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Teaching as a profession uva courseforum5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() The second is to look at the literature around how effective practices identified in research become embedded in every frontline practice. ![]() The first is to consider the growing body of literature on general expertise that suggests that mastery is gained through thousands of hours of deliberate, focused practice combined with clear feedback, expert advice and time for reflection. Three ways of looking at this problem produce identical conclusions. With ever-improving understanding of how to judge teaching quality we now need to focus on how to help teachers improve. The multi-million pound research project, Measures of Effective Teaching carried out by the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation showed that when student perceptions are mathematically combined with value-added indicators and two or more observation-ratings from trained observers then we begin to reach a reasonable level of reliability. Nevertheless progress is being made in this area. Single-person observations have been shown to be relatively unreliable and even measures of 'value-added' in test scores appear to be unstable and poorly correlated with quality of teaching. Subject knowledge appears to make little difference in most areas, and there are few practices that every great teacher appears to share. While some studies suggest that good teachers can be spotted from characteristics of leadership, perseverance, sense of mission and prior academic achievement, the evidence is weak. Teacher quality is an unclear and often-contradictory area in research. Unlike medics with their stark binary measures of life and death, we can only deal with proxies such as exam grades, but it's important that we keep fighting for clarity around teacher quality if we want to be rewarded for being good at our jobs rather than simply taking on ever-longer lists of responsibilities. It is always controversial to try and define 'great teaching' because it is equally (if not more) controversial to attempt a definition of a 'great education'. ![]()
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