Christopher M. Clark
Michigan State University
Abstract
Researchers on teaching offer three different portraits of good teaching under the banners of the process-product approach, teacher thinking research, and the teacher knowledge paradigm. But what do teachers themselves say about their best moments? And what do children remember about their best teachers? The messages from the research communities, practicing teachers and reflective students are laid side by side and implications drawn about teacher professional development.
I have come to speak of the good teacher: to describe him, to honor her, to celebrate that which is best in our profession. My premise is that we cannot hope for good education from the cradle to the doctorate, or at any place in between, in the absence of good teaching. For better, and sometimes for worse, the quality of teaching puts a limit on the quality of education. And the quality of our education will, in turn, limit or enable the good that the next generation of teachers is able to do.
In my portrayal of the good teacher I shall draw on three sources: 1) empirical research on teaching, 2) the voices of teachers themselves, and 3) what children have to say about good teaching. My own reflections on my experiences as a student, teacher, and parent of school children are also represented here. I hope that this analysis will create a composite picture of the good teacher in your minds--an idealized image, like Leonardo's Mona Lisa--that may inspire but may not be imitated or mass produced. Or like Michaelangelo's David--a heroic form on which we can project our own best qualities and aspirations, magnified in excellent proportion, larger than life, and radically encouraging to the human spirit.
Knowing something of the good teacher will not, by itself, solve the many problems of teacher education, certification, professional development, and life long learning that we are all concerned about. But coming to a better vision of good teaching may serve to encourage each of us as we address specific local and national probelms in our own creative and field-sensitive ways. For, in the final analysis, the good teacher equips his or her students for confident, independent thought and action in an uncertain world. The good teacher prepares us for a world of difference. The good teacher knows when to let us go. And this is almost always before the student feels ready to be on his own.
Before I summarize what researchers on teaching have to say about the good teacher, I want to tell you a story of teaching, learning, and leadership. The story is of a man who was captain of a submarine in which I served as chief engineer from 1966 to 1968. Captain Carlin is twelve years older than I am, and was born and schooled in the same neighborhood of the city of Philadelphia as I was. As captain of the submarine, he was a man of good humor, profound competence, and of high expectations for his officers and men. He was a good teacher.
A submarine is a complex and intense place to live and learn. The three different submarines in which I served were, basically, steel cylinders 16 feet in diameter and 300 feet long, crammed with all manner of equipment and people. It is a pretty intense learning environment. The safety of the seventy-five crewmembers depends, to a great extent, on how well every man learns to operate and repair every electrical, hydraulic, electronic, mechanical, and pneumatic system on board. Everyone has a personal interest in everyone else's learning. Our lives depend on the competence of the newest crewmember. This makes for a highly motivated learning community.
In this exotic context, what made Captain Carlin a good teacher? In part, it was his affirmative personality, good humor, and encouragement by example. He was very competent and knowledgeable about all aspects of submarine operations, and he was also open to learn new ways of doing things. He was eager for deeper understandings of the ship, the sea, and of the people with whom he worked and lived. He recognized that the unique character of the particular submarine he commanded must be patiently learned over time. He also taught me that the character of the crew could be cultivated but not imposed from above, that building on the strengths of each individual crewman is crucial, and that expressing respect for and interest in each man was one of the keys to his leadership. In part, he managed by wandering around the submarine, collecting each man's stories.
But lest you think that Captain Carlin was larger than life, he also showed us his human frailties and vulnerabilities. He did all of the grocery shopping for his family of six. He mowed his own lawn. He was uncertain about how to raise his four children. As the father of preadolescents at the end of the 60's, he had many reasonable fears about what could befall his boys and girls. He had car trouble, and he chewed his fingernails. He not only collected stories from each of us, he also told stories of his own life, his childhood, his weekend, and of his chilling feelings when he was missile officer on a Polaris submarine during the Cuban missile crisis.
One other fact about Captain Carlin will help you to appreciate him as a leader and a teacher: he put great energy into promoting and publishing the accomplishments of our ship and crew to the Division Commander and to the Squadron Commander. Our captain was our advocate; he was the teller of good news, the one who made us proud to be on the USS Bang. We rose to the occasion; we fed his need to tell good news by creating more good news. Both years during which he was our captain we were awarded the highest honor for operational readiness.
