I once did research myself into what makes a teacher a ‘real teacher’ in the eyes of their students. This was and is not an easy question. The question ‘What makes someone a good teacher?’ is also one of those questions almost everyone thinks they have an answer to, but the discussions start once you think about it for a little longer.
The obvious things are easy to come up with. You need to know your subject, of course. Being able to explain things well also seems obvious. Being enthusiastic, or passionate in my own research, helps. And having at least some talent for keeping a class under control is more than useful.
But which teacher characteristics are actually associated with the quality of their teaching according to research?
That is the question Nicoletta Bürger and colleagues try to answer in a recent, substantial meta-analysis. They collected 2,122 correlations from 197 articles, examining a wide range of teacher characteristics and how they relate to teaching quality. And before you respond: but quality is also a difficult concept. Yes, it is. But let us first look at how they operationalise all of this.
The researchers broadly divide teacher characteristics into four groups:
- Professional knowledge: subject knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge.
- Teachers’ beliefs about learning and teaching.
- Motivational characteristics, such as enthusiasm, interest, engagement and self-efficacy, meaning teachers’ confidence in their own ability.
- Occupational self-regulation, for instance how teachers manage their energy and cope with the demands of the profession.
The researchers then divide good, high-quality teaching into three familiar dimensions:
- cognitive activation, in which students teacher encourag students to really think about what they are learning,
- learning support,
- classroom management.
So, this is a fairly narrow, but manageable definition of ‘good teaching’. And what do they find?
Perhaps the most important conclusion is that quite a few characteristics matter, but no single characteristic is all-important. Most of the characteristics studied are associated with at least one aspect of instructional quality, but the relationships are generally small to moderate. You could therefore argue that theoretical models of what makes a good teacher often seem to suggest stronger and more consistent relationships than the research actually finds.
Let me make this concrete by looking at knowledge, an important word in current debates about education.
It seems logical that a good teacher should know a lot about their subject. And that is true, to be clear. But, as we have known for some time, subject knowledge by itself is not particularly strongly associated with the three dimensions of instructional quality examined here. For cognitive activation, for example, the researchers find a correlation of just .09, which is not statistically significant. For learning support and classroom management, the relationships are even smaller. We already saw something similar with Hattie years ago.
This really does not mean that subject knowledge is unimportant. Without sufficient knowledge, teaching becomes rather difficult. But simply knowing and understanding the content is not the same as knowing how to teach it. This is why teachers are sometimes described as having a kind of translator-interpreter role.
It is therefore not surprising that pedagogical content knowledge shows clearer relationships. More concretely, this includes knowing which misconceptions students often have about a particular topic, understanding why certain content is difficult, and knowing which forms of explanation might help. The correlation with cognitive activation is .22, with learning support .16, and with classroom management .21.
For those familiar with effect sizes like these, these are still far from spectacular relationships. Let us look at the other aspects.
Teachers’ beliefs about learning and teaching also shape what happens in their classrooms. In particular, teachers who believe that learning requires students to actively process what they are learning tend to show more cognitive activation in their teaching. The researchers describe these as constructivist beliefs.
When they include several teacher characteristics in the same model, these beliefs even show a stronger relationship with cognitive activation than professional knowledge or motivation.
But we need to cautious here too. The label constructivist can quickly take on a life of its own in educational debates. Yep, I know who was already getting ready to respond. To be clear, the researchers do not use the term to mean that direct instruction is bad or that students should discover everything for themselves. Rather, teachers with these beliefs see learning as requiring students to cognitively process the material, and teaching as something that should stimulate such thinking.
Student support produces a different picture. When the researchers consider several teacher characteristics at the same time, professional knowledge hardly plays a role. Motivation and teachers’ occupational self-regulation matter more, although these relationships also remain relatively small. The researchers summarise this nicely: support seems to depend more on teachers’ ‘will’ than on their ‘knowledge’.
Finally, there is no simple recipe for classroom management either. Enthusiasm and interest are positively associated with it. For engagement, the researchers even find a medium-sized positive relationship, while self-efficacy again shows a smaller positive association.
So, you might conclude that a good teacher needs to know a lot, be enthusiastic, hold the right beliefs and be able to regulate themselves well. Blog finished, right?
Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Studies differ substantially, and much of the evidence is correlational. Strikingly, much of the research was conducted with mathematics teachers.
Which leaves us with the question in the title: what makes a good teacher? Perhaps the most important answer is: not one thing. And that, most teachers probably knew already.