First, what defines an “expert teacher” is commonly translated for others by administrators, who may not be able to clearly identify all that effective teaching entails, but have a sense of what it looks like. Comments like “good teaching is good teaching” and “I know good teaching when I see it” are representative of the range of opinions provided when professionals are pressed to “grade” the work of their teaching colleagues. At the very core of this approach is a subjective perspective of the evaluator, unless the person is looking at evidence to suggest that all students are also learning.
The second major problem with the quality of teaching being defined in reference to the “expert teacher” literature, is simply that the field of education largely has no readily available mechanism that allows teachers to observe other excellent teachers. Fullan and Hargreaves (1996) report that teaching has long been called “a lonely profession” (p. 5), an observation that is supported by the architecture of the building and the schedule that prevents collaboration.
Because of fiscal and logistical obstacles, the field is not in a position to address what it already knows is a significant problem. In response, some schools have allowed the creation of “teacher studios”: staff are released from teaching duties for brief periods of time to observe each other teaching. This type of job-embedded professional development makes sense on many levels and fits just about any need a professional might have, including an interest in observing a differentiated classroom.
The body of research on effective teaching does confirm generally what many people envision a high-quality teacher to be: someone who understands children and knows how to assist their learning. For example, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC, 1995) established 10 key principles it believes to be central tenets of effective teaching.
In including these principles, many good teachers attempt to:
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future’s study What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future (1996) asserted, “What teachers know and can do is the most important influence on what students learn” (p. 10).
The American Council of Education (1999) synthesized a wide body of research to arrive at a similar conclusion in its report To Touch the Future: Transforming the Way Teachers Are Taught: “The success of the student depends most of all on the quality of the teacher. We know from empirical data what our intuition has always told us: Teachers make a difference. We now know that teachers make the difference” (p. 5).
Perhaps it seems trivially true that the field now clearly recognizes that teacher expertise and instruction matter. The field of education has come to this conclusion over a period of decades, and, while teachers have never doubted that this was the case, some researchers, politicians, and constituents of the general public have. What teachers do matters a great deal. Especially important is the quality of a teacher’s timely instructional decision-making based on informative assessment information and in relation to the needs of learners.
But knowing that effective instruction matters does not define for us exactly what it is that effective teachers are doing to make a difference. It also begs the question of just how many students are experiencing the difference an effective teacher makes, and if students are left out of that equation then we are back to a different question: “Effective teaching for whom?”
This leads to a third problem with translating the “expert teacher” research into guidelines for serving a diverse learning population. The emphasis is squarely on the characteristics of teachers and the full context in which students were served, what data was collected, and how; information on the decision-making process the teacher used to reach all students is lacking. The field is again left with a list of generally desirable teacher characteristics and little else to go on to apply to all other potential contexts.
In other words, there is no guarantee that if teachers simply “behave like an expert teacher,” then their students will actually learn. Framing quality teaching as a set of behaviors that teachers are to emulate provides very little
insight on how to reach students who are on the margins. Aside from broad notions of what constitutes teacher quality, there is little consensus regarding the precise definition of teacher quality. Simply put, there is no single answer to the question, "What qualifications and practices characterize high-quality teachers?"