Secrets of amazing teachers: What both sides of the education debate get wrong

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/09/secrets_of_amazing_teachers_what_both_sides_of_the_education_reform_debate_get_wrong_about_autonomy_and_accountability/

by tokenadult • 12 years ago

52 38 12 years ago

salon.com

zachsnow• 12 years ago

Sounds like another "it can be learned!" vs "you must be a natural!" disagreement. Practice 10,000 hours, no wait you need that innate talent. I haven't yet heard a conclusive argument one way or the other; so far I'm thinking "both".

HarryHirsch3• 12 years ago

Oh dear. When a student answers that 7/12 is 1.5 and doesn't immediately see why this couldn't possibly be true you know that the problem is rote learning of algorithms. Whoever gives such an answer does not connect classroom learning with the real world, he does not understand what the answer means.

You see this often, even in university students. The problem isn't solved with more accountability or more teacher autonomy. The only solution is better teacher training and a different syllabus.

Also this: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/

21echoes2• 12 years ago

or, as explained quite clearly in the article, a simple misunderstanding of symbols: the kid interpreted it as 12/7 instead of 7/12.

HarryHirsch3• 12 years ago

Two misunderstandings: the kid also thought that 1.5 means 1 remainder 5.

That's a profound lack of knowledge, he does not understand decimal notation. If you do not know what these number symbols mean, how can you communicate using those symbols? It all degenerates into futile pattern matching.

EpicEng• 12 years ago

Which, of course, is still wrong... again, not understanding what he is doing.

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

to be fair, that isn't necessarily a misunderstanding of symbols -- if you retested that kid several times, you might find him interpreting 7/12 as 12/7 and 12/7 also as 12/7, on the grounds that obviously you divide the larger number by the smaller number. That kind of "reasoning" is common, but amounts more to ignoring the symbols than misunderstanding them.

mikeash• 12 years ago

Excellent point. It happens again in the article with the 55MPH example. The original answer of 18 miles in 15 minutes is clearly wrong because it's more than a mile a minute, and a mile a minute is 60MPH.

I saw this sort of thing a lot when I tutored physics in college. My students would crank through the formulas and come up with an answer. I would point out that their answer says the roller coaster is seventeen light years tall, or the bowling ball weighs less than a grain of sand, and this couldn't possibly be right. I always tried to get them to look at the shape of the problem first, and then look at the details. Otherwise you're just pattern matching, and don't know when you've gone horribly wrong.

It's tricky, though, because you need to strike a balance. Seeing the big picture really well doesn't get the job done if you don't have the mechanics to back it up. If the goal is a precise answer, then knowing that 7/12 is around 0.5 and is definitely not greater than 1 doesn't get you there. But it seems that schools have gone way too far the other way, focusing on the mechanics almost exclusively. The "word problem" seems to be the one concession to the big picture, but even those are taught as pure pattern-matching exercises.

bottled_poe• 12 years ago

The human brain is not good at arithmetic. It is an outdated topic to be including in a modern curriculum.

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

When a student answers that 7/12 is 1.5 and doesn't immediately see why this couldn't possibly be true you know that the problem is rote learning of algorithms.

This doesn't seem right. What algorithm did you learn in school that would produce 1.5 from 7/12?

nmrm2• 12 years ago

Immediately means "without executing an entire algorithm".

titter• 12 years ago

Oh dear. When a student answers that 7/12 is 1.5 and doesn't immediately see why this couldn't possibly be true you know that the problem is rote learning of algorithms.

Not really, no.

1. Students have to have a good concept of division, as you suggest.

2. Students have to know a method of division that accurately gets a precise answer. (whether this is via an algorithmic method or via a calculator)

3. Students have to know that their answer to (2) should correspond to their concept in (1)

4. Students have to recognise that they can check their answer using (3), and then remember to actually check this.

A good teacher will teach all four parts of this process. However, it's not possible to teach part 4 without first teaching parts 1 and 2. Every single child makes this same mistake at some point in their learning. This is not really a "problem" and it doesn't indicate a failure of teaching - in fact, the opposite here: the important thing is that the teacher has identified it and can advise the child on how to improve their understanding.

