Effective Teaching: How the Standards Come To Be

For 25 years, education has been deeply concerned for students placed at risk of educational failure, due to poverty, race, or cultural and linguistic diversity. Many programs were developed to increase the success of specific groups: Native American, Native Hawaiian, inner-city African-American, Latino, or Asian immigrants. But there cannot be a separate program for every group, and most American classrooms have students of many ethnic or linguistic origins.

Is there any way of teaching and learning that is effective for ALL students? The five standards for effective pedagogy are the results of many years work by the Center for Research in Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) and its predecessor, the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. (Under the same leadership, the line of work began at the Kamehameha Early Education Program, Honolulu, in 1970). We scoured the research and development literature, looking for agreements among educators working with every diverse group. And we actually found five basic principles that everyone agrees on, whether they are working with Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native American Indians, Mexican immigrants, Appalachian urban immigrant whites, Southeast Asian newcomers, Eskimos or Aleuts, or mainstream gifted and talented. We then put those five principles through a consensus process, presenting them to every kind of educational group: researchers, teachers, parents, administrators, policy makers; in focus groups and in large auditoriums; in workshops and conferences; in professional meetings and community meetings. This process took five years; it has been two years since we have encountered any disagreement. We actually have a consensus.

CREDE has now issued these consensus statements as "Standards," by which we mean ideals that we can all set for ourselves -- ideals for best teaching practices. Thus they express the principles of effective pedagogy for all students. Even for mainstream students, the Standards describe the ideal conditions for instruction; but for at-risk students, the Standards are vital.

The Standards are expressed in the theoretical language of the sociocultural perspective. Of course not all the original reports use that vocabulary, indeed many writers whose work has contributed to the consensus work within other theoretical systems. Agreement across theorists adds to the credibility of the consensus. But there are advantages to expressing the Standards in a uniform theoretical language, because the interactions among them are revealed.

©2002 Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence. All rights reserved.