Four Dimensions of Effective Practice

As we worked with the Connect Framework, we began to think of the classroom as an organization and the teacher as a leader. To ensure that this logic made sense to teachers, we shared the framework with groups of HETs in our workshops in subsequent years. The framework resonated with them as a useful lens for making sense of their practice. The vertical and horizontal tensions represented in the framework and the resulting four dimensions of effectiveness are all important issues to classroom teachers. At the same time, the framework gives educators a common language to describe different aspects of their practice. Building from the framework, we were able to articulate a set of operating assumptions, or a theory of practice, associated with each quadrant.