Most Likely to Succeed

December 14, 2008 4:44 PM

The difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast... But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?
posted by twoleftfeet (72 comments total)

That article Wonderlicked.
posted by srboisvert at 4:59 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

You know, I started reading this, and totally lost interest. Yes, I do agree that we should be picking the best people to be teachers, but to compare that to professional football? With pro football, you're talking about the elite of the elite. A huge minority of people can achieve that. Just on scale alone, the metaphor doesn't fit. Not even close. Yeah, it would be nice if all teachers were the equivalent of NFL quarterbacks in skill, but if you look at the number of quarterbacks that reach the NFL, and the number that try, then you're looking at a small number, and add the fact that the quarterbacks are making eleventy grillion dollars, then the prospective pool gets even smaller. How many people want to make doodley squat to teach a bunch of snot nosed brats? Plus, there's no chance of endorsements.

Maybe what we should be looking at isn't so much how we pick teachers, but perhaps how we train them, and continue to train them once they're hired. Yes, who is important, but we're not looking at who in terms of 32 open spots in the nation, and for an extremely short career, but rather at many thousands of spots for a much longer career. We should be continually educating and training them as well.

Sorry, lame article.
posted by Eekacat at 5:11 PM on December 14, 2008 [5 favorites has favorites]

How many people want to make doodley squat to teach a bunch of snot nosed brats?

I'm guessing you're not a teacher.

Not a good one, anyway.
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:18 PM on December 14, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

My kid would be a much more motivated student if Ben Roethlisberger were his teacher.
posted by stargell at 5:22 PM on December 14, 2008

"How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?"

Well, the obvious answer is, you can fire as soon as you can tell.
posted by orthogonality at 5:25 PM on December 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

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?
Does Gladwell really suggest that there is evidence of care and patience being exercised in the selection of financial advisors? In which case, let's just start doing it randomly. I think it might well work out better.
posted by peacheater at 5:36 PM on December 14, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

I'm not sure, but I know Gladwell will have some literate, pop-sciencey suggestion-by-analogy that appeals to everyone for simplicity's sake and then turns out to be completely unreliable and run contrary to empirical data.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 5:36 PM on December 14, 2008 [10 favorites has favorites]

How many people want to make doodley squat to teach a bunch of snot nosed brats?

As it turns out, a TON. The college of education at my alma mater makes up about 10 percent of the student body. Feel free to find nationwide numbers.
posted by pwnguin at 5:39 PM on December 14, 2008

I liked it, and tried to show it to my wife, who was also turned off by the football analogies. The underlying idea, which I think has been in the New Yorker before, is still interesting.

The idea that we can easily identify good and bad technique is fascinating. Other articles I've read (like Gladwell's recent book) promote the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach expertise. I guess the next step would be, how many hours to reach good enough?
posted by atchafalaya at 5:40 PM on December 14, 2008

At the moment, I'm right in the middle of trying to figure out if I've got what it takes to be a good teacher. I'm a second grade teacher, but certainly not a very effective one at this early point in my career. As it turns out, the ability to explain and package ideas, procedures, and principles for one's students is only one small part of good teaching. Managing time, student behavior, and stacks of paperwork; dealing with administration, parents, support staff, and the community; and implementing/complying with scores of ever-changing mandates, initiatives and prescribed procedures is turning out to be the most challenging part of the job for me. Being a teacher in these times isn't what it used to be, and it takes a wholly different type of person to survive and thrive in a school today than in the schools of yesteryear.
posted by HotPatatta at 5:43 PM on December 14, 2008 [9 favorites has favorites]

A recent study found that beginning teachers making $30K a year were just as effective as tenured teachers making $80K. In today's regimented centrally planned public school environment, teachers lack flexibility when it comes to curriculum planning, which could very well negate most of the experience advantage. If that's true, you might get a lot more effective teachers for less money by skewering the pay scale to attract more first year teachers and just let them burn out and move onto a new career by year 5.
posted by COD at 5:44 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Obviously teachers need to know something about how how to teach, but I think this article might explain why 4 years of college and a masters in education does not necessarily make a great teacher.

In the example of the teacher trying to teach children about happy and sad faces, she probably dutifully read the exercise in a book and is trying to replicate it in the classroom. She is educated but doesn't understand how children learn and, more importantly, cannot empathize with them enough even to see that they don't get it. She lacks the withitness that the author describes.

I had two friends become middle school reading teachers at the same school right out of college. One succeeded because she understood the kids' perspective and learning styles and used that to motivate them. The other failed miserably because he was always trying stuff out he thought might appeal to them rather than finding out what actually did appeal to them. He was so busy thinking up creative lesson plans during class, he didn't interact with the kids and check on how they were feeling. A lot of teachers just don't have the ability the author describes and don't care to develop it.
posted by Mouse Army at 5:49 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Ah, the Gladwell haters have showed up early! A typically thought-provoking and well-written article; thanks for posting it.
posted by languagehat at 5:50 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I liked the way McCain put it in one of the debates, something like, "And those teachers that aren't performing, the bottom 20 percent, we need to help those people find new jobs."
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:53 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

you might get a lot more effective teachers for less money by skewering the pay scale to attract more first year teachers and just let them burn out and move onto a new career by year 5.

I think that this is essentially what Gladwell is suggesting. The argument is something like "if we even can't predict who will make a good quarterback - and people devote many hours and dollars poring over statistics trying to do this - then how can we predict who will make a great teacher. If teaching doesn't depend on training - and there is evidence that it does not - then why not open the doors to anyone with a college degree and a pulse? Test them in the field and fire the bad ones."

I don't necessarily agree with this argument (and I'm well aware of the antipathy that some here have for Gladwell) but it does seem to be a different take on the question of how to improve the educational system, a topic of increasingly political interest.
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:57 PM on December 14, 2008

Managing time, student behavior, and stacks of paperwork; dealing with administration, parents, support staff, and the community; and implementing/complying with scores of ever-changing mandates, initiatives and prescribed procedures is turning out to be the most challenging part of the job for me.

Oh man, when I taught preschool the hardest part of the job - bar none - was the parents. So, so much harder to build a good parent-teacher relationship than student-teacher (especially when the students in question are four years old). Also, filling out forms for every questionable behavior and trying to maintain some semblance of confidentiality in the face of "Who started it?!"

