis of teaching takes time. The “culture” of schooling has not demanded, nor even supported, objective analysis of performance and separation of performance and person.

The role of “expert” is mentioned above as important in the change process. In the case being described, the “experts” were the members of the research team—the superintendent and a field-based teacher educator from the participating school system, researchers, and university-based teacher educators. It probably is the case that similar “experts” will be essential facilitators and leaders in the initial stages of such a reform process; later they probably can be relegated to the role of resource personnel—to support the further understanding of the knowledge base. Of course, such “experts” must, themselves, possess that knowledge base and the knowledge and skills necessary for leading the professional development activity.

The APPLE implication that different teachers need different development strategies has not been addressed in action so far, except in that there is some “self matching” capacity in the APPLE procedures, but not enough, certainly, to clarify some of the system needs. It remains to be seen whether teachers whose development needs are significant can or will respond to the system or benefit significantly from having it applied to them. In the APPLE typology, there may be serious doubts about the capacity of the Child Minders, for example, to understand the processes sufficiently well to begin to engage in them.

Nevertheless, leaving aside those teachers who may be unable or unwilling to engage in this rigorous and demanding development activity, there is no reason why the process shouldn’t “work” for the majority, provided certain conditions are met. The APPLE Action experience to


date indicates that the following conditions are necessary in the education of teachers and principals to the use of the analysis processes:

130an overt commitment to learning and using the knowledge base—not as incontrovertible “fact”, but as “best-knowledge-for-now” (principles and theories that are good enough to make decisions better with them than without them);

131a rigorous and relentless approach to the analysis of teaching (not teachers) in which only “the best that might be” is regarded as high quality and as the legitimate standard for comparison;

132a clear statement of ethics and purposes, especially commitment to the responsibility of systems, schools and teachers to adopt the best strategies for doing the best they can for their students;

133an inclusive and invitational approach—all are invited to participate, no part of the system or individual is coerced (all the while, the system must continue to realize and use the clear understanding that it has the responsibility to provide effective, high-quality teaching for all its students);

134a commitment to the provision of adequate time and personnel to enable the approach to work required for teaching as a professional endeavor;

135an overt strategy for development of individuals and the organization in which decision-making about progress and tactics is shared;

136clear and well-managed connections to other, existing and new initiatives (e. g., National Board Certification of Teachers);

137a willingness to exercise patience and even to insist that change processes be implemented as they are intended and within the schedules that are reasonable to bring about the amount and scope of change intended—to take the processes at the best pace they will tolerate, not faster.

Day (1999) cites the experience of several major school improvement initiatives in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia (Hopkins et al 1998; Fullan, 1995; Joyce, Shaws & Weil, 1992; Sachs, 1997; Sachs & Groundwater Smith, 1996) and develops an analysis of conditions for success. Those conditions are not dissimilar to those obtained from the APPLE Action phase and listed above. They include, most importantly, the conditions for creating learning communities, which are continuing sensitivity to differences among individuals, sensitivity to particular characteristics and needs of schools, and to the affect of teachers—all operating within a goal-oriented ethos.

However, although Day (and others) stress the importance of several new and recent learnings about the hows and whys of teacher and organization development, the substantive knowledge base for teaching seems to be considered only implicitly. Furthermore, the capacity of teachers to articulate and communicate the knowledge base is given scant attention, except as a desirable outcome of developing communities of learners. The APPLE proposition is that both of these are fundamental to significant and sustained improvement of both teaching and schooling. Without the knowledge base and the ability to articulate it, the rest may well produce communities—but not of learners and not of professional practitioners.


However, combining these two conditions with others derived from the “communities of learners” idea, may well be a way forward. There are indications that the adoption of a knowledge base for effective teaching, the development of the abilities of teachers and administrators to articulate practice in a clear technical language connected to that knowledge base, and an understanding of the need for highly differentiated development processes are all possible using the APPLE framework.

Ultimately, school systems, not individual teachers or schools, are responsible for student learning; they are, then, responsible for knowing and making accessible to teachers the best technology for instruction. The dangers that some may feel from acknowledging these imperatives—“top-downism”, coercion, and exclusion of teachers from important decision making—are obvious, and with good reason based on many examples of poor organizational decision-making. Nevertheless, “professionals” should be able to distinguish their own decision-making responsibility and authority from that of other positions and functions within their respective organizations and field. Organization-level leadership is the responsibility of people in organization-level positions. “Professionals” in those organization-level positions will understand how to make decisions at that level and will not attempt to make decisions that are legitimately the domain of another level or type of professional within the organization—CEOs do not make product-design decisions; superintendents do not make particular classroom-practices decisions; principals do not make classroom organization decisions; etc. Rather, they create optimum organization conditions so the specialists in those areas who have the particular responsibility can make those decisions.

Teachers often are critical of “top-down” approaches to strategic decision-making that result in options that they think restrict unduly what they do or manages matters over which they think they, as teachers, should have individual or collective discretion. They often say, “we were not involved”, indicating that they think they should have been parties to the decision-making process. Teachers often use such examples of organization-level decision-making that encroach on issues or practices over which they think they should have control as a rationale for “site-based” decision-making or “more teacher control”. Perhaps justified. But, perhaps not.

Bad decision-making is bad decision-making, whether made by one person or by a collective that confuses democracy with professional competence and professional responsibility. Bad decisions made by people at any point within an organization do not necessarily indicate a need to adopt a new form of organization. More likely, bad decision-making indicates a need for better decision-making. Taking legitimate organization-level strategic decision autonomy and responsibility from the organization-level positions probably will not improve an organization over the long run, and probably will not make other occupation groups “more professional” because they have assumed control over those decisions.

It educational systems, it probably is essential that teachers are engaged in and with strategic decision-making—but in what ways and for what purposes? Legitimate strategic decision-making requires sound information on which to base the choices. When decisions are being made among strategies for, as an example, organizing the school to facilitate teaching and student learning, then someone must be able to describe the types of teaching and teacher work that will be most effective. That is the job of the teachers or instructional specialists, not the principal, superintendent, a lay board, or a legislative body. The findings from the APPLE


Project indicate that most teachers cannot do that with much degree of precision or from a common voice—they have no common professional knowledge base or language. Of course, neither do the others engaged in the decision-making. Therefore, whatever the decision outcome, the results probably will be less than what is needed to support teaching as a profession.

If there are aspirations for teaching to become more professional, then it might be well for teachers to strive to achieve the foundational conditions they need as teachers and as organizational attributes to support teaching as a profession. Among those conditions will be a sound organization in which the best technologies for teaching are adopted and the structural conditions created and maintained for those technologies to be manifested in practices. “Professionals” in strategic decision-making positions should know that they are not the people who know the best technologies. Rather, they should know, or know how to determine, who does know and then should know how to get their knowledge into the organization’s decision-making.

Those responsible for schools and schooling and teachers will become more “professional” to the extent that they insist that practices at each point in the organization meet reasonable standards for professional performance of a person occupying the respective positions—they place responsibility on people in leadership positions for sound decision-making, they do not try to make the decisions themselves. But, teachers cannot be professional until they collectively meet conditions for a profession. Reaching that point in respect to adopting and using a common technical and theoretical knowledge base will allow them to provide the information that “professional” organization-level decision-makers need for their work to create and maintain the organizational conditions the teachers need to practice professionally.

To paraphrase Eliza Doolittle a bit; perhaps the real difference between a “professional” and a “non-professional” is in how she’s treated! Professionals will know what they are doing and why, and they can articulate it. Furthermore, they will treat people authentically as they provide services that meet standards of their profession. Schools and school systems that value this standard for relationships and work will organize and support the development of conditions to support that interest. If teaching should ever achieve the state of being a profession, then others would treat them as professionals not in a “human” sense as intended by Eliza, but by not assuming they could or should make decisions that are legitimately those of the profession—principals, parents, superintendents, school boards and legislatures would leave matters of teaching practice to teachers.

If the schools and systems are to be successful in helping teaching to become a profession, they must adopt a knowledge base and a related common language, and then help teachers acquire them. APPLE findings indicate that this process of teacher development—thus school or system development—cannot be a “one-size-fits-all” approach, but rather one that recognizes the complexities of the relationships among the 16 dimensions of teaching and the differences among the types of teaching. Furthermore, the schools and systems must organize and operate so that teachers have discretion over legitimate teacher decisions. There should be no question in the organization or its context about who should make decisions that legitimately belong within a particular profession.

Implications for pre-service teacher education and training


The APPLE project has several important implications for the initial or pre-service education and training of teachers. These implications can be broadly categorized as:

138Identification of the knowledge-base that can underpin the curricula of teacher education and the processes of training needed for competence-building for classroom teaching;

139Identification of the knowledge-base and understandings of professionality that teachers will need if they are to fulfill in their wider roles as mentors, collegiate professionals, and participants in research;

140Identification of the ways in which organizational connections between school systems, schools and educational institutions are structured and, in particular, identification of the ways in which partnership roles for teachers or mentors are defined.

The first set of implications concern the need for a better conceptualization of the knowledge base for classroom teaching. The APPLE variables are drawn from a conceptualization of what that knowledge base might be; they are a distillation of it. They are claimed to include all aspects of “knowledge-for-now” about effective teaching. The APPLE evidence, reflected in the typology of teaching, indicates that there are significant numbers of teachers whose professional knowledge, especially of pedagogy, is incomplete, sometimes to the point of serious dysfunction. The typology also indicates that, even among the very best teaching examples, teachers found it difficult to discuss their practice using any reference to educational theories, principles, or beliefs.

However the knowledge-base for teaching may be defined in detail, its key components seem to be clear-–knowledge of subjects, knowledge of curricula, knowledge of learners and learning, knowledge of pedagogy and knowledge of the aims and functions of the system. Teachers in the APPLE project mentored beginning teachers or student teachers. These topics. The fabric of teaching, were discussed. When offered the opportunity of reflection about the basis for their practice, APPLE project participants had difficulty responding. Some participants, more often than not, seemed to lack important parts of this knowledge-base, or simply could not recall any rationale for their practices. Perhaps they were not taught it, did not learn it, have forgotten it or choose not to use it. A study of the curricula for teacher-education suggests that it is probably the first of these reasons which is most likely in the UK. In the US the problem may be more closely related to a discontinuity between theory and practice, especially temporal discontinuity, and to cultural expectations in teacher education which place a higher value on content pedagogy than on use of theoretical knowledge.

In the UK, the last fifteen years has seen growing centralized control over the content and design of initial training programs. (DES Circulars 3/84, 24/89, 14/93) to the point at which there is virtually a national curriculum for teacher training (DfEE Circular 10/97). Turner-Bisset (1999) identifies three themes which have characterized this period—the growing centrality of subject knowledge, the greatly increased involvement of schools and teachers in training programs, and the shift away from teacher education to competencies-based training. It is perhaps the focus on competence rather than on foundational professional knowledge that is the main cause of the failure of all these government initiatives to conceptualize adequately the knowledge for teaching. The most apparent, and damaging, feature of this failure is the near-exclusion of pedagogy from time provision in these programs. The assumption seems to be that pedagogy


doesn’t need to be taught—it can be caught while the trainees are in school with “real” teachers. The fact that not all these “real” teachers, themselves, have the required knowledge or language to express it, does not seem to have been considered. Other failures of these systems have included inadequate conceptualizations of subject knowledge for teaching and of curricular knowledge.

