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An essential feature of many modern teacher observation protocols is their “global” approach to measuring instruction. Global protocols provide a summary evaluation of multiple domains of instruction from observers’ overall review of classroom processes.  Although these protocols have demonstrated strengths, including their comprehensiveness and advanced state of development, in this analysis we argue that global protocols also have inherent limitations affecting both research use and applied school improvement efforts.  Analyzing the Measures of Effective Teaching study data, we interrogate a set of five potential limitations of global protocols.  We conclude by discussing fine-grained measures of instruction, including tools that rely on automated methods of observation, as an alternative with the potential to overcome many of the fundamental limitations of global protocols. 

In this study, the authors used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 to examine the instructional time allocation and instructional practices in eighth-grade English language arts classes for struggling readers, as measured by track level. The authors also analyze the titles and text complexity of the last three books assigned to students. The authors found that track level continues to be a significant predictor of what happens instructionally in the classroom. Struggling readers placed in low-track classes spent a larger portion of class time on skills and strategy instruction, completing worksheets, watching videos, and reading aloud than students in grade-level classes. Students in high-track classes spent more time on literature analysis, comprehension instruction, and group projects and were more frequently assigned homework than students in grade-level classes. Although there was considerable overlap in the text complexity and the text titles of books assigned at each track level, students in low-track classes read less challenging texts than students in grade-level or above-grade-level classes. Regression models controlling for a variety of student, teacher, and school variables, including student achievement, show that these adjustments in class time allocation, instructional practices, and text complexity go above and beyond what would be expected based on student achievement alone. 

Analyzing the quality of classroom talk is central to educational research and improvement efforts. In particular, the presence of authentic teacher questions, where answers are not predetermined by the teacher, helps constitute and serves as a marker of productive classroom discourse. Further, authentic questions can be cultivated to improve teaching effectiveness and consequently student achievement. Unfortunately, current methods to measure question authenticity do not scale because they rely on human observations or coding of teacher discourse. To address this challenge, we set out to use automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to train computers to detect authentic questions in real-world classrooms automatically. Our methods were iteratively refined using classroom audio and human coded observational data from two sources: (a) a large archival database of text transcripts of 451 observations from 112 classrooms; and (b) a newly collected sample of 132 high-quality audio recordings from 27 classrooms, obtained under technical constraints that anticipate large-scale automated data collection and analysis. Correlations between human coded and computer-coded authenticity at the classroom level were sufficiently high (r = .602 for archival transcripts and .687 for audio recordings) to provide a valuable complement to human coding in research efforts. 

This article reports results from a study of teacher beliefs among a panel of English and language arts teachers at three universities as the pre-service teachers entered methodological coursework and internships. Using a new assessment tool, the Developmental Instruction Assessment Battery (DIAB), along with a discrete choice task and one-on-one interviews, teachers reported their developing perspectives on (1) competition in the classroom, (2) hierarchies of traditional academic material, and (3) related views on classroom order, engagement, and teacher authority. We contrast these findings to beliefs reported by a sample of mid-career middle school English and language arts teachers in Western Pennsylvania.