One morning we were returning from two weeks at sea, and I was to be the Officer of the Deck, to bring the ship upriver and moor alongside the pier. Shiphandling in this situation is a difficult and hazzardous team effort, and I was a relatively inexperienced 25-year-old shiphandler. The captain stood behind me on the open bridge as I negotiated the river, came through a narrow drawbridge, and gave orders to helm and engine room that brought us smoothly alongside the pier. It was a very good landing.
What was the captain's role in this good landing? First, he kept silent throughout, letting me know that I was in charge. Second, he was present and alert, giving me the reassurance that, if the situation became especially difficult, I could call on him for help. And third, he was sufficiently aware of the particulars of solving this complex piloting problem, on this particular day, that his congratulations to me and our debriefing afterwards carried great meaning, credibility, and pedagogical value. I still remember his first words of that conversation of 25 years ago. The captain said "Lieutenants Clark, that was a fine landing. It cost me only three fingernails."
So here we have the beginnings of a portrait of the good teacher, in a setting quite different from school. Please hold these qualities of Captain Carlin in mind as we now shift our attention to what researchers on teaching have to say about the good teacher.
The question "What makes a good teacher?" is fundamental to much of research in education. This is particularly true for the several approaches to research on teaching that were conceived and led by educational psychologists. Next I will summarize the major contributions of three related research traditions to our knowledge about good teaching. These traditions are called: The Process-Product approach, the Teacher Thinking approach, and the Teacher Knowledge approach.
Process-Product Research on Teaching.
The first approach to research on teaching to be considered here began in the early 1950's. The young educational psychologists of that time were fresh from designing emergency training programs for soldiers, sailors and airmen in World War II. Naturally, they drew on their experiences and successes with task analysis, behavior reinforcement, and testing and measurement when they turned their attention to teachers and schooling. Their goals were to discover the secrets of success of the most effective teachers and then to create teacher training programs that could transform all teachers into very effective teachers.
The reason this approach is called the Process-Product approach is that the researchers concerned themselves with two classes of variables. "Process" refers to the visible and audible behavior of teachers and students during classroom teaching. "Product" refers to the objectively measurable results of teaching, usually expressed as achievement test scores of children. The good teacher, in this framework, is one whose students achieve the highest scores on tests of knowledge and skill following instruction. The research program is dedicated to describing the teaching skills and behaviors that reliably distinguish between the most effective teachers and less effective teachers.
During forty years of Process-Product research many developments have taken place in the theoretical and technical tools used to study teaching. Observation systems for describing teacher behavior and classroom interaction have become progressively more sophisticated and complex. Use of technology such as audiorecording, videotape, and direct computer coding of data have made possible complex studies that could not have been attempted fifteen or twenty years ago. And the technologies of testing and of large scale data analysis have also become more powerful and precise during our lifetime. Most importantly, thousands of researchers have spent tens of thousands of hours in school classrooms, carefully attending to teachers and teaching, students and learning. A scholarly community of research on teaching has developed internationally; a community of dedicated and intelligent professionals that has come to some concensus about what makes a good teacher. What do these people say to us today about the good teacher?
To answer this question I will draw heavily on the extensive literature reveiw by Jere Brophy and Thomas Good entitled "Teacher Behavior and Student Achievement" that appeared in the Handbook of Research on Teaching, third edition (Wittrock, 1986). Their sumary and integration of the findings of Process-Product research emphasizes results of studies that have been replicated a number of times and in which these reviewers have particularly high confidence. According to Brophy and Good, the most reliable findings about effective teaching depict a classroom teacher who is well organized, efficient, task oriented and businesslike. They describe this form of active, direct instruction as follows:
So, the image of the good teacher offered by Process-Product researchers is of one who is the eficient director and manager of a three part instructional process that involves lecture and demonstration, recitation with feedback, and supervised practice or seatwork. This body of research also offers guidance in considerable detail about which behaviors constitute effective recitation, or feedback, or appropriate seatwork. For example, the researchers have analyzed the recitation strategy of teaching into a three-part pattern consisting of structuring information, question asking, and responding to student answers. Breaking the strategy down even further, many studies have been done to discover which kinds of questions at what levels of difficulty are correlated with high student achievement. Similar studies have also been done of the varieties of structured information giving, of responding to students' correct or incorrect answers, of the pacing of instruction, of grouping for instruction, and of managing seatwork and homework assignments.
