This exploration of the essential knowledge offered by research on teacher planning is divided into four parts. The first part deals with the kinds of knowledge derived from research on teaching. It is noted that teacher effectiveness researchers have been primarily concerned with producing knowledge about the observable behavior of effective…

Prompted by research showing that communication is one element that distinguishes teachers rated effective by students from those rated ineffective, a study was undertaken to develop a scale for assessing the perceived communication effectiveness of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Two groups, one of undergraduate students and one of their…

A set of dimensions for describing teacher discussion style is presented in this paper written in 1963. In the task dimension, teacher style is defined in terms of statement posture (positive or negative assertion), discussion posture (teacher's attitude toward information, e.g., descriptive, analytic), statement types (value judgments or factual…

This research was designed to construct an instrument to measure teacher's expectancies for internal or external control of important aspects of the work of teaching. Items were composed for initial trial based on fourteen areas which past research has shown to be important satisfiers in teaching. The 75 items in the initial pool were administered…

Over the past 15 years a number of studies and official statements have considered characteristics and competencies of effective middle/junior high school teachers. Thirty-eight items found to be present in several studies were used to form a questionnaire, sent to 500 members of the National Middle School Association, about the importance of…

A description is given of the Descriptive Review Process, a method of analyzing a teacher's personal style in order to promote teacher development and improvement. The process combines teacher self-evaluation with evaluation by an observer and a chairperson. The emphasis of the process is on the teacher. The teacher's role in the process involves:…

Changes in teacher behavior in response to different types of feedback were examined. Subjects were faculty members from a two-year college. Five types of feedback were selected: (1) videotapes made during one class period; (2) the Bellack system, which provides the teacher with an observer-made graph of frequencies of teacher and student…

This study examined the relationship between teachers' beliefs and intentions about the importance of teacher-child interactions. The participants were 71 early childhood teachers who had worked with children ages 35 for an average of 9 years (range 0-29). Roughly 35% of the teachers had majored in early childhood education, and 63% held at least…

A study explored the general patterns of discourse during discussions of literature in secondary classrooms, and investigated teachers' and students' perceptions of the purposes that guide those discussions. Six teacher-researchers each studied one teacher as that teacher taught an instructional unit on a literary text, videotaping class sessions,…

A study investigated the types of in-class, speaking-oriented activities that second language learners find anxiety-producing and the types of instructor practices that students perceive as anxiety-reducing. A 4-page questionnaire was administered to 135 university-level students of intensive Spanish and 109 high school students in first- and…

The purpose of this study was the examination of the field-dependent cognitive style as it relates to differences in learning within an analytical, concept-based physical education curriculum. Subjects were 52 elementary school students in the second grade who scored in the fourth quartile on the Children's Group Embedded Figures Test. Observation…

Pupil control (discipline) takes on different forms in different schools, and among different teachers in the same school. Pupil control has been described as existing along a continuum from humanistic to custodial. The prototype of the custodial orientation is the school that provides a rigid and highly controlled setting concerned primarily with…

A study explored contextual influences upon the writing of students in their final year of secondary schooling. Six teachers in 6 subject areas and 12 students enrolled in 2 or more of these 6 classes were selected as case studies. The researcher spent an academic year observing the contexts in which writing occurred, recording class sessions,…