Practice: Critiquing Teacher Feedback
Analyzing Teacher Feedback
Teacher Feedback: Self-Assessment
About the Authors
James H. Stronge, PhD, is president of Stronge and Associates Educational Consulting, an educational consulting company that focuses on teacher and leader effectiveness with projects internationally and in many U.S. states. Additionally he is the Heritage Professor of Education, a distinguished professorship in the Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership program at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Dr. Stronge’s research interests include policy and practice related to teacher effectiveness, teacher and administrator evaluation, and teacher selection. He has worked with state departments of education, school districts, and U.S. and international education organizations to design and implement evaluation and hiring systems for teachers, administrators, and support personnel. Recently, he completed work on new teacher and principal evaluation systems for American international schools in conjunction with the Association of American Schools in South America and supported by the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Stronge has made more than 350 presentations at regional, national, and international conferences and has conducted workshops for educational organizations extensively throughout the United States and internationally. Among his current research projects are international comparative studies of national award-winning teachers in the United States and China and influences of economic and societal trends on student academic performance in countries globally.
Dr. Stronge has authored, coauthored, or edited twenty-six books and approximately two hundred articles, chapters, and technical reports. His 1994 book, Educating Homeless Children and Adolescents: Evaluating Policy and Practice received the Outstanding Academic Book Award from the American Library Association.
Dr. Stronge was a founding member of the board of directors for the Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation (CREATE). In 2011, he was honored with the Frank E. Flora Lamp of Knowledge Award, presented by the Virginia Association of Secondary School Principals for “bringing honor to the profession” and his “record of outstanding contributions.” He was selected as the 2012 national recipient of the Millman Award from CREATE in recognition of his work in the field of teacher and administrator evaluation.
Xianxuan Xu, PhD, is a senior research associate at Stronge and Associates Educational Consulting. Dr. Xu received her doctorate from the College of William and Mary’s Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership program. Her research interests are teacher effectiveness, professional development, and teacher and principal evaluation. She is also particularly interested in researching the relationship between culture and educational issues such as teaching, learning, and leadership. She has presented research findings at various U.S. conferences, including the American Educational Research Association, University Council for Educational Administration, and National Evaluation Institute. She is also a contributing author to Principal Evaluation: Standards, Rubrics, and Tools for Effective Performance and West Meets East: Best Practices From Expert Teachers in the U.S. and China.
Visit www.strongeandassociates.com to learn more about Dr. Stronge and Dr. Xu’s work.
To book James H. Stronge or Xianxuan Xu for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
When teachers improve, students improve. John Hattie (2012) summarizes this point well, saying, “Teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning” (p. 22). A logical reaction to this point is to wonder how teachers exert this influence on student learning. Moreover, how do they support and sustain teacher growth school by school and year by year? This book focuses on the important practices of effective teachers, specifically instructional delivery.
To illuminate what occurs in highly effective teachers’ classrooms, we conducted a multiyear research study in which we examined the instructional practices and beliefs of national award-winning teachers in the United States and China (Grant et al., 2014). The findings from the study reveal that exceptional teachers in both countries:
• Consistently use a wide variety of instructional activities (in fact, about nine instructional activities per lesson, on average)
• Engage students to a high degree
• Focus on varying cognitive levels during instruction
Based on our study, we know that the number, types, and selection of instructional methods along with the connectivity among those methods are important to effective teaching.
Instructional Methods
Portions of this material appear in Stronge, Grant, and Xu (2015).
Hattie (2012) reports that what teachers do and how they teach, collectively, yield an effect size (ES) of 0.62—quite a high impact on student achievement. Specific instructional strategies independently produce a dramatic improvement on student learning as well—consider microteaching (0.88), metacognitive strategies (0.69), and direct instruction (0.59). In essence, instructional methods matter (Hattie, 2012).
One prominent instructional method, questioning, can be a highly effective tool when used properly, as it has an effect size of 0.46 (Guo, Tsai, Chang, & Huang, 2007; Hattie, 2012). Questioning not only provides students with an opportunity to think critically and become more informed about their learning but also yields important input for teachers to support instructional modifications (Stronge, 2007). Effective teachers and ineffective teachers use questioning in substantially different ways. Effective teachers ask both lower-order and higher-order questions to improve the comprehension of students of all learning abilities. In addition, the questions they ask are relevant to the intended learning outcomes and serve to facilitate learning activities. Ineffective teachers, on the other hand, ask about 93 percent of all the questions, according to a study of science classrooms (Reinsvold & Cochran, 2012). The study also finds that these teachers tend to provide little wait time, ask questions at the lowest cognitive level, and use closed-ended questions. Another case study finds that effective teachers ask higher-level questions approximately seven times more often than teachers considered ineffective (Stronge, Ward, Tucker, & Hindman, 2007).
There is no single classroom practice that is effective with all subject matter and all grade levels in all circumstances. And effective teachers recognize that no single instructional strategy can be used in all situations. Rather, they develop and call on a broad repertoire of approaches that have proven successful for them. Effective instruction involves a dynamic interplay among content to be learned, pedagogical methods applied, characteristics of individual learners, and the context in which the learning is to occur (Schalock, Schalock, Cowart, & Myton, 1993). Ultimately, subject matter knowledge, pedagogical
