In Response to David Berliner

Abstract

I first became familiar with Dr. David Berliner’s work in the early 1970s, when I was a board member of the Far West Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development in San Francisco. I did not know at the time that I would come to regard him as one of the greatest researchers in education.

Dr. Berliner was a senior researcher at the laboratory. I was highly impressed then with the work that he and Dr. William Tikunoff were doing on the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study for the Educational Testing Service. This was one of the earliest studies to look at the distinctive features of successful teacher behavior, as compared to unsuccessful teacher behavior. Berliner and Tikunoff (1976) found 21 behaviors that separated the two groups of teachers. I believed then, as I believe now, that this approach, studying successful teacher behavioral processes or failure outcomes closely, would yield powerful results. This approach can be contrasted with the more typical research that begins from theory of some sort, ignoring the clear fact that some teaching is highly successful. Of course theory very is important, however so many theory first approaches have produced little of power in changing teaching. They have the disadvantage of perpetuating the idea that students are deficient in abilities. They tend to give undue weight to factors associated with poverty.