In the USA, there has been a strong movement or focus to include performance or competence-building in teaching education programs. This has not, as yet, replaced the development of foundational knowledge for teaching nor the development of theory as it relates to practice, but it may be dangerously close to that point. There is great emphasis in the larger community and in state legislatures on student learning and, in some states, monetary rewards for schools with high student achievement on large-scale, high-stakes tests. Universities and school systems have restructured, if not reconceptualised, their relationships so that field-based experiences are improved. This has also included the education of mentors to take new roles and responsibilities. (Wideen & Trimmett 1995, p222). US colleges and universities are still seeking to educate and train, perhaps doing neither as well as they might (or as well as they would like).

It is ironic that it is during this same recent time period that perhaps the most exciting advances have been made in the theory and research that could inform policy for teacher education and training. The fields of study on teacher thinking and the nature of professional knowledge for teaching can be claimed to have developed to the point at which we know enough to ground teacher education and training in a clear conceptualization of what beginning teachers need.

The APPLE findings, and those of others, indicate that the general curriculum areas for teacher education and training needs to include:

141Subject knowledge

142Curriculum knowledge

143Pedagogical knowledge

144Knowledge of learners

145Knowledge of organizations

146Knowledge of inquiry or research procedures.

The APPLE developments and findings go much further than merely elaborating these general curriculum areas to elaborate sets of specific technical and theoretical knowledge and skills that are needed to meet satisfactory standards for teaching defined by the 16 dimensions of teaching and the related APPLE Action processes for assessing teaching quality.

These general topics (above) probably can be found in most traditional teacher education programs. However, these curriculum components should not be treated as wholly discrete elements of content as they often are, but as interconnected and, above all, connected with practice. These interconnections are illustrated by the 16 dimensions, the types of teaching, and the systems for assessing teaching quality.


The relationship between theory and practice needs to be articulated clearly throughout teacher education programs and that relationship needs to be embedded in the ways courses and related experiences are designed and implemented. Just as professional development should be differentiated, so should the initial education of teachers. The same principles of adult learning used in the design of professional development of teachers should be used in the design of pre-service teacher education. The processes for educating pre-service teachers should include:

147Meaningful engagement with and reflection about teaching

148Authentic connections with teachers and schools

149Critical analysis of the processes of teaching and learning

150The use of evidence to explain teaching and learning, including linking teaching and learning consequences to the bodies of knowledge that underpin learning and the practice of teaching

151The use of self-assessment, development planning, and goal setting

152The creation of systems of learning across organizations: schools, universities, and the individuals within each organization.

The criteria for exit from teacher education programs should include:

153The ability to articulate an educational philosophy that is grounded in theories of learning and practice, rather than on personal values, and the ability to link that philosophy to related practices

154The expectation that teaching should be based on systems of generalizable evidence

155The willingness and expertise in engaging in collaborative learning

156The ability and propensity for independent learning

157The intention and ability to continue learning.

Perhaps most important, though, is the ability of teachers to conceptualize and express practice in a clear, precise technical language. It seems that it is in the area of pedagogy that this is most lacking. Also, it is far from clear that the conceptualization of subject matter knowledge for teaching and curriculum knowledge has reached a sufficiently sophisticated level within many teacher-education programs and among most teachers. For example, it seems clear that what Schwab (1964, 1978) calls substantive and syntactic elements of subject knowledge are understandings vital to teachers—you cannot teach history, for example, unless you understand the notion of history and historical ways of proceeding (except as a body of information to be learned). It would seem sensible to assume, then, that pre-service training should address these matters and ensure that beginning teachers have a sound epistemological foundation for their subject and curriculum thinking. Without this knowledge, any notion that teachers can analyze, critique and evaluate authentically the tasks they offer their students is false. Of course, all this proposes that teacher education and training should be both very intellectually demanding and practically effective.

Of course, a curriculum for pre-service teacher education and training can be only a foundation for the development of a full complement of professional knowledge and practical classroom


abilities. Such an intellectually and professionally authentic foundation presupposes a philosophy and system in which continuing professional learning is fully conceptualized and organized. Again, though, it is essential that a clear, well-founded, and practical definition of professional knowledge for teaching is found and agreed—at least for now!

A system for organizing continuing professional learning would be essential. The existing and growing Professional Development System (PDS) movement in the USA may well provide a basis for this, although so far impacts are relatively small-scale (Byrd & McIntyre, 1999). Kochan (1999), for example, reports that success in impacting the preparation of pre-service teachers, improving schools, and creating learning communities seems to be “the result of individual commitment rather than institutional change” (p.173). In the UK, the development of school-university partnerships and mentoring have been driven more by national policy than by choices made by the institutions. Although these developments have demonstrated the potential for partnership and mentoring to be professionally productive for both parties, the degree to which real gains in quality have been yielded has yet to be demonstrated. However, a system of University—School System and School partnerships, founded on a clear conceptualization of professional knowledge for teaching and incorporating a clear system for continuing professional learning could well be the way forward.

The idea of universities, school systems, and schools working together continuously, systematically and on a system-wide scale, with a clear conceptualization of the professional knowledge base for teaching, a commitment to excellence and clear strategies for development is a very long way from where we are now. But it does make sense—especially if teaching’s aspirations to professionalization is to begin to be realized.

The second set of implications of the APPLE project for the education and training of teachers concerns teachers’ wider collegiate and professional roles. As well as secure professional knowledge, teachers need the skills and attitudes and understanding of systems that underpin all co-operative systemic endeavor.

Fullan, (1993) cites several examples of attempts to make fundamental reform that, while apparently well founded, sustained, and well intentioned, failed to make any significant difference to student learning. His analysis leads to the conclusion that “faulty maps of change” is a key problem. Both top-down and bottom-up models are inadequate without a deep knowledge and understanding of change processes. This knowledge appears to be fairly rare in the educational world. Perhaps it should be seen as essential foundational knowledge for all who aspire to any kind of leadership role in education; that means everyone. Knowledge and understanding of systems, “the” system and change processes should be part of the teacher educator curriculum—at initial, further and advanced levels. But, to refer to the first theme of this section, the knowledge base issue, until we all have some kind of common ground about the technology of our task, little else can be achieved.

In Fullan’s vision, teachers would be active, knowledgeable, collaborative and reflective, similar to the idea of the teacher-as-researcher developed by Elliott and Adelman (1973) and Stenhouse (1976). The teacher-researcher idea has become somewhat unfashionable recently, perhaps because our centralized systems have become overly recipe-based (in terms of both curriculum and, increasingly, pedagogy). However, as Hargreaves (1996) argues, it is difficult to conceive


of a real professional who does not engage in some way with the study of his or her own practice.

This is not the place to discuss the “hows” of teacher-as-researcher except insofar as the idea impacts pre-service teacher education and training, when it would seem imperative to inculcate certain attitudes and values. Among these should be the understanding that theory is propositional, that theory is both exciting and of practical value, and that practical value can be utilized authentically in the study of classroom practices. Student teachers could, in this sense, be beginning researchers from the first time they start to analyze teaching in classrooms—theirs and others’. The selection of theory is, of course, important. It needs to be “usable” by, and clearly useful to, the teacher.

A starting point for this selection could be the underpinnings of the APPLE sixteen variables. Getting research mindedness into place early in teacher education programs could be further supported by the requirement for all student teachers to produce a more substantial piece of practice-based inquiry. This could help beginning teachers to know that there is, at least, something to use in teaching beyond what Hargreaves (1993) calls “professional common sense knowledge” (PCSK) and to know “that something” is a technical knowledge base for their profession.

The third set of implications of APPLE for pre-service education and training of teachers concerns the much more immediate matter of how schools and teachers operate their current mentoring roles. The problem is very clear—and it is a huge one. Schools and teachers now take a major part in the training of teachers. In principle, this is as it should be. But, in practice, it is a deeply flawed idea simply because an insufficient number of practicing teachers are adequately knowledgeable and skilled to carry out the role. The APPLE evidence indicates that even amongst the most able teachers the ability to articulate practice in a clear, technical language is rare. Further, the evidence indicates that significant numbers of teachers do not teach well. (Remember, the APPLE sample was drawn from the population of teachers who work as mentors in formalized university-school partnership systems).

To continue with this system of mentoring as it is now is to recycle inadequacy. This clearly won’t do. Ideally, of course, all mentors of students or beginning teachers would be mastercraftsmen who do have the ability to articulate practice. That, clearly, is not a realistic proposition at the present time. However, there is some cause for optimism from the initial stages of APPLE Action. Teachers, however their teaching may have been typed, demonstrated an interest in teaching better. An active commitment to improvement, securely based in real professional knowledge and evidence, applied system-wide as in the APPLE Action project, may prove to be the ideal environment for student and beginning teachers too. It is characterized by:

158commitment to improvement;

159openness and honesty;

160a concern for real professional knowledge;

161the understanding of the propositional nature of that knowledge;

162commitment to professional debate.


In such a climate there is every opportunity for beginning teachers to acquire the attitudes and values of continuing professional learning and to reflect critically on their own, and others’, teaching. Ultimately, though, there is no substitute for clear and well-focused professional knowledge.

All the above has focused mainly on teachers’ professional knowledge and their ability to articulate it. This knowledge is an indispensable foundation for effective teaching and effective schools. However, all the professional knowledge in the world is of little use unless teachers are skilled and highly competent practitioners. It is sad indeed that the recent history of teacher education and training in the UK seems to be based on the belief that you can’t have both—you either educate of train—and nowadays we just train. Yet this is not only an unnecessary dichotomy, it is a daft one. American educators would probably agree. Definitions of education and training from the work of Steadman, Eraut, Fielding & Harlin (1995, in Day, 1999) help to explain the complementary nature of the two:

“Education helps you decide what to do. Training helps you to do what is necessary more consistently, effectively and efficiently” (p.67).

What is proposed here for teacher education might, with some justification, be called a “professional knowledge paradigm”. However, as Calderhead (1993) argues in his critique of Zeichner’s (1983) four paradigms, such simple labels mislead. If APPLE is defined as proposing a “professional knowledge paradigm”, it is only in the sense that professional knowledge is defined as an indispensable foundation for everything else—the craft, the skills, the intuition, the reflection, the analysis, the knowledge of context, among others. Such a paradigm most certainly is not something that follows from Hargreaves’ PCSK.

