Those of you who missed the detailed, probing article about what makes a good teacher in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine should invest the time to read it. Often lost amid all the policy and political debate is detailed examination of what goes on inside the nation’s classrooms. The author of this piece, Elizabeth Green, helps run the excellent Gotham Schools education blog.
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I found the Timns article much more informative than the recent Newsweek article “Why we must fire bad teachers.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/234590
In the Newsweek article it laments that teachers come from the bottom of college graduate GPAs. Not only is this incorrect it doesn’t make a difference. Their is little correlation between a teacher’s college GPA and their success in the classroom. The Newsweek article is a classic teacher-bashing screed.
What about the GPA of Newsweek writer? They are so biased one could conclude they all went to the same globalist University.
Thanks for the tip. It’s a good article, but nothing new, really. There are books like The Art and Science of Teaching, What Works in Schools… by folks like Robert Marzano who have been conducting meta-analysis of years of research. The information they provide is helpful, but I have one main concern. The research has been done mostly in schools, and the research focuses too much on teaching. Sound odd?
I think we need to focus more on how children learn at various stages of cognitive and emotional development, and then design schools and instructional methods based on what we know about learners. In other words, we seem to have it backwards.
Some teachers are successful despite the fact that they are working in schools that were not designed to be conducive to learning. Most schools were designed for teaching, not learning, and as we all know, just because you can teach it that doesn’t mean they will learn it. Most schools are based on a 19th Century industrial model designed to sort and control at a time when only the elite were expected to graduate.
I’ve been arguing for years that reform needs to begin with the inner architecture of the learner, and then the architecture of the buildings and systems in which they learn. Truly, we need less teaching and more learning in our schools. Many teachers are teaching their brains out to a population that only marginally responds. Look at the typical teenager, for example. Are classrooms designed to meet their cognitive and emotional needs? I would say rarely. We have digital children being taught in an antiquated, industrial system. What we need are children learning in a system designed for them.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for improving teacher quality. Ultimately, though, we need to design learning systems in such a way that every child is able to learn whether they are lucky enough to get a good teacher or not. Guaranteed curriculum, not luck of the draw…
Here, here Kevin! We have to stop focusing on the teacher in the classroom and more on the learner. Not that the burden of learning is on the student, it is on the teacher. But focusing on whether or not the teacher is standing still while giving instructions leads to the belief that as long as the teacher follows certain protocols, their job is done. Administrators would be better served if they watched the student and not the teacher. Feedback to the teacher centers on the learning then and not the teaching. Teachers need to have the capacity to make adjustments based on these observations.
More teacher preparation course on classroom management will not improve learning. Teachers need to know how to critically self-evaluate and make adjustments. This comes from learning while doing, which means more time in the classroom with a mentoring teacher. Teach an educator a classroom management strategy and they make it through the day; teacher an educator how to adjust their practice and they can make it a successful career.
I find it curious that we spend so much time trying to decide if we should focus on teaching or on learning. Both can (and do) take place in the absence of the other. However, if we want schools to succeed, I think we need to direct our attention to the intersection of both teaching AND learning.
Does classroom management matter? Of course it does. Do a learner’s individual characteristics and needs matter? Again, yes. Teachers content mastery, learners motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic), background and prior experiences, etc., etc.? All yes.
We also need to understand this intersection in context (the education environment) and how the relationship between teaching and learning in context affects the quality and nature of all outcomes in indelible ways. The intersection and the environment in which it occurs cannot be meaningfully separated and I don’t think we can really understand anything useful about one without the other.
We further have to recognize that education is a process of mutual consent and that there are valid and invalid reasons for the various parties to withhold their consent. (for a quick read on why students might withhold their consent, have a look at “I Won’t Learn from You” by Herbert Kohl). It is also a process of mutual benefit. All parties take something away from the exchange (for teachers we want that to be more than just a paycheck).
I support a shift away from the reductionist program of hyper analyzing the characteristics of teachers and teaching or the characteristics of learners and learning. In a staggering diversity of fields, interesting new advances have followed a shift of focus from the parts to a focus on how the parts connect and interact with each other. Why should a similar shift in education reform thinking not also bear fruit?
It’s not like I’m the first person to have an idea like this but it just doesn’t seem to have any traction. But it strikes me that implicit in the driven pendulum of – it’s the teacher, no it’s the learner – lies the assumption that if we just get more focused on one of them and try a little harder, we’ll get something other than the result we’ve always got.
Mark, I agree with your last statement, especially. I’ve always believed that the best classroom management strategy is to have something of value happening for the students. My point, though, goes to the heart of what we mean by schooling and schools. For example, in the 21st Century is the classroom the best place for learning and teaching? Do classroom teachers struggle to be effective because they are teaching in classrooms? What should a school building look like? What architectural design would best support effective curriculum and instruction? Does it look like a factory with 1000 or more workers? Does it look like a home? Does it look like an internet cafe? Do we need a “highly qualified” teacher in every room, or can the expert be available at the touch of a finger from cyberspace?
Jeff: “In a staggering diversity of fields, interesting new advances have followed a shift of focus from the parts to a focus on how the parts connect and interact with each other. Why should a similar shift in education reform thinking not also bear fruit?”
