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Blikstad-Balas, Tengberg and Klette | Ways of Analyzing Teaching Quality
instruction is stronger than previously assumed. Accumulated research on what affects students’ achievement shows that how resources are used is far more important than how much are used, and that differences in teacher quality are the most significant explanation for differences between schools (Hanushek, 2020). “You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you have been” is a common saying. We believe this to also to be the case when it comes to educational matters and teaching quality. While acknowledging that teaching is extremely complex and hard to measure accurately, we also believe it is of paramount importance for educational discourses to not only focus on “where we are going” or “where we should be going”, but to connect the ambition to empirical and systemic knowledge about where “we are”.
THE PURPOSES OF MEASURING INSTRUCTIONAL QUALITY Research on teaching quality serves different purposes. School leaders might use research on teaching quality in attempts to evaluate their teachers, teachers might be interested in research on teaching quality to improve their own practice, while researchers may be interested in the relationship between different aspects of teaching quality and their possible implications for different groups of students. Policy makers and stakeholders rely on accurate information on the quality of teaching to make informed choices when developing educational policies and curricula. An important justification for research on teaching quality is that in order to improve the quality of instruction, the prevalent practices of teaching must be assessed against the best possible evidence of what characterizes effective teaching practices. This can be done in a number of ways and for a number of purposes at different levels. While school leaders and teachers may collaborate on a local level to assess and improve the teaching practices at a particular school, researchers may inform policy makers within a country or even several countries about the trends on instructional quality. A third route is teacher–researcher collaboration, where new knowledge of the applicability of various practices may be built through iterative cycles of application and analysis in practice contexts. Regardless of purpose and level (local, regional, national, or international), improving teachers’ instruction requires robust and rigorous knowledge about what characterizes the instruction in the first place. Particularly, it is crucial for research (as well as for professional development purposes) to know the characteristics of classroom situations where teachers struggle to bridge the gap between “best practice” and actual practice. Working on long-term development of instruc-