It is perhaps the case in current teacher education and training that the central problem resides in the conceptualization of teaching as a dual relationship between theory and practice. We now have enough information and understanding of teaching to conceptualize it as “multi-dimensional and multi-faceted, involving a large number of aspects and relationships. Teaching needs to be represented as complex and relativistic, pluralistic, not dualistic.” (Squires, 1999, p. 142.) It would be possible to design a teacher education and training system that was authentically knowledge-based, practically effective in developing skillful teachers, and that would lay a foundation for authentic continuing professional learning. Consider the following ideas:

163a theory base for effective teaching exists—and it is at least good-enough-for-now;

164theory that explains classroom events and can contribute to decision making does exist and is available; connectedness can be achieved given a secure knowledge base;

165a climate of interest and inquiry-mindedness can be established, especially where there is institutional commitment;

166theory and practice can be connected for pre-service teachers, beginning teachers and experienced teachers; all it needs is facilitating;

167practices in both teacher education and schools could be congruent if the knowledge base was secure and shared; theory-practice relationships might then also be clarified;


168pre-service programs could be designed to make theory and practice link, both in course content and in the temporal disposition of school-based and university-based activity; this is not just a pre-service issue, but one for schools and universities as they work together;

169learning to teach could be based on an inquiry-minded philosophy; “skilling” and knowledge acquisition are not mutually exclusive.

The time is ripe for acting on what we know.

To summarize, the APPLE findings indicate that all is not well with teaching. There are serious shortcomings in the knowledge-base of significant numbers of teachers and there is an almost universal inability to articulate practice in a clear, technical language. There is no profession in which such a state of affairs could, or should, be tolerated. There is a need for a radical re-examination of what the knowledge-base for teaching should be and of the ways in which it is acquired by aspiring professionals, both initially (pre-service) and throughout their careers. This implies radical changes in the curriculum for teacher education and training and for the roles and ways of operating of university and school systems.

Implications for advanced certification and qualification

Advanced certification, in the form of masters’ programs, National Board Certification (NBC) in the USA, the Advanced Skills Teachers (AST) scheme in England or any other advanced qualification in teaching, necessarily implies advanced teaching skills. The concept of advanced teaching is open to different interpretations by different people. Effective teaching as identified by the body of literature may not be the same as effective teaching as defined by others; for example, by advanced certification program requirements, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) in England, Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) in the USA, the general public (parents in particular), and teachers themselves.

Of course there is the danger that a universally-accepted definition might lead to recipes for effectiveness, as is already happening to some degree in both the USA and England. The APPLE view rejects recipe, but strongly asserts that dimensions of teaching that are associated with effectiveness can be identified and used as an interrelated set of criteria for effectiveness; and that many different kinds or styles of teaching can meet these criteria. The knowledge base that informs the use of these dimensions and their related criteria for quality is assumed always to be “for now”. Each new study (if not repetitive and is high in quality) contributes fresh understanding to this knowledge base, and each variable that is perceived to have an effect on the quality of teaching is “additive”–many small improvements combine to add up to overall improvement (Davis & Thomas, (1989).

Although the APPLE project does not advocate using the APPLE typology as a system for public recognition of exemplary teaching or for creating a position of status within teaching, the APPLE framework can illuminate and inform thinking about the recognition and certification of the most able teachers. The sixteen variables provide an articulation of the characteristics of teaching and a knowledge base for effective teaching; the analytic procedures, the typology and the definitions of “slippage” can all contribute to the development of frameworks for assessing


practice, especially when those frameworks aim to go beyond normative quality. Thus, although APPLE was developed as a system for assessing and developing teaching—not for testing and recognizing teachers—it might be used as part of a formal process for setting standards of performance or for defining certification criteria.

There is growing determination, both in the USA and England, to identify highly effective teaching. The NBC in the USA is a major initiative for identifying exemplary teaching and giving public recognition to teachers who achieve it; in England the fairly recent AST has the same purpose. The phrase “publicly recognized” is crucial. There are potential dangers inherent in public recognition of highly accomplished teachers. There is evidence that some teachers become complacent or “elitist” after achieving advanced certification. The concept of exemplary teaching, as identified by the APPLE project, is embodied in the mastercraftsmen. One of the attributes of the teachers who fit into that category in the APPLE study is their continuing thrust for personal learning and for personal growth. They seem unaware of how effective they are in the classroom; they exhibit no signs of complacency or elitism. Their focus is firmly rooted in improving student learning with no evidence of action intended to serve any personal or social needs. This creates a dilemma. On the one hand some means of public identification of teaching quality is necessary if excellent teachers are to have a role in the professional development of less skilled teachers. On the other hand, public recognition may provoke undesirable responses from some of the teachers so recognized, or among the other teachers who have not achieved that level of teaching quality.

An important characteristic of highly accomplished teaching is that there is evidence in the classroom of a strong underpinning framework, based on links between theory, research and practice. The links between theory and research and practice were problematic in the APPLE study; they are also problematic in the identification and assessment of exemplary teachers. In the APPLE project, the most accomplished teachers’ practice conformed closely to what theory and research, as synthesized in the sixteen variables, would propose. However, this was not explicitly known or acknowledged by these teachers. The underpinnings were there. “Theory-in-action” and “research-in-action” would not be wholly inappropriate descriptors of practice in these classrooms, but the link is implicit, seamless, unconscious. The NBC is based on a prescribed set of thorough and detailed standards that appear to have theoretical underpinnings, although these are not directly referenced in their materials. Some teachers cannot transfer theoretical knowledge to classroom practice (Borger & Tillema, 1993) or they may not acknowledge the place of theory in the classroom (Day, Pope & Denicolo, 1990). Teachers who engage with the APPLE Action process necessarily become skilled in making these connections and using them to develop their practice.

Despite the undoubted expertise in the classroom of the mastercraftsmen in the APPLE sample and evidence of theoretical underpinnings (albeit used unconsciously) of their work, the majority of these teachers cannot articulate their practice using a precise, technical language. If they are to be instrumental in the professional development of less skilled colleagues this is an area which is vital to include in advanced certification programs. NBC candidates are required to articulate their practice in writing. It is conceivable that this might work counter productively in two ways—a highly effective teacher may not be able to write fluently enough to provide evidence of accomplished teaching. Conversely, a less skilled teacher may be able to write convincingly


about what is, in reality, weaker practice. An alternative for assuring better evidence of validity might be an observation schedule, coupled with interview procedures, as used by APPLE, which enabled the team to gain important insights into the teachers’ thinking. This is a process similar to one advocated by Turner-Bisset (1999) as a means of overcoming the inability of many teachers to articulate their practice.

From that set of perspectives and issues, there appear to be difficulties and dilemmas with:

170the definition and identification of exemplary teachers;

171the authenticity of status of exemplary teachers’

172the ability of exemplary teachers to articulate their practice.

Numerous studies of teacher differences (c.f.; Bennett, (1976); Galton, (1980); Keefe & Jenkins (1989); and Ornstein (1990)) have highlighted the diverse nature of differences and the subsequent difficulties associated with professional development. However, all teachers should have the opportunity to develop their practice to the extent that they achieve as close to an exemplary level as possible—in APPLE’s terms, that of the mastercraftsmen.

To this end, the APPLE Action phase in North Carolina is attempting to promote analytic self-awareness through the induction of teachers into the investigative methods of APPLE and close examination of their own work and that of others. Using a comprehensive set of criteria, namely the sixteen variables identified as focal to effective teaching and the attributes of each type of teaching, teachers are being encouraged to identify their current practice to use as individual starting points for professional development according to need. This requires a genuine approach to assessment and a willingness to be open about shortcomings and it requires the ability to assess current levels of quality accurately. Willingness is not enough, however. Teachers must be trained in how to describe, analyze and reflect upon their own practice. The ability to do so cannot be taken for granted-they cannot do this now. For reflection to be productive, teachers need an organizing framework to work from(Schwab, 1964; Carré, 1995), such as one proposed by Dewey (1933) and the specific skills of reflection (Pollard & Tann, 1987; Korthagen, 1990). This set of conditions for self-assessment highlights, yet again, the need for teachers to have a clear, technical language to make useful dialogue possible among colleagues.

The next stage in improvement, having identified teaching differences, is perhaps both the most difficult and the most important. Provision of differentiated training, designed to address specifically the needs of individual teachers is a daunting prospect. By identification of the teaching attributes of each teacher, using the APPLE system, this might be possible. It would require the combined expertise and commitment of principals, exemplary teachers, school system and university personnel and researchers (Boudah & Knight,1999; Darling-Hammond, 1997). Each has separate but interconnected knowledge and understanding which could contribute to inservice packages which amalgamate the best of classroom practice, the operation of the school as a system, and theory and research. Pollard & Tann (1987) argue that “….the separation of academic and practical spheres of activity….has been wasteful and has resulted in many lost opportunities to improve the quality of educational provision and practice” (p.4).


The inclusion of exemplary teachers in this process is a key factor; it is a means of using outstanding teachers for the benefit of enhanced student learning in a wider context. Evidence of contributions to schools and colleagues is a requirement of the NBC candidates, but there are no requirements after the certificate has been awarded. NBC teachers are encouraged to give help and support to new candidates but this appears to be focused on support with the process of certification, not with aspects of teaching. The APPLE Action phase is designed to address improving teaching, not certification processes, and has the potential to push the boundaries of the teacher’s role beyond classroom practitioner to true professional.

Examining the current role of teachers reveals a complex situation in which teachers are expected to have a myriad of knowledge and skills. Delivering the curriculum effectively may be the prime concern but, in addition, teachers are social workers, upholders of moral values, surrogate parents, and much else. Laudable as this may be, it does little to promote true professionality based on sophisticated professional knowledge (Schulman, 1986; Lyons, 1990; Stahl & Hayes, 1997) and commitment to the education of the nation’s children as a whole (NBPTS, 1995).

Despite collaborative planning and uniformity of curriculum through state interventions, teachers continue to work mainly in isolation. Professionals, in all professions, communicate. This does not mean they use jargon with others who share an understanding of the same jargon; it means the way in which they are able to analyze, explain, justify and be held accountable for their work to employers, colleagues, and consumers.

Whether feasible or not, the implications of APPLE for valid advanced certification that contributes to the professionalization of teaching, appear to indicate a need to require:

173evidence of exemplary practice based on a full set of professional knowledge and competencies with assessment based on classroom observation and interviews with the teachers;

174the ability to articulate that practice using a precise, technical language;

175the ability to make powerful contributions to the professional development of colleagues according to individual need;

176evidence of authentic behavior in all aspects of practice.

The APPLE Action phase in North Carolina is a first step in this direction, especially for school and system improvement through development of exemplary teaching. The aim for systems should be that the majority of teachers would achieve this level, not the minority. The roles of teachers achieving advanced certification could develop so that there would no longer be separate theorists and practitioners. Instead, there would be educators, not only with aims in common, as now, but also with shared skills and knowledge. Outstanding teachers could undertake rigorous peer tutoring and mentoring, be able to articulate the place of theory and research that underpin their own work in the classroom, and contribute to new knowledge and understanding through original research in their own classrooms.

They would be rosy APPLES indeed!


Implications for research on teaching

The history of research on teaching can be broadly characterized as a series of phases, from, to use Dunkin & Biddle’s (1974) classification of variables, presage-product, through context-product, and process-product to process-process. Day, Pope & Denlicolo (1990) describe the sequence as from the positivist, through the interpretative to the critical. Similarly, Calderhead (1993) draws on Gibson’s (1986) characterization of research on teaching as falling into one of three traditions, the positivist (seeking for laws, generalizations and principles), the phenomenological (aiming for understanding of individuals’ perspectives) and the critical (concerned with the emancipation and sensitization of individuals). Lowyck’s (1990) overview describes early teacher-personality studies, the process-product phase and the more recent focus on teachers’ cognition, and, while asserting that paradigm shifts and changes are positive and enriching, notes with concern that scholars within the current field of teacher thinking research, “can invent an almost limitless number of research topics and designs” (p. 99).

