Variability in Teaching
July 8th, 2009
In an article about methodological challenges of studying the teaching of reading in Educational Researcher, Croninger and Valli include the following:
“…when we examined variation in the quality of teacher-student oral exchanges across observations, we discovered that most of the variance in these exchanges occurred among lessons enacted by the same teachers.”
In fact, they found that 84% of the differences in lesson quality were seen in lessons conducted by the same teachers. There is an important lesson here… one or two observations of a teacher are not going to capture the range of what a teacher does. You are not going to get a complete picture of a teacher without multiple observations across days. Of course, multiple observations are time and resource intensive, which is always a challenge in our budget-concious times. However, those doing teacher evaluation for accountability (as Pianta and Hamre suggest in the same issue) or as part of research projects should take note.
Reference: Croninger, R. G., & Valli, L. (2009). “Where is the Action?” Challenges to studying the teaching of reading in elementary classrooms. Educational Researcher, 38, 100-108.
Tags: observation, Teachers, variability
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