The global image of the good teacher supported by this research is of a businseelike person who is clearly in control of the flow of work in an orderly, efficient classroom. Such a person is clear, well organized, enthusiastic, and direct. The process of rapid and cumualtive coverage of academic content, with clear feedback and remedial instruction when necessary, leads to superior performance on tests of facts and skills. The culture of control, efficiency and convergence of learning outcomes defines the world of the Process-Product teacher.
Research on Teacher Thinking
Partly as a reaction to the behavioral and managerial focus of Process-Product research on teaching, a new approach to the question "Who is the good teacher?" began in 1975. This approach has come to be called research on teacher thinking, and researchers in this field concern themselves with the mental lives of teachers--the planning, decision making, beliefs, and theories that invisibly guide and influence teacher action. This field began with the image of a teacher as a diagnostician who was responsible for observing, categorizing, and acting in response to a complex array of cues and situations that described self, students, and learning environment. The metaphor of teacher as decision maker became central to this work, along with the assumption that teachers behave rationally almost all of the time. The challenge to researchers was to describe and understand the rationality underlying good teaching.
I have been a player in research on teacher thinking since 1974. With my colleague Penelope Peterson I conducted an extensive review summarizing approximately forty studies of teacher thinking. Our review concludes with this portrait of the good teacher:
We leave research on teacher thinking with the impression that the good teacher's effective action depends as much on his or her thoughts, plans, and decisions as on efficient behavior and management ability. The mental lives of teachers are at least as important to understanding and supporting the profession as are their visible behaviors.
Research on Teacher Knowledge
Let's now leave the frameworks of Process-Product and Teacher Thinking research to consider what the newest approach to research on teaching has to offer. This approach is called research on teacher knowledge, and the paradigm takes the postiton that what is most important and most neglected in teaching is the teacher's knowledge of the subject matter that he or she teaches. Logic and common sense suggest that one cannot teach what one does not understand. But how many of us have had the experience of being taught by a teacher or professor who is clearly the master of his discipline, yet is unable to communicate that knowledge to us struggling students? This paradox has led Shulman and his colleagues at Stanford University to initiate a series of case studies of the knowledge held by high school teachers and, most importantly, of the ways in which these teachers transform that knowledge in order to represent it to their students.
What these detailed case studies depict, in the teaching of history, of science, of literature, and of mathematics is what Claude Levi-Strauss calls a "conversation with the situation." This conversation takes place in the mind of the teacher as he or she reorganizes academic knowledge about Hamlet or photosynthesis or the Civil War to accomodate to local knowledge about the lives and minds of the children to be taught. A delicate balance must be struck each day between appropriate transformation of knowledge and the danger of distorting that which is to be taught. In this framework, the teacher is both a knowledgable representative of an academic discipline and also a translator who can faithfully express the big ideas of history or biology in the language of sixteen-year-olds.
This would be a difficult enough task if all sixteen-year-olds spoke the same language. But according to these researchers, the teacher is faced with many dialects and variations in students' ways of understanding. One of the best known scholarly reports of this research effort is entitled "150 Different Ways of Knowing" (Wilson, Shulman & Richert, 1987). This title is intended to emphasize their claim that a high school teacher who teaches 150 students each day ought to aspire to a repertoire of 150 variations in ways to represent content.
In an article that describes the philosophy and assumptions of research on teacher knowledge, Shulman (1987) lists seven constituents of the knowledge that good teachers have. These are:
-content knowledge;
-general pedagogical knowledge;
-curriculum knowledge;
-pedagogical content knowledge;
-knowledge of learners and their characteristics;
-knowledge of educational contexts;
-knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values (p.
8).
In my opinion, the central contributions of this newest approach to research on teaching are the coining of the concept of pedagogical content knowledge and the descriptions of particular cases of teachers developing and acting on this "special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is the unique province of teachers" (Shulman, 1987, p. 8). The good teacher, then, must not only know how to manage, give feedback, make practical plans and wise decisions. She must be more than a performer, more than a thinker. The good teacher must also be a practical scholar, a student of the academic disciplines, and a fluent translator. The good teacher becomes a life long learner. His journey toward becoming a good teacher has barely begun on graduation day.