Methods and methodologies have followed a similar sequence, from the predominance of psychometrics through systematic observation, ethnography and phenomenology to the present, where what Halpin (1966) calls “anecdotage” is prevalent. Overall, the significant shift over time, in both the foci and methodologies of research on teaching, has been from a positivist process-product paradigm which seeks to discover effective ways of teaching, to the phenomenological and critical which seeks to illuminate and understand teaching. Simply, the shift has been from a primary concern with what should be to a primary concern with what is.

However, this is not to say that the field of research on teacher thinking has ignored the issue of utility. Pope (1993) suggests that the concern for teacher participants to benefit from research in terms of reflection and the clarification of their thinking is evidenced in the work of Day (1984), Connelly & Clandinin (1985), Butt (1984), Yinger (1987) and Elbaz (1988). Such writings go beyond what Pope calls being “merely curious” (p.24). Similarly, it is not unusual to find references to the problems of utility and purpose in more recent writings in the phenomenological/critical paradigm (e.g. Carlgren, Handal & Vaage (1994); Day, Pope & Denicolo, (1990); Day, Calderhead & Denicolo, (1993)).

However, there remains a predominant concern in research with understanding teaching from the teacher’s perspective. Furthermore, there has been a growing concern with ethical issues. Properly, researchers are urged to attend to such issues when studying teachers and their thinking (Sabar, 1994), sometimes to the point of proposing that teachers should have veto rights over final reports (McCutcheon, 1990).

There can be no question that research is important if it seeks to extend and deepen knowledge of how teachers think, make decisions, reflect, learn, and perceive their world. Much of this research is illuminating and significant. However, the aims of illuminating, understanding and emancipating remain predominant in the field; there seems to be insufficient attention paid to the improvement of teaching by using what is known about effectiveness.

Early studies that attempted to connect teacher personality to effectiveness revealed little. Similarly, process-product studies, beset with methodological problems, came to be regarded as having limited success in identifying specific teaching behaviors associated with effectiveness.


The reaction of an important part of the research community, though, has been to seek refuge in the phenomenological and the critical and to pay little attention to the potential of all research on teaching to contribute to effectiveness. Partly, this may come from a fear of “doing research to” teachers. There appears to be an understandable reluctance to combine understanding and explaining with judging. On the other hand, this may be just part of a wider fashion cycle in the social sciences. Whichever, we argue here that, within the whole body of research on teaching, there is a significant degree of convergence about the definition of effective teaching and the conditions for effectiveness. To the extent that such information exists, the research community should attend to its function—organizing and providing that information for improving teaching for the benefit of students and the whole community. The continuing focus on “what is” rather than on “what might be” is dysfunctional.

To illustrate, Calderhead (1993) explores the problem of teaching student-teachers to plan and proposes that collaborative activities with experienced teachers may be part of the solution. It probably is, but the fact that some teachers plan well, some adequately, some poorly, and some not at all is not addressed. The issue of quality in teaching and teachers is not given the prominence in research that it probably deserves. The APPLE data indicate that the most able teachers plan clearly, are very goal-aware, and communicate goals to their students. The same point can be made about classroom relationships, instructional techniques, and organizational strategies, among others.

To focus on practice as it is and to seek solutions in ever finer-grain descriptions of how “real” teachers teach is to ignore the obvious—teachers differ in the degree to which they are effective teachers. Research which ignores this fact is in danger of falsely promoting all teachers to the status of expert, regardless of their real quality. Research should seek to go beyond normative quality.

There is a real danger that in merely attempting to reveal, for example, professional common-sense knowledge (PCSK), (Hargreaves, 1993) and associated recipes, research will stop at “what is”. Squires (1999) connects this notion to the place of anecdote and its growing respectability as a means of revealing the communal knowledge and know-how of teaching. However, as Squires argues, “….anecdotal knowledge tends to carry a heavy normative charge….(which) makes it difficult for the practitioner to stand back from the practice of the group, and bring his or her analytic powers to bear” (p.5).

To summarize, unless research concerns itself with effectiveness it will merely re-cycle practice; it won’t improve it. Likewise all the efforts directed towards “reflective teaching”, which has become something of a slogan in both the UK and USA. Teaching teachers to reflect is pointless unless they have something to reflect with as well as something to reflect on; that something has to be secure professional knowledge about what makes teaching more or less effective.

However, this is not to argue for a return to the process-product paradigm. Beyond the well-documented methodological problems of this approach there is the problem that, like the illuminative and critical, this paradigm is also essentially normative. Process-product studies typically use systematic observation to record teaching behaviors, cluster teachers into types and seek to associate each type with more or less student learning. The “processes”, i.e. the teaching, is not studied or tested against objective criteria that are, themselves, grounded in theoretical


frameworks; it is merely described, analyzed and typed. Again, the starting point is “what is”, not “what might be” or “what should be”. Even in the positivist tradition, then, there has been a failure to start with what is known about effectiveness.

The APPLE project attempts not to return to a positivist and simplistic search for precise effective teacher behaviors, nor to seek to define and impose recipes for effective teaching. Rather, what is proposed might be called a post-positivist paradigm which starts with the proposition that the knowledge we have about teaching can be distilled into a set of interconnected variables that are, in sum, a sound basis for the analysis of teaching as more or less effective and more or less efficient. This “known-for-now” basis is propositional, not positivist. In research terms it is forever a “work-in-progress”, always open to amendment and adaptation in the light of new research and changing contexts. In a sense, this is a plea for some means to be found of inserting the “known-for-now” into the craft knowledge with which teachers do their thinking.

This is not to suggest a simplistic application of research findings to practice; rather it is to treat the known-for-now” perhaps as what Bassey (1998) calls “fuzzy generalizations” (p.22)—statements about practice that have built-in uncertainty and that underline the nature of this knowledge as propositional, complex, interdependent and, in part, context-dependent. This is very different from the kind of connections between research and practice called for by Hargreaves (1996), but it would help to achieve his worthy aim of connecting teaching with evidence about effectiveness.

Thus, APPLE has tried to avoid the pitfalls of ideology and methodology, to take the best aggregation of research on teacher effectiveness, school effectiveness, and systems analysis that could be managed and then to test teaching practices against a set of criteria thereby distilled. Of course, every concept, construct, theme and strand that emerges from effectiveness studies carries with it its own baggage of fashion and ideology. The APPLE aim has been to attempt to isolate the significant and the important from the ideological, at both macro and micro levels.

For example, macro constructs such as formal and informal, democratic and authoritarian, traditional and progressive have been rigorously excluded from the criteria. Similarly, micro or process-related constructs such as time-on-task have been excluded because they are too particular, too partial, or too simplistic. That is not to say that time-on-task doesn’t matter—there is plenty of evidence that time-on-task and learning outcomes are related (Bennett, 1978, 1980, 1995; Campbell, 1994, Alexander, 1992, 1994). But we argue for a more sophisticated recognition of teacher effectiveness variables as highly complex and highly interconnected.

Time-on-task is only a “good” thing if the task is an efficient servant of worthwhile and intended learning. Further, some kinds of higher-order learning tasks generate low levels of time-on-task, thus the variable may be not only inadequate as a measure of effectiveness, but also probably misleading. The aim of the APPLE collection of variables is to be inclusive—to ensure that every aspect of teaching is represented if it has been shown to be significant in research on teacher, school, and systems effectiveness, and also to recognize that although they can be seen as discrete variables they are also , in practice, inter-dependent variables—each dependent on several others.


Doyle’s (1977, 1979) ecological notion of classrooms can be applied here—the variables are interdependent in complex ways. To illustrate, the variable “quality of communications” can be treated in analyses as a discrete variable. It would be perfectly possible, and reasonable, to study the apparent causal link between this variable and learning outcomes—and it would be very surprising, indeed, if strong connections were not found. However, the same could be said of “focus on goals” or “management of results”. Indeed, most (not all) of the sixteen variables could be connected directly to learning outcomes in process-product type studies; many have been.

However, “quality of communications” affects other variables. Notably, “relations with students”, “management of activities”, “focus on task”, “focus on goals” and “management of results”. But it is, is in turn, affected by these variables. However, what APPLE has not done is to map systematically what all these connections might be and how they might “work”. In this respect APPLE is, so far, at the point of the observation and critical description of such connections in sets of cases.

Here is the first major implication of APPLE for research on teaching: the further mapping of this field in a way which enables the connections to be made less opaque. For example, we do have a wealth of knowledge about the efficacy of certain features of direct instruction for different learning goals and different learners. New research and action that impinges on this knowledge, such as the pilot numeracy project underway in the Barking and Dagenham school system, should be reported and studied critically and rigorously so that such innovations can add to and enrich our “knowledge-for-now” about direct instruction. The recent replication of the ORACLE study (Galton, Hargreaves, Comber, Wall & Pell, 1999) adds significantly not only to our “knowledge-for-now” about direct instruction, but also to the question of how imposed changes in pedagogy may affect the whole. Both studies, in different ways, add to the sum of “knowledge-for-now”.

So we need to converge on some kind of agreed-for-now foundation of professional knowledge, expressed in a clear technical language, that could serve as a basic knowledge-held-in-common by all teachers. It is important to stress that this is not merely the kind of how-to/competency type of knowledge commonly expressed in appraisal and inspection instruments, but knowledge which transcends the theory-practice divide. APPLE’s sixteen variables are intended to provide a basis for this. They are intended to be comprehensive, complex, and sensitive, resistant to ideology and recipe, open to context and situationally-specific application but grounded in what are known-for-now to be effective and efficient ways of proceeding.

However, in the application and action phases of this kind of project, there is a further set of research questions to be addressed. These have to do with whether teachers, administrators, and researchers working together, embracing such a principled and knowledge-based system can make a difference. At present, the APPLE Action phase in North Carolina is in its early stages, with the training of approximately 50 teachers and principals in the use of the sixteen variables and the mutual interrogation process being pilot tested as an alternative system-wide evaluation and development initiative. Further research questions that will be addressed during this process are:


177how do teachers cope with learning and applying the sixteen variables; to what degree can they master the process?

178does engaging in the process, especially in mutual interrogation, help to improve the clarity of expression of pedagogy; does it begin to establish that clear technical/professional language that even most of the mastercraftsmen lacked?

179does engaging in the process generate a thirst for more professional knowledge and, if so, how can that be best met and exploited?

180is engaging in the process as emancipatory for all involved as the APPLE team hopes; are power-relations changed?

181does engaging in the process have any impact on the traditional anti-theory and anti-research stances taken by many teachers?

182does the process cast any light on the problem of defining future roles for administrators and university personnel?

Further questions concern the self-sustaining capacities of such systems once installed, to what degree, why and why not. What is claimed, though, is that such a knowledge-based program which embraces teachers as key personnel, on a system-wide scale, with the clear goal of improvement has real potential to be authentically emancipatory—far more so than the study of “what is”. Further, such programs may well have a better chance of overcoming the problems of bridging research and teaching, teachers anti-research and anti-theory stance (Green & Kvidahl, 1989) and, in the partnership context, regard themselves as members and not merely subjects (Zeichner, 1995).

