What can student teachers expect to make of courses in effective teaching? Can they expect to glean from the epistemological cream of distilled knowledge anything that is scientifically solid, reapplicable, or movable from class to class or from school to school? Are there markers which will emerge for students which give a good sense of what is effective in teaching? One would hope so, but Gary Thomas's (1997) recent article, "What's the Use of Theory?, made me wonder if the whole notion of effective teaching isn't a bit of a shame. Indeed, I am never really sure what has been effective in my own classroom practice. Inner feelings that I have been particularly effective in class have often been dashed by an overheard conversation in the hall just after class. Conversely, I have been told that, what I thought was a minor point, mentioned only in passing, radically changed someone's thinking about a topic. Thus, I am led to wonder how much we say about effective classroom practice is often a vague romanticism in which a pedagogical moment is turned into a nostalgic idealistic ghost. It would seem that any rules for best practice based on such romantic notions as "teachable moments" need further study and explanation about what is going on in the teacher's mind in these instances. To test Thomas's provocative arguments against the continued use of theory in education, I decided to look at the field of effective teaching to see if there are any rules that could be sifted from the literature on effective teaching to help guide the novice towards what might be considered best practice.

First off, Borich (1992) warns that there are no tests of personality traits, attitudes, aptitudes, or psychological characteristics that can be used to single out prospective effective teachers. Borich sees too many variables in classroom practice for such tests or lists of characteristics to emerge.

In the past, classroom teaching has been studied from a number of vantage points and empirical studies have focused on a variety of research areas, e.g., the cognitive and intellectual behaviour of students, classroom communications, the emotional and social climate of the school, and the various teaching techniques and instructional strategies. Traditionally, and especially since the early 1950s, methods of educational inquiry have generally been empirically based and scientifically oriented. They have often tried to generate data that could be transferred into an easily accessible and quantifiable format. Terms like "knowledge delivery systems," "assessment strategies," "peer tutoring and evaluation," " growth schemes," "discovery based learning," "supervision for growth," and "the six-day cycle" foster the idea of teaching as being both technical and scientific. However, whether teaching is viewed and studied from a behavioural, sociological, psychological, or anthropological perspective, our understanding has frequently seemed incomplete or unsatisfactory.

In the 1960s and 1970s preservice teacher education was dominated by both an applied science or technical view of teaching and by a craft conception of practice. States Zeichner (1983),

These skills led to a student teacher's classroom 'performance' being evaluated along prespecified levels of proficiency. Little time was given to critical reflection on social continuity, meaning, or change. Thus, it was the acquisition and demonstration of very basic and general skills which were of central importance.

The craft conception of teacher education is viewed as a process of apprenticeship and/or internship. Tom (1980) traced this approach toward teacher education back over a period of one hundred years, but points out that because of the dominance of the behaviouristic approach to teacher education and because of attempts to 'professionalise,' teaching the craft conception of teacher education has had few proponents since the normal school era.

Behaviourism, in one form or another, came to dominate the research into effective teaching in the 1970s. Its preeminence can be demonstrated by the influence it has had on teacher preparation in the United States. Various states have legislatively mandated teacher education and/or evaluation programmes¹ that rely heavily upon behavioural research. Indeed, a review of the sections that cover tests of 'professional knowledge' in a number of preparatory study guides for the National Teachers Examination (NTE) reveals a preponderance for behavioural related questions (see for example Weinlander). What is emphasised in these texts is the acquisition of special and specific skills. Speaking to this point, Zeichner states,

He goes on to say in the next paragraph that underlying this view of teacher education and competence,

Hence, the means of producing and distributing knowledge about teaching can be controlled by those who set the parameters for performance and the criteria for competence. Zeichner recognised a behaviouristic view of teaching as falling with in the technical tradition of teacher education which allows little room for the teacher's own practical knowledge.

Although research about reflective teaching is relatively new, research about teacher effectiveness has a long history (see Charters, 1918; A.S. Barr, 1929; Gage, 1970). Historically, teacher effectiveness studies have grown in numbers over the past fifty years. Indeed, by 1974 over 10,000 published studies were available. Dunkin and Biddle (1974) quote Gage's 1960 reported in which he states, "not only is the literature on this subject overwhelming, but even the bibliographies on the subject have become unmanageable" (pp.12-13). However, the results essentially have been ineffective and disappointing.

