What Makes Good Teachers Great?

In the 1970s and 1980s, educational researchers began to study what makes good teachers great. One common approach of these early researchers was to compare experienced teachers with novice teachers; they found that experienced teachers have a greater repertoire of scripts than novice teachers – standard sequences of activities, or responses to students, that work in specific situations. Researchers also found, however, that experienced teachers were better at improvising in response to each class's unique flow; in fact, they tended to spend less advance time planning than novice teachers (Berliner & Tikunoff, 1976; Borko & Livingston, 1989; Yinger, 1987). Experienced teachers do two apparently contradictory things: They use more structures, and yet they improvise more.