ABSTRACT
In this chapter we engage critically with teacher effectiveness research (TER). Like others before us, we argue that TER employs a reductive view of teaching and that the uptake of its tools and products can potentially have negative impacts on teachers and teaching. Like others, we argue that TER overly emphasises teachers’ classroom-based pedagogic behaviours as predictors of student achievement, but we also problematise the assumptions underpinning the processes and products of TER: that classroom-based pedagogic behaviours can be documented, assessed and indeed manipulated in meaningful and straightforward ways. TER has been critiqued from many angles1. By engaging with the tenets of practice theory, we provide a critique from an onto-epistemological basis; that is, the philosophical sensibilities of a ‘practice perspective’ are used as a basis to critique the assumptions TER makes about what teaching is, and how it might be known and shaped. We suggest that the theoretical sensibilities of practice theory call for alternative approaches that would support more productive engagements with the complexities of teaching: engagements that would potentially be more supportive of transformational agendas in school education than those offered by current manifestations of TER. We do not do this by adopting a particular practice theory. Instead, we draw on the practice writings of Reckwitz (2002), Thrift (1996, 2007) and Schatzki (2012) – all of whom provide analyses of commonalities to be found amongst diverse practice theories – to articulate our ‘practice perspective’.
