What makes for an effective teacher?
It’s a complex question, but when it comes to the attributes that produce students with better GCSE results, Professor Simon Burgess believes he’s found an answer.
Burgess is a professor of economics at the University of Bristol and, together with Dr Shenila Rawal from the Oxford Partnership for Education Research and Analysis (OPERA) and Eric S Taylor from Harvard University, he has identified which teaching practices drive up GCSE results in English and maths.
“Teachers are incredibly important for pupil progress. There is a lot of research which shows that, but we don’t have a huge amount of information on what an effective teacher does, as opposed to what an ineffective teacher does,” he says.
“This research, and my research more generally, is focused on the contribution of teachers to students learning, to students growing and, in particular, thinking about how well they do at GCSE, which are obviously the most high-stakes exams they take.”
Burgess recognises that effective teaching is about more than student success in GCSEs - it’s about character development, social skills, broader learning and more. However, he stresses that doing well in GCSEs is really important.
“We know that it matters hugely for getting into university, for getting a good job, for life chances in general, it’s not just simply about proudly writing down that you got three 9s in your GCSEs on your CV,” he says.
Looking at which teacher practices have a positive impact on GCSE scores is therefore really important, Burgess says.
So how did the study work and what does it tell us?
The research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and is the first of its kind in the UK. It analysed the GCSE results of around 14,000 students from 32 secondary schools and compared them with classroom observations of 251 teachers in the academic years of 2014-15 and 2015-16.
In the observations, teachers from the same school recorded which instructional activities the teacher used during class and for what amount of time, and then also rated the teacher’s effectiveness using Danielson’s Framework for Teaching, the 2007 version (more on this later).
The importance of class time
The overarching finding was that what teachers do in class does matter.
“There’s quite a wide range of ways that teachers use class time. Does that matter? The answer is, yes, very much so,” Burgess explains. “There are some things that teachers spend their time on that appear to be particularly helpful for children’s futures through their GCSEs.”
So what are those things?
In English, the research found that the most important activity is facilitating interaction and discussion between classmates; more time spent on this tends to raise English GCSE scores.
Conversely, for maths teachers, the key activity is making time for students to practise questions individually in class; again, more time on this increases GCSE marks.
“This does, perhaps, fit with intuition,” Burgess argues. “What we’re saying is the way that teachers use their class time within English and maths differs quite a lot and those differences matter. Sometimes, teachers should consider the idea that they ought to spend a little bit more time on some things and maybe a little bit less time on others.”
The research also found that this is not simply about the skills of the teacher: class time use predicts student test scores even after controlling for the effectiveness of teaching. So even when teacher effectiveness was taken out of the equation, the activities used by the teachers still had an effect on the GCSE scores.
However, that’s not to say that teacher skill doesn’t matter.
The impact of a teacher’s rating
Another finding Burgess urges teachers to consider is this: when a teacher was rated highly by their peers using Danielson’s Framework, their students’ GCSE results were higher.
So how, exactly, does the framework work? Burgess explains that it measures four domains of teaching responsibility: planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities, and teachers are rated on a 12-point scale.
Those observing were given just a couple of hours of training, and were from a whole range of roles throughout the schools: they were not highly trained and expert observers.
Despite this, the research found that these ratings of teaching effectiveness predict student test score outcomes. The average student will score two to three percentile points higher when assigned to a teacher whose peers rate them among the top quartile.
The research also highlights that the students taught by the observers gain as much in terms of test scores as the students taught by the observed teachers - this opportunity for self-reflection for the observers is clearly valuable to them, and benefits their students, Burgess says.
Based on these findings, Burgess recommends that schools implement a similar peer observation system.
This kind of peer observation process isn’t expensive, he adds - the framework used is free to access online.
But how much of a difference do class time, and teacher ratings, have on GCSE results, exactly?
The study says this: “While these coefficients are small as a share of the total variation in test scores, they are large as a share of teachers’ contributions to test scores.
“For example, the effect of a one-standard-deviation higher teacher effectiveness rating is small as a share of the total variation in student test scores - just 7-8 per cent of the total - but the difference is large as a share of a teacher’s contribution to student test scores, perhaps one-third of the teacher contribution.”
Put simply, this means that the impact of the teachers’ choice of activities, and the rating they receive from their peers, is quite small when you look at all the factors that influence exam performance overall. However, when you consider just the part that teachers can influence, it accounts for about a third of that influence.
As a result, there is another takeaway from the research that Burgess wants teachers to consider: which teachers are placed with which students.
“We also found that lower-ability students gained more from having highly-effective teachers than higher-ability students. Everyone gains from having a more effective teacher, but the gain is greater for low-ability students than for higher-ability students,” he explains.
“It appears to be the case that the highly-effective teachers are allocated to the high-ability students, but actually, school leaders might want to think about allocating their most effective teachers to the lower-ability students, as that would probably bring some gains overall.”
As Burgess says, this research is the first of its kind in the UK and, at the moment, only focuses on specific activities in English and maths. No doubt there will be more studies in this area in the future to consider.
“This is one of only a few [studies] around the world which links observation data with how well students do, so it is important. But I want to be very clear: we are not saying that teachers ought to spend 13.7 per cent of every lesson doing this or that activity. That would be ridiculous,” he says.
“However, there are some useful findings for English and maths to think about: they might have to spend more time on certain activities, based on our findings. I think that’s a valid thing to say.”
