Improving Teaching Quality : Promoting a Dynamic Approach to Teacher Professional Development

This presentation draws on teacher effectiveness research to consider implications for teacher professional development. The first part provides a critical review of research on teacher effectiveness. The major findings of this field of research are analyzed. It is argued that teacher factors are presented as being in opposition to one another and that the whole process of searching for teacher factors had no significant impact upon teacher professional development. In this context, the dynamic model of educational effectiveness that attempts to establish stronger links between research and improvement of practice has been developed. Studies investigating the validity of this model and especially its attempt to identify relations among teacher factors reveal that teaching skills can be grouped into stages of effective teaching. These distinct stages move gradually from skills associated with direct teaching to more advanced skills concerned with new teaching approaches and differentiation of teaching. Teachers exercising more advanced types of teacher behavior have better student outcomes. Thus, it is advocated that teacher professional development should be focused on how to address groupings of specific teacher factors associated with student learning and on how to help teachers improve their teaching skills. The second part presents the main characteristics of this dynamic integrated approach to teacher professional development. Moreover, experimental studies supporting the use of the dynamic integrated approach for improvement purposes are presented. Finally, suggestions for research investigating its impact on promoting quality of education are presented. Introduction One of the key findings from decades of Educational Effectiveness Research (EER) is the importance of the classroom level as a predictor of pupil outcomes (Scheerens and Bosker 1997). Research has consistently shown not only that the classroom level can explain more of the variance in pupil outcomes than the school level, but that a large proportion of this classroom level variance can be explained by what teachers do in the classroom (Creemers and Kyriakides 2008). As a result of these findings, classroom practice has become firmly integrated into theoretical and empirical models of educational effectiveness. This presentation aims to summarize key findings and developments in the area of Teacher Effectiveness Research (TER) and to discuss the main methodological and conceptual limitations of TER. We also refer to recent developments in the area which reveal the importance of identifying grouping of teacher factors associated with student achievement and present results of projects conducted in different countries which reveal that teaching skills can be grouped into specific developmental stages. As a consequence, a dynamic approach to teacher professional development has been developed. The main characteristics of this approach and the main findings of experimental studies supporting its use for improvement purposes are presented. Finally, suggestions for research investigating its impact on promoting quality of education are