Oh yeah, the second hardest part of the job was getting 18 four year olds on the playground with hats on and coats zipped up in January. Some days, the time getting ready for recess vastly exceeded the actual amount of time outdoors.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:58 PM on December 14, 2008

attract more first year teachers and just let them burn out and move onto a new career by year 5

That's essentially what Teach For America is all about.
posted by HotPatatta at 6:03 PM on December 14, 2008

In the software shops I've worked at, we solved the problem of not being able to screen potential applicants adequately by using contract-to-hire positions. Would that concept translate well? Hire a teacher under contract for one year / school term. At the end of the term, either hire or let go.
posted by Bort at 6:04 PM on December 14, 2008

Hire a teacher under contract for one year / school term. At the end of the term, either hire or let go.

The college system uses adjuncts (part-timers) this way.
posted by twoleftfeet at 6:11 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I was a fill-in at a daycare center while I was in college. They had respite care for kids with severe disabilities, which was where I usually worked. I was often called into a room of 12 two-year olds. The two teachers in there were about 20 and had little to no control over the classroom. It was like herding cats! No wonder one or the other called in sick once a week.

Then, one day, they both called in sick and someone who normally did house visits for disabled children filled in with me. She had taught in this arena before she defected to the far less stressful house visit gig.

The woman had them mesmerized. She actually had 12 two-year olds sitting down for a story. Mealtime, naptime, outdoor time, my god... it was like a miracle. She was incredible and just observing her work that classroom made me a better sub. She was just a minimum wage, high school educated fill-in but she was the best preschool teacher I ever saw.
posted by Foam Pants at 6:25 PM on December 14, 2008

twoleftfeet- "uses" is exactly the correct word.
posted by Jpfed at 6:26 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The college system uses adjuncts (part-timers) this way.

Not in the colleges where I've worked as an adjunt. There are far more adjuncts than permanent positions and most schools are very glad to keep stringing adjuncts along indefinitely. But this is getting afield of the issue at hand.

For those of you advocating the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach, please remember that you're actually talking about a very important job, dealing with people in a hugely important developmental phase of life. Current teacher ed and prep may not guarantee that every teacher is excellent, but presumably even the bad teachers get some information and insight about teaching kids that not every warm body on the street necessarily knows--or at least some screening.

As the teachers above have stated, there's a whole lot more to teaching than mastery of the subject matter. Throwing someone totally unprepared for all the rest in front of a classroom of elementary school kids is a recipe for disaster, and most of all, not fair to the kids.
posted by Sublimity at 6:30 PM on December 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Mouse Army touched it, I think. The entire educational "system" needs to be re-tooled with less of an emphasis on teaching and more focus on how people learn.

Oh yeah, I've got all the answers.
posted by jaronson at 6:47 PM on December 14, 2008

What you do is you make much more money available. You start treating education as if it were something that really matters, and teachers with the same sort of societal cachet attached to doctors or lawyers (well, maybe just doctors). You make every school a showpiece. You raise the average pay of professional teachers to three or four times its current level. You hire more people at lower but still livable salaries to assist in-school. Then you make it really fucking hard to become a teacher, with more rigorous hurdles and better education for the teachers themselves, and stricter and more stringent evaluation of teachers in terms of their abilities as much as their tangible results, with systems in place to help those who are borderline educators to improve their skills, and no mercy for those who simply aren't any good. Help 'em find new jobs.

Wait 4 or 5 years, and it sorts itself out. Problem with that plan, though, of course, starts with the first step: more money. Even if the amount of money needed would be dwarfed by what America, for example, spends on its wars.

Disclaimer: I am a long-time teacher, and got out of teaching kids long ago, because noble as it may be, the deck is stacked against you. Also, I'm not overly fond of kids.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:51 PM on December 14, 2008 [9 favorites has favorites]

You know, I started reading this, and totally lost interest.

Yes, that would be the Gladwell effect.
posted by R. Mutt at 6:53 PM on December 14, 2008 [5 favorites has favorites]

The difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher, as between a good doctor and bad doctor, or good shoe sales clerk and bad shoe sales clerk, amounts to three things: understanding of the work, love of the work, and desire to improve at the work. Fortunately teaching isn't terribly hard to understand. Teaching is one of the core forms of natural inter-human interaction, and is one of the primary purposes of communication itself. A knows something B does not; A informs B; both now know it. Depending on how complex the thing is, and what it implies for B's life, A can be said to have told, trained, taught or inspired B.

Our cultural meme of thinking of teaching as something done only to children holds us back, by encouraging people to think that they, at any point, know enough. This is never really true, and the more it approaches being true, the more essential it becomes that the knowledge be shared with others, before you die and it is gone. There is only one reason teaching is concentrated on children: they don't know much about much. Adults by contrast tend to know a lot about a little, and a little about a lot. Which, as long as one doesn't desire to step out of one's plain existence, is enough to get by.

How to be a teacher, in the general sense rather than in the "profession of teacher" sense, is something most of us get at a passable level by about age ten. People who are bad teachers, are bad teachers because of one or more bad assumptions or attitudes: excessively shy, boring, impatient or confrontational personality; inability to quite grasp the idea that another person doesn't know something that they themselves know, or doesn't instantly understand, or needs a different method; inability to break down something known into logical steps; inability to coherently explain; inability to effectively demonstrate. It is all this sort of stuff that teacher training is supposed to address. Correcting weaknesses in the exercise of skills already possessed, as much or more than adding a new skill.

Four-year teaching degrees are excessively long, and in my opinion from observing friends go through this, very much encourage the university/college to load up the degree with subjects of little practical use. By far the most a student teacher learns about their profession is learnt during prac placement, which is usually done far too late in the course; some percentage of student teachers realize then that they don't like it, and don't want to learn to do it well, but by then have committed three years and tens of thousands of dollars to the degree.

So there's two practical recommendations for teacher training: prac early and often; and an easier escape route from the course, before entering the profession. (As an aside, there's a good argument for making university courses payable upon successful graduation - if the university has failed to teach the student, or failed to realize the student is unteachable and divert him/her into another course, or out, they haven't done their job.)

Love of the work will come and go. Making the eject lever too easy to pull will lead to the loss of good teachers after one bad semester. The best method for addressing this shades into the method for addressing a lack of desire to improve: peer support. A teacher is clearly told to teach kids, but has no formal directive in most schools to continue to teach him/herself, or his/her fellow teachers. Teachers need to be able to show off their successes, for the admiration of their peers, and also need to be able to receive support with their failures, to address whatever problem caused them to fail. This requires the system to support them through failures - so they can say "this didn't work, what did I do wrong?" without excessive professional risk. Some kind of basically-anonymous AskMeFi-style teacher forum would help a lot.

