with or without a college degree - as long as they are an example of how well they have learned a subject, they can reverse-engineer their learning and teach it. It's all about the heart.
This link has been bookmarked by 210 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Dec 2008, by pablodgz.
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19 Jul 14
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There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that?
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The school system has a quarterback problem.
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seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculia
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standards don’t track with what we care about.
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18 Aug 13
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This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that?
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“value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year
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Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year.
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Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.
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But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.
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Pianta’s team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.
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“Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity,”
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Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.
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Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
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It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?
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15 Aug 12
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It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability “withitness,” which he defined as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head.’ ” It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?
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They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now.
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“You know, a better way to handle this would be to anchor something around the kids,” Pianta said. “She should ask, ‘What makes you feel happy?’ The kids could answer. Then she could say, ‘Show me your face when you have that feeling? O.K., what does So-and-So’s face look like? Now tell me what makes you sad. Show me your face when you’re sad. Oh, look, her face changed!’ You’ve basically made the point. And then you could have the kids practice, or something. But this is going to go nowhere.”
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Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
“In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,” Pianta said. “But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.” Pianta and his team watched in awe.
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30 Apr 12
Dorrine M"Most Likely to Succeed" Predicting pro success, from QBs to teachers: http://t.co/Gt6KElzt (Malcolm Gladwell, @newyorker '08) v @nxthompson
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katie moffat"your child is....better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher." http://t.co/wlfSst4M
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Amy Meehan"Annals of Education
Most Likely to Succeed
How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?
by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008
Effective teachers have a gift for noticing
Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—what one researcher calls “withitness.”
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Keywords
Teachers;
Education Reform;
Quarterbacks;
Performance Predictions;
Football;
Shonka, Don;
Daniel, Chase
On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a football coach, and before that he played linebacker—although, he says, “that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago.” Every year, he evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his homework for the evening’s big game—an edited video of the Tigers’ previous contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.
Shonka methodically made his way through the video, stopping and re-winding whenever he saw something that caught his eye. He liked Jeremy Maclin and Chase Coffman, two of the Mizzou receivers. He loved William Moore, the team’s bruising strong safety. But, most of all, he was interested in the Tigers’ quarterback and star, a stocky, strong-armed senior named Chase Daniel.
“I like to see that the quarterback can hit a receiver in stride, so he doesn’t have to slow for the ball,” Shonka began. He had a stack of evaluation forms next to him and, as he watched the game, he was charting and grading every throw that Daniel made. “Then judgment. Hey, if it’s not there, throw it away and play ano -
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Add Sticky Notewith a pulse and a college degree
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High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding
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28 Jan 10
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This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.
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One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year.
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You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.
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But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.
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It wasn’t that professional quarterbacks didn’t need to be accurate. It was that the kind of accuracy required to do the job well could be measured only in a real N.F.L. game.
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Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors
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Bob Pianta, the dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education
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Among them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.
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Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity,”
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feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success
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“High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding.”
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Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning.”
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As Pianta played one tape after another, the patterns started to become clear. Here was a teacher who read out sentences, in a spelling test, and every sentence came from her own life—“I went to a wedding last week”—which meant she was missing an opportunity to say something that engaged her students. Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn’t turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.
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He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.
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Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
“In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,” Pianta said. “But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.” Pianta and his team watched in awe.
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Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom.
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It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability “withitness,” which he defined as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head.’ ”
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the experience of financial advisers is a useful guide to what could happen in teaching as well.
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In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.
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Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher.
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if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
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20 Jan 10
shaz rasulTest scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
Read more: http://www.newyorke -
18 Jan 10
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04 Jan 10
Andrea SaveriHow do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?
teaching gladwell psychology research teachers learning statistics education Deneen
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09 Nov 09
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Add Sticky Noteretested
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So instead of one test we have two big tests in a year.
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Add Sticky Notewhy shouldn’t we value someone who hasn’t had the chance to play as highly as someone who plays as well as anyone in the land?
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Why we should have a two year mentorin gprogram. 1st year watching learning and occasionaly teaching 2nd year teaching and taking constructive criticism
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But these aren’t cognitive skills.
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Add Sticky Noteinstead, try out three or four “good” candidates
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Why not spend more time in actual classrooms? instead of one sememster of student teaching which is actually only 6 to 9 weeks why not a full year or even two of working in the classroom?
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With full pay?
