Effective Teaching Methods:

Research-Based Practice

By
Gary D. Borich
 Chapter 1:
The Effective Teacher
The Effective Teacher
 The Effective Teacher
▪ A good teacher is a good person—a role model who meets the
community ideal for a good citizen, good parent, and good
employee.
▪ In the past, teachers were judged primarily on their goodness as
people and only secondarily on their behavior in the classroom.
▪ They were expected to be
✓ honest,
✓ hardworking,
✓ generous,
✓ friendly, and
✓ considerate
▪ Teachers are supposed to demonstrate these qualities in their
classrooms by being organized, disciplined, insightful, and
committed.
Teaching Some Science
The Effective Teacher
▪ The term good teaching changed to effective teaching, and the research
focus shifted from studying teachers exclusively to including teachers’
effects on students.
▪ The focus is now on teacher-student relationship in the classroom as the
modern definition of effective teaching.
▪ During the past few decades, researchers developed new methods for
studying the classroom interaction patterns of teachers and students.
▪ Researchers’ goal was to discover which patterns of teacher behavior
promote desirable student performance.
 Key Behaviors
▪ Approximately ten teacher behaviors have been identified that show
promising relationships to desirable student performance, primarily as
measured by classroom assessments and standardized tests.
▪ The first five are called key behaviors, because they are considered
essential for effective teaching.
▪ The second five are called helping behaviors, because they can be used
in combinations to implement the key behaviors.
▪ Following are the five key behaviors essential for effective teaching:
1. Lesson clarity

2. Instructional variety
3. Teacher task orientation
4. Student engagement in the learning process
5. Student success rate
The Effective Teacher
▪ Lesson Clarity
▪ Lesson clarity refers to how clear a teacher’s presentation is to the class, as
indicated in the following points:
▪ More Effective Teachers
▪ Make ideas clear to learners who may be at different levels of understanding.
▪ Explain concepts in ways that help students follow along in a logical, step-by-step
order.
▪ Have an oral delivery that is direct, audible to all students, and free of distracting
mannerisms.
▪ Less Effective Teachers
▪ Use vague, ambiguous, or indefinite language, such as “might probably be,”
“tends to suggest,” and “could possibly happen.”
▪ Use overly complicated sentences, such as “There are many important reasons for
the start of World War II, but some are more important than others, so let’s start
with those that are thought to be important, but really aren’t.”
▪ Give directions that often result in student requests for clarification
▪ If you teach with a high degree of clarity, you will spend less time going over
material.
▪ Your questions will be answered correctly the first time, allowing more time for
instruction
Indicators of Clarity
The Effective Teacher
▪ Instructional Variety
▪ The term instructional variety refers to your variability or flexibility of delivery
during the presentation of a lesson.
▪ One of the most effective ways of creating variety during instruction is to ask
questions.
▪ Therefore, the effective teacher needs to know the art of asking questions and how
to discriminate among different question formats—fact questions, process
questions, convergent questions, and divergent questions.
▪ Another aspect of instructional variety in teaching is perhaps the most obvious:
✓ the use of supplemental learning materials,
✓ computer software,
✓ displays,
✓ the Internet, and
✓ space in your classroom.
▪ The physical texture and visual variety of your classroom can also contribute to
instructional variety.
▪ For example, some studies found the amount of disruptive behavior to be less in
classrooms that had more varied activities and materials.
Indicators for Variety
The Effective Teacher
▪ Teacher Task Orientation
▪ It is a key behavior that refers to the amount of classroom time the teacher
devotes to teaching an academic subject.
▪ The more time allocated to teaching a specific topic, the greater the opportunity
students have to learn.