So, now we have a picture of the good teacher from the points of view of the educational research community. You probably know teachers who fit these descriptions. You or your children may have been taught by teachers who express these qualities. You may know yourself to be a good teacher in these ways. But is it good enough to demonstrate comprehensive mastery of subject matter, to exhibit technical skills in managing a classroom and explaining its complexities, and to be an effective planer and decision maker? Is it good enough to score high on teacher evaluation checklists developed from research on teaching?
For some answers, let us turn to what teachers have said about what it takes to be a good teacher, to what good teachers have said about themselves, and to what ordinary teachers have said about times when their teaching was exceptionally good. These answers come from my conversations with more than one hundred teachers of high school and elementary school during the last four years.
The teachers who have spoken to me about good teaching would agree with much of the advice we have heard from researchers on teaching. In fact, experienced teachers often react to reports of research by saying "Of course! Everyone knows that. Why did you need to do an expensive study to demonstrate what is obvious?" And mixed in with this somewhat skeptical attitude toward research is an element of gratitude and appreciation for the thoughtful attention and support that research on teaching has brought to an underappreciated and isolated profession.
What is different about the teachers' voice in the conversation about good teaching is what is in the foreground. To teachers, the heart of good teaching is not in management or decision making or pedagogical content knowledge. No, the essence of good teaching, for teachers, is in the arena of human relationships. Teaching is good when a class becomes a community of honest, nurturant, and mutually respectful people. Experienced teachers treasure the moments and memories of times when laughter, compassion, and surprise describe their day or year. Cultivation of the self esteem of young people is very high on the list of goals of the good teacher. "Better to leave my class having learned a little math and love it than knowing a lot of math and hate it." Good humor was mentioned again and again as a quality of the best teachers remembered. Enthusiasm for teaching, fascination with the content, and openness to admitting mistakes are important in good teachers. The good teacher is capable of expressing love, care, and respect in a hundred and fifty different ways. The good teacher is an adult who takes children seriously. The good teacher, they say, is the colleague who supports me and is open to my support.
As I listened to experienced educators speak of the good teacher, the word "good" took on richer meaning. The good teacher became one who could find that which is good in her students, individually and collectively. The pedagogical challenge becomes one of how to celebrate and elaborate the noblest human qualities in the context of a school. For teaching is a social and a moral enterprise. Teaching is more than the transmission of information. Intentionally or not, teachers shape the character of their students and influence the character of society for years after they retire. The good teacher attends to this human, social, moral dimension of life in schools as much as to the technical and academic. Good teaching is a vocation, a calling, as much as it is a profession.
The last voice that we shall hear speak about the good teacher is, perhaps, the most important: the voice of children. What do the children say? I have listened to little children, to adolescents, and to adult students. I urge you to listen for the voice of your own children; to imagine or remember what they know to be true about their experiences of good teaching. Almost invariably, their thoughts and stories about good teachers have to do with four fundamental human needs: 1) to be known, 2) to be encouraged, 3) to be respected, and 4) to be led. (These four human needs are the positive side of four primal fears that children and adults labor against throughout life: fear of abandonment, of despair, of ridicule, and of being lost.)
In the language of children, their good teachers nurture them by treating them as intelligent people who can become even more intelligent, by taking the time to learn who we are and what we love, treating us fairly by treating us differently, by explaining why he teaches and acts as he does, by telling stories of her own life outside school and listening to ours, by letting me have a bad day when I can't help it. The good teacher is both funny and serious. We can laugh together, and this makes me feel happy and close. She puts thought into surprising us in ways that we will never forget. He draws pictures that show how ideas are connected; we don't feel lost or afraid that we will be sent away or humiliated. The good teacher loves what he is teaching, but does not show off or put distance between us and him. The good teacher sets things up so that children can learn how to learn from one another. She knows how to be a friend while still a responsible adult.
Very often, the good teacher does not know of the good he has done at the time. A letter from a gifted, high achieving student written five years after college graduation closes with these words:
The good teacher puts people first, say the children. The good teacher acts from love and caring, and is loved and cared for in return.