In 1952, the American Educational Research Association's Committee on the Criteria of Teacher Effectiveness reported a list of discouraging findings:

In 1976, Shavelson and Dempsey reported that, so far, none of the research results into teacher effectiveness had "identified consistent, reapplicable features of...teaching that lead directly--or even indirectly---to valued student outcomes " (p. 553). In 1978, Doyle reported that his analysis of nine studies on teaching produced "few consistent relationships between teacher variables and effectiveness criteria..." (p. 161). In his 1989 address at the annual meeting of AERA, Gage (1989) quoted the work of both Tom(1984) and Barrows (1984) to sum up his own review of the research conducted on teaching during the sixties, seventies, and eighties by saying that such research had been characterised as "at best, inconclusive, at worst, barren" and "inadequate to tell us anything secure and important about how teachers should proceed in the classroom" (p. 135). To quote Tom directly, "even a cursory historical review of the meagre research results from this tradition should cause teacher effectiveness researchers to consider abandoning their approach" (p. 53).

Given the negative results of these studies, something seems dramatically askew with the research about effective teaching or with its premise. Indeed, in the 1980s researchers began to recognise problems with the scientific or quasi-scientific approaches to the study of teaching. Kagan (1988), writing in a paper reviewing a multitude of studies on how teachers have conceptualised and ordered their instruction in both the United States and Europe since 1974, concluded her findings by saying that the model for studying teacher cognition is showing teaching to be a more complex and dynamic activity than originally thought. She states that because teaching involves the weaving together of various intellectual structures, and because so much of a teacher's lesson is improvised once it has begun, recent results of studies into teacher cognition (Leinhardt and Greeno, 1986; Brown, McIntyre, and McAlpine 1988; Krabbe, McAdams, and Tullgren 1988) have "effectively moved teaching further from science and closer to art" (p.497). Though Kagan does not specifically delineate what she means by 'art' she is essentially suggesting that research on teaching needed to shift away from the scientific and technical ways of perceiving and analysing the teaching act and to move closer to an artistic position similar to that suggested by Eisner (1968, 1982).

It has often been common practice for educational researchers, whenever they reach an impasse in their definition of teaching, to allude to the art or the artistry of teaching to explain any enigma. What is significant about Kagan's analysis is th at she has tried to go beyond affixing the label 'art' to that which is difficult to scientifically delineate and is calling for an abandonment of effective teaching research and for an analysis of teaching with artistic principles in mind.

In 1982, Eisner, as one of the few proponents of an aesthetic conception of teaching, encapsulated the numerous problems associated with prescriptive models of teaching. Among his arguments are what he calls the four fallacies of the scientific view of teaching.

The Fallacy of Additivity. Eisner states that it cannot be assumed that the various parts of a teaching behaviour can be afforded equal weight nor can the frequency counts of 'good' teacher behaviour be totalled to determine a teacher's competency. Eisner argues that the quality and depth of each of the various teaching behaviours must be accounted for within the context of the teaching activity. Thus, the tone and the quality of a teacher's remarks take on significant, but varying, importance to each individual student within a particular class. As Kagan observes, the false but "implicit assumption of the scientific knowledge base provided by process-product research is that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts...." (p.4 97).

The Fallacy of Concreteness. It is falsely assumed that all the act of teaching encompasses is observable in the behaviour of the students and teacher. This fallacy shows a disregard for perceived meanings and intentions of students and teachers.

The Fallacy of the Act. Here Eisner points out the assumption that teaching can be evaluated in a single detached event. Inherent in this fallacy is the belief that perception can be increased by controlling the variables within the teaching act. When evaluators go into classrooms to observe and record questioning techniques, verbal rewarding systems, probing methods, or other phenomena, there is the conviction that their frequency counts or noted data can be used in exclusion of other classroom events or teacher-directed activity.

The Fallacy of Method. Importantly, Eisner questions the methodologies used by those who advocate a scientific view of teaching. He says that teachers assume classroom behaviour can be validated by using multiple observers to record classroom teaching activities. However, by using inter-rater reliability counts or tabulations from observed behavioural check lists and other 'objective' measurements, all a teacher's subjective views as to why he or she proceeded to create meaning within a given context are removed. The observers' perceptions are all that count in gathering data and drawing conclusions in the methodology.

At the heart of any analysis of effective teaching are the conflicting conceptions of what exactly should be observed and considered when viewing classroom action, and precisely what it is that constitutes teaching proper within that action. We are again forced to consider how teachers think about their work as opposed to how researchers traditionally conceptualised it.

