Marzano Responds to "A Teacher's Take on The Art & Science of Teaching (part 1)"

This post is Robert Marzano's response to A Teacher's Take on The Art & Science of Teaching (pt. 1).

First, let me state that I'm honored Dina would be interested enough in The Art and Science of Teaching to blog about it. In the beginning, I'd like to make a few points. First, although I appreciate Dina's intent in the use of the word "guru," I'm anything but that. We all have our place in the grand scheme of K-12 education in the U.S. There are people who are building administrators, central office administrators, curriculum developers, state level administrators. There are also people like myself who try to translate research and theory into practical tools and ideas for practitioners. However, all of us listed so far are on the periphery. The place where the rubber meets the road is the classroom, and the people who are at that critical point of contact with students are teachers.

Yes, there are gurus out there but they spend their time working with students as opposed to writing books. I'm going to call those good folks experts. That doesn't mean that everyone working in a classroom is an expert. I think they are few and far between. The best a book like The Art and Science of Teaching can do is to capture some of the broad areas in which experts show their expertise. Blogs organized around those broad areas can help enlighten us non-experts by the discussion and debate that occurs around them.

Second, the book The Art and Science of Teaching was written to update the research that was discussed in the book Classroom Instruction That Works and the book Classroom Management That Works and, more importantly, to communicate that message that expert teaching is as much (or more) art as it is science. Thus, teachers might violate some of the general principles described in The Art and Science of Teaching and still be expert teachers. The one and only criterion for an expert teacher is that students consistently learn in their classrooms (regardless of their background knowledge, socioeconomic status, or race).

With these principles in mind we can have a useful conversation about the use of specific strategies—not whether they are "good strategies" or "bad strategies" but the specific situations in which they are the most useful and the specific situations in which they are less effective. Hopefully, a few or many experts will join the conversation to provide guidance as how to adapt specific strategies to specific situations and students.

Robert J. Marzano is a senior scholar at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Aurora, Colorado; an associate professor at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; president of Marzano & Associates; and author of several ASCD books.