Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology

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Teaching Processes in Elementary and Secondary Education

experienced as part of content lessons. In general, excellent

teachers do much to make connections across the curriculum.

Often, they accomplish this task by emphasizing a particular

theme for a week or so (e.g., a social studies unit about the post

office in which students read books about the post office or read

books in which postal letters play a prominent role, with the

reading and social studies lessons complemented by the writ-

ing of postal letters). Connections occur across the entire year

of instruction in excellent classrooms; the teachers remind stu-

dents of how ideas encountered in today’s lesson connect to

ideas in previous lessons (e.g., during a story about polar bears,

the teacher reminds students about the unit earlier in the year

about animal biological adaptations). Connections, of course,

do not stop at the classroom door. For example, the excellent

teacher makes certain that students know about books in the

library connecting with current instructional themes and is

effective in getting students interested in such books.

Thinking Processes

Excellent teachers send the message that students can learn to

think better, explicitly teaching the students problem-solving

processes and strategies for a variety of academic tasks. The

excellent teacher encourages students to reflect critically

about ideas and to be creative in their thinking. As part of

stimulating their students’ thinking, excellent teachers model

problem-solving skills, often thinking aloud as they do so.

For example, when writing directions on the board, the ex-

cellent teacher might reread what was written, asking aloud

whether it makes sense or whether there might be some errors

that could be corrected. Similarly, when reading a passage

aloud, the teacher might model rereading in order to under-

stand the passage better. Perhaps when confronting a new vo-

cabulary word in a text, the teacher might sound out the word

for the students.

Provides Appropriate Challenges

Excellent teachers appropriately challenge their students,

consistently presenting content that is not already known by

their students but not so advanced that students cannot under-

stand it even if they exert effort. For example, elementary

classrooms often have many leveled books, with students en-

couraged to read books at a level slightly beyond their current

one. Also, when excellent teachers ask questions during

lessons, they are difficult enough to require some thinking by

students but not so difficult that there are only a few bidders to

answer them. The pace of questioning—and the pace of all in-

struction—is not so slow as to bore students. During question-

and-answer sessions and all of instruction, excellent teachers

encourage risk taking (e.g., encouraging students to give their

answers to a question even if the expressions on their faces

suggest that they are not certain about it).

Different students get challenged in different ways in

good classrooms: Excellent teachers embrace the diversity of

talents and abilities in their classes. The need to personalize

challenges often means that one-on-one teaching is required,

with the teacher monitoring carefully what the student can

handle and then providing input well matched to the student.

Scaffolding

Excellent teachers scaffold student learning, providing just

enough support so that students can continue to make progress

with learning tasks and withdrawing help as students can do

tasks autonomously. As part of scaffolding, excellent teachers

ask questions as students attempt tasks—questions that can be

revealing about what students know and do not know. Scaf-

folding also includes hints to students to check work, espe-

cially when the teacher detects shortcomings in student work

(e.g., encouraging students to reread their own writing to

detect potential problems). Scaffolding also involves urging

students to help one another—for example, by encouraging

students to read their compositions in progress to others in

order to obtain suggestions about how to continue the writing.

Scaffolding teachers also encourage students to apply the

problem solving, reading, and writing strategies that have

been taught in class (e.g., prompting use of the word wall to

find some of the words they want to include in their stories).

Monitoring

Excellent teachers walk around their classrooms a great deal,

monitoring how their students are doing and asking questions

to check for understanding. As they do so, excellent teachers

note who needs additional help and which ideas should be

covered additionally with the whole class. 

Clear Presentations

Excellent teachers give clear directions, which are easy to

follow. The expectations are always clear for students as are

the learning objectives.

Home-School Connections

Excellent teachers communicate to parents their expectations

about parental involvement in student learning (e.g., reading

with their children, helping with homework rather than doing

it). Such teachers also ask students to have parents assist

Challenges of Teaching

167

them with test preparation and sign selected assignments. Ex-

cellent teachers make certain through conferences, newslet-

ters, and take-home assignment folders that parents know

what is happening in class as well as what their students

know and what help they need in order to achieve at higher

levels.

Summary

What we have found in our work is that excellent teachers

do much to make certain that the curriculum and instruction

in their classrooms is excellent. Many different approaches

to instruction are used, and many resources are organized to

support student learning (e.g., classroom aides, students help-

ing students, parental involvement with homework). The

teacher models and encourages active thinking, not only with

respect to today’s lesson but also in connecting the ideas en-

countered today with those encountered earlier in the year.

The content and teaching challenge students but do not over-

whelm them, which requires much planning because students

are at different levels of ability. Although excellent teachers

encourage student self-regulation, they always provide a

safety net of support when students falter—teacher scaffold-

ing, reinstruction, and reexplanations are prominent in excel-

lent classrooms.

