Observing secondary school teachers’ effective teaching behavior in the Netherlands, England, and the United States using the ICALT observation instrument

Abstract

IntroductionThe purpose of this study was to examine measurement invariance in observer scoring of effective teaching behavior in three secondary education contexts–the Netherlands, England, and the United States. It also aimed to describe what effective teaching behavior looks like in secondary education across the three education contexts.MethodsA uniform observation measure called International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) was used to observe teachers.ResultsResults revealed that the hypothesized factor structure of effective teaching behavior was confirmed for the Dutch and English data, but not for the US data. Teachers in the Netherlands showed higher levels of more basic teaching behaviors, but lower levels of more complex teaching behaviors, compared to teachers in England.DiscussionImplications of the findings are discussed.

Teaching in a Shared Classroom: Unveiling the Effective Teaching Behavior of Beginning Team Teaching Teams Using a Qualitative Approach

“…Previous studies on effective teaching behavior [58], using the ICALT observation instrument, indicate that teachers in the USA and the Netherlands achieve higher scores in the context of solo teaching for the more basic dimensions, such as creating a safe and stimulating learning climate, efficient classroom management, and providing clear instruction. The more complex dimensions, that the beginning team teaching teams in this study highlighted as a clear added value, obtain lower scores in different educational contexts, such as the Netherlands, the USA, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, and South Africa [18,58]. Notably, within these contexts, adaptive teaching appears to be the least prevalent [18].…”

“…The teams prioritized other, more complex dimensions and noted that a growth opportunity exists for the dimension "teaching learning strategies" to develop in their team teaching context. Nevertheless, the results of earlier studies have highlighted the importance of this dimension and indicated that it takes roughly 15 to 20 years of experience to develop the most difficult teaching skills in the context of solo teaching [19,58,81]. However, a significant number of teachers never develop these more complex skills.…”