Teaching Across the Grades: Dispositions of Ideally Competent Teachers

ABSTRACT

The study of dispositions for effective teaching has become a key topic in education. Diverse characteristics, skills, and behaviors have been proposed as centrally important. Nevertheless, little work has been done on evaluating these disparate claims, or whether importance varies across primary and secondary teaching contexts. We address these issues by using a new instrument that incorporated a wide range and a large number of individual dispositions with an established methodology (the Q-sort; Block, 2008) that allows dispositions to be meaningfully ranked by importance and then compared across grade level. A diverse group of experienced teachers were consistent in their rankings, and their judgments showed both similarities and differences across grade level. We discuss theoretical and practical implications.