What makes a great teacher?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

by jseliger • 17 years ago

58 28 17 years ago

patio112• 17 years ago

Teach for America recruits smart, young graduates and aggressively researches and optimizes what works so that they can teach kids better. They're covered extensively in the article and they're one of my favorite organizations.

If you follow American education, this should be absolutely no surprise for you: the unions hate Teach for America.

P.S. Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo.

andrewvc• 17 years ago

This jives with some of the studies mentioned in the excellent book "How We Decide". Basically, if you want to get good at something, relentlessly question your methods, benchmark yourself, and try to get better.

I become a teacher of sorts about a year ago. I teach my boss's kid how to code on the weekends, he's learning Javascript at the moment. I've had to majorly re-adjust my teaching strategy about 4 times over the last year. When I started I was doing a terrible job, and now I know I'm doing a much better job (though I still have a long way to go). Whenever I teach it takes quite a bit of brainpower on my end as I try and get inside of my student's head, so I can see what's working and what isn't. I can only imagine how hard teaching is when you don't have the luxury of focusing on just one student, but rather 5 classes of 30.

In my memories of high school and college (high school in particular) so many of my teachers seemed detached, uninterested, and even bored with a lesson plan that they'd probably taught year in year out. I wonder how these people can be fixed? Can they just copy off teachers who actually try, or are they doomed to mediocrity? Can one be genuinely self-critical if one isn't motivated? My intuition tells me the answer, sadly is no.

wisty4• 17 years ago

How often do good coders read other people's code (in code reviews, or in their free time)? How often do teachers "sit in" on other teachers lessons?

philk2• 17 years ago

One of the most promising things in that article is how the government is using federal money to get legislative changes through that enable the performance of teachers to be measured, and, potentially fire low performers.

Obviously the unions aren't happy about it, but really, the teachers unions seem to think that school is run for the benefit of their members rather than students. If we could break them it'd be a great day for kids and a great day for America.

andrew1• 17 years ago

I'm no great fan of unions in general but teaching unions do provide important advice, support and representation to teachers. There have been enough cases of teachers being wrongly sacked over false claims by children of abuse etc. that I can understand teachers wanting to belong to an organisation which will help defend them if they're ever in that situation. You could argue that that could happen in any profession - I could be wrongly accused of stealing from the office I work in - but child abuse is a more sensitive issue than most and schools can feel pressured to appear to be 'protecting children' and perhaps more cynically to not want to take the risk of a repeat incident bringing more bad publicity.

philk2• 17 years ago

It's a fair point but unfortunately the unions have greatly overstepped defending teachers against wrongful allegations and moved into advancing teachers rights at the expense of students.

The following article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers3-2009may03,...

contains a few examples of just how hard it can be to fire a bad teacher, including one who mocked a student's suicide attempt to the rest of the class yet was reinstated in his job.

Additionally, a bad teacher will potentially damage the futures of hundreds of students throughout their career; because of the high cost I'd say that erring on the side of dismissal is worth the risk.

coolnewtoy• 17 years ago

Teaching under unions is a middle-class, family friendly occupation.

Teaching under Teach for America is a 2-year volunteer gig with unsustainably long hours.

If the unions were to disappear tomorrow I just don't think you'd be able to generate enough enthusiastic effective young people at that burn rate to fill out the entire system.

In many suburban schools, it's actually pretty easy for a group of involved parents to pressure the district to not renew the next year's contract of a new teacher they don't like, as long as it's done before the teacher is tenured (~three years in my state). Maybe this is one reason schools without a critical mass of involved parents suffer under the current system.

bwh2• 17 years ago

It's very misleading to say Teach For America is a volunteer gig. TFA teachers are paid salaries and benefits by the districts they work in, just like every other teacher.

The TFA program itself is volunteer, but it's not like these people are teaching for free.

teeja• 17 years ago

As anyone who's been there knows, the great majority of teachers volunteer half the time they spend working anyway.

Bashing unions is a popular right-wing ad hominem, but there are two equally recalcitrant partners in education equally to blame for educational deficiencies: school boards and parents.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

the teachers unions seem to think that school is run for the benefit of their members rather than students.

This is well known to the most eminent economists of education. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)

andreyf3• 17 years ago

I wonder what limitations there are to using standardized testing for evaluating "progress"? From personal experience, many of my friends who score very well on standardized tests aren't necessarily "smart" in the sense Feynman was "smart" - that is, capable of creating and sharpening their models of the world.

