What makes great teaching?

This article summarises the report: Coe R, Aloisi C, Higgins S et al. (2014) What makes great teaching? Review of the underpinning research. Sutton Trust, October 2014. London: Sutton Trust. Available at: suttontrust.com/researcharchive/great-teaching. The aim of our review was to address three deceptively simple questions: What makes ‘great teaching’? What kinds of frameworks or tools could help us to capture it? How could this promote better learning in schools? The quality of teaching is by far the biggest factor within schools that can make a difference to the achievement of children and young people. In the report, we review over 200 pieces of research to identify the elements of teaching with the strongest evidence of improving attainment. The report also identifies some common practices that can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research, and analyses different methods of evaluating teaching (Coe et al., 2014). We define effective teaching a