Indeed, what has come to be called Participatory Research and Development (PR & D) may, as Boudah & Knight (1999) propose, deliver the means of enabling communities of thoughtful and collegial enquirers to be created and to flourish in schools. The Professional Development Schools (PDS) movement in the USA is, indeed, partly responsible for the APPLE project, which grew out of a school-system-university partnership in North Carolina.

Byrd & McIntyre (1999) quote four goals for PDS, using the work of Frankes, Valli & Cooper (1998). These goals are teacher as researcher, teacher as decision maker, teacher as teacher educator, and teacher as political activist. The evidence seems to suggest that there has been considerable success in respect of the first three, and less in respect of the last. However, the scale of typical PDS activities and the nature of published work in the field indicate, as with the teacher thinking movement, the focus is on the phenomenological, illuminative and emancipatory. There is little evidence of efforts being directed or influenced by what is known about effective teaching. As Byrd & McIntyre state in their commentary on the PDS movement, “the implementation of important research findings in educational programs is both imperative and difficult” (p.xi). The PDS movement, when it results in PR & D, then, needs to be grounded in secure professional knowledge— that is to combine the “post-positivist” with the emancipatory.

There is some evidence, albeit anecdotal, from the beginnings of the APPLE Action phase that suggests that the “post-positivist-emancipatory” idea may help to address the problem, implied


by the APPLE typology, of different teachers having widely different development needs. The research team, not knowing whether to anticipate interest, apathy, or even anger from the participating teachers at the initial feedback and reporting meeting, were delighted by a positive and forward-looking response. Typical was the statement, “I know I’m a Hard Grinder and it’s not what I want to be. Tell me how to improve”. A key idea explored at these meetings was the notion of “extending to each other the courtesy of honesty—warts and all” in discussing and evaluating teaching. If this confidence to be ruthlessly honest with self and peers can be sustained and built upon, then the potential for real teacher emancipation is great. Thus, self-evaluation and self-knowledge based on rigorous and informed analysis could be an effective starting point for all.

The APPLE Action phase raises questions about the professional roles, perceptions, self-images and learning of all involved—teachers, administrators and researchers. Perhaps the organizing questions here are, can the post-positivist be combined with an emancipatory philosophy and, if it can, is it successful in improving the quality and effectiveness of schools and school systems? The APPLE position is that secure and sophisticated professional knowledge (together with the ability to express it in a clear technical language) is essential to this process.

To summarize, the APPLE project claims, albeit tentatively, to contribute to research on teaching and effectiveness in the following ways:

183by proposing and exploring a post-positivist paradigm in which what is known-for-now about effectiveness is central;

184by arguing for the inclusion of a dimension of quality in all aspects of the study of teaching;

185by arguing that much current work in the field is concerned with “what is” at the expense of “what might be” and to suggest that, even in the process-product paradigm, the nature of such studies precludes the “what might be” from the definition of excellence;

186by proposing a set of sixteen variables, drawn from the study of teacher effectiveness, school effectiveness, and systems analysis, that are intended to be comprehensive, complex and sensitive, resistant to ideology and recipe and open to context and situation specific application; further to suggest that the incorporation of new studies that add to this knowledge is a both worthy and urgent aim of research on teaching;

187by proposing that a rigorous and knowledge-based approach to teachers, school and school system development can be combined with authentically emancipatory values; further to assert that honesty and rigor in the judgment of teaching is a pre-condition of real professional growth.

In its own terms, APPLE will only be worthwhile if it makes a difference to real teaching and students’ learning. The APPLE Action phase, ongoing, seeks to illuminate further the ideas and propositions outlined above.

Implications for Policy and Governance


Public education of children is a major enterprise in both Britain and the USA, and it has emerged over the past few decades as among the major sources of public and political issues. While some of the public debate over education may deal with legitimate conditions that should be matters of concern relating to control, costs, and quality, there is ample evidence that many of the issues, and many of the claims related to topics, have little real validity, except for their political value. Nevertheless, while it is under very severe criticism from many fronts, public education is currently being asked to address many conditions of society over which it has little control, limited resources to address, and limited control over how it might go about serving those conditions.

There appears to be some attention to public education at all levels of public policy that is genuinely intended to result in improvements that are believed to be needed. On the other hand, there is other attention that appears mainly intended to use education and the public concern for it solely for personal or political ends—education is a pawn for personal gain. But whatever the motivation, public education at all levels is under strict scrutiny and strong pressure to reform—whatever it takes.

Much of the current pressure to improve is occurring under the name of “high standards”, or some variation on that theme. So, who can argue with high standards? The developments and findings from the APPLE Project can provide significant information for understanding the issues around pressures for high standards, and for understanding why most of the efforts will not be successful in improving public education processes and systems.

Most of the efforts to define and adopt standards for education are in terms or outcomes, most often student achievement, as measured by some form of standardized testing system. That approach may be the only logical option available for the large-scale attempts. Nevertheless it is ill-informed and almost certainly will lead to significant distractions from the legitimate purposes of schooling. How so? Isn’t it a simple matter to determine whether a child can read or not? Therein lies much of the trouble—few people within education understand measurement processes and issues well enough for responsible use of such testing programs, and even fewer within the general public and in public-policy positions.

What does “read” mean: Decoding print? Comprehending meaning? What level or complexity of printed materials? What content areas? Familiar content? New content? To what degree of proficiency? Etc., etc., and so forth. Whatever answer is given to any or all of these questions is likely to be arbitrary, conditional, and situational. There is no objective, correct answer. Nevertheless, in a standard-setting process, some answers will be given, and testing systems are likely to be developed to measure the degree to which standards are met.

Now, returning to the APPLE finding that even the mastercraftsmen did not have a common technical and professional knowledge base nor a technical language to communicate the knowledge base they do have. Issues in standard-setting relate to both curricular definition and operational definition of performances indicating curricular achievement. Teachers and other educators have neither the common knowledge bases nor languages to take whatever may be adopted as the “standards” and translate them into a structure for professional decision-making to guide regular teaching to achieve the desired ends. If stakes are high for achievement of the


“standards”, as they often are, the response by teachers, almost without exception, will be direct teaching of test content—teaching the tests or, at best, teaching to the tests.

Compare this condition to a business system in which the product inspection system is checking for qualities or quantities that the production system does not have the capacity to produce. If such inspection continues, and the production workers are being held accountable, they almost certainly will devise some way to prevent the inspection system from detecting the fact that the desired results are not being achieved. We should expect no less in schools. After all, every system is designed ideally to produce the results it gets.

Another common policy approach to improving student learning is to adopt “packages”—programs developed and disseminated to other sites. This has become especially common in the US as federally-funded programs encourage (or require) adoption of “research-based approaches”, such as in the Comprehensive School Reform and Dissemination (CSRD) program or the Reading Excellence Act (REA). When writing proposals for funding, it is quite difficult to build a case for adoption of professional teaching practices when there is not a commonly-adopted set of standards for professional quality. Therefore, most proposals, and therefore resulting projects, adopt a “package” that is among the list of “research-based models”.

While some of these models were not intended to be recipes for practice, the staff who implement them typically adopt a recipe approach to practice. If the recipe is a good one, and if it is implemented well, there probably will be a significant increase in performance of students on the adopted tests—at least for a few years. Nevertheless, a recipe is a recipe, and almost without exception it will not meet the needs of some children in any given class.

So, if the recipe is not a good one, how did it get on the list of “research-based approaches”? Most studies to “validate” a model program use a type of research or evaluation design in which the “experimental model”—the good one—is compared with “traditional”. Almost without exception, “traditional” is not defined in such a way that either the model or comparison are known as a set of theoretical design principles along with understanding of the degree to which the principles were followed in implementation. Therefore, a designed package that is being tested—and probably fairly well implemented—is compared with—well, with whatever it happens to be. Almost without exception, the program that is implemented systematically as approximately as intended will fare better in student performance than—well, whatever it happens to be.

And that appears to be the nature of much of the “research base” for many of the packaged programs. Nevertheless, some of these programs do have sound designs, and if implemented as intended, can provide a sound foundation for professional work. More often, this approach to reform merely is another step in a seemingly-endless path of trying one program after another without building upon a foundation and making systematic improvement in the system of education or performance of teachers—try this one this year, replace the one we started two years ago, switch to another one year after next. All the while, the rhetoric of poor education quality continues, and pressure to educate children better continues, from inside and outside of education.

So, how should policy-makers try to make improvements in education?


First, stop trying to make a system produce more than it has the capacity to achieve. Remember that teaching is not now a profession, even though meeting learning needs of children in most classrooms requires “professional” rather than technical services for best results. Any attempt to improve the quality of education should be based on a clear understanding that the quality of teaching will be the primary factor in determining the learning outcomes of students. But, attempting to improve teaching by monitoring student learning outcomes and using any of a variety of coercive techniques without giving serious attention to improving the quality of teaching, almost certainly will fail. Not only will it not work, but it also will likely be distracting to the schools from what they were before the initiative began—whether that was good or not.

Next, stop attempting to impose prescriptions on educational practices. Legitimate educational practices require application of judgment at some level of implementation—they cannot be reduced to a routine that can merely be followed. Consider a teacher who is attempting to implement a routine for teaching students the meaning of a vocabulary word. In the middle of the instruction a child asks a question about why another child hit him during play time, and wants to know whether she can go see the nurse. Responding to such situations require exercise of judgment about how to address the situation and continue to keep other children engaged in activity related to the intended learning. No routine can be designed that will address all learning activities from initiation through learning. Indeed, teaching should never be treated as a technical process such as the process for preparing payroll for a work group based on a set of established definitions, rules, and procedures.

Finally, focus policy on continuing to develop and support teaching as a profession. The APPLE Action process can be used as one example of how teachers can be taught a common knowledge base and language related to that knowledge. Furthermore, these processes and content provide objective standards for quality and develop the capacity of teachers and school leaders to make objective analyses of teaching quality. Once those understandings and skills are developed, teachers and leaders can begin to develop plans for individual and collective development based on real needs. Such an approach can get teaching quality to a higher level—and thus student learning—while building the quality of the school and system in a way that becomes self-sustaining. Change efforts that build toward the professionalization of teaching should be the focus of policy attention.

Implications of the APPLE Project -Conclusion

By taking a “different” approach to the study of teaching—different in the sense that the focus has been on teaching as it might be, not teaching as it is—the APPLE project has attempted to illuminate the characteristics and needs of the (aspiring) profession in novel ways. The indications, drawn from the individual sections above can be organized and summarized usefully as a set of action themes. Essentially they all derive from the key findings that:

188many teachers lack a secure knowledge base for the “professional” activity;

189most teachers lack the ability to articulate their practice in a clear technical language;

190when set against rigorous criteria for excellence, teaching falls short, not along a single quality continuum, but in varied and complex ways.


Whether the long term goal should be the professionalization of teaching can be argued. What is not in dispute is that the real goal is the improvement of the quality of teaching for the benefit of the students and the community at large. If, by the way, that is congruent with the professionalization of teaching, so much the better.