Double-blind teaching assessment would help too, where occasional lessons would be recorded (with the knowledge of teacher and class), and sent to other teachers in distant schools for evaluation, with no way of knowing whether this is a current teacher being evaluated or a recording from years past. Without the obligations of school politics, a far more honest and useful evaluation can be obtained for actual teaching performance.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:54 PM on December 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

This is an interesting article, but Gladwell's suggestion is a bad one for for the following reasons:

1. Even for those who have the disposition to be good teachers and are well-trained, teaching is so complex that it takes a few years to really get the hang of it. Making a decision after only a year or even two years might not get you the people who will be most effective in the long run.

2. It is hugely disruptive to a school's culture and morale to churn through teachers that fast. Schools tend to move from being ok to great only when the faculty really establishes the bonds of teamwork, and that's impossible with high turnover.

3. Financial planning is nothing like teaching. Students are not clients. Schools are not firms. Learning is not money.

4. Teachers need to committ to the profession not because they stand to make a killing at it (and are thus willing to risk a high likelyhood of being fired) but because they care about helping students learn. I am not saying you shouldn't pay teachers more, but society will never be able to afford to pay teachers as well as private-sector jobs that require comparable skill and committment of time and effort to be good at. If you make it about money, teaching is a stupid choice. Thus, because people are making an investment of emotional energy, it seems disastrous to the morale of the profession to simply fire half the new teachers at the end of the year.
posted by mai at 6:56 PM on December 14, 2008 [5 favorites has favorites]

Okay, Gladwell's choice of pro football as an analogue for elementary school teaching may seem odd... but I think it's useful.

It's an interesting (if unnecessarily detailed, but all the more interesting for being so) way of highlighting the main point of his argument-- that our present system selects teachers using bad criteria.

What did surprise me, though, was that he seems to imply that the best way out of the can't-know-they're-good-till-we-put-em-in-the-classroom problem is to throw lots of teachers at the wall and see which ones stick.

While I don't deeply object to that, and it's certainly better than our present Instant Tenure Zero Feedback Hired Forever civil service model, one could as easily just completely dump the credential system, and train teachers not in book-learnin' skills, but extremely fine large-group interaction skills.

The kind of observations the researchers were shown gathering with videotape is exactly the kind of feedback and training all teachers need, and from the first day. In fact, if that kind of feedback-- offered daily, and set to higher and higher standards over a 30 or 60 day period-- was the only training given to teachers, I'd guess we'd immediately start cranking out far better teachers than the ones we have now.

Would having interaction experts (read: charismatic teachers with experience and documented effectiveness) poring over hours of videotape be expensive?

Sure.

But what we're getting now is, in terms of results, really ineffective, and therefore really, really expensive.
posted by darth_tedious at 6:59 PM on December 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

train teachers not in book-learnin' skills, but extremely fine large-group interaction skills.

This is a point that bears repeating. Teaching skills are more important than knowledge of the subject. A good teacher can be only one lesson ahead of the class and still inspire them to do well on the tests and enjoy and understand the subject. A bad teacher who knows the work thoroughly will be able to answer any question, but this is useless without inspiring the students to be interested enough to ask those questions, and without creating understanding in the questioner's mind. Good teaching skills also imply good study skills for learning things oneself, so by the third time both have taught the subject, our good but new-to-the-subject teacher will most likely know the subject about as well as our bad, but well-informed, teacher - and will definitely know where to find out answers to students' questions.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 7:13 PM on December 14, 2008

My cousin works in the education department at Trinity University, and this year she's working on creating dispositional assessments for their teacher education program -- creating some kind of system that can help identify which students have the dispositions to become good teachers, and which ones might have some more trouble. I haven't talked with her much about it, but she's written about it on her blog. I'm not sure if you can really predict a potential teacher's success based on their personality, but I like how it shifts the focus to bettering how teachers are trained rather than evaluating how they perform. Though maybe that's just because I'm halfway through my school's teacher certification program and I'm scared to death about stepping into a classroom and I want as much training and evaluation beforehand so I don't mess up anybody's life.
posted by lilac girl at 7:21 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

There can be no change in the teaching profession without a systematic change in how society views teachers. Teaching, in common with nursing and childcare, is a job that commands little respect and understanding of its challenges. It is no coincidence that these are jobs in which women far outnumber men.
I thought Matt Yglesias' recent series of posts about teaching in Finland and how it compares with the US was really illuminating especially the following paragraphs:
One important difference between how this works and how equivalent systems work in the United States is that the education programs are highly competitive. Only 10-20 percent of applicants are accepted, and the applicants typically come from the top half of upper secondary schools which themselves only basically the top half of Finnish primary school graduates (the rest go to vocational schools)...
t’s a bit hard to say what accounts for the strong level of interest in a teaching career in Finland. Finnish teacher compensation seems about average for the US (which is to say considerably more generous than some states, considerably less generous than others). The relative salary is higher because other professionals such as lawyers and doctors earn less in Finland than do their US equivalents. And the subjective quality of the job experience seems better in Finland since the kids have many fewer discipline issues.
But at the same time, there seems to be a somewhat circular phenomenon at work. Teaching is held in high regard not just in the abstract, but in practice as a profession a lot of people want to get into. Consequently, the teaching programs are quite selective. And the selectivity itself makes teaching prestigious since everyone knows teachers are graduates of selective programs. Which helps make going into teaching seem appealing to a lot of people. And so on and so forth in an interesting way.

posted by peacheater at 7:25 PM on December 14, 2008

aeschenkarnos, you say:

Fortunately teaching isn't terribly hard to understand. Teaching is one of the core forms of natural inter-human interaction, and is one of the primary purposes of communication itself. A knows something B does not; A informs B; both now know it.

As a teacher who is beginning to be good in his third year, I can tell you that this doesn't work. You may start out thinking it's that simple, but if you're perceptive you'll notice you get farther and farther from good results the more you just tell them what you want them to know.

T teach well, you need to set up a context in which you induce in your students a wish to find out; you supply the method for finding out; you observe and shepherd and drop strategic hints as your students fail, over and over, to find out; and then you act on the new momentum that results from (finally!) finding out. And you do this with (in my case) 24 nine-year-olds simultaneously.