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Add Sticky Notefirms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers
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Actually what most of these firms do is bring in thousands of applicants tell them they can make hundreds of thousands per year and then work them to death until there are just a few left. Meanwhile taking the orphaned clients and passing them off to vets who survived the trial by fire.
Having thousands of applicants actually makes them more money than being selective about who they hire.
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08 Sep 09
kulub lnuANNALS OF EDUCATION about how to predict performance in teaching and football. On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Don Shonka made his way through a videotape of the Tigers’ previous contest, against…
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At this age, when kids show their engagement it’s not like the way we show our engagement,
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And a good teacher doesn’t interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student’s perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom.”
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Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity,” Hamre said
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Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success.
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“Mind you, that’s not great feedback,” Hamre said. “High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding.” The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha’s name card, point to the letter “V,” show her how different it is from “C,” and make the class sound out both letters.
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“On the other hand, she could have completely ignored the girl, which happens a lot,” Hamre went on. “The other thing that happens a lot is the teacher will just say, ‘You’re wrong.’ Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning.”
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“You know, a better way to handle this would be to anchor something around the kids,” Pianta said. “She should ask, ‘What makes you feel happy?’ The kids could answer. Then she could say, ‘Show me your face when you have that feeling? O.K., what does So-and-So’s face look like? Now tell me what makes you sad. Show me your face when you’re sad. Oh, look, her face changed!’ You’ve basically made the point. And then you could have the kids practice, or something.
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Here was a teacher who read out sentences, in a spelling test, and every sentence came from her own life—“I went to a wedding last week”—which meant she was missing an opportunity to say something that engaged her students. Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn’t turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.
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“In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,” Pianta said. “But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.” Pianta and his team watched in awe.
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Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible.
-
But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.
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In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp
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20 Apr 09
Lilliam HurstGladwell on teachers
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almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the
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19 Feb 09
Michael RichardsAN interesting look at teaching. Malcolm Gladwell uses the analogy of evaluating talent for NFL to make a position on evaluating teachers.
education teaching gladwell teacher teachers success malcolm_gladwell annals
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neil stephensonArticle on the effect good teaching has on student outcomes, focuses on feedback as a key element.
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kiberensThe performance of teachers, like NFL quarterbacks, is impossible to predict. Only as they do their jobs can their success be measured and quantified. We use the wrong indicators to predict teacher success, such as test scores and grades. Instead, we can only gauge a teacher's "withitness" when we see them in the classroom.
Teaching_reform quarterback_problem withitness gladwell malcolm_gladwell.
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Before that, he was a football coach, and before that he played linebacker—although, he says, “that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago.”
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And yet Harrington’s career consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and down the field. “How will that ability translate to the National Football League?” He shook his head slowly. “Shoot.”
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Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year.
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Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.
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As Shonka talked, Daniel was moving his team down the field. But he was almost always throwing those quick, diagonal passes. In the N.F.L., he would have to do much more than that—he would have to throw long, vertical passes over the top of the defense. Could he make that kind of throw? Shonka didn’t know. There was also the matter of his height. Six feet was fine in a spread system, where the big gaps in the offensive line gave Daniel plenty of opportunity to throw the ball and see downfield. But in the N.F.L. there wouldn’t be gaps, and the linemen rushing at him would be six-five, not six-one.
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A college quarterback joining the N.F.L., by contrast, has to learn to play an entirely new game.
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The problem with picking quarterbacks is that Chase Daniel’s performance can’t be predicted. The job he’s being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won’t.
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09 Jan 09
Jim PetersonIt needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to
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08 Jan 09
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djplanerHas somethings to say about the importance of the teacher compared to other factors in the quality of learning. Implications for the focus on anything but that at Universities.
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07 Jan 09
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the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year.
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your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.
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If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren
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06 Jan 09
Mark Gomezgreat for both football coaches and teachers... lucky me!!
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Add Sticky NoteA teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test
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although very true, sometimes the truth is the best excuse not to change... and i feel a lot of teachers use these two truths to escape the responsibility they share for their students academic performance.
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Add Sticky Noteno one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.
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uhm... hello, i think this is not the root of the problem. i have seen many a great teachers with huge potential, just like the quarterbacks.
perhaps we should take a look at how these great rookies are supported once they are in a program (school or team) and how there potential is maximized.
i have seen great teachers leave because they are not supported in ways that help them unleash their potential or continue to develop it...