That's what teaching is. As you say, many adults have not consistently achieved part 4 - in fact, it's not immediate at all: it has to be learned.

javajosh2• 12 years ago

It's funny, a physicist is going to say "it's a half". A math person is going to roll their eyes, bored, and not answer at all. Only a mechanical engineer or a carpenter or an accountant are going to need an exact answer.

Most of us are well served by the physicist approach to estimation, because even in the rare case we do need the precise answer our estimate will prevent obvious errors. And having a "feel" for OOM estimates is handy almost everywhere.

And, actually, the approach even gives you a short cut to the precise answer. It's about 1/2, because it's so close to 6/12. In fact, it's only 1/12 away from half. Which means the answer is 1/2 + 1/12 (which is actually a better answer for, say, a carpenter). Note also that this problem is really crappy to do in decimal, as 1/12 yields a repeating decimal (.08333...), which is natures way of saying "use fractions".

jessriedel• 12 years ago

This article needs an abtract.

glenra3• 12 years ago

The article doesn't actually say anything useful, so it would be hard to write one.

mkal_tsr• 12 years ago

The best teachers I've had throughout school (preschool to uni) were the ones that were A) passionate about students learning and B) didn't let the curriculum get in the way. Looking back, the inverted-teaching model was what worked best for me (lessons/readings at home, in-class time is used to work on problems & troubleshoot w/ teacher). Unfortunately all the teachers now are following curriculum that encourage specific lesson plans with specific homework to pass specific tests. I don't think that's a great way to learn, for me at least.

afafsd• 12 years ago

I agree with you in my own experience, but let's face it, we were (I'm just gonna guess here) among the smart kids, and what works well for smart kids isn't necessarily what works well for the average or dumb kids. Maybe dumb kids learn more effectively through different methods.

ams6110• 12 years ago

In the article this jumped out at me: “From the moment our children step into a classroom,” Barack Obama said in 2007, “the single most important factor determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.”

That's just absolute nonsense or he was pandering to a constituency. Their parents and their family income and where they live are absolutely the most important factors. You take a school where the average kid lives in a single-parent home, with an uneducated, unemployed parent on welfare, who moves three or four times a year, or whose parents are in and out of jail, meth users, or otherwise completely irresponsible and negligent, and you can put the best teachers in the the world in that school and it will still be a failing school on every standardized measure.

kaitai2• 12 years ago

This has been studied as well, and dumb kids learn very well through inverted methods (as the post above calls them). "Dumb" kids show the greatest gains with active and experiential learning -- after all, we think they are dumb because they don't learn well by listening to a lecture, reading a text alone, and then regurgitating content on a test!

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/turning-educ...

glenra3• 12 years ago

The article is an excerpt from a book called "Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How to Teach It to Everyone)", but it feels like an introduction; it doesn't say anything useful or even give much of a hint as to what the author believes. Certainly it doesn't live up to the title. It doesn't tell us what the "secrets of amazing teachers" are, nor establish that there are only TWO sides of "the education debate" and as for the subtitle, it vaguely appears to be knocking down a straw man.

Certainly some teachers say "we need more autonomy!" and some teacher critics say "we need more accountability!" but neither one is saying "...and if we had THAT, everything would be perfect and teachers would know what exactly they need to do to improve!" So it's not clear that the people who want autonomy and accountability are actually getting anything wrong.

The writer appears to think that good teaching can be taught, but doesn't (in this article) say how.

kaitai2• 12 years ago

Moreover, the arguments are slightly misrepresented. If the autonomy folks are comparing to Finnish education, they're talking about a system with plenty of time and attention devoted to ongoing development of professional teaching skills. I don't think anyone believes that we can just let American teachers have complete autonomy and expect good results: many American teachers have been placed into positions teaching subjects they don't have degrees in, and they're given very little time for class prep or continuing education. At best this autonomy would free some of the teachers to teach to the classes they have rather than being forced to push through the mandated syllabus that says by week 4 you should be on fractions whether the kids understand multiplication or not.

javajosh2• 12 years ago

doesn't say anything useful

Doesn't it? The author asserts clearly that a great teacher is, first and foremost, defined by their ability to gleen "where the mind fired incorrectly", rather than it being some innate, unlearnable thing. A great teacher is more like a programmer debugging a problem in the kids head than a "born performer". And I found this insight, well, insightful.

glenra3• 12 years ago

She does indeed seem to assert that, supporting the point with an anecdote I found less than convincing. But suppose we grant her that point. Let us suppose that "master brain debugger" is indeed the crucial skill that makes for a good teacher. Here's the problem: she doesn't (in this article) indicate how THAT skill can be taught either! So for all we know, being able to do THAT - debug what's going on in a student's head - might be an innate, untrainable thing that teachers are innately born with or magically acquire through experience without knowing how it's done.