It takes a peculiar sort of planning and reverse thinking, not to mention an ability to keep 10, 20, 30 different rhythms going at once, to impart some direction and sense of purpose in what they're doing. You're teaching by inducing discovery, not by telling.

As for the try-many-teachers idea -- you never do find out what kind of teacher you are until you have sole responsibility for a classroom for a preset length of time (a year, usually). Rapport with students and classroom "withitness" are necessary but not sufficient preconditions to being a good teacher. The planning, monitoring, daily-maintenance parts are at least as important. Hard to simulate that with apprenticeships.
posted by argybarg at 7:36 PM on December 14, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

I teach at a school that actually works similarly to what Gladwell (and, sorta, Michelle Rhee in D.C.) suggest. It pays very well, imposes high barriers to entry (standardized tests, multiple interviews, 10 page plus writing sample on a series of prompts about teaching technique and philosophy, demonstration class attended by administrators and teachers as well as students), offers no tenure at all (only one-year contracts, in fact, although this year I was offered a two-year that I declined), provides incentives (mainly offering extra class hours--yes, wages are paid hourly), and constantly runs evaluations of all teachers.

It certainly has some downsides, but it has some upsides too If, somehow, a lackluster teacher slips through the hiring process, he or she only lasts a year. Our kids accomplish a lot and have impressive academic achievements (much of which, admittedly, is a result of a selection effect rather than a training one: we attract the best students).

I definitely believe Gladwell's right about the value of individual teachers, the gape between good ones and bad ones, and the significance of the impact that gap can have on their students.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:39 PM on December 14, 2008

Would I be out of line to suggest that perhaps finding sufficient money and training for teachers is not the issue for most schools in the US, and a much more pressing problem is a culture that prioritizes everything but academics? A culture that creates social pressure from peers to not succeed, combined with, in the most extreme cases, a lack of interest or push to succeed from home?

Or even that changing the start time of school from 6 AM or 7 AM to 9 or 10 AM and providing healthier meals would do more good than somewhat misguided efforts to ensure that 100% of public school teachers are in the top 1% of their profession?
posted by Nonce at 7:41 PM on December 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I read this article in the dead-trees version a few days ago, and was hoping someone would post it here, because I was interested in what MeFites would have to say about it.

Thanks for the FPP.
posted by paisley henosis at 7:57 PM on December 14, 2008

I really like Malcolm Gladwell's stuff, and I've linked to him before, but each book feels shallower than the previous book and I'm getting a little nervous.
posted by mecran01 at 7:58 PM on December 14, 2008

Is Gladwell familiar with Direct Instruction?
posted by drezdn at 8:06 PM on December 14, 2008

I remember attending a conference at a small private school in the Northwest where faculty had to viciously compete for tenure. They had these bright, young faculty who were just oozing desperation and anxiety. That can't be good for learning.
posted by mecran01 at 8:10 PM on December 14, 2008

Are there no prisons? Are there no work-houses??
posted by hermitosis at 8:25 PM on December 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

>Rapport with students and classroom "withitness" are necessary but not sufficient preconditions to being a good teacher.


True; but the rapport and withitness (Jesus, what an awful word--I vaguely remember Gladwell quoting it from somebody, but still) are, I think, much better foundations for effectiveness than the ones we have-- and the planning and maintenance tasks you mention might even be things that, in part, can be farmed out to assistants.

Let teachers focus on creating the Learning Vibe, and then, after class time, let their assistants debrief them and help them with both the long-term This is What Little Betty Needs planning and the daily What Boxes Did We Check Off monitoring.

>I'm not sure if you can really predict a potential teacher's success based on their personality, but I like how it shifts the focus to bettering how teachers are trained rather than evaluating how they perform.

Yeah, exactly.

While it would be nice if we could increase salaries and better conditions so much that teaching would become a career of choice for top-achieving college grads... focusing on recruiting the best and brightest is actually a very inefficient way of achieving good results.

After all, this is still throwing things at the wall, only now you're throwing super-expensive things at the wall.

Charisma (or, let's say, Benevolent Inspiring Authority) is a lucky attribute... but it's also a learnable skill; and since it's the determinative skill when it comes to teaching, that's what our training should focus on.

That said, we obviously should ratchet up salaries, and reduce workloads.

>Is Gladwell familiar with Direct Instruction?

DI is one of those things that sounds bloody awful, but (I'm guessing) probably works very well-- especially with the youngest kids, and especially in poor, blighted, chaotic neighborhoods.
posted by darth_tedious at 9:12 PM on December 14, 2008

I am a teacher, working on my Master's in K-12 Literacy and in my second year as a teacher in the district that employs me. I am also 35 years old, with a child of my own and three other careers behind me, as well as a third-term elected school board member in my city (not the city I work in). I found this article very interesting (although a bit cumbersome with the football analogies) in the same manner as I find information about Michelle Rhee in D.C. ineresting.

I am not a member of my local Teacher's Union, however I benefit financially from their presence and I do pay a fee for them to represent me. Fundamentally, I think teacher's unions may have had a place in the past but have outlived their usefullness. I truely believe that they are in place to protect poor teachers.

That being said, my experience indicates that schools do not hire outside of their comfort zone. My advice to beginning teachers is to subsitute in a school, figure out if you fit with their dynamic and style and then apply for a position. Young teachers are much more likely o get a job if they know what initiatives, curriculum and population they will work with every day and establish a repoire with the population prior to applying for the open position.

My (way out there) opinion about schools is that they should be more standardized. NCLB says that districts must demonstrate competencies but doesn't tell them how to do it or even fund it. States are having their own assessments created and forcing students who cannot perform appropriately to participate in these assessments, because the alternative is so completely overwhelming to staff with huge caseloads that they cannot organize the alternative portfolio.

I really do believe that the goal is for students to demonstrate the same competencies, whether the kiddo is in California, Iowa, New Hampshire or Alaska. Why are we allowing the states to create and set their own minimum benchmarks? This is a true demonstration of the inequities of our educational society. Once we can create a universal idea about what good education "looks like" we can create a "standard" for beginning or first year teachers.
posted by sisflit at 9:52 PM on December 14, 2008

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.

He says that as if it doesn't apply to every job in the world.
posted by Chuckles at 10:02 PM on December 14, 2008

I'm glad we're listening to economists' opinions of teacher quality, given the bang-up job they've done assessing the quality of investments. This is why the economy is in such great shape.
posted by mobunited at 10:26 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh Direct Instruction, christ amighty. I don't have foul enough words for that. It's scripted teaching, that's all -- scripted, formulaic, with the teacher, not the students, doing the work. Could be a good script, could be (and more often is) a bad script.