▪ All teachers need to prepare their students to learn and want them to enjoy
learning.
▪ However, most researchers agree that student performance is higher in
classrooms with teachers who spend the maximum amount of time
Indicators for Teacher Task Orientation
The Effective Teacher
▪ Engagement in the Learning Process
▪ Also called engaged learning time, student engagement is a key behavior that
refers to the amount of time students devote to learning in your classroom.
▪ Student engagement is related to but different from a teacher’s task orientation.
▪ It is important that a teacher’s task orientation should provide students the
greatest possible opportunity to learn and to practice the material being taught.
▪ Even though a teacher may be task oriented and providing maximum content
coverage, the students may be disengaged.
▪ This means they are not actively thinking about, working with, or using what is
being presented.
▪ Such disengagement can involve an emotional or mental detachment from the
lesson that may or may not be obvious.
▪ When students jump out of their seats, talk, read a magazine, or leave for the
restroom, they obviously are not engaged in instruction.
The Effective Teacher
▪ Suggestions for teachers for promoting student engagement:
1. Set rules that let pupils attend to their personal needs and work routines without
obtaining your permission each time.
2. Move around the room to monitor pupils’ seatwork and to communicate your
awareness of students’ progress.
3. Ensure that independent assignments are interesting, worthwhile, and easy
enough to be completed by each pupil without your direction.
4. Minimize time-consuming activities, such as giving directions and organizing the
class for instruction, by writing the daily schedule on the board. This will ensure
that pupils know where to go and what to do.
5. Make abundant use of resources and activities that are at or slightly above a
student’s current level of understanding.
6. Avoid timing errors. Act promptly to prevent misbehaviors from occurring or
increasing in severity so they do not influence others in the class.
▪ These teaching practices have also been found to be beneficial for small groups
and independent seatwork (Jones et al., 2007).
Indicators for Engaging Students
The Effective Teacher
▪ Student Success Rate
▪ The term student success rate refers to the rate at which your students
understand and correctly complete exercises and assignments.
▪ A crucial aspect of the previously cited research on teacher task orientation and
student engagement has been the level of difficulty of the material being
presented.
▪ In some of these studies, level of difficulty was measured by the rate at which
students understood and correctly answered questions on tests, exercises, and
assignments.
▪ The three levels of difficulty are as follows:
✓ High success.
The student understands the subject matter taught and makes only
occasional careless errors.
✓ Moderate success.
The student has partial understanding but makes some substantive errors.
✓ Low success.
The student has little or no understanding of the subject matter
▪ Researchers have found that students who spend more than the average time in
high-success activities have higher achievement, better retention, and more
positive attitudes toward school.
Indicators for Student Success Rate
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ To complete our picture of an effective teacher, it is also necessary to know about
some behaviors that can help you implement the five key behaviors in your
classroom.
▪ These can be thought of as helping behaviors for performing the five key
behaviors.
▪ Research findings for helping behaviors, although promising, are not as strong
and consistent as those that identified the five key behaviors.
▪ Among these helping behaviors are the following:
1. Using student ideas and contributions
2. Structuring lesson content
3. Questioning
4. Probing
5. Teacher affect (developing the teacher–learner relationship)
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Using Student Ideas and Contributions
▪ Using student ideas and contributions is a behavior that includes acknowledging,
modifying, applying, comparing, and summarizing student responses to promote
the goals of a lesson and encourage student participation.
▪ Acknowledging: Taking a student’s correct response and repeating it to the class
(to increase lesson clarity)
▪ Modifying: Using a student’s idea by rephrasing it or conceptualizing it in your
words or another student’s words (to create instructional variety)
▪ Applying: Using a student’s idea to teach an inference or take the next step in a
logical analysis of a problem (to increase success rate)
▪ Comparing: Taking a student’s idea and drawing a relationship between it and
ideas expressed earlier by the student or another student (to encourage
engagement in the learning process)
▪ Summarizing: Using what was said by a student or a group of students as a
recapitulation or review of concepts taught (to enhance task orientation)
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Structuring Lesson Content
▪ Teacher comments made for the purpose of organizing what is to come or
summarizing what has gone before are called structuring.
▪ Used before an instructional activity or question, structuring assists learners in
bridging the gap between what they are capable of doing on their own and what
they are capable of doing with help from the teacher, thereby aiding their
understanding and use of the material to be taught.
▪ Used at the conclusion of an instructional activity or question, structuring
reinforces learned content and places it in proper relation to other content already
taught.
▪ Both forms of structuring are related to student achievement and serve as
effective catalysts for performing the five key behaviors.
▪ Another type of structuring uses emphasis. Can you find a point of emphasis in
the previous dialogue?
▪ By using the phrase “Most important,” this teacher alerts students to the
knowledge and understanding expected at the conclusion of this activity.
▪ Activity structures can be built in many ways (e.g., cooperatively, competitively,
independently) to vary the cognitive demands they make on the learner and to
give tempo and momentum to a lesson.
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Questioning
▪ Questioning is another important helping behavior.
▪ One of the most important outcomes of research on questioning has been the
distinction between content questions and process questions.
▪ Content Questions
▪ Teachers pose content questions to have the student deal directly with the content
being taught.
▪ An example is when a teacher asks a question to see whether students can recall
and understand specific material.
▪ The correct answer is known well in advance by the teacher.
▪ It also has been conveyed directly in class, in the text, or both.
▪ The art of questioning will become one of your most important skills as a teacher.
▪ Asking questions is rarely an end in itself but rather a means of engaging
students in the learning process by getting them to act on, work through, or think
about the material presented
Questioning
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Process Questions
▪ There are different purposes for which questions can be asked, with the intent of
encouraging different mental processes.