Exactly. Context, connection, interaction… systems thinking…
Great thoughts, Kevin! 19th century buildings cannot fathom the reality of the present and the future. But hey, let’s face it, the schools of a hundred years ago were even then out of step with reality. The inefficiencies were huge and the many were sacrificed for the few who could somehow manage to learn in prison-like schools. Even in my school, the endless shuffle of one class after the next, up and down a sterile hallway can’t really be a joyous experience, can it? We and kids do need rules, structure, but even pre-modern societies had that going for them and they thrived within the boundaries of their own worldview.
I doubt there is any way to rescue the souls of children from the maw of industrial design. If only we could start over…oh yeah, what IS our worldview that informs the decisions we make about what we call education?
jj: “I doubt there is any way to rescue the souls of children from the maw of industrial design. If only we could start over…oh yeah, what IS our worldview that informs the decisions we make about what we call education?”
Some are trying to start over by creating magnet schools and charters, private schools, and home school networks. This is why it is imperative that “regular” public schools reinvent themselves! Unfortunately, many interested in rescuing “the souls of children from the maw of industrial design” are simply checking their kids out. Many would-be high school students check themselves out.
As for “our worldview” – Therein lies the rub. There is no “our worldview,” but I would maintain that if we are not careful the tyranny of the majority will dictate… This is why we need choices whenever and wherever possible, even in rural areas. Since my first teaching job in an alternative program in the 1980′s I have maintained that if more “regular” schools looked like “alternative” schools there would be no need for “alternative” schools. Every school should be an alternative.
jj: “The inefficiencies were huge …”
And in that setting, the devotees of the Efficiency Movement set about correcting this situation by applying the same empirical tools used to analyze and improve manufacturing processes.
I wonder how many working teachers have even heard of the Efficiency Movement. Quite a bit of what goes on these days reminds me of what went on during that time. Of course, having no idea about it keeps us from choosing not to recycle the same failed ideas.
So, in my strongly held opinion, another element of “building a better teacher” must be an adequate exposure to the foundations of education (both history and philosophy). Ignorance of what has been done and thought in education does nothing to advance reform.
Oh yes, the Efficiency Movement. Now there is a fascinating study in sociology
And weird. And as you say, we are still at it. But we’re Americans after all and Kevin, maybe we do have a worldview we pursue as every generation of Americans finds a “new” reason to flog public schools: the fervent, even utopian, belief in the perfectibility of the product er, student/citizen/worker.
jj, I really do feel I need to respond to what I believe are inaccurate assumptions on your part. First, I don’t believe I and most people who are critical of public education are naive enough to believe in a “utopian…perfectibility.” Also, I’m not sure “every generation of Americans finds a ‘new’ reason to flog public schools.” My central complaints are no different today than they were when I was a high school student in the 1970′s, or as you said earlier: “But hey, let’s face it, the schools of a hundred years ago were even then out of step with reality.” For example, art of “Building a Better Teacher” has to do with helping them become more skilled at differentiation. But differentiation to me seems a band-aid placed on a larger problem. As much as I support standards, I also fear that an unintended consequence of the standards movement is the further entrenching of the march to mediocrity. We spend a lot of resources trying to get the U and PP students to a rather mediocre P, but comparatively few on continuing to raise the ceiling on our brightest. Differentiation is a reaction to a system that tends toward the middle, a system that tends to lockstep movement through a relatively inflexible curriculum in such a way that teachers must either differentiate for the top and the bottom or risk numbing the minds of those who are ready to move on and creating learned helplessness for those who are not ready for the curriculum in the first place. This concern is not new to this generation or any other (think Dewey or Montessori).
Kevin, my bit about perfectibility was really a response to the Efficiency Movement, not so much directly to you, and I suggested that “maybe” our American worldview encompasses that movement applied not just to things but to people. I share your concern, actually, about the tendency towards mediocrity. But have we not witnessed each and every new generation of political and educational leaders bemoaning the sorry state of American education? And then offering this or that fix or program or set of standards? And nothing every really changes.
Or seems to change. Let me throw this out to everyone: I think some of this continuing concern about the educational system is a bit like complaining that medicine never gets any better because people still get sick, suffer and die. But, one might insist, the illnesses are shorter, the lives longer the suffering treated with better palliatives. That’s kind of how I think of it sometimes–the world is more complex now than the 1970s, the demands on what kids know and are able to do are greater now, there are more standardized tests now, there are more options as to what to major in or get a job in now, social life contains more ambiguity and uncertainty now… Really, I very much doubt America would still be the planet’s leading nation if we weren’t doing something right. And as with medicine, we get ever closer to immortality but still have a long way to go. How much ‘improvement’ in meeting educational goals is really, actually, possible in what amount of time? Well? How much could reasonably be done in a perfect world?
Kevin, differentiation is the result of recognizing that students learn at different rates and with different styles. When you and I went to high school in the 1970s, there was only a recognition that it was the teachers job to document these differences, not to recitify them.
Mark, I understand what differentiation is and why it occurs, and I’m not saying I’m opposed to it. In fact, it is absolutely essential given, as I said before, “a system that tends to lockstep movement through a relatively inflexible curriculum…” That is my point. Differentiation should be the norm, not the exception. And actually, I remember a couple of teachers I had in the 70′s that made it a point to “rectify” differences in learning rates and styles.