Brendan Murphy on 2009-11-09
So instead of one test we have two big tests in a year.
This link has been bookmarked by 102 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Dec 2008, by pablodgz.
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09 Nov 09
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retested
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why 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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Brendan Murphy on 2009-11-09
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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instead, try out three or four “good” candidates
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Brendan Murphy on 2009-11-09
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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firms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers
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Brendan Murphy on 2009-11-09
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.
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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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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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07 Jan 09
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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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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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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
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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-06
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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no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.
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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-06
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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We 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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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-06
imagine that!! qualitative indicators as well as quantitative?
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In 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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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-06
that is interesting, not sure you could not find the same correlation between bad teachers and new placements...
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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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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-06
this is something that needs to be reviewed and shown to TEP students...
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desist” 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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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-07
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? -
Brendan Murphy on 2009-11-09
more time in teh classroom watching and disecting master teachers more time in teh classroom being evaluated by master teachers.
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That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now.
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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-07
wow... now we are going to piss some people off... i like it!!
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An 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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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-07
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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Teachers’ unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement.
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Mark Gomez on 2009-01-07
this bothers me a lot... even as a union supporter.
http://www.ed4change.com/?p=81
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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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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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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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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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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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Karen Richardson on 2008-12-16
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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Karen Richardson on 2008-12-16
Crude is the right word but it's all we've got. Unfortunately, this isn't usually how the testing works...teachers are judged by end of the year scores only from one year to the next so it's different groups of kids.
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Karen Richardson on 2008-12-16
Unfortunately, the schools that really need the good teachers usually don't have 1000 applicants for ten positions...they're lucky if they have more than one.
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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
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15 Dec 08
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nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers
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The school system has a quarterback problem.
football NFL testing teaching education intelligence prediction hiring finance
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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. 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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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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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.
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13 Dec 08
John Short"Academic performance of kids in U.S. schools would be enhanced by getting rid of the worst 10% of teachers. How do you know who they are?" -Aldaily
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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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Jenn Broekman on 2008-12-13
And yet NCLB makes the certifications mandatory. Not that I think you can effectively teach high school content without a thorough grasp of the content and at least as thorough a grasp of basic pedagogy, but transcripts don't do a great job of measuring those...
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Charlie Brooks on 2009-01-07
What about certifications like CTT+ that are behavior-based? And are there any predictors for success in distance learning?
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Brendan Murphy on 2009-11-09
It isn't that the need for a requirement is wrong, it's that the certification process itself is emphasizing the wrong things.
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It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.
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Jenn Broekman on 2008-12-13
YES!
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12 Dec 08
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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.
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ne 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 performa
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ne 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 performa
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Michael Scott on 2008-12-12
Exactly,,, this is why data we have about reading and math instruction should be used to find out who our really good teachers are. It's why I take the time to look at the data. You can't observe these people frequently enough to know, but if they work for us for a number of years, we sure can find out who is effective.
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Peggy GeorgeMost Likely to Succeed
How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?
by Malcolm Gladwell
Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—what one researcher calls “withitness.” What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?education teaching gladwell teacher success annals malcolm_gladwell
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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. 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.
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After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers.
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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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At this age, when kids show their engagement it’s not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They’re leaning forward and wriggling. That’s their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn’t interpret that as bad behavior.
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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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“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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“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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after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are
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A group of researchers—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.
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there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.
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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.
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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.
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09 Dec 08
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A group of researchers—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. 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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According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers.
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A group of researchers—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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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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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.
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What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
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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. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.
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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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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 academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium.
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Clay Burell on 2008-12-09
A facile analysis, and skewed. Upper class schools are above average, while poor SES schools are below. The problem is the poor schools.
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According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.
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Clay Burell on 2008-12-09
"Simply" is not that simple.
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Jenn Broekman on 2008-12-12
Especially when you factor in licensing and "highly qualified" requirements.
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After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design,
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Clay Burell on 2008-12-09
I hope you substantiate this with data about what has been DONE about these issues, instead of the "worry." Because by many accounts, not much has been done at all.
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many reformers
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Clay Burell on 2008-12-09
Which ones? And how about the "many" who disagree with them?
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Sarah CannonIn teaching, the implications are ... 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 pul
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Katie DayHow do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?
malcolm_gladwell teaching learning success assessment football
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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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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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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.
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After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. 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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We’re used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors. We 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. We can have better physicians if we’re just smarter about how we choose medical-school students.
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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. In 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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Picture a young preschool teacher, sitting on a classroom floor surrounded by seven children. She is holding an alphabet book, and working through the letters with the children, one by one: “ ‘A’ is for apple. . . . ‘C’ is for cow.” The session was taped, and the videotape is being watched by a group of experts, who are charting and grading each of the teacher’s moves.
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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.
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The lesson continued. Pianta pointed out how the teacher managed to personalize the material. “ ‘C’ is for cow” turned into a short discussion of which of the kids had ever visited a farm. “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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It was a key moment. 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. Not only did the teacher catch the “Me!” amid the wiggling and tumult; she addressed it directly.
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Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt.
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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.
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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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A group of researchers—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. 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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Another educational researcher, Jacob Kounin, once did an analysis of “desist” events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior.
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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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Deutschlander sees his role as keeping the gate as wide open as possible: to find ten new financial advisers, he’s willing to interview a thousand people. The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team to give up trying to figure out who the “best” college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four “good” candidates.
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.
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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.
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An 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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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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What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
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Sarah HanawaldFun read from Gladwell that also provokes. What a great writer/thinker he is!
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08 Dec 08
Daniel RiveraGood teachers matter more than any other factor in deterimining student success.
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Lance Sy"A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice."
expository education sports The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell statistics
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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