As Shanker said, “The professionalization of medicine took a generation”. Teaching doesn’t have a generation. Public trust in and respect for our public schooling systems is not in good shape, especially in our great cities. Equality of educational opportunity is not only a worthy goal, it is an imperative of a fair society. If we are to preserve the democratic imperative of universal access to a high quality, effective, and well respected system of schooling, then it is essential that action for real quality starts now. It may already be too late.

There would seem to be two possible choices for development of the field of teaching. First, there can be even more central imposed recipes for teaching, management of schools, and the governance of schools and school systems—a “recipe” approach—and then there might be a “professional” approach. The APPLE study includes evidence that the “recipe” approach will not work—at least not well enough. The inevitable result will recipe teaching; APPLE has shown that recipe teaching, while possibly good enough for some of the students some of the time, and perhaps a good “quick fix” for some conditions, does not meet the standards for what teaching might be. On the other hand, “professionalization” demands an intelligent and informed approach to the reform of the educational system. It is more complex, would probably require more resources, and would imply commitment to authentic professionalization. We think this is what needs to be done, and that it can be done. But in order to do that will mean attending to:

191the need for convergence on what counts as legitimate and sufficient professional knowledge for teachers;

192the need to understand that there is quality beyond normative quality in teaching—that “what is” does not need to define what “might be”;

193the need to develop a clear and purposeful role for theory in the whole enterprise and the need to connect theory and practice, which means selecting/using theory purposefully;

194the need for teachers to be enabled and empowered to use clear technical language; this is not to undervalue or underrate the craft knowledge of teaching. It is to say that craft knowledge is not enough;

195the need for the whole system to adopt a professional knowledge base and theoretically grounded approach. This is important, not least because of the need for connectedness between/among all parts of the system—teachers, administrators, teacher educators and even politicians.

196the need for a reorientation of the research effort—what research is done, how it is perceived and how it is used;

197the need to understand that it is probably too late for slow incremental change and that it is possible to converge on principle and to fast track toward action;


198the understanding that real “emancipation of teaching” within clearly defined goals and functions is absolutely dependent on real professionalization, a real knowledge base and an authentic sense of purpose;

199the understanding that neither “top down” nor “bottom up” approaches work. The former will fail because it is coercive, non-inclusive, alienating, untrustworthy and recipe-based. The latter will fail because it is unlikely to get past normative quality and unlikely to give rise to the necessary degree of coherence, consistency and accuracy in the knowledge base. What might work most effectively and efficiently is a community of learners in which professional standards are rigorously determined and applied, professionally.

All this implies very substantial reform, conceptually and operationally. As Linda Darling-Hammond says, “Professionalizing teaching involves attending to all the facets of the enterprise”. To put the challenge in the words of one teacher in the APPLE Action project, “We can’t all be mastercraftsmen, can we?”. Well, yes we can—and further, we can be mastercraftsmen who can articulate our professional knowledge and action. The present Prime Minister in the UK claims his priorities are “education, education, education”; there is no doubt that in the USA there is also real determination to improve its public schools. The will is there but, if the expression of that will continues to be recipe-based and to rely on coercive methods for change and compliance which are, in both systems, perceived by educators to be inauthentic, inefficient, and unfair, there can be little hope for future improvement of teaching and schools.

The real need is for genuine will harnessed to authentic, intelligent, informed (and therefore professional) methods. There never was a good time for recipes and quick fixes; the sooner both systems abandon these the better. There is a lot to do. There is a case for starting sooner rather than later.


BIBLIOGRAPHY


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acheson, K. & Gall, M. D. (1992) Techniques in the Clinical Supervision of Teachers, New York: Longman.

Airasion, P. W. & Gullickson, A. R. (1997) Teacher Self-evaluation Tool Kit, Thores & Daks, California: Corwin Press, Inc.

Alexander, R. (1992) Policy and Practice in Primary Education, London: Routledge.

Alexander, R. (1994) “What primary curriculum? Dearing and beyond,” Education, 3 – 13, 22. No. 1, pp. 24 – 35.

Alexander, R., Rose, J., & Woodhead, C. (1992) Curriculum Organization and Classroom Practice in Primary School, London: Dept. Of Education and Science.

Andrews, T. E., & Barnes, S. (1990) “Assessment of teaching”, in W. R. Houston (ed), Handbook of research on teacher education: A project of the Association of Teacher Education, pp. 569-598. New York: Macmillan & Company.

Arnn J. W. & Mangieri, J. N. (1988) “Effective leadership for effective schools: A survey of principal attitude”, National Association of Secondary School Principals, February, 1988, pp. 1-7. in A. C. Ornstein (1990) Strategies for Effective Teaching, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, pp. 554.

Bass, B. M. (1960) Leadership, Psychology, and Organizational Behavior, New York: Harper and Brothers.

Bassey, M. (1998) Fuzzy Generalisations and Professional Discourse, Research Intelligence. No. 63, pp. 22 – 24. Woking: Optichrome.

Batten, M. (1993) “The identification, development and sharing of professional craft knowledge”, in C. Day, J. Calderhead, & P. Denicolo, (eds) Research on Teacher Thinking: Understanding Professional Development, Washington, DC: The Falmer Press.

Batteson, C. & Bali, S. J. (June 1995) “Autobiographies and interviews as means of ‘access’ to elite policy making in education”, British Journal of Educational Studies, XXXXIII, (2).

Bennett, S.N. (1976) Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress, London: Open Books.

Bennett, S. N. (1978) “Recent research on teaching: A dream, a belief and a model”, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 48, pp. 127 – 147.

Bennett, S. N. (1980)Time to Teach, Professorial Inaugural Lecture. Lancaster University, England.


Bennett, S. N. (1995) “Managing time”, in C. Desforges (ed) An Introduction to Teaching: Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bennett, S. N., Desforges, C., Cockburn, A., & Wilkinson, B. (1984) The Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bennett, S. N., Andreae, J., Hegarty, P. B., & Wade, B. (1980) Open Plan Schools, Slough: NFER.

Benson, T. M., Hegarty, P.B., & Thomas, C. (1999) Talking Curriculum, Manuscript submitted for publication.

Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1967) in P. S. Tolbert, & L. G. Zucker, (1996) in Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C. & Nard, W.R. (eds) (1996) Handbook of Organisational Studies, London: Sage Publications.

Bloom, B. S., et al. Committee of College and University Examiners. (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook 1- Cognitive Domain, New York: David McKay Company, Inc.

Borger, H. & Tillema, H. (1993) in C. Day, J. Calderhead, & P. Denicolo, (eds) Research on Teacher Thinking: Understanding Professional Development, London: Falmer Press.

Borman, S. & Levine, J. (1997) A Practical Guide to Eementary Instruction from Plan to Deliver, Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Boudah, D. J. & Knight, S. L. (1999) “Creating learning communities of research and practice: Participatory research and development”, Association of Teacher Education. in D. M. Byrd, & D. J. McIntyre, (1999) Research on Professional Development Schools. Teacher Education Yearbook, VII, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, pp. 97 – 114.

Brown, J. L. (1995) Observing Dimensions of Learning in Classrooms, Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Brubacher, J. W., et. al. (1994) Becoming a Reflective Educator- How to Build a Culture of Inquiry in the Schools, California: Corwin Press.

Butt, R. L. (1984) Arguments for using biography in understanding teacher thinking. in R. Halkes, & J. K. Olsen, (eds) Teacher Thinking, Lisse, Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Byrd, D. M. & McIntyre, D. J. (1999) “Research on professional development schools”, Association of Teacher Education Yearbook, VII, pp. 97 – 114. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Calderhead, J. (1993) “The contribution of research on teachers’ thinking to the professional development of teachers”, in: C. Day, J. Calderhead, & P. Denicolo. Research on Teacher Thinking: Understanding Professional Development, pp. 11 – 18, Basingstoke: Falmer Press.


Calderhead, J., (ed) (1987) Exploring Teachers’ Thinking. London: Cassell Education Limited.

Calderhead, J. & Shorrock, S. J., (1997) Understanding Teacher Education, London: Falmer Press.

Campbell, J. (1994) “Managing the primary curriculum: The issue of time allocation”, Education 22, (1), pp. 3 – 13.

Carlgren, I., Handal, G., & Vaage, S. (1994) Teachers’ Minds and Actions: Research on Teachers Thinking and Practice. London: Falmer Press.

Carlgren, I., Handal, G., & Vaage, S., (eds) (1994) “Teachers’ minds and actions”, in Research on Teachers’ Thinking and Practice, London: The Falmer Press of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Carre, C. (1995) “What is to be learned in school? “ in Desforges, C. (ed) An Introduction to Teaching: Psychological Perspectives, Oxford: Blackwell.

Clarke, C., MP. (1998) “Resurrecting educational research to raise standards: Statement from the new minister responsible for research”, Research Intelligence, No. 66, pp. 8-9, Woking, England: Optichrome.

Clegg, D., & Bilinton, S. (1994) Effective Primary Classrooms, London: David Fulton Publishers.

Connelly, F. M. & Clandinin, D. J. (1984) “Personal practical knowledge at Bay Street School: Ritual, personal philosophy and image”, in R. Halkes, & J. K. Olsen, (eds) Teacher Thinking, Lisse, Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Costa, A. L. & Garmston, R. J. (1994) Cognitive coaching - A Foundation for Renaissance Schools, Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Cooper, H., Hegarty, P., Hegarty, P. B. & Simco, N.P. (1996) Display in the Classroom. London: David Fulton.

Council for School Performance (1997) ref p. 26

Croll, P. & Hastings, N. (1996) Effective Primary Teaching, London: David Fulton.

Croll, P. & Hastings, N., (eds) (1988) Effective Primary Teaching: Research-Based Classroom Strategies, London: David Fulton.

Cronback, L. (1982 Designing Evaluations of Educational and Social Progress, San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Cruickshank, D. R. (1990) Research That Informs Teachers and Teacher Educators, Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappan Educational Foundation.


Danielson, C. (1996) Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, Baltimore, MD: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1997) “What matters most: 21st century teaching”, Condensed from Principal, 77, (September, 1997), pp. 5 – 11. The Education Digest.

Davis, G. A. & Thomas, M. A. (1989) Effective Schools and Effective Teachers. Needham, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon.

Davis, N. M. (1948) “Attitudes toward work among building operations”, Occupational Psychology, 22, pp. 56-62.

Day, C. (1984) “Teachers’ thinking – Intentions and practice: An action research perspective”, in R. Halkes, & J. K. Olsen, (eds) Teacher Thinking, Lisse, Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Day, C. (1999) Developing Teachers. The Challenges of Lifelong Learning, Philadelphia & London: Falmer Press.

Day, C., Calderhead, J., & Denicolo, P. (eds) (1993) Research on Teacher Thinking: Understanding Professional Development, London: Falmer Press.

Department of Education & Science (1984) Circular 3/84 London HMSO



Department of Education & Employment (1997) Circular 10/97 London DFEE

Deming, W. E. (1993) The New Economics, Cambridge: MIT Press.

DES (1978) Primary Education in England: A Survey, London: HMSO.

