EDUCATION : A Call to Focus on Techniques of Teaching : Some experts say methods often are neglected, with classroom creativity not valued by U.S. educators as much as in other countries. More collaboration and exchanging of knowledge are urged.

Teachers in classrooms across the nation are under mounting pressure to raise student achievement. But some experts say that their efforts are likely to fall short unless more attention is paid to an almost universally neglected subject: the nitty-gritty details of teaching technique.

Higher academic standards, greater accountability, smaller class sizes and better training for future teachers--the heart of current reform efforts--are important, these experts say, but they will not bring the desired improvement unless individuals are educated about the most effective tools of teaching.

“The whole effort to reform education in the last 20 years has directly avoided what happens in the classroom,” said UCLA educational psychologist James W. Stigler.

Stigler directed a massive videotape study of classroom methods in various countries. In a study of how eighth-graders are taught math, he found striking differences among methods in the United States, Japan and Germany--and considerable uniformity within countries.

Regardless of region or type of school, American teachers lean heavily toward rote learning of procedures and repetitive drills. First teachers explain the new process, then the students practice repeating the answer.

In Japan, by contrast, teachers tend to let students make mistakes as they grope toward solving a math problem, on the theory that they will ultimately understand both the problem and the underlying math.

In addition, Stigler found, teachers in Japan routinely form teams and spend as much as a whole school year developing more creative ways to teach particular lessons and concepts.

“You go into a classroom in Japan and you see just mesmerizing lessons,” said Sam Stringfield of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “You say to yourself, ‘Now that’s how to present a concept.’ ”

American schools operate on “the miracle model of great teaching,” said Catherine Snow of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They assume that, working alone in a classroom, “you somehow discover yourself as a great teacher, like an artist.”

“Basically, in the United States, one of the problems is that we don’t treat teaching as a craft,” Snow said.

But she noted that schools do not build time or facilities for collaboration into their programs, and attitudes inside schools may even discourage it.

“In the culture of American education, you don’t come into my classroom and I don’t come into yours,” said Eugene C. Schaffer of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. “That’s a long tradition in this country. It’s another element of American individualism.”

Talking to other teachers about how they teach their students, especially how they could do it better, can seem intrusive.

Even when teachers work together in teams, as many do in middle schools, and time is budgeted for collaborative planning, the focus is often not on improving specific lessons. One recent survey found that middle school teaching teams often spent most of their meeting time discussing discipline and logistics for things like field trips instead of instruction.

Physical layout and architecture of schools can play a role too. Normally, American teachers have their desks in their own classrooms, which fosters isolation. In Japan and Taiwan, teachers’ desks are clustered together in one huge room, facilitating informal as well as formal idea-sharing.

“It’s not that we need to teach like the Japanese,” Stigler said, “but we need to create a culture in which teachers examine the way they teach and how they can better achieve their own goals.”

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What Schaffer, Stigler and others are talking about is not adding more high-flown educational theory in teachers colleges. Rather, they want to establish systems at the schoolhouse level to help teachers improve the way they present material to students--so they learn more quickly and with deeper understanding.

In reading, for example, what is the best way to show young children that the letter A has one sound in the word “cake” and a different sound in the word “cat”--and that learning such basic elements of phonics is crucial to learning to read?

Or what is the best way to introduce the subject of combining fractions with different denominators, such as 1/2 + 1/4? Faced with this problem for the first time, some students will add the numerators and the denominators and get 2/6 or 1/3; master teachers will anticipate the mistake and use it not only to show the correct procedure but also to understand the underlying mathematics better.

There is no single “right” way to teach such concepts, experts acknowledge, but some ways work better than others. And some techniques may work better with some kinds of children and other techniques with other kinds of students.

The problem is that while gifted and experienced teachers may develop effective techniques, there are few mechanisms for sharing such knowledge with their colleagues--or for helping the average teacher find a better way.

Ironically, it was not too many years ago that education researchers in the United States were at the forefront in studying teaching technique.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, scholars lavished attention on how to teach better, Stringfield said, “but that has almost vaporized” as a concern.

Where the U.S. effort seems to have left a mark is overseas. In European schools, he said, many teachers and school leaders were trained at Harvard, UC Berkeley and other elite American colleges.

Like auto manufacturers in Japan who figured out what kind of cars Americans would like to drive, he said, “they have managed to make better use of what they learned than we have.”