Additional problems arise with the prescriptive views of teaching which need to be articulated. First, in many cases there is an attempt to 'teacher-proof' the curriculum. This phrase highlights the current practice of manipulating and controlling the end results of classroom instruction. (Ontario's recent move into Outcomes Based Education epitomises this conception). The view of teaching as a precise technical activity has been used as a model for framing restrictive educational goals and objectives. This preordination of the curriculum in behavioural terminology then allows for preselected objectives to be tested and evaluated once the teaching act has taken place. The effect of this positivistic oriented process/product conception of education is that for both teacher and student there are built-in pathways constructed for thinking about and arriving at prescribed curriculum destinations.

This view of teaching fosters control by managerial evaluation. When enough students do not arrive at their prescribed 'destination,' the school management team can be brought in to trace back along the 'instructional' route and find out where things became derailed. Subsequently, teacher's instructional techniques can be assessed, modified, and brought back on line. The 'product' can be manipulated to flow more easily and more directly to its predetermined destination. Future tests can then be run to examine if the preset behavioural objectives are being met. Assuming they are, the teacher can be told that he or she is doing a satisfactory teaching job. Since the 'product' is now classified as satisfactory, the teacher need only to monitor h is or her process (teaching) to keep production on line. Any deviations, digressions, or alternative methods of teaching the prescribed curriculum run the risk of negatively affecting the preselected goals as outlined by the systems management team. The result of any experimentation or digression by the teacher could cause a future visit by the bureaucracy to assess what has gone 'wrong'. Obviously, when teaching is conceptualised in this manner, there is a desire to gain exacting control over all the dimensions of the teaching act, to insist on the mastery of a series of effective teacher behaviours, and to limit direct teacher input. Hence the new phrase 'teacher-proofing the curriculum' can only be seen as an effort to downplay the human interaction side of teaching. This seriously limits the effects that teachers can have on curriculum outcomes.

A second problem with the scientific view of teaching is the failure to recognise that teaching phenomena are fabricated and that teaching problems have a variety of possible solutions (solutions which may be unknown prior to the start of the teaching act itself). Hence, any generalities or patterns thought to be found are likely to shift or be lost over time with the arrival of new or different classes of students. The effective teacher could indeed turn out to be a person who is able to choose the 'right' course of action from a diverse teaching repertoire, which has been assembled over a long and varied teaching career, and apply it situationally.

A third problem with the prescriptive view of teaching is that at its base is the notion of manipulation and control. It starts from the assumption that teachers can be viewed as technicians who are hired to apply prescribed curricula. A teacher's (or student's) own agenda is given little weight and seen as an addendum in curriculum planning. As Apple (1979) has pointed out, the systems managers, in their quest for certainty and regularity in human behaviour, must be manipulative if they are to achieve their goals (pp. 110-111). To admit individual teacher goals into subject planning would require giving up some authority.

A fourth problem with the scientific or technical approach to teaching, is the belief that pervasive educational problems can be solved by outside specialists and experts. It is believed that when the specialist finds a 'solution' to a particular problem, the teacher need only apply the right technique or remedy to the problem and it will be solved. Often the individual teacher is totally removed from the equation (or is questioned on the periphery for specific pieces of information) because answers are seen and assumed to be 'technical' in nature. Hence, resolution can only be achieved by the specialists--the ones who have the appropriate 'technical' knowledge and know how.

The process/product way of looking at educational planning is, by its very nature, a simplistic approach and methodology. It seldom takes into account the realities, the diversity, nor the complexity of classroom life. Teachers who have taught the same elementary grade for a number of years reach a point where they can look back on past years and extract the elements that made a particular year go well or pinpoint the worst experience they have ever had with a mathematics group, or detail the willingness of a particular class to stretch their investigation skills and sweep the awards in a local science fair. Whatever elements made those classes good or difficult or exciting came together at a particular time and in a particular room for those involved and could not be preplanned or predicted nor repeated. A technical view of teaching has difficulty accepting the transience or randomness of these factors.

A fifth problem is the quest by some to transplant systems management techniques into educational institutions, it is believed that certitude, regularity, and efficiency will be established. However, as Apple has tried to make clear in Ideology and Curriculum, this is based on an assumption that systems management is neutral:

This assumption is grounded, not only in the supposed neutrality of science, but also in its supposed efficiency and crisp effectiveness. Additionally, it is taking into account only the skills involved in practice. But as Kuhn (1970) has quite clearly demonstrated, science can be a very messy business. Indeed, good science allows for and works with ambiguity, incertitude, and suspicion; paradigms compete against one another, wrestle with each other's theories and notions, pulling apart and reconstructing various ideas. Good science, it can be said, seeks out conflict and ambiguity in its effort to make new discoveries and explain phenomena. It also can be said that 'failure' is far more often the case in science than 'success'. Setbacks are all part of thoughtful experimentation and exploration; they are all part of the risk taking, the leap of faith, the creative processes involved in good experimentation and laboratory work.

