In this article, Graham Nuthall critiques four major types of research on teaching effectiveness: studies of best teachers, correlational and experimental studies of teaching- learning relationships, design studies, and teacher action and narrative research. He gathers evidence about the kind of research that is most likely to bridge the teaching-research gap, arguing that such research must provide continuous, detailed data on the experience of individual students, in-depth analyses of the changes that take place in the students' knowledge, beliefs, and skills, and ways of identifying the real-time interactive relationships between these two different kinds of data. Based on his exploration of the literature and his research on teaching effectiveness, Nuthall proposes an explanatory theory for research on teaching that can be directly and transparently linked to classroom realities.
In this article, I argue that classroom teaching is structured by ritualized routines supported by widely held myths about learning and ability that are acquired through our common experiences as students. These ritualized routines and supporting myths are sustained not only by everyone's common experience of schooling, but by teacher education practices, the ways we evaluate teachers’ classroom performance, and many common types of educational research. My own research on teaching over the last 45 years has produced a number of apparently contradictory and puzzling findings that have progressively led me to understand the nature and power of these routines and myths. While ritualized routines are necessary to allow a teacher to manage the experiences of 20–30 students simultaneously, they also explain why individual student experience and learning remain largely invisible to teachers. The problem is to find ways to stand outside the ritualized routines and myths to identify how they control what we perceive, believe, and do about reforming teaching and learning.
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