How To Be An Effective Teacher

There has been much (political) debate in recent years in both Britian and America about the difference teachers make to their students in terms of the narrow (but politically primary) measure of outcomes. To put it bluntly, what, if any, difference do teachers make to student test scores?

Within this particular scenario and all-things-being-equal (which they never actually are) there’s a lot of evidence to show that some teachers are more successful than others in helping their students learn. There is, in this respect, a Teacher Effect to learning which, anecdotally, many of us will have experienced in terms of That Teacher who somehow inspired us to do well when all the others had written us off…

While anecdotal evidence is one thing, actually measuring a possible Teacher Effect is another: although there’s been no shortage of such studies, making sense of what they’re collectively saying is something well beyond the purview of most of us – so a recent meta-analysis of “40 studies conducted during the first two decades of the 21st Century” covering around 1.5 million secondary school students and nearly 7,000 teachers across 17 countries by

Lopez-Martín and colleagues(2023) provides a helpful way to both answer the initial question and identify the most (and, by extension, least) significant characteristics of effective teachers.

In this respect, Lopez-Martin calculated that, overall, teachers made around a 10% difference to their students’ academic performance. Although a relatively modest difference in the grand scheme of things, it’s large enough that an effective teacher can make the difference between a student who is underachieving and one who is not.

If you also add in the fact that the “moderate effect” they found would be a magnitude greater if less-successful teachers did the things that made their more successful counterparts effective, it’s not stretching things too far to suggest an effective teacher can both turn an underachieving student into one who is comfortably achieving their goals and an averagely-achieving student into one gaining top grades.

While this broad, ball-park, improvement figure is undoubtedly important, to understand why some teachers can be more-effective than others we need to understand the range of possible factors – and their respective effect sizes – that go into making more-effective teaching and learning.

While Lopez-Martin’s research identified 21 factors that impact on teaching we can, for the sake of brevity, outline a small sample of those factors that seem to have negligible effects on learning before moving-on to identify the key factors that have both moderate and large effect sizes.

Negligible effects…

As you might expect, a substantial number (the majority…) of factors have relatively negligible effects on student learning. Psychological traits such as “agreeableness, openness and extraversion”, for example, seemingly have very small effects, as do personal skills such as leadership qualities and, perhaps more-surprisingly, communication. It’s possible the latter is a skill likely to be displayed by the majority of teachers, thereby making a relatively small comparative difference in achievement.

Perhaps one of the more surprising things in this category is the relative unimportance of sociodemographic factors such as gender in student learning. Given the recurring panics over the so-called “feminisation of teaching” and it’s supposedly detrimental effects on boys’ learning, the evidence suggests gender has very little, if any, effect when compared with a range of more-significant factors.

Moderate effects

Something that has a moderate effect on learning is subject-specific training – in basic terms the level of subject expertise a teacher brings to the classroom. This might seem surprising given that, anecdotally, we might expect teachers with a deep level of subject knowledge to be rather more effective than those with a lower level of knowledge. The relationship between levels of subject knowledge and student learning is, however, more problematic than this simple relationship might suggest, for a number of reasons:

• as with psychological traits such as the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, there are unlikely to be huge differences in levels of teacher subject knowledge in countries like Britian and America where, in both, undergraduate degrees and some form of accredited teacher-training are required.

• although popular sentiment might argue otherwise, there’s no simple relationship between expert levels of subject knowledge and the ability to convey this knowledge to high school students. As the Channel 4 experiment The Unteachables (2005) vividly demonstrated, putting internationally-acclaimed experts in front of disaffected students didn’t significantly  transform either their behaviour or levels of achievement. As Phil Beadle, one of the prime movers in the experiment concluded “I think in the most part it was probably a failure…So for us to claim it was a success would be a big fat fib.”

• while the kind of thinking that equates effective teaching with very high levels of subject mastery can be questioned, it’s entirely possible that good subject knowledge can be a cornerstone for the development and expression of skills that do have large effects. Teachers who feel secure in their grasp of subject knowledge may, for example, be able to display more confidence in their ability to teach (self-efficacy) as well as being more willing and able to explore and evaluate different ways of teaching through professional development.

Despite the evidence subject-specific training only has a moderate effect on student learning, this shouldn’t be taken to mean subject knowledge isn’t, in itself, important. Rather, it suggests that there’s an optimum level of subject knowledge required for effective teaching and anything over and above this isn’t likely to make much difference.

Two further factors that appear to have moderate learning effects are classroom management – in basic terms, a teacher’s ability to effectively organise their classroom in terms of things like teaching routines and rules, how space and resources are managed to facilitate student engagement, how disruptions are minimised and so forth – and instructional clarity and credibility. In the latter respect, lessons that were well-structured and employed clear, consistent, teaching techniques resulted in moderate positive learning effects. 

Large effects

Factors that the meta-analysis identified as having the largest effects on student learning focused on areas like an individual’s ability to develop and maintain a reflective attitude to their own teaching beliefs and practices. Effective teachers, in other words, were continually questioning their beliefs about how students learn and, in the light of new knowledge and understanding, adjusting their teaching accordingly. This, in some respects, reflects a new interest in the metacognitative aspects of teaching and learning where constant reflection on classroom practices leads to better and more-effective ways of both teaching – such as through the use of Spaced Repetition – and learning (encouraging students to think about things like Active Listening and different ways of recording information through techniques like Cornell Notes and Mindmappping).

A reflective attitude was also found to link closely to the notion of self-efficacy – a teacher’s confidence in their own ability to do things like plan, manage and deliver their teaching in ways that have a positive impact on their students’ learning. What the meta-analysis broadly showed was that teachers with high levels of self-efficacy tended to set ambitious learning goals for their students, develop ways of engaging and motivating them, overcome challenges by adapting their teaching strategies to changing situations and show a willingness to innovate in terms of both lesson design and classroom management.

The final factor impacting significantly on student learning – something that again links closely with reflection and self-efficacy – was the idea of professional development. The most effective teachers in the meta-analysis not only engaged in conventional forms of professional development like conferences and workshops, they also tried to cultivate a growth mindset focused on identifying and employing ways to improve their teaching, both individually and, most-importantly, in collaboration with their students and peers.

The broad intention here, therefore, was to use continuous professional development to do things like improve how they taught in the light of current teaching practices and stay broadly current with the latest forms of educational research. It’s important to note, however, that the most effective teachers were those who thought critically about their professional development.

Effective teachers, in other words, don’t simply jump on the latest educational bandwagon. Rather, while they’re open to new ideas, teaching techniques and ways of managing their classroom, effective teachers reflect critically on these things before trying to incorporate them into their teaching.

Reference

Esther Lopez-Martín, Belen Gutierrez-de-Rozas, Ana María Gonzalez-Benito, Eva Exposito-Casas (2023) “Why Do Teachers Matter? A Meta-Analytic Review of how Teacher Characteristics and Competencies Affect Students’ Academic Achievement”: International Journal of Educational Research 120