Research on Teacher Effects: Uses and Abuses

Research linking teacher behavior to student outcomes has direct relevance to practice, and if used appropriately, will have the same professionalizing and empowering effects (i. e., not deskilling effects) on teachers that the development of a knowledge base underlying medical practice has had on physicians. However, this assumes that certain common mistakes are avoided when deriving instructional principles from these findings and using them as the basis for preservice teacher education programs, induction programs for new inservice teachers, or teacher evaluation and accountability programs. Toward that end, this article offers guidelines for appropriately interpreting and using teacher effects research (and thus for avoiding its misuse). Ideally, teaching is a technology for producing learning, informed by scientific data linking teacher behaviors to student achievement measures. Schools will fulfill their missions most effectively when teachers are trained to follow scientifically developed guidelines for instruction and then monitored to ensure compliance enforced through rigorous accountability procedures. On the contrary, teaching is and always will be an art. Attempts to legislate instruction and turn teaching into a technology are doomed to failure. Schools work best when individual teachers use their professional knowledge and experience to decide what to teach and how to teach it to the particular students in their classes.