CHAPTER 7 - Effective Classroom Teaching: The Necessary but Not Sufficient Condition for Developing Exemplary Schools

Abstract

This chapter discusses the various ways of effective teaching. The single most important factor in predicting whether or not a teacher will be effective is whether the curriculum that is delivered to students in his or her classroom is linked logically or empirically to the outcomes that are desired. An important instructional variable that has not received a great deal of attention in discussions of effectiveness, until recently, is the variable of success rate. Three obvious levels of success rate may be defined: (1) high success rate is defined as the amount of time students spend in high success experiences where approximately 80% or more correct responses are made, (2) medium success rate is defined as the percentage of time students spend in activities or with curriculum materials that provide them with between 20 and 80% correct responses, and (3) low success rate is defined as the percentage of time students spend in activities or with curriculum materials that provide for approximately 20% or fewer correct responses. High success means that a student would show a low error rate and consider the task to be easy and low success means a student has a high error rate and probably considers the task difficult. It is an important variable in a discussion of effectiveness because very high and very low success rates in classrooms appear to affect student attitudes and student achievement.