DES (Elton) (1989) Discipline in Schools: Report of the National Enquiry, (The Elton Report) London: HMSO.

Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective-thinking to the Educative Process, Chicago, Henry Regnery.

Doyle, W. (1977) “Learning the environment: An ecological analysis”, Journal of Teacher Education, 28, (6), pp. 51 – 55.

Doyle, W. (1979) “Classroom tasks and students’ abilities”, in P. Peterson, & H. Walberg, (eds) Research on Teaching, pp. 183 – 209. Berkeley CA: McCutcheon.

Doyle, W. (1983) “Academic work”, Review of Educational Research, 52, 159-199.


Doyle, W. (1985) “Effective teaching and the concept of master teacher”, Elementary School Journal, September, pp. 30.

Dunkin, M. J. & Biddle, B. J. (1974) The Study of Teaching, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Dweck, C. S. & Leggett, E. L. (1988) “A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality,” Psychological Review, 95, 256-73.

Elbaz, F. (1990) “Knowledge and discourse: the evolution of research on teacher thinking”, in C. Day, M. Pope, & P. Denicolo, (eds) (1990) Insight into Teachers’ Thinking & Practice, Basingstoke: Falmer Press.

Elliott, J. & Adelman, C. (1973) “Reflecting where the action is: The design of the Ford Teaching Project”, Education for Teaching, 92, pp. 8 – 20.

Ely, M. (1984) in Doing Qualitative Research: Circles within Circles. The Falmer Press.

English, F. W. & Hill, J. C. (1994) Total Quality Education: Transforming Schools into Learning Places, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.

Erickson, F. (1986) “Tasks in times: Objects of study in a natural history of teaching”, in Improving Teaching. ASCD Yearbook. Alexandria, VA: Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Fenstermacher, G. (1980) “On learning to teach effectively from research on teacher effectiveness”, in C. Denham, & A. Lieberman, (eds) Time to Learn. Washington: US Department of Education/NIE.

Fenstermacher, G. (1988) “ The place of science and epistemology in Schon’s conception of reflective practice”, in P. P. Grimmett & G. L. Erickson (eds) Reflection in Teacher Education, pp. 39 – 46. New York: Teachers College Press.

Ferguson, R. F. (1991) “Paying for public education: New evidence on how and why money matters”, Harvard Journal of Legislation, 28, (Summer), pp. 465-98.

Ferguson, R. F. & Ladd, H. F. (1996) “How and why money matters: An analysis of Alabama Schools”, in Helen Ladd (ed) Holding Schools Accountable, 265-298. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute.

Fisher, C. W., Berliner, D. C., Filby, N. N., Marliave, R., Cahen, L. S., Dishaw, M. M. & Moore, J. E. (1978) BTES - Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study, Technical Report Series. Washington: National Institute of Education.

Flanders, N. A. (1960) Interactive Analysis in the Classroom: A Manual for Observers, Ann Arbor, Michigan:


Flanders, N. A. (1965) Teacher Influence, Pupil Attitudes, and Achievement, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office.

Frankes, L., Valli, L. & Cooper, D. (1998) “Continuous learning for all adults in the professional development school: A review of the research” in D. J. McIntyre, & D. M. Byrd, (eds) (1998) Strategies for Career-long Teacher Education, pp. 69 – 83. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Fried, R. L. (1995) The Passionate Teacher, Boston: Beacon Press.

Fullan, M. (1993) Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform, London: Falmer Press.

Fullan, M. with Steigelbauer, S. (1991) The New Meaning of Educational Change, Teachers College Press, New York

Fullan, M. (1995) ‘The limits and the potential of professional development’, in Guskey, T. R. & Hubermna, M. (eds ), Professional Development in Education, New Paradigms & Practices, pp. 253-268.

Fullan, M. & Hargreaves, Andy. (1996) What’s Worth Fighting For in Your School, New York: Teacher College Press.

Gagné, R. M. (1970) Conditions for Learning, New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Gagné, R. M. & L. J. Briggs (1979) Principles of Instructional Design, 2nd ed., New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Gallaway (1987) in Ornstein, A. C. Strategies for Effective Teaching, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Galton, M. (1995) Crisis in the Primary Classroom, London: David Fulton Publishers.

Galton, M., Simon, B., & Croll, P. (1980) Inside the Primary Classroom, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Galton, M., Hargreaves, L., Comber, C., Wall, D. & Pell, T. “Changes in Patterns of Teacher Interaction in Primary Classrooms: 1976 – 96”, British Journal of Educational Research. Vol. 25 No. 1. pp. 23 – 37.

Getzels, J. W. (1952) “A psycho-social framework for the study of educational administration,” Harvard Educational Review, 22 (Fall), 235-246.

Getzels, J. W. & E. G. Guba (1957) “Social behavior and the administrative process,” School Review, LXV (Winter), pp. 423-41.

Gibson, R. (1986) Critical Theory and Education, London: Hodder & Stoughton.


Gill, J. & Johnson, P. (1997) Research Methods for Managers, 2nd Ed. Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd.

Gipps, C. (1992) What We Know About Effective Primary Teaching, London: Tufnell Press.

Glatthorn, A. A.with Brugaw, D.; Dawkins, K. & Parker, J. (1998) Performance Assessment and Standards-Based Curricula: The Achievement Cycle, Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

Glickman, Carl D., Gordon, S. P., & Ross-Gordon, J. M. (1995) Supervision of Instruction - A Developmental Approach, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon.

Good, T. L. & Brophy, J. E. (1988) Looking in Classrooms, New York: Harper Collins.

Green, K.E. & Kvidahl, R.F. (1989) Teachers as Researchers: Training, Attitudes and Performance, Paper presented at the meeting of AERA, San Francisco.

Green, M. (1973) The Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age, Belmont: CA: Wadsworth.

Green, M. (1984) “How do we think about our craft?” in A. Leiberman (ed.) (1984) Rethinking School Improvement: Research, Craft, and Concept, New York: Teachers College Press.

Grimmett, P. & MacKinnon, A. M. (1992) “Craft Knowledge and the education of teachers”, pp. 385-456. Review of Research in Education. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Hagger, H., Burn, K. & McIntyre, D. (1993) The School Mentor Handbook, London: Kogan Page.

Halpin, A.W. (1955) “The Leader Behavior and Leadership Ideology of Educational Administrators and Aircraft Commanders”, Harvard Educational Review, Vol 24, No. 4, (Winter 1955), 18-32.

Halpin, A. W. (1957) “The leader behavior and effectiveness of aircraft commanders” in Stogdill, Ralph M. & Alvin E. Coons (eds) (1957) Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement, Research Monograph Number 88, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio, 52-64.

Halpin, A. W. (1966) Theory and Research in Administration. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Halpin, A. W. & B. J. Winer (1977) “A factorial study of the leaderbehavior descriptions” in Stogdill, Ralph M. & Alvin E. Coons (eds) (1957) Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement. Research Monograph Number 88, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio, 39-51.

Hargreaves, D.H. (1996) Teaching as a Research Based Profession, The Teacher Training Agency Annual Lecture. London: Teacher Training Agency.


Hargreaves, H. H. (1993) “A common-sense model of professional development of teachers, in Elliott, J. (ed) (1993) Reconstructing Teacher Education. London, Falmer pp. 86 – 92.

Harmin, M. (1994) Inspiring Active Learning - A Handbook for Teachers, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Herbert, Hirsch, Adler, & Bennett ( ) ref. P. 16

Hegarty, P. & Barter, J. (1996) Partnerships and Pedagogy in Primary Education in England, Paper presented at the Association of Teacher Educators Conference. St. Louis, Missouri.

Hegarty, P. B. & Knight, D. J. (1995) Goal Setting and Professional Learning in Final Teaching Practice, BERA European Conference on Educational Research, Bath/Lancaster University, England.

Hegarty, P. & Simco, N. (1995 ) Partnerships in Progress: Teacher Mentoring in the U.K. Teacher Education (Primary), Paper presented at the ATE Conference. Detroit, Michigan.

Hemphill, J. K. (1949) Situational Factors in Leadership, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio.

Hersey, P. & Blanchard, K. H. (1972) Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources, Englewood Cliffs NY: Prentice Hall.

Hiebert, E. H. & Taylor, B. M., (eds) (1994) Getting Reading Right from the Start: Effective Early Literacy Interventions, Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

HMI (1978) Department of Education and Science. Primary Education in England: A Survey by Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, London:HMSO.

Hopkins, D., West, M. & Ainscow, M. (1998a) Improving the Quality of Education for All, London, David Fulton Publishers.

Hopkins, D., West, M. & Beresford, J. (1998b) ‘’Conditions for school and classroom development’, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 4, 1, pp. 115-42.

House, E. R. (1996) “A framework for appraising educational reforms”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 25, No. 7, October, 1996 (pp. 6-14) American Educational Research Association.

Hunter, M. (1982) Mastery Teaching, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Jackson, P. W. (1968) Life in Classrooms, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Jankowicz, A. D. (1995) Business Research Projects, 2nd Ed., Chapman & Hall.

Johnson, B. (1996) The Performance Assessment Handbook, New Jersey: Eye on Education.


Jones, B. F. et al. (1987) Strategic Teaching and Learning: Cognitive Instruction in the Content Areas, Illinois: North Central Regional Educational Library.

Joyce, B. & Marsha W. (1996) Models of Teaching, 5th edition, Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Joyce, B., Showers, B., & Weil, M. (1992) Models of Teaching, 4th Edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall.

Kaplan, L. & Edelfelt, R. A. (1996) Teachers for the New Millennium- Aligning Teacher Development, National Goals and High Standards for All Students, California: Corwin Press.

Katzenmeyer, M. & Moller, G. (1996) Awakening the Sleeping Giant- Leadership Development for Teachers, California: Corwin Press.

Kauchak, D. P. & Eggen, P. D. (1989) Learning and Teaching: Research-Based Methods, Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Keefe, J. W., & Jenkins, J. M. (1989) “Personalized education,” in H.J. Walberg & J.L. Lane (eds) Organizing for Learning: Toward the 21st Century, Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Keefe, J. W. & Jenkins, J. M. (1997) Instruction and the Learning Environment, Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

Kennedy, M. M. (1987) “Inexact sciences: Professional education and the development of expertise”, in E. Z. Rothkopf (ed), Review of Research in Education, Vol. 14, pp.133-167, and in Vol. 18, pp. 393, Washington, DC: American Education Research Association.

Knight, P. & Smith, L. (1989) “In search of good practice”, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 21, No. 5, 427-440.

Kochan, F.K. (1999) Professional Development Schools: A Comprehensive View, in Byrd, D.M. & McIntyre, D.J. (1999) Research on Professional Development Schools, ATE Teacher Education Yearbook VII Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. pp. 97 – 114.

Korman, A. K. (1966) “‘Consideration,’ ‘Initiating Structure,’ and ‘Organizational Criteria’—A Review,” Personnel Psychology: A Journal of Applied Research, XIX, No. 4 (Winter 1966), 349-61.

Korthagen, F.A.J. (1990) Techniques for Stimulating Reflection through Seminars on Campus, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the AERA, April 1990. Boston.

Kounin, J. S. (1970) Discipline and Group Management in Classrooms, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.