Discussion

Our work has been qualitative—intended to generate hypothe-

ses about excellent teaching. The megahypothesis emerging

from this work is that excellent teachers do not do simply one

or a few things differently from more typical teachers. Rather,

their teaching is massively different. They do much to moti-

vate students. Their classroom management is masterful.

Their classroom instruction is complex and coherent, meeting

the needs of the whole class while matching to the abilities and

interests of individual students.

This hypothesis contrasts with the perspectives of many

educational researchers. Those who claim that achievement is

largely a function of motivation are like blind persons touch-

ing part of the elephant. Those who argue that classroom man-

agement is the key to classroom success are similarly blind,

similarly touching only a different part of the elephant. Those

who contend that one particular type of instruction or curricu-

lum material will do the trick with respect to improving

classroom functioning join the ranks of the blind persons from

this perspective, simply tugging at yet another section of the

elephant. The elephants that are excellent classrooms, how-

ever, are complex, articulated animals, with many parts spun

together by their teacher leaders. The resulting elephant

coherently walks and proceeds through a long life (i.e., for any

particular cohort of students, usually at least a school year with

the same teacher). The hypothesis we have generated is that to

understand the elephants that are classrooms, it is necessary to

understand the parts as well as the functioning whole, aware

that masterful teachers develop classroom elephants with

every individual part better—and every part articulating

better—than do less masterful teachers who develop less im-

pressive classroom elephants. That is to say, as anyone who

has visited a zoo knows, although all elephants are complex

creatures, some are more magnificent than others. We love

watching the most magnificent of these beasts when we visit

the zoo, preferring them to their less imposing cage mates, just

as we love watching the classrooms created by excellent

teachers much more than we love watching the classrooms

created by more typical teachers down the hall.

CHALLENGES OF TEACHING

Teaching is a challenging activity. Thus, beginning teachers

are challenged during their first year or two of teaching

(Veenman, 1984); analyses of beginning teaching challenges

appear throughout the twentieth century, from Dewey (1913)

to U.S. Department of Education reports at the end of the

century (Lewis et al., 1999). There were many studies in be-

tween (Barr & Rudisell, 1930; Broadbent & Cruickshank,

1965; Dropkin & Taylor, 1963; Hermanowicz, 1966; Johnson

& Ryan, 1980; Lambert, 1956; Lortie, 1975; Martin, 1991;

Olson & Osborne, 1991; Ryan, 1974; Thompson, 1991; Wey,

1951). Although the challenges seem to decrease with expe-

rience, teaching remains a very challenging profession even

for veterans (Adams, Hutchinson, & Martray, 1980; Dunn,

1972; Echternacht, 1981; Koontz, 1963; Lieter, 1995; Litt &

Turk, 1985; Olander & Farrell, 1970; Pharr, 1974; Rudd &

Wiseman, 1962; Thomas & Kiley, 1994). A complete analy-

sis of teaching processes appreciates that teaching always

occurs amidst contextual challenges.

Roehrig, Pressley, and Talotta (2002) summarized all of

the types of challenges that elementary and secondary teach-

ers can face. Their starting point was the many published case

studies of beginning teaching (e.g., Dollase, 1992; Kane,

1991; Kowalski, Weaver, & Henson, 1994; Ryan et al., 1980;

Shapiro, 1993). Then they had a sample of first-year teachers

and experienced teachers indicate which of the potential

challenges occurred in their school lives during the past

school year. The result was nearly 500 separate challenges,

all of which were reported as experienced by one or more

teachers. The challenges clustered into 22 categories, sum-

marized in Table 8.1.

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Teaching Processes in Elementary and Secondary Education

TABLE 8.1 Categories of Challenges of Teaching

Category

Examples

Classroom discipline

Spending too much time on discipline.

Not disciplining enough.

Not knowing when and how to punish students.

Student misbehavior

Students cutting class.

Student inattention.

Student violence and weapons violations.

Motivating students

Undermotivated students.

Students under too much pressure to do well.

Students who do not believe they can do well.

Dealing with individual differences

Immature students.

between students

Angry and depressed students.

Students living in poverty.

Assessing students’ work

Concerns about how to do assessment.

Lack of confidence in ability to judge student work.

Keeping up with volume of assessment (grading).

Relations with parents

Alcoholic parents, divorced parents, or parents with other

characteristics adversely affecting student.

Lack of support of teacher by parents.

Getting parents to come to conferences.

Classroom management

Challenges of organizing classroom environment, especially if moving from

room to room across the day.

Difficulties in teaching and monitoring students at same time.

Special education teachers sometimes do not show up on time.

Resource issues

Insufficient supplies and materials.

Dated textbooks.

Classroom in disrepair.

Teacher-student communications

Learning names of so many students.

and interactions

Hard to relate to students who want to be left alone.

Handling students with rage.

