Knowledge Know-How Needed For Teacher Quality

This article was first published in WestEd's R&D Alert^®, 2005.

For years, people viewed teacher quality through fairly narrow lenses: Did educators have the proper academic credentials? Did they know their subject well? Could they effectively use a variety of instructional strategies? Now, a growing body of research and practice has made the picture of teacher quality considerably more complex, focusing on the combination of knowledge and skills that actually help students learn.

This larger framework emphasizes how intricate the teaching process actually is. Effective teachers need more than a simple understanding of content and more than generic instructional skills. They need a mixture of both, known as "pedagogical content knowledge," a particularly deep understanding of subject matter that includes knowing how students think about the subject and instructional skills that are specific to the subject.

Strengthening Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Two acclaimed WestEd math and science initiatives are making sure this complexity is reflected in professional development that mirrors actual classroom experience. Building on the pioneering work of Lee Shulman and colleagues, WestEd's initiatives are based on the premise that teachers' knowledge and skills need to bridge both content and pedagogy. In addition to strengthening teachers' understanding of subject matter, the projects help teachers discover why students find certain topics especially hard to learn and figure out how to make those concepts comprehensible.

"We not only teach the science content for adults, but we focus on how children think about those science ideas, what typical instructional strategies or representations help kids, and what the tradeoffs are of those approaches," explains Kirsten Daehler, codirector of WestEd's Understanding Science Project. The project helps K-8 teachers learn major science concepts, examine how children make sense of those concepts, and analyze and improve their teaching practices.

For the many elementary and middle school teachers who do not have a strong background in math or science, these subjects can be particularly challenging. An elementary teacher who took a single biology course in college, for example, would hardly be prepared to teach a fourth grade unit on electricity.

By taking additional college courses, the teacher could gain more knowledge of science. By participating in targeted professional development, the teacher might also learn how to manage hands-on work with students or how to use questioning strategies to probe their understanding. But rarely does the teacher get the opportunity to critically reflect on subject matter, explore different representations of important concepts, and adapt the material to address students' prior knowledge and misconceptions.

By contrast, WestEd's math and science initiatives stress this integration of content and pedagogy. In science, teachers re-enact hands-on investigations and examine student work for evidence of errors in children's thinking. Collaborating with colleagues, teachers also confront areas where their science knowledge is superficial and identify ways to close similar learning gaps for students.

Consider what happens when teachers examine how fourth-graders make sense of magnetism. Because children often have limited experience with magnets, they tend to think magnets work like adhesive tape — one side sticks, and the other doesn't. In actuality, only opposite magnetic poles attract, while like poles repel. With an adhesive-tape notion, students struggle to make sense of how, when, and why magnets push away from each other. Some students even believe a magnet is broken when it doesn't stick.

Through case discussions about classroom dilemmas that arise from these kinds of misunderstandings, teachers learn to identify where students got confused, what about their thinking might be logical but incorrect, and what instructional strategies could have contributed to their misunderstanding. Most importantly, teachers begin learning what might help students develop a more accurate way of thinking.

Taking Professional Development to the Classroom

Alma Ramirez, codirector of WestEd's Mathematics Case Methods Project, explains that teachers must learn to probe students' understanding, show them how to recognize and avoid common mistakes, and ensure that they can apply their skills in multiple settings.

"Two things we're trying to do," Ramirez says about the K-7 math program, which provides supplementary lessons and problem-solving strategies for core topics in each grade level. "One is to deepen teachers' own mathematical knowledge. But the other is to deepen their understanding of how to use that knowledge when they're teaching. And how they use their knowledge is impacted by what they understand is essential for kids to know and difficult for kids to understand."

To make a more direct and immediate impact in the classroom, Ramirez and project director Carne Clarke also created a set of materials for students and teachers. Known as Mathematics Pathways and Pitfalls, these materials bridge what teachers learn through courses or case discussion and bring this knowledge directly into the classroom through instructional materials for students.

The insights of this project are critically important in light of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act and other recent state and federal requirements that hold schools accountable for improving student achievement. Although policymakers recognize that bolstering teachers' skills is central to this process, they may not realize which learning opportunities for teachers will produce the intended results for students.

"With professional development, you have to make it okay for teachers to talk about what they don't know and to acknowledge that there's more than one way to approach a problem or think about science," Daehler says. "If you're going to have teachers think about content, then they also must have opportunities to take their learning back to the classroom to think about what this means for students."

Strong Results

Matthew Ellinger, a former fifth-grade teacher from San Francisco, described how he and his colleagues improved their professional practice as a result of participating in WestEd's Understanding Science Project. In a paper he wrote for a conference of science educators, Ellinger said he and other teachers he interviewed became more accomplished listeners by asking questions that revealed how students were thinking about the science. The teachers subsequently redesigned instructional activities to address common misunderstandings. They also became more reflective about their work, recognizing how the language, materials, and methods they chose affected students' achievement.
Results from the Understanding Science Project and Mathematics Case Studies Project, both of which have completed longitudinal studies across multiple school districts, show significant increases in teacher knowledge and student achievement compared to non-participants. An especially encouraging sign is that low-performing students make the biggest gains.

Bolstered by these results, WestEd's work in math and science is generating important lessons about improving teacher quality. First, teachers need deeper subject knowledge so they can analyze and respond to the different ways students think about the content. Without a sophisticated understanding of topics, teachers will likely stick to a fact-based curriculum that doesn't clear up students' misconceptions or help them to transfer skills.

At the same time, teachers need guidance and practice making good choices when conveying subject matter. "Effective teachers have more adaptive expertise," Daehler says. "They have a flexibility of knowledge that enables them to analyze instructional strategies and invent new ones to meet students' needs."

Third, teachers don't have time to create lessons that incorporate all the new research and techniques they explore in professional development. They benefit more from practicing, modeling, and refining lessons that are designed to help them meet their curricular and assessment goals.

"If we do a lot of professional development where teachers have to layer new strategies or new knowledge on top of what they already have to do, often they can't because they lack the time or the pedagogical content knowledge," Ramirez says.

By developing the Mathematics Pathways and Pitfalls materials that embed both the essential concepts and the instructional strategies that will help students learn these concepts, WestEd helps teachers use content in practice.

"Instead of having teachers, especially teachers of English learners, always adapting lessons and having to remember to front-load vocabulary or state the basic purpose of the lesson, we write it into the process of conducting these lessons," Ramirez says. "We have videotapes that orient teachers to the materials and the structures. So, teaching the lesson with these pedagogical processes and content-rich structures becomes second nature."

As recent research demonstrates, teacher quality is the single biggest factor in student achievement. If we are serious about raising academic standards, we must pay attention to how teachers and students learn together.

Contact Information

Kirsten Daehler
650.381.6402
kdaehle@wested.org