Learning About Teachers’ Literacy Instruction From Classroom Observations

The purpose of this study is to contribute to efforts to improve methods for gathering and analyzing data from classroom observations in early literacy. The methodological approach addresses current problems of reliability and validity of classroom observations by taking into account differences in teachers’ uses of instructional actions (e.g., modeling) in specific skill areas (e.g., fluency, reading comprehension). The findings from observations of secondand third-grade teachers’ literacy instruction showed that teachers’ instructional actions differed by literacy skill area and were more consistent within than across skill areas. Furthermore, teachers’ uses of instructional actions in a given skill area were more strongly associated with students’ gains in achievement in that skill area than were teachers’ uses of actions across all skill areas. The approach offers significant improvements in methods to identify features of effective literacy instruction. In recent years, the drive to improve students’ achievement in literacy has focused interest on how teachers teach and what characteristics of their teaching are associated with students’ literacy achievement. Although there are a variety of ways to gather information about teachers’ literacy instruction (e.g., student surveys, gains on state tests), many consider observation of instruction the most promising approach because it offers the opportunity for teachers and researchers to gain insights into effective literacy instruction (e.g., Hoffman, Maloch, & Sailors, 2011; MET Project, 2012, 2013). Because of the promise of this method for studying learning in classrooms, observation systems have been used to examine a wide range of factors that might affect teachers’ instruction as it relates to students’ academic achievement—for example, the quality of the climate in classrooms (e.g., Pianta & Hamre, 2009), teachers’ sensitivity to student needs (e.g., Connor et al., 2009), and the texts that are used in literacy lessons (Hoffman, Sailors, Duffy, & Beretvas, 2004). Despite the potential of classroom observations to identify differences in instructional actions of more and less effective teachers, there are reasons to be concerned about the extent to which observation studies can yield measures of effective teaching. Researchers have expressed concerns about the lack of rigor in the design and analytic methods used in many such studies (Hoffman et al., 2011). Two particularly pressing problems are the low levels of reliability in descriptions of teachers’ instruction and the low external validity of such descriptions in predicting students’ literacy achievement. These problems were noted in the report of the Measures of Effective Teaching project; even with as many as four observations and observers, most classroom observation scores demonstrated low reliability (e.g., on the order of .5) and Ben Kelcey University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA