Roehrig et al. (2012). Effective teachers and teaching: Characteristics and practices related to positive student outcomes.” – Article summary

Effective teachers are teachers who have a positive impact on students’ engagement in learning activities and the outcomes associated with students’ learning (e.g. self-regulation). Teachers operate in the atmosphere of the classroom (1), instruction (2) and management (3). Effective teaching encompasses all three domains. This means that an effective teacher is one who considers how the three domains interact and is able to respond to the teaching environment by implementing practices aligned with the four dimensions of effective teaching.

There are four dimensions of effective teaching:

1. Developing caring classroom communities
   This includes elements from classroom management (e.g. monitoring) to promote a fair, democratic and caring classroom atmosphere.
2. Enhancing students’ motivation to learn
   This is done by providing informative feedback that focuses on students’ effort while still expressing high expectations in ways that promotes interest and engagement.
3. Planning and delivering engaging, assessment-driven instruction
   This includes processes of classroom management and the use of instructional strategies. The learning activities need to be planned and managed to provide an appropriate context in which to motivate students’ learning. Methods include individualizing instruction for students (1), using student assessment data for student grouping (2) and using this data for instructional focus (3).
4. Supporting students’ deep processing and self-regulation
   This includes all other domains and requires careful coordination of all domains.

Teachers’ knowledge and dispositions are reflected in their behaviour and are thus also important. However, this indirectly influences students’ outcomes but directly affect teachers’ skills.

Developing caring classroom communities requires eliciting desirable social and behavioural student outcomes (e.g. cooperation) by using affective mechanisms (e.g. praise) and behavioural mechanisms (e.g. procedures) to establish a safe place for students ’learning. Teachers establish classroom community and atmosphere early in the semester and tend to maintain this atmosphere. Positive classroom atmospheres provides students with emotional and academic support. To establish this, teachers need to be caring and fair (1), get to know students (2) and create an atmosphere of mutual respect and positive interpersonal relationships (3).

Teachers need to be emotional warm and teachers’ positive interactions with students provide support for building their social competencies. Students need to feel a sense of belonging in school settings to promote their academic achievement and social well-being. Allowing for student collaboration fosters students’ interest, engagement and autonomy. Monitoring without public punishment leads to more engaged students. Instructional talk allows for students to respond and this may foster autonomy.

Developing a classroom community can be done by monitoring behaviour rather than punishing (1), foster a classroom community (2) and establish a democratic classroom (3).

An effective teacher elicits desirable affective and cognitive responses from students about their academic work (e.g. being excited and engaged in learning) by using affective mechanisms (e.g. their own excitement) and cognitive mechanisms (e.g. having students make predictive inferences about a story) to enhance students’ motivation to learn.

Teachers with mastery-focused values and goals tend to display more positive emotions during teaching and tend to elicit more positive emotions from students. Teachers’ beliefs about students’ abilities affect the ways in which teachers interact with students. Teachers’ expectations are linked to student outcomes because they affect choices of instructional activities (1), teacher-student interactions (2) and students’ perceptions of these interactions (3).

Providing informative feedback enhances students’ motivation. Effective feedback provides students with specific information about attainment of learning goals (1), their progress and how to proceed (2) and greater possibilities of learning (3). This kind of feedback can focus on providing information about the task or the product (1), the process used to complete the task (2), the self-regulation of learning processes (3) and the learner as a person (4). The least effective feedback is about the learner as a person. Positive and negative feedback may both be effective when focused on the task level but not when focused on self-regulation level.

Formative feedback refers to information provided to modify the learner’s thinking or behaviour to improve his or her learning and this is a part of effective feedback. Delayed feedback is more effective for high-achieving learners and immediate feedback is more effective for low-achieving learners. Feedback that enhances learning has several characteristics:

1. The feedback is focused on the task and not on the learner.
2. The feedback is elaborate.
3. The feedback is presented in manageable units.
4. The feedback is specific and clear.
5. The feedback promotes a learning goal orientation.
6. The feedback is provided after learners have attempted a solution.
7. The feedback reduces uncertainty between performance and goals.

There are several behaviours that should be avoided:

1. Normative comparisons should be avoided.
2. Praise should rarely be used.
3. Feedback should be presented in writing.
4. The learner should not be interrupted with feedback when he is actively engaged.
5. Progressive hints that terminate with the correct answer should be avoided.

A teacher should be focused on improvement and effort (e.g. not use competitive grading). Teacher mastery goals are positively associated with students’ self-efficacy (1), intrinsic motivation (2), persistence (3), divergent thinking (4) and effective learning strategies (5). Teacher performance goals are associated with negative affect (1), challenge avoidance (2), superficial learning strategies (3) and self-handicapping (4). Performance goals may lead to better performance, depending on the student and the type of task.

Students’ attributions related to their performance (e.g. “I studied hard”’; “this was lucky”) are related to their motivation.

Teachers should communicate high expectations of the students. However, high expectations must be communicated with care as high expectations without caring can result in impossible goal setting. Expressing high expectations is important and may function through its relationship to student engagement.

Teachers promote students’ motivation through positive emotion-related behaviours (e.g. use humour). Displaying positive emotions and emotional scaffolding of students’ learning experiences help support students’ willingness to take academic risks.

Effective teachers elicits desirable cognitive and behavioural responses from students during academic work. This is done by planning and delivering engaging, assessment-driven instruction. One way of doing this is organizing engaging content and activities. Effective teachers make the content meaningful for the student and this increases engagement and understanding (e.g. relate it to real life). Students are also more likely to be interested in a new activity if they have been successful in similar situations in the past.

Another method is individualizing instruction using assessment data. The level of difficulty should also be individualized. A last method is planning for instructional density. The instruction needs to be well-organized, flexible and at a pace that keeps students engaged. Instructional density can be achieved through varied methods and a well-planned instruction.

Supporting students’ deep processing and self-regulation requires all the other dimensions. It is necessary to continuously assess the effectiveness of their decisions, practices and outcomes. Effective teaching practices to achieve these goals rely on students’ knowledge about and control over their own cognitive processes. Metacognition enables students’ learning from instruction. High levels of cognitive, behavioural and emotional engagement may interact in ways that positively enhance one another.

Higher order thinking involves understanding relationships among various aspects of the material, thinking creatively and formulating predictions. This is promoted by effective teaching. Low level thinking involves memorization or applying procedures that take little thought. Higher order thinking can be promoted by modelling and explicitly articulating metacognitive processes. One effective method could be asking students higher order questions but not providing them with the answers.

Another method of supporting deep processing and self-regulation is balancing an appropriate challenge level. Maintaining high levels of instructional density for all individuals requires balancing and targeting of appropriate challenge levels.

Effective teachers facilitate metacognitive activities in which students reflect on their thought processes and engage in self-monitoring and planning to promote self-regulation and motivation.