Krathwohl, D. R., et al. (Committee of College and University Examiners) (1964) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook I1-Affective Domain, New York: David McKay Company, Inc.

Kyriacou, C. (1991) Essential Teaching Skills, Hemel Hempstead: Simon & Schuster.

Kysilko, David. (1987) (ed) Realizing Teacher Reform: A State Action Plan for Developing the Profession. Alexandria, VA, National Association of State Boards of Education.

Leinhardt, G. (1990) “Capturing craft knowledge in teaching”; Educational Researcher, 19(2) pp. 18-25.

Lieberman, A. (1988) Building a Professional Culture in Schools, New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Liebermann, A. & Miller, L. (1984) Teachers, Their World, and Their Work: Implications for School Improvement, Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Lippitt, R. & R. K.White (1943) “The Social Climate of Children’s Groups”, in R. J. Barker, J. S. Kounin, & H. F. Wright (eds) Child Behavior and Development, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 485-508.

Lortie, D. (1975) Schoolteacher, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lowyck, J. (1990) Teacher Thinking Studies: Bridges Between Description, Prescription and Application, in Day, C., Pope, M. & Denicolo, P. (eds) (1990) Introduction to Insight into Teachers’ Thinking & Practice, Basingstoke: Falmer.

Lyons, N. (1990) “Dilemmas of knowing: Ethical and epistemological dimensions of teachers’ work and development. Harvard Educational Review, 60m 159-180. in S. A. Stahl & D. A. Hayes (eds) Instructional Models in Reading, (1997) Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Malinowski, B. (1950) in Psathas, G. (1972) “Ethnomethods and phenomonology”, in: Manis, J. G. & Meltzer, B. N. (eds) Symbolic Interaction, 2nd Ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon Inc.

Marzano, R. J. (1992) A Different Kind of Classroom- Teaching with Dimensions of Learning, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

McCutcheon, G. (1990) Conflict about Conflict: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Paper presented at the annual meeting of AERA, Boston, MA.

McIntyre, D. & Macleod, G.(1978) “The Characteristics and uses of Ssystematic classroom observation” in McAleese, R. & Hamilton, D. Understanding Classroom Life, Slough: NFER.


McPherson, B. & J. A. Rinnander (1988) “Collegiality: Its meanings and purposes”, Independent School, Fall 1988, pp. 41-44.

Medley, D. M. (1979) “The Effectiveness of Teachers” in Peterson, P. L. & H. J. Walberg (1979) (eds) Research on Teaching: Concepts, Findings, and Implications, Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Meir, D. (1995) “Foreword” in Fried, R. L. The Passionate Teacher, Boston: Beacon Press.

Millman, J. & Darling-Hammond, L. (ed) (1990) The New Handbook of Teacher Evaluation: Assessing Elementary and Secondary School Teachers, 2nd edition, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Mitzel, H. E. (1960) Teacher Effectiveness, in Harris, C.W. (ed) Encyclopedia of Educational Research, 3rd edition, New York: Macmillan.

Mortimore, P., Sammons, P., Stoll, L., Lewis, D. & Ecob, R. (1987) School Matters: The Junior Years, London: Open Books.

Mortimore, P. Sammons, P. Stoll, L. Lewis, D. & Ecob, R. (1988) School Matters. Wells: Open Books.

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (1995) Standards for National Board Certification, DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. (1996) What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

Novak, J. D. & Gowin, D. B. (1984) Learning How to Learn, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Odiorne, G. S. (1955)“Some Effects of Poor Equipment Maintenance on Morale,” Personnel Psychologist, 8, 195-200.

Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) (1992, 1993, 1998) Making the Most of Inspection: A Guide for Inspection of Schools and Governors, Alexandra House, London: OFSTEAD.

Olson, C. (1996) “Strengthening the Teaching Profession in North Carolina,” a Report to the North Carolina State Board of Education by the N.C. Professional Practices Commission, September, 1996. (Unpublished document.)

Ornstein, A.C. (1990) Strategies for Effective Teaching, New York: Harper & Row.

Perrone, V. (1991) A Letter to Teachers: Reflections on Schooling and the Art of Teaching, San Francisco, Jossey - Bass.


Peterson, P. L. (1979) “Direct Instruction Reconsidered”, in Peterson, P. L. & H. J. Walberg (1979) (eds) Research on Teaching: Concepts, Findings, and Implications, Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Pollard, A. & Tann, S. (1987) Reflective Teaching in the Primary School: A Handbook for the Classroom, London: Cassell Educational Limited.

Pope, M. (1993) Anticipating Teacher Thinking, in: Day, C., Calderhead, J. & Denicolo, P. (1993) Research on Teacher Thinking: Understanding Professional Development, pp. 11 – 18, Basingstoke:Falmer.

Psathas, G. (1972) “Ethnomethods and phenomonology” in Manis, J.G. & Meltzer, B. N. (eds) Symbolic Interaction. 2nd Edition, Boston: Allyn & Bacon Inc.

Reiman, A. J. & Edelfelt, R. A. (1990) School-Based Mentoring Programs: Untangling the Tensions Between Theory and Practice, Report No. 90-7, Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State University. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. Ed 329 520).

Reiser, R. A. & Walter D. (1996) Instructional Planning: A Guide for Teachers. Allyn & Bacon, Boston.

Rush, C.H., Jr. (1957) “Leader Behavior and Group Characteristics” in Stogdill, R.M. & A.E. Coons (eds) (1957) Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement, Research Monograph Number 88, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio, 69-73.

Ryans, D. G. (1960)Characteristics of Teachers, Washington, DC: American Council on Education

Sabar, N. (1994) “Ethical Concerns in Teacher-thinking Research”, in Carlgren, I., Handal, G. & Vaage,S. Carlgren, I., Handal, G. & Vaage,S. (1994) Teachers’ Minds and Actions: Research on Teachers Thinking and Practice, pp. 109 – 124. London: Falmer.

Sachs, J. (1997) “Reclaiming th agenda of teacher professionalism: An Australian experience’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 23, 3, pp. 263-75.

Sachs, J. & Groundwater-Smith. (1996) Celebrating Teacher Professional Knowledge: School Reform and Teachers’ Professional Judgemnet, Paper presented to Re-engineering Education for Change Conference, UNCESCO and Asia Pacific Centre for Educational Innovation and Development, Bangkok.

Sanders, S. L., Skonie-Hardin, S. D., & Phelps, W. H., The Effects of Teacher Educational Attainment on Student Educational Attainment in Four Regions of Virginia: Implications for Administrators, (1994) Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Mid-South educational Research Association.

Schachtel, E. G. (1959) Metamorphosis, New York: Basic Books.


Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, New York: Basic Books.

Schön, D. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Schubert, W. H. & Ayers, W. C. (1992) Teacher Lore- Learning From Our Own Experience, New York : Longman Publishing Group.

Schulman, L. (1986) Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching, Educational Researcher, 1,5,2. pp. 4 – 14.

Schutz, A. (1962) “Collected Papers, Vol. 1, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff”, in Psathas, G. (1972) “Ethnomethods and Phenomonologyn”, in Manis, J.G. & Meltzer, B. N. (eds) Symbolic Interaction. 2nd Edition, Boston: Allyn & Bacon Inc.

Schwab, J. J. (1964) “The Structure of the Disciplines; Meanings and Significance”, in Ford, G.& Purgo, L. (eds) The Structure of Knowledge and the Curriculum, Chicago: Rand-McNally.

Schwab, J. J. (1978) “Education and the Structure of the Discipline”, in Westbury, I. & Wilkof, N. J. (eds) Science, Curriculum & Liberal Education, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Seels, B. & Z. Glasgow (1998) Making Instructional Design Decisions, Second Edition, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Shanker, R.

Shartle, C. L. (1957) “Introduction” in Stogdill, R. M. & A. E. Coons (eds) (1957) Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement, Research Monograph Number 88, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio, 1-5.

Shinkfield, A. J. & Stufflebeam, D. L. (1995) Teacher Evaluation: A Guide to Effective Practice, Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Shulman, L. (1986) “Those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching”, Educational Researcher, 1,5,2. pp. 4-14.

Simco, N.P. (1995) Using Activity Analysis to Investigate Primary Classroom Environments, British Educational Research Journal, 21,1: 49-60.

Simco, N. P. & Warin, J. (1997) “Image-based Research”, in British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 23 No. 5 pp. 661-672.

Soar, R. S., & Soar, R. M. (1983) “Context effects in the teaching-learning process”, in D.C. Smith (ed) Essential knowledge for beginning educators, Washington, D.C.: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

Squires, D. A. (1999) Teaching as a Professional Discipline. London: Falmer.


Squires, D. A., Huitt, W. G, & Segars, J. K. (1989) Effective Schools and Classrooms- A Research Based Perspective, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Stah, S. & Hayes, D. A. (1997) Instructional Models of Reading, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Steadman, S. Eraut, M., Fielding, M. & Horton, A. (1995) Making School-based INSET Effective, Research Report No. 2., University of Sussex Institute of Education.

Stenhouse. L. (1976) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann.

Stiggins, R. J. & Duke, D. (1988) The Case for Commitment to Teacher Growth: Research on Teacher Evaluation, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Stogdill, R. M. & A. E. Coons (eds) (1957)Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement, Research Monograph Number 88, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio.

Stogdill, R. M. & A. E. Coons (1957) “Development of the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire”, in Stogdill, Ralph M. & Alvin E. Coons (eds) (1957) Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement, Research Monograph Number 88, Bureau of Business Research, The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio, 6-38.

Strickland, G. (1998) Bad Teachers, New York: Pocket Books.

Stufflebeam, D. L., et al. (Phi Delta Kappa National Study Commission on Evaluation) (1971) Educational Evaluation and Decision Making, Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc.

Turner-Bisset, R. (1999) The Knowledge Bases of the Expert Teacher, BERJ Vol. 25. No. 1, pp. 39 – 55.

Vonk, J. H. C. “Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Mentor Knowledge and Skills”. Mentoring, Vol. 1, No.1 31 – 39.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1988) ref p. 17

William, D. (1998) Personal communications with one of the authors.

Wilkin, M. (ed) (1992) Mentoring in Schools, London: Kogan Page.

Wilkin, M. & Sankey, D. (eds) (1994) Collaboration and Transition in Initial Teacher Training, London: Kogan Page.

Wilson, S.M., Shulman, L.S., & Richert, A.E. (1987) “150 different ways of knowing: representations of knowledge in teaching”. in Calderhead, J. (ed) Exploring Teachers’ Thinking, London: Cassell.


Yinger, R.J. (1978) A Study of Teacher Planning: description and a model of pre-active decision making, Research Series 18, East Lansing: Michigan State University.

Zeichner, K.M. (1983) “Alternative paradigms of teacher education”, Journal of Teacher Education, 34.3. pp. 3 – 9.

Zeichner, K.M. (1995) “Beyond the divide of teacher research and academic research”, Teachers & Teaching: Theory and Practice, 1 (2), pp. 153 – 172.

Zumwalt, K. K. (ed) (1986) Improving Teaching- 1986 ASCD Yearbook, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.


the apple project: › educol › documents › 00001488.doc · web viewthe unique approach to...

Documents