Teacher training programs: Since the 1980s, there has been a significant increase in the collegiate coursework requirements necessary to earn a preliminary teaching credential. Beyond a subject-area degree, methods coursework, and practicum hours, most states require potential teachers to take additional classes in English language development, technology, cultural awareness, and techniques for teaching reading. Unfortunately, while teacher-preparation requirements have increased, student achievement has not. Hattie (2009) finds, in fact, that teacher-training programs have a low-leverage impact rate of 0.11 standard deviations in the annual growth of student learning—significantly lower than the 0.40 baseline of highly effective teaching strategies.
Step-and-column pay scales: Most school districts structure their teacher-compensation scale to encourage continuing education and advanced experience. Often referred to as step and column, this compensation scale offers teachers higher salaries for earning continuing-education credits and postgraduate degrees, as well as for completing more years of service under the premise that greater content knowledge and teaching experience will improve teacher effectiveness. In reality, these practices produce only minimal gains in student achievement—Hattie (2009) finds that postgraduate degrees, for example, have an impact rate of 0.09. Likewise, studies that have correlated years of experience and teacher effectiveness find that teachers show the greatest productivity gains during their first few years on the job, after which their performance tends to level off (Rice, 2010). While we are not suggesting that promoting continuing education and rewarding teacher experience are nonbeneficial, it is unlikely that these practices will significantly and sustainably improve core instruction.
Ability grouping: In the name of differentiation—in other words, in the attempt to adapt the core instructional program to meet the varying demands of individual student needs—some schools have stratified core instruction by grouping students according to their perceived ability. This practice, known as ability grouping, is justified with phrases such as, “We are differentiating by teaching students at their level.” In reality, ability grouping doesn’t represent instructional differentiation; instead, it is nothing more than student tracking, a practice that has been proven controversial among educators. Hattie (2009) finds that ability grouping, or tracking, has minimal effects on student learning (producing just a 0.12 standard deviation) and, at the same time, can have profoundly negative effects on equity, as the students perceived to have the lowest ability are most often minorities, English learners, and students from poverty.
Flexible grouping: Another common differentiation strategy involves the use of in-classroom flexible groupings to meet individual student needs. In this strategy, instead of grouping students by perceived ability, teachers flexibly group students within the classroom by skill. Commonly, these groups rotate through both self-guided stations and direct instruction with the teacher. Many teachers, claiming they know their students best and are in the best position to meet each student’s learning needs, advocate this strategy. Hattie’s (2009) meta-analysis of this practice determines an effectiveness impact of 0.18, which is hardly better than the deviation in learning improvements achieved through ability grouping (0.12)—or simply through living. (We describe using flexible grouping effectively in chapter 2, page 46.)
Class-size reduction: During the first decade of the 21st century, many states funded class-size reduction programs to improve classroom teaching. Proponents argued that reducing class size leads to more individualized instruction, more student-centered learning, increased teacher morale, fewer student misbehaviors, and higher student engagement—all factors that should improve classroom instruction (Hattie, 2009). However, Hattie’s meta-analysis of fourteen major studies on the impact of lowering class size identifies an overall impact rate of 0.21; therefore, lowering class size did not significantly impact student learning. Thus, the size of the class size itself is not as important as the quality of the instruction that takes place in it.
Teacher evaluation and merit pay: Many states are attempting to improve teaching through a more demanding teacher evaluation process, the use of merit pay to reward teachers who demonstrate above-average results, or both. In reality, there is no evidence that either incentive-laden or overly punitive teacher evaluation processes will significantly improve instruction. In actuality, teacher evaluations do not recognize good teaching, leave poor teaching unaddressed, and do not inform decision making in any meaningful way (Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). Additionally, three out of four teachers report that their evaluation process has virtually no impact on their classroom practice (Duffett, Farkas, Rotherham, & Silva, 2008). Likewise, research consistently concludes that merit pay does not improve student achievement or change teacher behavior in a positive way. It may actually contribute to declines in student learning, as it is typically abandoned within a few years of implementation (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006).
As you can see, each of these efforts to improve core instruction has failed to result in high-leverage education practices. There are two primary reasons for these failures. First, the reforms have focused on the wrong outcome—ultimately, the goal of education reform is not to improve teaching but to increase student learning. While this difference might sound like semantics to some, in reality, it represents a seismic shift in thinking, as the effectiveness of any given teaching strategy can only be determined by evidence of its impact on student learning (DuFour & Marzano, 2011). When the goal of education reform was to improve teaching, we could logically assume that instruction could improve if teachers were required to meet more rigorous credentials and evaluation expectations, utilize research-based textbook programs, differentiate instruction in their classroom, and expect to receive bonus pay when they achieved better-than-average results in their students’ learning outcomes. However, when compared to the criteria of increased student learning, all of these efforts to improve teaching fail miserably to hit the mark—wrong target, wrong result.
Second, these previous education reform efforts view teaching as primarily an individual act. That is, they assume that teaching is what each teacher does in his or her own classroom. When teaching is framed this way, then the perceived solution is to train, observe, evaluate, entice, bribe, reward, threaten, dictate, or coach each teacher into individually providing better performance—the basis of failed reform efforts previously described. We can assume that individuals with good intentions advocated, and often mandated, this litany of unsuccessful reform efforts. But as Jim Collins (2009) says in his book How the Mighty Fall, “Bad decisions made with good intentions are still bad decisions” (p. 148).
If coaching individual teachers into better performance has failed to significantly increase student achievement, then how does a school strengthen its core instructional program to ensure higher levels of student learning? What we will advocate for in this book, and describe in great detail, is that good teaching is not an individual act but instead a collaborative process. Good teaching is not “what I do for my students” but instead “what we do with our students.” The PLC at Work process will create the framework for teacher-to-teacher collaboration, and effective differentiated instruction will engage students to be partners in learning. A review of what we know about good teaching will prove these points.
Synthesizing What We Know About Good Teaching
Based on comprehensive meta-analyses of the research on effective teaching, as well as decades of site evidence on the effectiveness of previous reform efforts, the teaching profession has never had greater consensus on what constitutes good teaching—and what does not. We know that effective teaching cannot be reduced
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