Teaching and teachers

Teaching is not a straightforward task. For classroom teaching to be effective, many components need to line up. Lesson activities and textbooks need to be aligned with learning goals, which need to be accurately assessed in tests and exams. All of those components need to be compatible with students’ learning levels, needs, and contexts.

Teachers are pivotal to children’s current and future well-being. But teachers occupy a difficult position. They face competing expectations from different sources:

• top-down expectations from the education ministry, district officials, headteachers, and everyone in between
• ground-level expectations from students, parents, and communities.

Some of these expectations help teachers’ work toward student learning. Other expectations detract from learning—such as targets for completing the curriculum whether or not children understand what is taught, or pressure to raise test scores even by rote memorisation or cheating.

Education systems need to strike a careful balance. Given teachers’ tremendous responsibility, they must be held accountable for students’ learning. But given the complexity of their task, teachers also need the training, instructional materials, and autonomy that would equip them to facilitate student learning—and stakeholders need to take a holistic, context-sensitive view of the quality of teaching.

On the complexity of effective classroom teaching:

• Teaching Practices That Support and Promote Learning: Qualitative Evidence from High and Low Performing Classes in Vietnam, Joan DeJaeghere, Bich-Hang Duong, and Vu Dao
• Preparation, Practice, and Beliefs: A Machine Learning Approach to Understanding Teacher Effectiveness, Deon Filmer, Vatsal Nahata, and Shwetlena Sabarwal

On improving classroom teaching:

• Aligning Levels of Instruction with Goals and the Needs of Students (ALIGNS): Varied Approaches, Common Principles, Yue-Yi, Hwa Michelle Kaffenberger, and Jason Silberstein
• Systems Implications for Core Instructional Support Lessons from Sobral (Brazil), Puebla (Mexico), and Kenya, Luis Crouch

On the competing priorities and multiple stakeholders shaping the teaching profession:

• The Struggle to Recruit Good Teachers in Indonesia: Institutional and Social Dysfunctions, Aris R. Huang, Shintia Revina, Rizki Fillaili, and Akhmadi
• Purpose, Pressures, and Possibilities: Conversations About Teacher Professional Norms in the Global South, edited by Yue-Yi Hwa

On strengthening the teaching profession:

• Teacher Careers in Education Systems That Are Coherent for Learning: Choose and Curate Toward Commitment to Capable and Committed Teachers (5Cs), Yue-Yi Hwa and Lant Pritchett
• What have we learned about how to support teaching? Reflections from RISE researchers (webinar)

For more, see our list of RISE research outputs on teachers and teaching.