You should know what bullshit it is by reading the language that DI advocates use -- they "explain" it by saying that teaching should be "skillful" and "effective" and that every child deserves to learn. You see how impossible it is to disagree with that? There was even a brief drive to rename it The Effective Teaching Method. You feel like using the ineffective teaching method?

There's no there there. It's a bunch of jargony rah-rah for what boils down to bureaucratic scripting of teaching.
posted by argybarg at 11:26 PM on December 14, 2008

Charisma (or, let's say, Benevolent Inspiring Authority) is a lucky attribute... but it's also a learnable skill; and since it's the determinative skill when it comes to teaching, that's what our training should focus on.

Must disagree. If you sat me down to play a board game that was lousy, it wouldn't matter how charismatic or inspiring you were -- the game would be lousy and I wouldn't get much out of it. School is most often a lousy game. It's repetitive, it's slow, it's both too simple and too difficult, and it doesn't seem to have any larger point. It just isn't engaging.

Making the curriculum, the class expectations, even the game system of the classroom worthwhile is much, much more important than the teacher's winning personality.
posted by argybarg at 11:32 PM on December 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'm glad we're listening to economists' opinions of teacher quality, given the bang-up job they've done assessing the quality of investments. This is why the economy is in such great shape.

Don't tar-and-feather everyone whose job title includes some latinate derivative of "money". The difference between a financial advisor and a hedge fund manager is like the difference between an urban planner and a Senator. Completely different.
posted by breath at 11:32 PM on December 14, 2008

>There's no there there. It's a bunch of jargony rah-rah for what boils down to bureaucratic scripting of teaching.

Y'know, I just googled DI, as I should have in the first place, and I think I may have mixed it up with the KIPP program...
posted by darth_tedious at 12:25 AM on December 15, 2008

I teach adults for a living. I frequently teach the same five day course a dozen times in a year to different groups of students. In those dozen tries, I get many chances to make improvements to my presentation of a topic. I learn what works and what doesn't. I continually work on improving my presentations. I have pity for elementary school teachers that get only one chance a year to make improvements on their teaching a particular subject.

I have disgust for teachers who make no effort to improve their teaching. If I get a 9 out of 10 score on an evaluation form, I consider that an area for improvement (One advantage that I have is that I get meaningful evaluations directly from my students). If I ever get an 8 on anything, I was a miserable failure at teaching it, and need to try something radically different next time. Even when I get a 10, I still look for ways to improve. I expect that of me, and that's what I expect of the teachers of my children.

You may not be able to tell who the best teachers are, right at the start. But I can tell you this, though: they are always getting better.
posted by Xoc at 1:25 AM on December 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Don't tar-and-feather everyone whose job title includes some latinate derivative of "money". The difference between a financial advisor and a hedge fund manager is like the difference between an urban planner and a Senator. Completely different.

I like bank tellers and coin collectors just fine. Why should I give a shit about the opinions of Eric Hanushek? He's a bullshit artist in a bullshit demi-field invented to help jackasses dismantle the educational system. In fact, proving that poorly paid teachers and large class sizes are good for everyone is Hanushek's basic focus -- but it would be a safe bet to say that his kids aren't in a crumbling portable with 35 kids crushed into it.

There are, on the other hand, people who actually know quite a bit about how people are effectively educated. As a field, these people are called, unsurprisingly enough, "educators." And for several decades, they've largely said that continuous professional development, small class sizes and a tailored learning environment work. Also, a bunch of dirty hippie child centered stuff worked pretty well, but unfortunately pundits, social conservatism and a quasi-racist fear of Asian rote-learning traditions have combined to help politicians brand teachers as lazy, dishonest frauds and many, many studies as things to be ignored, over and over again, until it's viable to kick the education system all the way back to the 1950s while destroying the teaching profession entirely, so our kids can get tech-training for nice, class-reinforcing drudgery.
posted by mobunited at 3:24 AM on December 15, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I teach part time at two Universities in the UK. This is just sorta something I fell into but I've found that I really enjoy it.

A banker by education and profession, I was asked to teach econometrics at one University after giving a couple of presentations to the students on a bond market bubble that I had an insiders perspective of. I've held that teaching position since 2003, it pays the mortgage and, most importantly, I've always enjoyed doing it. So I seem to be pretty good at it.

The second post I found on my own last August after I decided to take a year off my banking job. I taught one module, 'Corporate Finance and Financial Markets' for these guys, the term just finished, but they've asked me back to teach three classes in 2009. We'll see.

Now the system at both of these Universities is fairly rigorous across a couple of different dimensions; first of all, folks from my management chain can and do sit in on class, and no, I don't know who they are or when they do it as each class is offered at different times and students will sub one for the other. So I've got to be %100 on top of my game %100 of the time.

Secondly, both conduct the usual standardised instructor evaluation at the end of the term. So I constantly have to keep in mind that my customers (the students) will soon be in a position to directly comment on my performance. If someone is clearly having a bad day, asking inappropriate or downright idiotic questions I've got to manage the situation in a constructive, not confrontational manner, and making sure it's a win / win for all three parties involved (i.e., the student with the problematic question, myself and the remainder of the class).

Third, each school rates us on student performance; as we don't mark on a curve in the UK, it is conceivable that everyone will pass. So I strive to make the material as presentable and as understandable as possible. I'm trying to help people improve themselves, get better jobs or just add to their knowledge; it's an awesome responsibility and having had poor professors at Uni, those who are either openly contemptuous of questions or downright difficult to deal with / get answers from, I vowed I'd never ever become one myself. I'd quit teaching first, I feel that strongly about such behaviour in the classroom.

Fourth, I bring the real world into the classroom as much as possible. I challenge the students to discuss current market events, and in fact deliberately seize between fifteen to thirty minutes of my three hour lecture for these off topic / non syllabus driven discussions of current events. I bring to each class several ideas / news links / etc, all current and relevant to the materials we are discussing that evening. For example, one evening I was to teach 'Cost of Captial', what return firms have to offer investors to purchase their shares or debt. Coincidentally at that time we had some very sharp equity market drops, so these current and real world events helped to illustrate not only the riskiness of the markets, but also how firms funding costs could rapidly change due to factors totally out of their control (i.e., equity market correction). Of course these events all over the newspapers, and by talking about it I seized upon something students were already aware of and likely to be asked about by family friends ("you're studying finance - what do you think ..."). So by pointing to current, real world events and challenging the students to bring in their own examples, I've found that interest and participation is markedly higher. At one Uni I have actually managed to migrate these off syllabus discussions to a bonus question on the final exam (a real struggle but we've done it), so student interest is clearly much, much elevated since we've now tied real world events into their self interest on a final exam.