Putting the Picture Together
Now we have heard from researchers, from teachers, and from children about the good teacher. The composite picture may seem overwhelming--too much for any human being to become, too much for any teacher preparation program, certificatiion process, or national plan to guarantee. Yet I am optomistic, for these voices that speak of the good teacher describe real people, actual classrooms, true stories, powerful experiences. This is not wishful thinking, fantasy, or groundless idealization. These are the voices of inspiration and encouragement. One high school girl with whom I spoke estimated that about one third of the thirty teachers she has been taught by were good teachers in these ways.
Perhaps it is now time to change the question. Let us turn away from asking "Who is the good teacher?" Instead, let us ask "When is teaching good?" How can we each do a better job of acknowledging the good teaching that is already happening every day in our schools? How can we improve policy, conditions, and support systems so that ordinary teachers can have good moments and good days more often? We should begin to build an ethos of good teaching by learning to tell stories, even sagas, of heroic but invisible good teaching. We need help from minstrels, poets, biographers, historians, and film producers to create a vivid literature of good teaching. We need help from clinical psychologists and from one another to heal our childhood woundedness and to prevent us from unthinkingly passing on our wounds to the next generation. We, as teachers, need to learn to respect the children by learning to respect and love the wounded child within each of us. We must begin with ourselves.
Good teaching will never be easy. Nor will it ever be easy to be a good parent, a good nurse, a good scientist, or a good state superintendent. The essence of these callings is a courageous willingness to form moral relationships, to embrace uncertainty, to do what seems right at the time, to lead but not to control. In these ways, good teaching happens every day in our schools and in our homes, in our workplaces and state capitals. Perhaps the best preparation for the future of life long learning, in this culture and elsewhere, is to cultivate and treasure a better appreciation of the present state of good teaching. We cannot change the past, but we can come to understand and cooperate with contemporary goodness more constructively.
I would like to close by quoting part of a letter that I wrote recently to a master teacher and friend. She is an outstanding teacher of little children, and she wrote to me asking advice and support in her new role as mentor to beginning teachers. I did send to her some scholarly papers on teacher education and professional development (a professor's reflexive response to any question). But I think that my best advice and encouragement came from the following words:
In conclusion, I ask myself What would Captain Carlin say about your situation? How would he advise you if he were here today to consult on teacher certification standards for the 21st Century? I think he would not offer you a set of pat answers. Rather, he, and I as a Carlin-trained thinker, will offer a list of symptoms and pitfalls to watch out for as you try to keep your deliberations on a profitable and sensible track. I call this list "Symptoms of Wasting Our Time."
"We are wasting our time when ...
Now, like Captain Carlin, I stand alert yet silent, eager to support you in your efforts to promote and celebrate good teaching. I wish you great success, and look forward to your stories. So far, this has cost me only three fingernails.
Brophy, J. J. & Good, T. (1986). Teacher behavior and student
achievement. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.),
Handbook of research on
teaching, (3rd ed., pp. 328-375). New York: Macmillan.
Clark, C. M. & Peterson, P. L. (1986). Teachers' thought
processes. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.),
Handbook of research on
teaching (3rd ed., pp. 255296). New York: Macmillan.
Schon, D. (1983).
The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action.
New York: Basic Books.
Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new
reform.
Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1-22.
Wilson, S. M., Shulman, L. S. & Richert, A. (1987). "150
different ways" of knowing: Representations of knowledge in teaching.
In J. Calderhead (Ed.),
Exploring teacher
thinking. London: Cassell, pp. 104-124.
Epilogue
Six months after I wrote this
paper I sent a copy to Captain Carlin's address in Alexandria,
Virginia. We had been out of contact for six or seven years. I
included a note to the effect that I hoped he didn't mind being used
as an example of a good teacher when he was merely trying to be a
good sailor. Two weeks later I received a letter from Barbara Carlin,
Bob's wife, which said, in part:
- Bob died on October 25, 1988. He had interstitial fibrosis, a lung disease for which there is no known cause or cure. The children and I were so touched by your rememberances of Bob. He would have been pleased and proud, and probably would have said: 'l wasn't quite that good.' Thank you for a beautiful tribute to Bob and to all good teachers. You have touched our hearts.