What makes great teaching?

Robert Coe, Cesare Aloisi, Steve Higgins & Lee Elliot Major

Research Summary

This report reviews over 200 pieces of research to identify the elements of teaching with the strongest evidence of improving attainment. It finds some common practices can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research. Specific practices which are supported by good evidence of their effectiveness are also examined and six key factors that contribute to great teaching are identified. The report also analyses different methods of evaluating teaching including: using ‘value-added’ results from student test scores; observing classroom teaching; and getting students to rate the quality of their teaching.

Researchers

Robert Coe, Cesare Aloisi, Steve Higgins & Lee Elliot Major

Research Institution

Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, Durham University, Sutton Trust

What is this about?

This review set out to address three apparently simple questions:

1. What makes ’great teaching’?
2. What kinds of frameworks or tools could help us to capture it?
3. How could this promote better learning?

What was done?

The researchers carried out a review of a large number of international research sources on what makes great teaching and different ways to evaluate teaching quality. Those found to be most relevant are included in the review. The review concludes with recommendations about how the findings might be taken forward, i.e. keeping a focus on student learning, using multiple measures of evaluation, asking school leaders to develop high quality assessment and data skills and balancing challenge and acceptance so that there is not too big a gap between the research evidence and what teachers are already doing.

Main findings and outputs

The two factors with the strongest evidence of improving pupil attainment are:

• teachers’ content knowledge, including their ability to understand how students think about a subject and identify common misconceptions
• quality of instruction, which includes using strategies like effective questioning and the use of assessment

Specific practices which have good evidence of improving attainment include:

• challenging students to identify the reason why an activity is taking place in the lesson
• asking a large number of questions and checking the responses of all students
• spacing-out study or practice on a given topic, with gaps in between for forgetting
• making students take tests or generate answers, even before they have been taught the material

Common practices which are not supported by evidence include:

• using praise lavishly
• allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves
• grouping students by ability
• presenting information to students based on their “preferred learning style”

Relevance to RE

The emphasis on teacher content knowledge underlines the need for RE to be taught by qualified specialists. It also encourages RE teachers to think hard when planning topics and lessons about how their specialist subject knowledge might be used to promote student learning. The other main findings are also relevant to RE classroom practice, e.g. the emphasis on quality of instruction suggests that teachers and departments might build up banks of questions and assessment tasks found to be effective in promoting student learning.

Generalisability and potential limitations

The authors do recognise limitations. For example, their review is focused on teacher effectiveness, “that which leads to high achievement by students in valued outcomes, other things being equal.” (p.9). However, they acknowledge that this might not fully capture desirable aims for education. They also acknowledge that attributing effects on student outcomes to individual teachers is not straightforward and that a range of factors should really be taken into account. The report merits careful consideration and cannot be understood as a check-list.

Find out more

The report is freely downloadable from https://www.suttontrust.com/research-paper/great-teaching/