Eugene Schaffer

An Innovative Beginning Teacher Induction Program: A Two-Year Analysis of Classroom Interactions

Classroom observational data from an innovative 2-year, university-based teacher induction program indicate that the inductees made significant gains in the level of their teaching skills. First-year gains in instruction typically resulted from improvements in the classroom organizational and management skills of the inductees. Second-year gains tended to be related to changes in more intellectually complex areas of teaching.

Improving Secondary Students' Academic Achievement through a Focus on Reform Reliability: 4- and 9-Year Findings from the High Reliability Schools Project.

The authors describe a reform effort in which characteristics derived from High Reliability Organization research were used to shape whole school reform. Longitudinal analyses of outcome data from 12 Welsh secondary schools indicated that 4 years after the effort was initiated, student outcomes at the sites were strongly positive. Additional quantitative and qualitative data, gathered 5 years after the end of the intervention, indicated that the majority of the schools continued using the high reliability principles and continued making strong academic progress. Results are discussed in terms of the original High Reliability Schools model, systemic effects, and sustainability.

The Contributions of Classroom Observation to School Effectiveness Research

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the measurement of the classroom level. It describes the problems with classroom observation instruments/systems used in the research on effective teaching and presents some solutions to those limitations. The chapter also describes the kinds of classroom observation instruments that have been used in recent studies on effective schools, citing both their strengths and limitations. It presents the challenges related to the development of classroom observation instruments for an international study of school effects that includes classroom processes in the design. It proposes a classroom observation system based on both the effective teaching and effective schools research. The instrument attends to these challenges involved in conducting observations in an international school effectiveness study. The chapter discusses the problems that are involved in developing observational instruments appropriate for internationally comparative studies, where there are very large variations by context in the meaning attributable to behavior and in the simple practical problems of translating and back translating items.

School Effectiveness Research: A Review of the International Literature

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the literature on school effectiveness from virtually all the countries in the world where research has been conducted to assess the state of the art of the discipline across the world. It conveys a sense of the historical background to school effectiveness research in various countries and a sense also of the reasons why the countries differ so much in the quantity and the quality of their knowledge bases. The chapter discusses the lessons from the various countries in terms of their contribution to research practice and general conceptualizations of the way to practice school effectiveness research. It also discusses the ways in which the field of school effectiveness might usefully develop in the future, based on an appreciation in different countries of the value of research approaches that reflect best practice as identified internationally. The chapter presents a survey of school effectiveness research in Canada and reviews the countries of Hong Kong, Norway, Australasia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the United States, and the Great Britain.

Sustaining Turnaround at the School and District Levels: The High Reliability Schools Project at Sandfields Secondary School

Beginning from 1 high-poverty, historically low-achieving secondary schools successful turnaround work, this article provides data relative to a successful school turnaround, the importance of external and system-level supports, and the importance of building for sustainable institutionalization of improvements. The evidence suggests the importance of creating a more nearly high-reliability set of reform supports at the school and district levels.

Making best practice standard - and lasting

A 16-year-old effort to improve schools in a challenged, high-poverty area in Wales could offer lessons to schools elsewhere.

The Evolving Role of Teachers in Effective Schools

There are thousands of studies in the areas of both teacher effects and school effects. In each field, a minority of the studies rise to high levels of rigor. Unfortunately, the number of studies that meld the two fields is strikingly modest, with a great need for additional research. In this chapter, we explore the intersection of the two fields with a particular focus on current issues in teacher effects and how they might inform the school effects research base. The fields of teacher and school effects share a common challenge. Both are attempts to understand and elaborate on what most people intuitively know to be true. Millions of American parents add time to their daily commutes and pay tens of thousands of additional dollars to purchase homes in neighborhoods served by “good schools.” Similarly, they will attend Parent Teacher Association meetings, do volunteer work in the schools, and make multiple stressful visits to principals’ offices to get their children into classes taught by “good teachers” (or to avoid “bad teachers”). Clearly, parents – and students – believe that some teachers and schools are more effective than others. The two fields also share a common problem in their research histories: Both began with years of frustration in attempting to identify precisely “what matters” in terms of academic effectiveness. When the fledgling American Educational Research Association (AERA) commissioned the first Handbook of Research on Teaching (Gage, 1963), the 1000 page, two-column per page tome covered the widest practical range of topics in teaching, but not one of the chapters yielded replicable evidence that anything that teachers did mattered in terms of differentiating measurable student gains on any outcome. Similarly, in school effects, the first major US study of the effects of schools, the much-referenced “Coleman Report” (Coleman et al., 1966; reanalyzed by Jencks, 1972) concluded that neither teachers nor schools had differential effects on student achievement, and that the backgrounds and socioeconomic status of individual students’ families were the determining factor in student achievement.1 In no small part because

Book Review of Forging Links: Effective Schools and Effective Departments

Any book that challenges the basic assumption held by many that, by the time students are in secondary school it is too late to help them, merits our attention. Forging Links: Effective Schools and Effective Departments pre ents evidence that efforts to improve secondary schools are well worth our while, particularly for students placed at risk. Forging Linkswas motivated by popular concerns that schools poorly serve the lower 30%, or “trailing edge,” of students. The study also addresses a growing concern in the United Kingdom and in the United States about poor student behavior and attendance problems. Conducted in England, this study informs American educators through an examination of both the variance between schools and within schools. Sammons, Thomas, and Mortimore believe their findings related to within-school differences may be as important as their findings regarding the comparative effects of schools. Using a sample of inner-city London schools, the authors described effective, ineffective, and mixed-effective secondary schools (Grades 7–12) through statistical analysis and case studies. In the process, they unpack the multiple layers of secondary schools by using research strategies that can benefit researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in the United Kingdom. These findings assist the U.S. educator in examining the contribution of individual departments to student learning. Forging Linkspresents a picture of secondary education and, in particular, the role of departments that has largely escaped U.S. researchers and policy makers. JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR STUDENTS PLACED AT RISK, 5(3), 329–332 Copyright