Pre-service teachers are no doubt familiar with this question:

Is teaching an art or a science?

The question, binary in nature, is meant to provoke discussion rather than promote side-taking. But once teachers progress into the field, there can be significant side-taking, particularly (in my experience) in secondary English departments. As educational leaders encourage the use of standards and of data for pedagogical reflection, it has not been uncommon for me to hear my English teacher colleagues gripe along the followin lines: "What are looking at data? We teach literature." "You can't standardize how to teach." "You can't quantify what I do; it's an art."

While we should always approach iniatiatives with a healthy skepticism, teachers should also be careful to apply this skepticism to their own positions, too, including the idea that the sciences, and in this case, educational psychology, have nothing valuable to say about what teachers do in the classroom. And they should especially attend to what research says about teaching if the direction object of the verb teaching is not "literature," or "writing," or "books," but rather, "children."

One teacher who situated the learning sciences into the English classroom is Dr. George Hillocks, a ground-breaking researcher at the University of Chicago as well as (simultaneously) a middle-school classroom teacher in a South side public school. In 1986, the National Conference on Research in English commissioned Hillocks to conduct a meta-analysis on over 500 studies of the teaching of writing that had been undertaken since the 1963 Braddock report, a meta-analysis of similar stature. Hillocks findings, published as Research on Written Composition: New Directions in Teaching, revealed several important, validated truths about the teaching of writing (also depicted in the table below), including:

• As discovered by Braddock in 1963, the teaching of formalized grammar has neglible to negative effects on student writing growth, while sentence combining and ranking models had the greatest effect;
• Students given time for substantive, structured talk when solving composition problems perform significantly better (statistically speaking) on future composition tasks than those without such opportunities (in the video below, a high school English teahers demonstrates how to apply this learning-by-talking to literary analysis);

• Writing workshop ("free writing") models, though popular, do not yield statistically significant growth in student abilities, but explicit instructional sequences tailored to particular modes of writing has the greatest impact;
• Of various modes of instruction, lecture has the least impact on student growth, and problem-solving settings (in the table below as "inquiry") produced the greatest improvement in student writing;
• There is a statistically-significant, inverse relationship between number of teacher comments on student writing and student growth; in other words, as the volume of negative teacher comments on draft 1 increases, the quality of draft 2 decreases.

These findings were affirmed in Steven Graham's and Andrea Perin's meta-analysis, "Writing Next," commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation in 2002, and Arthur Applebee's and Judith Langer's study of writing instruction practices in 3000 high schools in 2009, commissioned by the National Writing Project. 

Graham and Perin affirmed, as Hillocks did, that certain pedagogical moves had a demonstrably stronger effect on student writing growth than others. Their findings, echoing Hillocks', are summarized below:

As the table below illustrates, Applebee and Langer found that student progress (or lack thereof) in reading and writing did not notably improve over a twenty-give year period, despite the fact that discoveries, such as Hillocks, had been widely disseminated by 2004 (the last year of data available to Applebee's & Langer's work). 

So while it may be true that there is no one "formula" for crafting a perfect teacher, and while it may be true that good teachers come in many permutations, it is also true that the learning sciences do have significant things to say about what is, and is not, effective for fostering student growth.

References

Aliontas. Catcher in the Rye debate using critical lenses: Is Holden Caufield a normal adolescent? [video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fffc1FhcGMQ

Applebee, A., & Langer, J. (2009). What is happening in the teaching of writing? English
Journal 98,18-27.

Braddock, R., Lloyd-Jones, R. & Schoer, L. (1963). Research in written composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Graham, S. & Perin, D. (2007). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. Journal of Educational Psychology 99, 445-476.

Hillocks, G. Jr. (1986). Research on written composition: New directions for teaching. Urbana: National Conference on Research in English and Educational Resources Information Center.