School-based demands on time

Too much paperwork.

Committee work.

Coaching can be draining.

Relations with colleagues

Cliques among teachers.

Disagreements between teachers about fundamental goals of the school.

Other teachers suspicious of your methods of teaching.

Planning lessons and school days

Not receiving enough information before school starts to plan well.

Not having enough time to plan.

Stressed by staying one chapter ahead.

Classroom instruction

Balancing direct instruction and constructivism.

Meetings needs of individual students and needs of whole class.

Providing challenge to the brightest students.

Induction, mentoring, and inadequate guidance

Receiving little mentoring.

Being observed by mentor is stressful.

Receiving little information about the folkways and norms of the school.

Relations with principals and administrators

Principals being critical or disrespectful.

Principal directives that are vague.

Worrying about being rehired the next year.

Diversity issues

Teaching students with different backgrounds from own background.

Teacher can be victim of racial resentment.

Students claiming teacher discriminates.

Personal life issues

Having little spare time.

Difficulties getting continuing education credits.

Physical illness or injuries interfering with teaching.

Having unconstructive attitudes and perceptions

Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or incompetent.

Feeling the rewards of teaching are not great enough.

Not believing that the material being taught is important or useful for students.

Gender and sexual issues

Sexual harassment by another teacher.

Student flirting with the teacher.

Teacher finding a student attractive.

Concerns about the greater community

If community is deteriorating, often negatively affects life in school.

Some communities are boring.

Some communities are hard to get around.

Note. From Roehrig, Pressley, and Talotta (2002).

Some challenges are caused by characteristics of teachers

themselves—by what they do not know (e.g., curriculum,

rules of the school), teacher attitudes (e.g., not liking teach-

ing), or physical illness. Some are caused by the students

(e.g., their diversity, individual differences in abilities). Some

are caused by the many responsibilities of the job (e.g., cur-

riculum planner, disciplinarian, assessor). Some are caused

by other adults in the school (e.g., other teachers, administra-

tors, parents). Furthermore, there are the challenges outside

the school (e.g., the teacher’s family or lack of family, chal-

lenges of inner city life). In short, challenges are coming

from many directions.

That said, for both beginning and experienced teachers,

Roehrig et al. (2002) found that the most frequent source of

challenge that teachers report is the students—student mis-

behavior, lack of motivation, and individual differences were

rated as frequent sources of challenge. There are many differ-

ent types of student folks, all of whom need different strokes.

Roehrig et al. (2002) also found that both beginning and

experienced teachers reported facing multiple challenges

every day, with some teachers reporting many, many chal-

lenges daily (i.e., 20 or more) and across the year (200 or

more different challenges during the year). More positively,

most challenges can be handled. There are some very serious

challenges (i.e., serious in the sense that they cannot be

solved easily), however that occur often in the lives of teach-

ers. Beginning teachers often have serious problems with

disruptive or uncontrollable students, rude and disrespectful

students, students who do not do homework, and students

who are mean, living in dysfunctional families, or have spe-

cial education needs. Beginning teachers also are frequently

hassled by not having enough time to help each student as

much as needed and by not having any spare time for them-

selves. The picture is not much different for experienced

teachers; they report frequent challenges with angry and

hard-to-reach students as well as with students living in dys-

functional families. Hyperactive and tardy students cause

many difficulties for experienced teachers, as do students

who do not do assignments or who do sloppy work. In short,

again, the message is clear that students are the source of

many of the challenges in teaching.

In summary, to teach well, it is necessary to surmount many

and diverse challenges, many of which persist throughout

one’s teaching career. The most serious source of challenge is

the students, who challenge by what they do (e.g., misbehave),

by what they do not do (e.g., homework), and by who they are

(e.g., people with different talents and needs). That student

motivation can be problematic makes clear the importance of

the work on academic motivation of the past quarter century.

That student behavior is a challenge validates that the empha-

sis on classroom management in the teaching literature is well

founded. That there are students with varying abilities and

needs justifies the emphasis on instruction—much needs to be

known about the many different ways of teaching if all stu-

dents are to be reached. Educational researchers have been

pursuing the right issues in constructing a science of teaching.

That educational researchers and excellent teachers converge

in their emphases on motivating instruction, classroom man-

agement, and curriculum and instruction provides strongly

convergent support for a framework of teaching that focuses

on increasing student achievement motivation, crafting effec-

tive classroom management, and developing complexly co-

herent curricula and instruction.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

We know a great deal about how teaching can be excellent.

