Effective teaching and teacher development

Effective teaching is essentially concerned with how best to bring about the desired pupil learning by some educational activity (Kyriacou, 1986). Teacher development or professional growth of teachers is concerned with our ways of thinking about effective teaching. The stages of competence of teacher or effective teaching range from novice, through beginner, competent, proficient to expert level (Galton, 1989). What are the characteristics of novices and experts? How do novices become experts? Teachers develop coping strategies that represent active and creative responses by teachers to the constraints, opportunities, and dilemmas posed by the immediate contexts of the classroom and the school (Calderhead, 1987). There is little question that classroom influence is reciprocal in nature and that teachers’ perceptions of pupils’characteristics, expectation, and behaviors influence the nature of teacher development. Over the years, thinking about effective teaching has been approached in a number of different ways. On one hand it is felt that the environmental demands posed by current classroom arrangements establish limits on the range of teacher behaviors that can be successful in particular settings, and that ‘successful’ teachers must learn a set of coping strategies appropriate to particular settings (Calderhead, 1987). On the other hand, the characteristics and activities of the classroom need to be closely examined in any attempt to understand teacher development. However, the analysis cannot remain at the level of the classroom alone because teaching is also the product of policy decisions (e.g. curriculum policy) and political or cultural actions at levels beyond the classroom. Attributes of teachers, such as knowledge, personality traits and training might have a bearing on their effectiveness. We can cluster the different ways of effective teaching into a few developmental aspects of a teacher: social development, subject knowledge development, pedagogical development and cognitive development. The stages of social development, subject knowledge development, pedagogical development and cognitive development of a teacher will go through the proficiency levels ranging from novice to expert. To be of value a theory of professional growth should also inform the teacher education programme which techniques of instruction are best used at a particular stage of a teacher’s development. Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.