What's ironic is that while Teach for America acknowledges that it's extremely difficult to measure what makes a "good teacher", in that same sense of a person who continuously creates and sharpens their models of the world, they seem to assume it's trivial to measure a "good student", even though the two are fundamentally the same.

patio112• 17 years ago

I wonder what limitations there are to using standardized testing for evaluating "progress"?

Any heuristic you care to use is significantly better than the traditional metric for school quality, which is spending per pupil. (This metric was selected because optimizing for it optimizes for the outcomes teachers unions desire. American public school exist to employ union teachers and sometimes cause education as an industrial biproduct.)

This puts me in mind of the metric my day job used to track productivity for several decades: hours worked by the engineering staff. That one had perverse consequences, too. (Having a bad quarter? Need a good statistic to report to the head office? Start a deathmarch!)

wisty4• 17 years ago

Goodheart's Law (not to be confused with Godwin or Murphy's Laws): "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes".

Randall Munroe (xkcd) has make a similar observation.

wisty4• 17 years ago

It's not a teachers job to teach "smart". It's a teachers job to teach the subject, which gives the students more tools to make themselves "smart". I'm not sure if there is any way you could design a schooling system that teaches "smart", short of outlawing homework so students have more time to teach it to themselves. (I'm only half joking).

There are a number of levels in teaching (and learning). You learn the basic facts (or processes), you learn to apply them in simple situations, and you learn to apply them creatively. This can be tested by multiple-choice tests, or more in-depth tests, but multiple-choice is fairly reliable and very cheap.

Besides, the difference between a "good" and "bad" student is pretty easy to measure, if you look at the broad population.

andreyf3• 17 years ago

It's not a teachers job to teach "smart".

Yes it is, by definition. Once people are "smart", in the Feynman sense, there's no need for anyone to teach them a subject - they're self-motivated learners that will seek them out on their own.

You learn the basic facts (or processes), you learn to apply them in simple situations, and you learn to apply them creatively.

Although somehow intuitive, I don't think that's a good model. What are "basic facts"? What is a "simple situation"? What does it mean to "apply facts creatively"? All of these are vaguely intuitive but not well defined, with no epistemological basis. There is a much better definition of learning - the ability to create models of our experiences, test, and refine them. I know of no reason a cheap test can't be devised to test such learning, nor of any attempts to create one.

thrdOriginal2• 17 years ago

The article definitely glossed over how they measure "good students" and this is a very real problem. When student success is measured only or mainly by standardized tests (and teacher and school success extrapolated from that) surprise surprise: teachers start teaching only to the test. Now you have students that are great at taking tests but have not been encouraged to develop those "Feynman smarts."

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Now you have students that are great at taking tests but have not been encouraged to develop those "Feynman smarts."

Proof that one goal necessarily excludes the other? Right now we are getting neither, in most cases in most schools, so what Teach for America is looking at seems to be progress to me.

RyanMcGreal2• 17 years ago

> Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. [...] But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. "They’d say, 'Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?'"

Way to miss the point. :/

edw519• 17 years ago

Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.

Patrick (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11), this one paragraph helped me understand why your business is so important more than all the discussion about it here on hn over the years. You may want to pursue using it in your marketing efforts.

Your business is a perfect example of what Guy Kawasaki calls, "Make Meaning". One more way for you to inspire the rest of us. Respect.

boredguy82• 17 years ago

He's also a pretty cool cat. Not like I'm making a fan club or anything, but yeah.

boredguy82• 17 years ago

OK, having read the whole article, it seems like energetic people who buy in to what they're doing are more likely to be successful than people who despair at their ability to control their outcome. People highly energetic about where they're going are more likely to work harder at it, so that's not all that surprising.

And there have been enough links on here about 'grit' to make that consequence not surprising at all.

The interesting question to me would be to see longitudinal results from random teachers in general. I remember in high school having a PHENOMENAL teacher who was in his 3rd year of teaching. I went back to visit him recently (he'd have been teaching 10 more years now), and he was very, very despondent. I wonder how his 'class performance' during those first 3 years compares to his class performance during his last 3.

"Great teachers...were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: 'They’d say, "You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could." When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.' Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing."

Sounds like software development, too.

What makes a great teacher?

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