Fifth, I don't drown the students in PowerPoint. My slides are very, very terse - no more than five points per slide, and we approach the topic from the point of view as a conversation, not lecture. The idea here is I engage the students, ask them questions, convince them they are already experts in finance - they just don't know it yet! So, drawing upon and doing the opposite of some professors I didn't care for when I was taking my degrees, I talk with my students, not to them. Again, no place to hide in my classes, we're all gonna have a nice chat about the markets, what's happened, what's happening and what's gonna happen what's your view on these questions and you know something ? You're gonna master this material while we're doing it. The knowledge sneaks up on them.

On the topic of contract to hire as a filter, I'm not so sure this would be effective. Both of my positions are contract, seems there is a lot of this going on in the UK academic markets, at least. I'd never seriously consider permanent. But I do have to go through the motions if offered, in fact this is a conversation I'm currently having with one Uni. I don't think I'd like permanent as for my situation if I can get fifty to sixty pounds a hour as a contractor, why on earth would I go permanent and have to integrate myself into the departmental politics, working more hours for far less money? I can easily do the math, quantify the bundled cost of benefits and holiday but truth be told, I already can see the drama and get more than enough exposure even when I'm just passing through, thank you very much.

Having a dog in those departmental fights wouldn't thrill me too much. And I like the way the power is structured at present; if something turns crappy at either Uni I can just sever the relationship when my contract expires at end of term.

At the end of the day, it's all about the students. Being on a tenure track would distract me from that focus.
posted by Mutant at 3:51 AM on December 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

At the end of the day, it's all about the students.

That says it all.
posted by RussHy at 4:55 AM on December 15, 2008

I found the football analogies distracting and, well, failing at their intended purpose. The comparison didn't illuminate the topic to me, it muddied the point and confused me as to the thesis of the article. It made me feel as if I was talking to some boor at a party who is so in love with his idea that he's unaware that he's tipsy and rambling.

A little odd to throw in such a disjointed analogy in an article about effective teaching methods, isn't it?

Regarding the teaching content of the article: don't undergraduate education majors still include coursework in child psychology, developmental cognitive milestones for different age groups, and require student-teaching fieldwork?
posted by desuetude at 7:35 AM on December 15, 2008

Gladwell, it appears, doesn't have a very clear idea about what makes a good teacher in part because he's drowning (as usual) in his own flabby extended metaphors. On the other hand, I don't think anyone else has a good lock on it either, and I think this is one of the problems we (as a culture, as a species) face when we look at dearly-held institutions like free public education for all, or free higher education, or whatever our respective societies hold as being valuable.

Here's a question I flip back and forth in my mind a fair amount, even though I don't teach anymore: What is a good teacher? Is that different from the answer to the question: What does a good teacher do? In either case: How do we measure this? What's our metric?

Until we come to some agreement here, I don't know that we're prepared to answer this question in any meaningful way. Are we concerned only with what the student can demonstrate she has retained between instruction time and test time? That's the model currently. Is that a meaningful model for assessing teaching acumen? Should it be? Are we really--honestly--concerned with education if we're interested only in the sorts of outcomes we can suss out with a Scantron?
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 7:52 AM on December 15, 2008

Mutant, you're teaching advanced students after a zillion layers of self-selection and selection by others have happened. You're seeing only those students who, in their own right and with the help of their families and with the help of earlier teachers, have successfully made it through primary school, and successfully made it through academic-oriented secondary school, and have successfully made it through university.

This isn't to impugn your teaching or disagree with anything you've said here, but there's not a whole lot of lessons to draw from that environment that apply to teaching everyone, including the ninety-odd percent of students who do not make it as far as graduate business school. You're seeing only students with some reasonably clear goal and reasonably high degree of self-motivation, instead of the full mix of everyone. You're seeing only people with reasonably useful study skills instead of the full mix of everyone. You're seeing only people with relatively high cognitive functioning or intelligence or whatever you want to call it instead of the full mix of everyone* that primary and secondary school teachers deal with. Likewise, what little I learned about teaching to elite undergraduates at my graduate school was next to useless as far as teaching at far more inclusive Big State U's went. And teaching at either tells me essentially nothing about teaching primary-school classes.

*Bar people with retardation or other mental/developmental disabilities.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:28 AM on December 15, 2008

For anyone still to read the article, I would recommend skipping the absurdly long paragraphs about football. No one should have time for that.
posted by theyexpectresults at 8:31 AM on December 15, 2008

In most industries you get paid for performance. Teachers get paid for length of service and education level. You want better teachers? Base their pay on performance. D.C. has an interesting proposal to get the teacher's union to agree to just such a proposal. I still don't see how they will be able to evaluate performance though.
posted by caddis at 9:07 AM on December 15, 2008

I'm going to offend the shit out of some people, but here goes: What type of people are attracted to a career in education in the first place? When I was in college, it tended to be people who couldn't decide on any other major, or who couldn't cut it in other majors and thus switched. Some seemingly had no interest in children at all; they just couldn't think of anything else to do. Yes, this is completely anecdotal, and subject to confirmation bias, but I still think it's worth a look.
posted by desjardins at 9:27 AM on December 15, 2008

i didn't become a really good teacher until my fifth year, and one big reason i became good was because i had resolved to quit. (i was no longer afraid of being fired.)

teaching really is intuitive and just as much of an art as it is a skill. (and managing a classroom of 25 is just a ridiculously stupidly onerous task for all involved.) it involves a willingness to constantly shift gears, change tactics, and individualize on a scale that is not encouraged in the modern classroom. (or even really possible, since it's all about teaching to the test. oh yes it is.)

i am now a substitute. and i have a unique perspective on just how lazy teachers get a few years in. they get tired, and their egos won't let them realize that much of the lameness of school stems from their own disinterest in innovation and new technology. if something works one year, you can bet that it becomes a permanent part of the year's teaching, whether it works subsequently or not. (if it doesn't work after that one time, it's somehow the students' fault.)