So for this point to be useful, we'd need both (a) stronger evidence that it's actually true, (b) evidence that it's teachable. Absent those things, it's just somebody's random assertion. And wouldn't it be just as easy to tell a story of that sort claiming the key to great teaching is empathy, or flexibility, or knowing the material really well?

(Actually, the featured anecdote featured TWO attributes. (1) skill at debugging what's going on in the student's brain, (2) skill at figuring out how best to CORRECT the misconception without unduly harming the student's ego. And I'm sure these are both useful skills for a teacher, but I would need more convincing that they matter more than all the OTHER skills such as being organized, speaking clearly, presenting NEW material effectively, etcetera.)

Side note: in the back of my mind while I read the piece I was probably thinking about Direct Instruction. One provably superior teaching method is to have teachers follow an exact script that is carefully designed to minimize misconceptions in the first place. If teachers could get better at not introducing misconceptions to their students, it might be less important to be good at debugging those misconceptions.

beloch• 12 years ago

It's true that some teachers have a special aptitude for the job. However, you can't rely on a few exceptional individuals to fix a system that is deficient by design. You need to change the average teacher. This article pays homage to the exceptional but does not address how to change what is typical.

Compare teacher salaries to average salaries in countries with the highest academic performance on standardized tests. The ratio in such countries (e.g. Canada) is almost always significantly higher than in the U.S.. Educational requirements to hold teaching positions are also typically higher. That's the secret to improving teaching quality on a demographic scale. Pay more, but expect more.

tuukkah• 12 years ago

This. Change the average teacher. Require and provide them with a Master's degree in education (in primary schools) or in the subject matter together with a minor in education (in high schools). When they graduate, they will contain the nucleus of the expert teacher in them and will grow with experience. The feedback they get from the students (and parents) - no need for performance evaluations!

Why does autonomy work in Finland, as mentioned in the article? First, we have invested in the teacher training. Second, we have provided more resources to the schools with a more troubled student body. No need for the blame game that is the recent Global Education Reform Movement. Could you implement this in a US state similar to Finland such as Massachusetts, if not staight away in all of the US?

ASneakyFox• 12 years ago

Whoever taught this person to write an article didn't do a good job.

bostik• 12 years ago

I'm surprised by the tone of the comments so far. In the article I see a clear parallel between the example teacher doing things right, and the hacker mentality.

Think of it as an overall problem with code - how do you teach someone how to get good at debugging? A more generic version of that question may be simpler, but maybe even harder to answer: how do you teach general problem solving skills?

The teacher in the article was doing nothing less than debugging erroneous logic as applied by her students. Not just for the procedural errors, but for the underlying faults which allowed the logical errors to manifest.

That's pretty hard core.

wmt• 12 years ago

Accountability is irrational if you are just enacting something someone told you to do, and autonomy with no feedback leads to random results.

The thing that teachers and schools need is more responsibility, more power to plan and decide how they teach, but still keeping an eye on the results.

The mentality of punishing schools with low scores will however not help. Beating the weak rarely makes them stronger. Give more resources and guidance for schools that are lacking behind, and award more autonomy for schools that work properly.

MaysonL• 12 years ago

Probably a better article, by the author of this book, from the NYT Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

stefan_kendall3• 12 years ago

Teachers become excellent with this one weird trick.

10 things you've been doing wrong for years.

etc.

lelifer• 12 years ago

nothing beats self education through prospect motivation. teachers are becoming and will be outdated and software WILL replace teachers eventually if not soon. its already replacing them...you can see the trends in webapps such as blackboard and online courses etc. Anything that is repeated in a loop can be systematized through software, teachers constantly waste human resources by repeating the same things over and over again, books are also an extreme waste of resources and much harder to update. software is just soo much more flexible, its only a matter of time before teachers stop existing all together.

Secrets of amazing teachers: What both sides of the education debate get wrong

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