The purpose of this pilot project was to develop, use, and film teaching tasks to demonstrate their effectiveness in showing variations in teaching styles. Thirty teaching tasks designed to include a variety of curricular dimensions were developed by 6 observers with considerable experience as preschool teachers and observers; each task listed…

Requests for evaluation instruments measuring program quality rather than program content have required the development of new measuring procedures. Two sets of materials are presented in this report--the first to identify objectives and expected outcomes for school programs and persons in the school, and the second to identify the actual climate…

Ten students, randomly selected from each of three different elementary mathematics methods programs at one university, each were videotaped teaching one lesson to four randomly assigned third graders. Findings showed significant correlations between three teaching variables (clarity, questioning, pupil involvement) and pupil achievement, and…

Microteaching, or peer teaching, is an activity that requires science methods students to plan, teach, and evaluate a particular lesson. The peer teaching activity, although obviously similar to teaching a lesson in a traditional classroom, enables the methods students to teach to a small group of their peers, thus easily receiving constructive…

The study reported here analyzed the interaction performance of instructional supervisors as they conducted postobservation conferences with teachers. Seven supervisor-teacher pairs consisting of varying combinations of experienced, beginning, and novice teachers and supervisors were examined, to determine status indicators such as jargon use,…

There are differences in how preservice, novice, and expert teachers view effective teaching. This study traced conceptual changes among preservice teachers at different points in their preparation; investigated whether there were differences in perceptions of students in the elementary and secondary programs; and examined how second and fourth…

This guidebook for preservice secondary student teachers outlines in detail the techniques for relating field experiences to the academic work in the university classroom. It assumes a progressive involvement on the part of the student teacher, beginning with active observation and leading to tutoring, working with small groups, teaching a whole…

This document provides part of a final report to the Scottish Education Department on a study of student teachers' observations of and interviews with cooperating teachers. The purpose of the research was to help student teachers acquire an understanding of and control over teaching methods. The findings are from experiments with three samples of…

A study sought to determine the extent to which cooperating teachers' narrative comments on weekly observations reflect six categories of beginning teachers' competencies and to ascertain the relationships among cooperating teachers' narrative comments, their midterm evaluations of student teachers, and their final evaluation of student teachers.…

Described in this article are the Teacher Performance Evaluation materials and techniques that are part of the School Improvement Model project, which endeavors to improve teacher and administrator performance with the ultimate goal of improved student learning. According to the author, this project utilizes new teacher evaluation technology…

The Assessments of Performance in Teaching (APT), presented here, is a classroom teacher performance evaluation procedure mandated by the South Carolina Legislature for all student and first year teachers, and will be implemented in 1982. Aiming to measure minimal competence, the instrument addresses five performance dimensions: planning;…

The object of this research was to establish a reliable test battery to determine probable future success for those persons who wish to be trained as expert classroom observers. The focus of this investigation was to predict coding performance. This report presents the findings of a replication of an earlier study that indicated that coder…

Live microwave broadcasts from two special education and six regular elementary classrooms are disseminated nationally via satellite, providing a special observation laboratory experience available to teacher preparation institutions. Observation theory is merged with effective teaching research in an instructional model that has demonstrated…

Informed by theory and research in inquiry-based classrooms, this paper examines how classroom practices support students' understanding of decimals. Data from a six-month teaching experiment, based on the work of Moss and Case's (1999) use of percentages and metric measure as visible representations for students' emerging understanding of…

Use of the Teaching Strategies Observation Differential (TSOD), a 10-category system for observing and classifying teacher classroom behavior, is discussed as it relates to training preservice elementary school science teachers. Contends that skill in the use of TSOD helps preservice teachers become more effective in bringing about desired pupil…