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Add Sticky NoteWe now realize that being a good doctor requires the ability to communicate, listen, and empathize—and so there is increasing pressure on medical schools to pay attention to interpersonal skills as well as to test scores.
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imagine that!! qualitative indicators as well as quantitative?
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Add Sticky NoteIn fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft—that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance—and how well he played in the pros.
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that is interesting, not sure you could not find the same correlation between bad teachers and new placements...
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Add Sticky NoteAmong them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.
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this is something that needs to be reviewed and shown to TEP students...
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Add Sticky Notedesist” events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior. In one instance, “Mary leans toward the table to her right and whispers to Jane. Both she and Jane giggle. The teacher says, ‘Mary and Jane, stop that!’ ” That’s a desist event. But how a teacher desists—her tone of voice, her attitudes, her choice of words—appears to make no difference at all in maintaining an orderly classroom. How can that be? Kounin went back over the videotape and noticed that forty-five seconds before Mary whispered to Jane, Lucy and John had started whispering. Then Robert had noticed and joined in, making Jane giggle, whereupon Jane said something to John. Then Mary whispered to Jane. It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability “withitness,” which he defined as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head.’ ” It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.
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this is something that should have an entire course dedicated to teacher training programs.
i have watched enough kung fu movies in my time that i refuse to believe that with enough conscious and explicit training, something like "withitness" couldn't be taught...
it might look ridiculous and funny at the outset, but why couldn't new teachers get practice with the different types of class management techniques and develop more people (student) friendly skills? -
more time in teh classroom watching and disecting master teachers more time in teh classroom being evaluated by master teachers.
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The best people do not go into teaching and those who got baited into it because they're so idealistic get burned out.
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Add Sticky NoteThat means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now.
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wow... now we are going to piss some people off... i like it!!
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Add Sticky NoteAn apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
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a healthy reward isn't always monetary (just ask any teacher now) the holidays help with the actual health part... but i am all for increasing teacher rewards for those deserving...
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More autonomy AND more money. But AUTONOMY is more important. I run my own private learning center now, it has made ALL the difference in student learning.
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Add Sticky NoteTeachers’ unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement.
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this bothers me a lot... even as a union supporter.
http://www.ed4change.com/?p=81 -
I don't know about your country but in my country a majority of people become teachers because they're not competent, responsible, accountable or talented enough to even handle a clerical job.
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05 Jan 09
Ms. RowleyAnnals of Education: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
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01 Jan 09
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Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.
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29 Dec 08
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22 Dec 08
Patrick HigginsGreat piece from Gladwell on relating teaching to NFL Quarterbacks.
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Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
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21 Dec 08
Ari RGladwell on the difficulties of determining who will be successful in a particular job before actually seeing how they perform in the job. "Deutschlander sees his role as keeping the gate as wide open as possible: to find ten new financial advisers, he’s
psychology education success statistics predictions sports teaching schools performance malcolmgladwell football nfl
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19 Dec 08
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Andrew DeVigal"How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?"
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18 Dec 08
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Todd SuomelaEducational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers-that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you've watched Pianta's tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.
education teaching by(MalcolmGladwell) policy testing evaluation regulation credential
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17 Dec 08
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16 Dec 08
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Patti PortoMost Likely to Succeed
How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job -
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“regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom
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Add Sticky Note
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Actually, the more pressing problem is KEEPING the teachers, especially the good ones since they are more likely to be frustrated by the flawed system and leave to do something else.
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Because good teachers have high self-esteem, high levels of ethics. They are less tolerant of bullshit. I believe all good teachers should be free market agents and parents come together as a co-op and higher the best teachers.
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It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.
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But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers.
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Will RichardsonEric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of
Public Stiky Notes
perhaps we should take a look at how these great rookies are supported once they are in a program (school or team) and how there potential is maximized.
i have seen great teachers leave because they are not supported in ways that help them unleash their potential or continue to develop it...
Having thousands of applicants actually makes them more money than being selective about who they hire.
i have watched enough kung fu movies in my time that i refuse to believe that with enough conscious and explicit training, something like "withitness" couldn't be taught...
it might look ridiculous and funny at the outset, but why couldn't new teachers get practice with the different types of class management techniques and develop more people (student) friendly skills?
http://www.ed4change.com/?p=81
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