Page 83 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                4.1 Introduction
Since the 1970s, increasing attention to the evaluation of teachers’ generic competencies has resulted in the development of a variety of observation instruments
that are widely used to assess elementary and secondary education, such as the
Stallings Observe System (Stallings & Kaskowitz, 1974), the Framework for Teaching
(Danielson, 1996), the International System for Teacher Observation and Feedback
(Teddlie, Creemers, Kyriakides, Muijs, & Yu, 2006), the International Comparative
Analysis of Learning and Teaching (Van de Grift, 2007), and the Classroom Assessment
Scoring System (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008). Other instruments used to examine
teacher behavior include, for example, teachers’ self-reports, (semi-structured) 4 interviews, and student questionnaires (e.g., Kyriakides, 2008; Kyriakides, Campbell,
& Christofidou, 2002; Maulana, Helms-Lorenz, & Van de Grift, 2015; Muijs, 2006). However, despite its labor-intensive nature, classroom observation is viewed as a more unbiased form of data collection to examine teacher behavior (Pianta & Hamre, 2009; Wragg, 1994).
The development and implementation of observation instruments can be very useful in more effectively shaping teacher education and professional development programs and in evaluating classroom-based interventions (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2012; Lavigne & Good, 2015; O’Leary, 2014; Yoder & Symons, 2010). However, most of these instruments focus on teachers’ generic competencies rather than teachers’ subject-specific competencies. Therefore, scholars such as Grossman and McDonald (2008), Desimone (2009), and Schoenfeld (2013) emphasized the importance of adding subject-specific observation instruments to research on teaching and teacher education.
Although some recently developed observation instruments focus on more specific teacher competencies, such as classroom talk (Mercer, 2010), project-based learning (Stearns, Morgan, Capraro, & Capraro, 2012), and the reform of learning and instruction (Sawada et al., 2002), only a few observation instruments focus on teachers’ subject- specific strategies, such as English reading (Gertsen, Baker, Haager, & Graves, 2005; Smit, Van de Grift, De Bot, & Jansen, 2017), content- and language-integrated learning (De Graaff, Koopman, Anikina, & Westhoff, 2007), English language arts (Grossman et al., 2010), and mathematical instruction (Hill, Charalambous, & Kraft, 2012; Matsumura, Garnier, Slater, & Boston, 2008; Schoenfeld, 2013).
Testing an observation instrument
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