Excellent teachers do much to motivate their students, excel

at classroom organization and management, and engage in a

complex orchestration of teaching processes—sometimes

directly teaching with modeling and explanations, sometimes

providing experiences that permit students to construct under-

standings, and sometimes scaffolding instruction (i.e., guiding

discovery or assisting students to apply skills that were taught

directly). Excellent teaching is a complex balancing act,

which is all the more impressive because there are many chal-

lenges to doing it well. The greatest challenge is students—

some of whom do not want to learn, some of whom have

difficulties learning, and all of whom must be affected posi-

tively if the teacher is to be considered really successful. One

of the great joys in studying expert teachers is spending time

in classrooms in which absolutely every student is engaged,

happy, and making progress. It can and does happen.

One of the sad outcomes of studying expert teaching is

the awareness that far too few classrooms are really excellent

classrooms. To find the classrooms that were showcased as

excellent in our research, we spent much time in many more

classrooms that were far from excellent. In many class-

rooms, motivation is low, management is weak, and instruc-

tion falls far short of the complex balancing of direct

teaching, scaffolded practice, and discovery that occurs in

excellent classrooms.

How can weaker classrooms become better classrooms?

Based on our analyses of excellent classrooms, we believe it

requires a commitment on the part of the teacher to make the

classroom completely motivating by using the many motiva-

tional mechanisms that have been validated in the research

literature. It also requires getting so good at classroom man-

agement that it becomes unnoticeable—that is, classroom

Concluding Remarks

169

170

Teaching Processes in Elementary and Secondary Education

management needs to be mastered to the point at which there

are very few discipline problems. To some extent, manage-

ment will become less of an issue if instruction becomes

excellent—if the material and lessons taught are interesting

and clear to students; so much instruction is going on that stu-

dents have no time to be distracted; powerful connections are

drawn across the curriculum and to the world, which make

what is being learned meaningful and understandable; and

the instruction is at such a level that kids can get something

out of it, at least with assistance that is available in the form

of scaffolding. In short, to become excellent teachers, teach-

ers must work on improving many competencies at once—

being motivators, managers, and curriculum and instruction

experts who can tailor to the many individual needs of their

students.

Essential to improvement is the head of the teacher. Excel-

lent teachers know a great deal about motivation, manage-

ment, and teaching—from extensive knowledge of the

curriculum to detailed knowledge about the lives of the chil-

dren in their classrooms. We have been struck again and again

that the excellent teachers we have studied are absolutely cer-

tain they can change their students for the better—that their

students can and will learn in their classrooms. Such teachers

have internalized a set of beliefs about themselves and their

students that empowers them. Although it seems likely that

some of what teachers know is learned through formal educa-

tion (i.e., college courses, professional development, profes-

sional reading), much more of it is probably learned on the

job. Formal education and on-the-job experience are clearly

not enough for the teacher to mature to the point of being an

excellent teacher, however, for there are many, many experi-

enced teachers who are far from excellent. How is it that

some develop magnificently as teachers and others do not?

This is a huge next question for the educational researcher

community to tackle. It will not be an easy question to answer

because development of high teaching proficiency probably

requires much in the way of experiences and personal moti-

vation. Such development is probably at least as complex as

excellent teaching itself.

There continue to be simple conceptions of teaching im-

provement in the marketplace of ideas about education. This

review is being written at the start of a new school year when

the media is filled with ideas about education; thus, claims

abound that if schools simply turn to direct instruction

models, problems will be solved. At the other extreme,

constructivist educators argue that direct instruction is the

problem and that the cure is constructivism. Some educators

continue to peddle classroom management schemes that also

promise to solve the achievement ills of the nation. The sim-

plicity of the proposed approaches to improved teaching,

however, contrasts with the complexity of the excellent teach-

ing documented in the past quarter century. Moreover, the

many challenges that must be confronted to be an excellent

teacher make it seem unlikely that anyone ever became a

great teacher by simply changing one or two elements of

teaching—ones that would work well with all students.

Finally, in closing this chapter, we recognize that much

more seems to be known about teaching in elementary class-

rooms than in secondary classrooms. More positively, some

analyses tapping both elementary and secondary teaching sug-

gest greater similarities than differences—for example, in the

challenges facing elementary and secondary teachers (Roehrig

et al., 2002). Even so, we are also aware of analyses such as

Stodolsky (1988), which made the case that secondary teach-

ing and learning vary greatly depending on the content area.

Still, as we have surveyed the literatures pertaining to sec-

ondary content teaching, we have been struck by the presence

of discussions about direct transmission, constructivist teach-

ing, motivating instruction, and teacher thinking—the themes

overviewed in this chapter. Moreover, the major hypothesis

emerging from our own work—that excellent teachers create

complex classroom worlds flooded with motivating input,

which are well managed and elegantly balance instructional

approaches—seems a hypothesis worth evaluating across the

entire elementary and secondary range. Another way of stating

this hypothesis is that there are no quick fixes—just the great

big fix of educators working very hard for years to acquire the

knowledge, beliefs, and skills necessary to put together moti-

vating, orderly, instructionally rich environments.