CTESS Manual -RSP

Preface

Effective Teaching Matters What a teacher does (or does not do) in the classroom has a substantial impact on student achievement (Hattie, 2009; Slavin, Cheung, Groff, &Lake, 2008; Slavin, Lake, & Groff, 2009). In fact, instructional delivery is one of the most important variables that bring about academic excellence in students. It has become clear that good teaching is powerful; however, some teachers usemore effective teaching practices than others. Research indicates that the difference in student achievement over the course of one year between a good teacher (whose skills are rated at the 75th percentile) and a poor one (whose skills are rated at the 25th percentile) is estimated to be one year’s growth (Hanushek, 2002, 2011;Roberts, 2011).Thehighly- skilled teacherproducesanaverage of a-year-and-a-half of growth and the poorly skilled teacher produces an average of half-a-year’s growth. The higher performing teacher typically gets three times more growth from students than does the less skilled one.

What EffectiveTeaching Looks Like Educational research has converged on many of the active ingredients that improve student achievement. These teachingpractices can be incorporatedin all classrooms in order to increase student outcomes. In his book Visible Learning , John Hattie (2009) reviews over 150 teaching strategies and their impact on student achievement.This review suggests that some strategies clearly do not work well. For example, retaining studentshasbeen showntohavea negative impact, typically decreasing achievement by ¼ year (effect size = -0.16). On the other hand, there are some teaching strategies that have been proven to be very effective. For example, when students receive assessment feedback, understand goals and decision rules, and graph their own progress, student achievement increases bymore than two years (effect size = .90); and giving students clear and specific feedback

increases student achievement by an average of about two years (effect size = .74); and direct/explicit instruction increases achievement by about a year- and-a-half (effect size = .59) (Hattie, 2009; Reaves, 2012 referencing Hattie, 2011). Every teacher, highly accomplished or not, can improve their practice by incorporating evidence- basedstrategiesin theirdaily classroom instruction.

Hattie defines d=0.4 to be the hinge point , an effect size at which an initiative can be said to be having a ‘greater than average influence’ on achievement.