i will say this: being observed and critiqued has limited appeal for me. while i often get sort of awed kudos from teacher's aides who are in on my sub-days (which makes me wonder what the day-to-day teacher is like), i find it distracting and i don't teach my best when i'm worried about the opinions and criticisms of an observing adult. my talent as a teacher really comes out when i'm *only* interested in what the students are thinking, what their eyes are giving back to me. we bond as a group, in those moments. i can't do that in front of a camera or in front of the principal's narrowed eyes.

i left because of the drudgery of teaching to standardized testing, and because the whole thing's set up against both student and teacher. the idea of being judged based on test results only encourages cheating.

kids know who is a good teacher and who is not. it's as simple as asking *them*. the idea that they're not trustworthy, or that they hate "hard" teachers is bunk. it all balances out if you pay attention. but as i've said often in the blue before: kids should be the ones who decide which teachers they want and be matched with them according to teaching styles--parents and children should be allowed to be the "hirers" in a way. teachers in high demand will be paid more, and teachers who aren't in high demand would be invited to improve or quit.
posted by RedEmma at 9:40 AM on December 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

desjardins: you're right, mostly. i'm firmly of the opinion, based on long years of observation, that education majors (esp. elementary) are among the stupidest, most boring people on the planet. they often act as if they are drones in the system, and it contributes to the overall banality of schooling.

to be fair, however. i was attracted to teaching because i wanted to pass on my love of the subject (literature and writing) to others. also, i love teenagers. really, i do. i think that a lot of teachers go into it for those reasons. (unfortunately, many of them find that loving their subject isn't enough. teaching in the system is extremely hard work. to the point where to be good at it, you must basically devote your entire being to it. that's why i quit. i wanted more from life than just being a good teacher.)

also, i found out as the years went by, that teaching encourages egomaniacal behavior. this is not good.
posted by RedEmma at 9:54 AM on December 15, 2008

In most industries you get paid for performance. Teachers get paid for length of service and education level. You want better teachers? Base their pay on performance. D.C. has an interesting proposal to get the teacher's union to agree to just such a proposal. I still don't see how they will be able to evaluate performance though.

It still comes back to a problem with metrics, though. How do you prove that the kids are learning? Give 'em a standardized test. You link the teacher evaluations on how well their students do on a standardized test, and the teachers are pressured to teach the test like a robot. When your aim is to improve the average score of your students overall, it doesn't leave as much time for responsiveness or a longer learning arc or creativity or inspiration or music or art class.

Added to this is the issue of economic disparities. Testing students who are subject to the stressors that come with poverty isn't quite an even playing field, is it? Neither is the inability of a test to acknowledge a teacher far overcoming the shortcomings of a failing system. There are certainly plenty of dedicated teachers who can take a classroom of kids with poor diets and unstable home lives and teach them well with insufficient books and no gee-whiz technology in crumbling buildings. Certainly there are highly motivated kids with average teachers who will shine anyway. But the scores of these kids are going to be a little blip that can only make so much of a difference in a sea of undereducated kids within their school.

I'm not disagreeing with the idea of linking evaluation to performance. It's just so frustratingly difficult to come up with a fair system of assessment.
posted by desuetude at 10:43 AM on December 15, 2008

That's exactly why I think D.C. will fail even if they do get the union to agree to a two tiered system. Testing is not how businesses do it. There are generally some metrics, but mostly a good manager knows who the good employees are. For something like teachers you wouldn't want the manager to have to manage more than about a dozen or so employees. As mentioned up thread, student input should be quite important in this evaluation. The flip side of course is that public schools are creatures of politics and pressure from school boards or politically connected school administrators can distort the performance review process. For instance, the creationists have been on a mission as of late to take over local school boards. One can only imagine the havoc they could wreak in such a system.
posted by caddis at 11:28 AM on December 15, 2008

desjardins:
I majored in math with a minor in physics. I wrote my BA paper in gender studies. I could have gone on to further work in any of those things, but I chose to become a teacher. Now, you may be right that many people choose teaching for job security, but that is true of many professions.

Emperor Snookloze:
I don't think we have an absolute lock on what makes a good teacher, but I have some ideas.
1. "Withitness," as Gladwell describes it, is really important.

2. An ability to understand the material from the students' point of view and communicate about it in a way that makes sense to them. This is sorely lacking in most of the teachers I have known, even some of the pretty good ones. I am just getting the hang of it myself. If you read an elementary-level social studies or language arts textbook, you will see what I mean - tons of information presented completely removed from any meaningful context, so that it flies right over the heads of the students or goes in one ear and out the other.

3. Creativity in planning or the ability to steal creative plans from others. This must be contrasted with "gimmicky" instruction that just makes everything a game without making it meaningful.

4. "Big picture" thinking skills. You are trying to help the kids grow in a meaningful way, not just get them to simplify fractions correctly.

5. Attention to detail. Like what.

6. A no-nonsense demeanor that is simultaneously able to engage in silliness with the students sometimes.

7. Patience. Caring. Enthusiasm. Energy.

8. The ability to learn from your mistakes, to improvise and think on your feet when things aren't going well or when you sense a need in the students.

9. The ability to be really present with the kids. I can tell you from experience that this is the most profound gift that anyone can give to anyone else, and when you give it to your students, they will remember it.
posted by mai at 12:54 PM on December 15, 2008

I'm sorry, but this is something up with which I cannot stand:

Two were complete busts, and the last was so awful that after failing out of the N.F.L. he ended up failing out of the Canadian Football League as well.

Gladwell is claiming that the CFL is akin the NFL's kiddy league. This is just not true. Canadian football is similar but different game, with a different-shaped field, a different number of downs, and other differences. Don't insult us, please.
posted by Lemurrhea at 1:06 PM on December 15, 2008

kids know who is a good teacher and who is not. it's as simple as asking *them*.

Exactly. Once you get to grade 7 or 8, all the students know which teachers can actually teach and which ones are just phoning it in. Let the students have a say in getting rid of those terrible teachers. A system that got rid of even just the bottom 20% of bad teachers would improve public education enormously.
posted by ssg at 1:28 PM on December 15, 2008

I still don't see how they will be able to evaluate performance though.

Bingo.

There's a basic problem here if, as I suspect, good teaching tends to be more of an art than a science. You can identify elements of successful practice, you can get motivated and engaged people to practice them, but unless they have some inate sense for those practices, they're always going to be a little tone deaf.

