Susan H. Landry on the definition of “quality” teaching
It is a critically important goal to develop tools for effectively measuring “quality” teaching in the preK and elementary school grades. Of course, a large challenge in achieving this goal is the determination of what “quality” means. Robert Pianta is correct in his statement ("Neither Art nor Accident: New Research Helps Define and Develop Quality PreK and Elementary Teaching," HEL, January/February 2008) that our definition of good (quality) teaching is “all over the map.”In a time when accountability is becoming key in the education of our children, it seems that the definition of “quality” teaching needs to be linked to whether specific teaching practices are supporting children’s learning of a broad range of social, cognitive, and specific academic skills. To know if this is happening, a quality teaching measurement tool needs to demonstrate that high scores and/or gains across a school year on teaching domains predict stronger gains in key aspects of children’s learning than is seen for children whose teachers have lower scores. Unfortunately, this form of examination has often not occurred. For the field of professional development of our teachers to move forward, greater attention needs to be given to providing specificity in our measurement of teaching practices.
A laudable goal of CLASS is to measure effective teaching and to inform professional development practices. CLASS is based, in part, on a previously developed teacher observation measure that does demonstrate some relations with child outcomes for 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades. It will be interesting as future work is conducted with CLASS to go a step further in understanding the relation between the teaching domains and children’s learning. For example, with separate measures of teachers’ emotional versus instructional support CLASS results may inform the field about the relative importance of these two teaching characteristics for different areas of learning. Also, it will be critically important to go beyond global measurements of instructional practices to include more fine-grained observations to determine what specific practices are promoting learning of math, reading, and science, as well as children’s understanding of their social world.
It is only when we begin to make this direct link between what the teacher is doing with what the child learns that we can effectively support our teachers.
Susan H. Landry is Michael Matthew Knight Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the director of the Children’s Learning Institute in Houston, Texas.
