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What Are the Attributes of an Effective Teacher?

By Gordon Eldridge, TIE Columnist
01-Oct-10


Vast amounts or research converge around the conclusion that teachers make a difference; and there is almost always a far higher difference in student progress between classrooms within a school, than between schools.
Hedges (2004) reports that between seven and 21 percent of the variance in achievement gains can be explained by variations in teacher effectiveness. Sanders and Rivers (1996) found that the least effective teachers achieved student achievement gains of roughly 14 percentile points a year, while the most effective teachers helped their students achieve gains of 52 percentile points a year. This is a staggering difference!
So is it what we do, or who we are that makes us effective teachers? Is it the strategies we employ, or our individual attributes that make a difference? The synthesis of research conducted by John Hattie and described in a previous article on this page would suggest that it is mainly what we do. Most of Dr. Hattie’s synthesis of meta-analyses is related to particular instructional strategies and their effects on achievement. There are, however, a number of factors, related more to who we are and how we relate with our students, that can also have an impact on achievement.
So what were the results of Dr. Hattie’s synthesis? Irving (2004) conducted a meta-analysis of student ratings of teachers that were then correlated with actual achievement. The factors with the highest positive correlations were:
• Teachers challenging students
• High expectations
• Getting students to think about the nature and quality of their work
• Teaching the language, and processes, of thinking and reasoning within the subject
From Dr. Hattie’s summary of the research, three categories of attribute stand out as being of prime importance: teacher-student relationships, teacher expectations and teacher clarity.
Teacher-Student Relationships
The variables related to teacher-student relationships which correlated most highly with student achievement were (in order of average effect size):
• Non-directivity
• Empathy
• Warmth
• Encouragement of higher-order thinking
• Encouraging learning
Teacher Expectations
The research strongly suggests that high teacher expectations are critical to supporting students in making a maximum of progress. Some points of interest are:
• A culture of achievement, where teachers’ aim to develop talent in each student correlates with higher levels of progress overall than in cultures where teachers aim to select talent in order to track children into particular future educational pathways
• Teachers who believe that achievement is changeable achieve better results than those who believe achievement is difficult to change because it is innate
• When teachers have low expectations, they tend to do so for all students in the class
Teacher Clarity
The finding here is fairly simple:
• Teachers who clearly communicate the learning intentions, and clearly convey what success means in relation to those intentions, are more effective at supporting student progress.
So what does this all mean? It is interesting to note that high expectations come out strongly, in the research both on parents’ influence on achievement and teachers’ influence on achievement. Clearly, having high expectations and ensuring that our students are challenged is of primary importance. Further, being clear about exactly what is expected, and defining what it means to successfully reach these expectations, makes if far more likely that students actually will reach them.
Finally, we need to establish the kind of relationships that will support students in reaching these high expectations. A supportive classroom environment where students experience warmth and empathy is clearly important for this, but interestingly, the number one factor in supporting achievement related to teacher-student relationships was non-directivity.
Similarly to the findings related to parent support, reported in my earlier article, we as teachers must ensure that we find ways to foster and support student autonomy in learning.
Reference
Hattie, J. (2009) “The Contributions from the Teacher.” In Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, pp. 108-128. London: Routledge.




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