What's more, while I think some of the metrics talked about in the article are interesting and do get at part of the heart of successful practice, which is progress, I suspect that even if you had a full complement of them, you're still going to have evaluation troubles. Why? It's the problem of hiring a good graphic designer or a good programmer: the person doing the hiring has to be as adept at understanding the metrics and the principles distilled behind them as the practitioner is at executing. The people in the article are, presumably, experts who can really, truly appreciate specific aspects of superior performers. So, you'll come on a new problem: some schools will have administrators and staff who are better at evaluating teachers than others. And that's if you get a full complement of good metrics, which I have my doubts about.

Not to say that rewarding performance is a fundamentally poor idea. It has a lot of merit. But it seems to me it's a phrase that's tossed around quite a bit, often without any acknowledgment of of the difficulty involved in quality assessments, and I think any plan that depends on it without a serious attempt to come to grips with the real struggle involved is not only going to fail, it's going to add chaos to the system.
posted by weston at 1:46 PM on December 15, 2008

I'm going to offend the shit out of some people, but here goes: What type of people are attracted to a career in education in the first place? When I was in college, it tended to be people who couldn't decide on any other major, or who couldn't cut it in other majors and thus switched.

For me, it was much the same thing that attracted me to metafilter. I like learning about things and talking/writing to other people about ideas. Likely a sign of some sort of deficiency.

(Curiously enough, though, I finished the B.S. in Math and not the B.A. in Math Ed, so...)
posted by weston at 1:47 PM on December 15, 2008

Mai:
I think your list is a fine one; I have no disagreements with what you lay out. On the other hand, can you measure those? Can you show me how those qualities directly correlate to how we conceive of student achievement? This is what I'm pointing at over all, I guess. I think anyone who's taught and put their all into it--sweated the small stuff and reveled in the little successes and mourned the quotidian failures--would have insights that are as smart and nuanced in their implications as yours.

I wish that were what's really valued. It's not.

The situation at the primary and secondary levels others can (and have, above) speak to more clearly than I; at the postsecondary level in the US (both 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions), the situation is even more fraught with the overproduction of graduate degrees, the rise of the helicopter parent, and the reliance on undercompensated contingent faculty who've no guaranteed income, never mind insurance nor the most fundamental protections from the vagaries of personality or a sour student evaluation.

If the kinds of characteristics you and I put stock in were really valued, I think teaching, how it's perceived, and perhaps education more generally in this country would look a lot different.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 5:12 PM on December 15, 2008

While this Gladwell article and Time's article on Rhee bring up some interesting points, neither address what society's end goal is for education. Are we striving to be ranked in the top10 countries based on how well the top kids score on math tests? Are we trying to make sure everyone can read at an 8th grade level? Should the goal of K-12 education be to push more kids to get college degrees? Or are we just trying to come up with an elaborate and cost-effective babysitting program for kids until they turn 18?

I think society needs to define what success is for K-12 education is before anyone can really start making real changes. Do we want to train all the kids to perform useful work in future corporate environments? Perhaps we should just start medical school at age 10 for everyone... that'll fix our healthcare system at the same time....
posted by mhh5 at 6:25 PM on December 15, 2008

desjardins: I'm going to offend the shit out of some people, but here goes: What type of people are attracted to a career in education in the first place?

My type I guess.
And I'm not offended. You asked a question and are seeking knowledge, so I guess it's just natural for me to want to supply an answer. And maybe that's part of my answer.

I love teaching. I love being an educator. Ever since I was a little girl, it's all I ever wanted to do. I loved everything about it. Kids would play astronaut and police and ballerina and I played school. I've taught for 20 years as an elementary teacher, reading specialist and now as a high school English teacher. I still get the same kick out of the reaction of a student who finally "gets it." That look in their eyes, that "light bulb" moment. I've never hated going to work and really enjoyed the kids and helping them to grow and learn new things. It's never been about the money for me. It's about the feeling of accomplishment, of pride in my students, of knowing that I did something for the future and tried to make it better.
posted by NoraCharles at 6:51 PM on December 15, 2008

Sometimes I think the people who are attracted to teaching are like people who want to train animals - people who are very interested in making connections and understanding how minds work.
Working for what NoraCharles calls the light bulb moment.

desjardins, for everybody you know who couldn't make up their mind about a major, I can show you a working professional who didn't really give a damn and just did what they could do fairly easily (though not truly well), or what their dad did, or whatever was the highest-paying major at the school where their mom was on the board of regents.

The first thing to think about in what makes a good teacher is that not all students are the same. When the article talks about engaging the students, and having eyes in the back of your head, that's some really subtle stuff. There are plenty of wee drama queens who do need to be shut down, and there are children who might be seen as well-behaved but are just not engaged. Knowing who's who and when to use which technique is an art, and not an easy one. mai is very right that this is not something even a very gifted teacher will always have in year one. I don't remember much talk of apprentice-teaching in this article - but if you're serving under a crap teacher...

For me, the answer is always "Have people in charge who know how to hire" which means you have to figure out to identify the people who should be in charge.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 8:39 PM on December 15, 2008

While this Gladwell article and Time's article on Rhee bring up some interesting points, neither address what society's end goal is for education.

Well, sadly this was kind of determined a long time ago and is at the root of a lot of the problems in the US educational system/philosophy. John Taylor Gatto's "Against School: How public education cripples our kids, and why" quotes Woodrow Wilson (then president of Princeton) speaking to the NYC School Teachers Association in 1909:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

And lays out the six basic functions of school according to Alexander Inglis, one of the architects of US education:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

What most of us think of as "education" is too dangerous to fall into the hands of the rabble, apparently.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:54 PM on December 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Emperor Snookloze:
Can you measure these qualities? Sure, why not. Get someone who is trained to do these things well and have them observe another teacher and take notes, and they will be able to tell you if that teacher engages in these behaviors often, sometimes, occassionally, or never. Granted, this isn't an objective or numerically robust measurement, it's a subjective measurement, but that's good enough for social science, right?

Can I correlate these measures of good teaching to increased student achievement? I don't have a full list of citations at my fingertips, nor is it neccessarily possible to do strict studies with a control group and such for all of these things, but research is being done - see the book
Writing Essentials by Regie Routman for info on 2, 3, 4, 8, and 9, and see also this website for links to some interesting research at the University of Chicago.
posted by mai at 12:57 PM on December 16, 2008