Highly Effective Teaching

For students to achieve at high levels, they need excellent teachers.

PEF's teacher quality initiatives are defining excellence in teaching by researching the skills and capacities of highly effective teachers.

Since the initiative began in 2000, PEF's research studies have been funded by the Public Education Network, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the Lyndhurst Foundation of Chattanooga, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

In a study funded by the Lyndhurst Foundation in 2001, PEF identified a core group of 92 highly effective teachers from 42 elementary and middle schools whose students made exceptional, measurable progress year after year. PEF researchers observed and videotaped their classroom teaching, reviewed their personnel files, interviewed and surveyed them, and gave them personality inventories.

The results of this research - from the effective teachers' techniques to their ideas on teacher training and school organization - are now being incorporated into other PEF programs and guiding further research.

Because of the extraordinary amount of nationwide interest in the initial results, a follow-up study was begun in 2003 to deepen our understanding of teacher effectiveness. The results of that study will be available soon.