▪ To problem solve, to guide, to arouse curiosity, to encourage creativity, to analyze,

to synthesize, and to judge also are goals of instruction that should be reflected in
your questioning strategies.

▪ It is important to notice that the process questions encourage more thinking and
problem solving by requiring the learner to use personal sources of knowledge.

▪ They use this actively to construct her or his own interpretations and meanings.

▪ There is no need for doing it through acquiring understanding by giving back

knowledge already organized in the form in which it was given.
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Constructivism
▪ It is a theory that says learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take
in information.
▪ Constructivism states that children learn through adaptation.
▪ Children are not passive in knowledge, but active at making meaning, testing out
theories, and trying to make sense out of the world and themselves.
▪ Constructivism is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by
reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world
we live in.
▪ Each of us generates our own “rules” and “mental models,” which we use to make
sense of our experiences.
▪ Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to
accommodate new experiences.
▪ Therefore, Constructivist teaching strategies emphasize the learner’s direct
experience and the dialogue of the classroom as instructional tools while
deemphasizing lecturing and telling.
Constructive Teaching Strategies
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Probing
▪ It refers to teacher statements that encourage students to elaborate on an
answer—either their own or another student’s.
▪ Probing may take the form of a general question or can include other expressions
that elicit clarification of an answer, solicit additional information about a response,
or redirect a student’s response in a more fruitful direction.
▪ Probing often is used to shift a discussion to some higher thought level.
▪ Generally, student achievement is highest when the eliciting, soliciting, and (if
necessary) redirecting occur in cycles.
▪ In this manner, teacher may begin a lesson with a simple fact question; then by
eliciting clarification of student responses, soliciting new information, or
redirecting an answer, you can move to a higher level of questioning.
▪ Constructivist teaching strategies emphasize the learner’s direct experience with
the content being taught and the dialogue of the classroom as instructional tool.
▪ The teacher’s role was limited to eliciting clarification, soliciting additional
information, and redirecting the discussion.
Probing
Helping Behaviors Related to Effective Teaching
▪ Teacher Affect
▪ Anyone who has ever been in a classroom where the teacher’s presentation was
lifeless, static, and without vocal variety can appreciate the commonsense value of
the affective side of teaching.
▪ Students are good perceivers of the emotions and intentions underlying a
teacher’s actions, and they often respond accordingly.
▪ A teacher who is excited about the subject being taught and shows it by facial
expression, voice inflection, gesture, and movement communicating respect and
caring for the learner is more likely to hold the attention.
▪ Enthusiasm is an important aspect of a teacher’s affect.
▪ Enthusiasm is the teacher’s vigor, involvement, excitement, and interest during a
classroom presentation, and willingness to share this emotion with learners, who
will want to respond in kind.
▪ It can be displayed to your students in many ways, the most common being vocal
inflection, gesture, eye contact, and animation.
▪ Research has found a teacher’s enthusiasm to be important in promoting student
engagement as well as achievement (Kuh, Kinzie, Smith, & Whitt, 2005;Tischler,
2005).
Teacher Affect
Effectively Teaching Learners at all Socioeconomic Levels
▪ The term socioeconomic status (SES) can mean different things, but generally, it
is an approximate index of one’s income and education level.

▪ For the classroom researcher, the SES of students is determined directly by the
income and education of their parents or indirectly by the nature of the school the
students attend.

▪ Some schools are in impoverished areas, where the overall income and education
levels of the community are low, whereas other schools are located in more
affluent communities.

▪ Many schools in impoverished areas qualify for special financial assistance from
the federal government.

▪ SES is strongly tied to culture or ethnicity.