Critical theorists (Apple, 1970; Giroux, 1981; Beck, 1990) have shown that scientific investigations into the nature of teaching are often not scientifically neutral or without cultural bias. They have linked the political, economic, and social powers in society to the overall structure within educational institutions. They stress the view that the present conception of education is serving the dominant social classes and perpetuates this dominance by controlling certified knowledge, curriculum materials and content, and teacher actions. Because research into teaching has consistently focused most of its attention on the technical aspects of the profession, the critical theorists accuse educational researchers of having avoided any political commitment regarding educational research design, questioning, or classroom relationships. Furthermore, critical theorists accuse the educational researchers of having, more or less, ended up serving the dominant classes by reproducing existing inequality and perpetuating dominant class interests and agenda. Thus, the aims of such positivistic research approaches are seen as trivial in light of the need to restructure society more equitably.

While focusing on the qualitative, holistic, and interpretive approach to classroom instruction, qualitative researchers reject, as Eisner does, the notion that teaching can be studied as individual pieces of behaviour, or that classroom activities can be viewed and quantified without regard for the subjective or inside view of classroom phenomena. They also reject the assumption of uniformity in nature. Hence, observed educational events cannot be expected to occur similarly in different places or under different classroom circumstances. To pin down objective causality in the shifting moods and nuances of the classroom is seen as fruitless from their perspective.

Thus, to conclude this analysis of the scientific and technical conception of teaching, we must place alongside the historical documentation for the failings of the scientific and technical approaches to the study of effective teaching over the past fifty or sixty years, the more recent issues raised by the critical theorists and the qualitative researchers.

If it can be assumed that the educational research community has continued to generate (at a modest rate) additional studies on effective teaching during the three decades since Gage identified the 10,000 studies in 1960, a staggering figure begins to emerge. Something is dramatically wrong with research that consistently fails to produce any significant findings or results. Surely by now we should have a sound body of codified knowledge derived from the empirical findings of the discipline from which to add to or branch out from. Observers (e.g., Barrow, Tom, Eisner, Kagan, Gage, Raven) offer a number of detailed reasons for the failure of the research. Whatever the reasons for this failure both here and abroad, not every one of the thousands of researchers can be doing bad science. The fact remains that, because so many studies have failed to document any significant findings on effective teaching, the underlying assumptions upon which this research has been based must be questioned.

It has been the quest for efficiency and certitude that has governed a prescribed and technical approach to the study of teaching. The underlying metaphors are of production and measurable outcomes. Thus, hard binary improvements are sought in the products of students. But what of the other competencies we wish students to possess which are not easily measured or quantified? These competencies include communicating, observing, finding information needed to achieve a particular goal (collected by observation or by talking to people rather than by reading books), inventing, persuading, or showing leadership. How do we quantify a student's ability to take what was read and to think laterally about it or to discard what is irrelevant and to reformulate required information? Indeed, Raven (1992) has argued that "learning" has invariably been referred to as a mastering of the content areas. Yet he sees no reason why learning should not be conceptualised as including an ability to do

To include these types of learning outcomes and others like them muddies the waters for those wishing to quantify the results of effective teaching. The items on Raven's list, after all, are difficult to measure and need large amounts of time to penetrate and assess.

It is time for researchers to look to other metaphors of teaching to explain the actions of the thoughtful teacher. Teaching might better be thought of as 'a work in progress' for it does not seem to get any easier of time.

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1. The National Teachers Examination is administered by Educational Testing Services of Princeton, New Jersey, and is made up of a core battery and speciality area tests. These tests are administered several times a year throughout the United S tates. Test scores are sent from Princeton to the various state departments of education. Each state is responsible for setting the minimum passing score it will accept for teacher certification.

2. In the United States, where even some individual school districts ask for a prospective teacher's NTE test results in addition to their state certification, a case can be made that faculties of education are limited in the amount of control they have over the content of their own curriculum. Since their students are required to take an external examination, there is pressure, if not an obligation, for education faculties to 'cover' material thought to be on such teacher examinations.