

What makes a great teacher? - jseliger
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

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

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

~~~
patio11
_I wonder what limitations there are to using standardized testing for
evaluating "progress"?_

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

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

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

Randall Munroe (xkcd) has make a similar observation.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
As soon as you start measuring something and attaching organizational outcomes
to the results, you encourage gaming.

~~~
tokenadult
As above, better that what people are pursuing is student learning than
spending per school.

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

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

~~~
andrew1
I'm no great fan of unions in general but teaching unions do provide important
advice, support and representation to teachers. There have been enough cases
of teachers being wrongly sacked over false claims by children of abuse etc.
that I can understand teachers wanting to belong to an organisation which will
help defend them if they're ever in that situation. You could argue that that
could happen in any profession - I could be wrongly accused of stealing from
the office I work in - but child abuse is a more sensitive issue than most and
schools can feel pressured to appear to be 'protecting children' and perhaps
more cynically to not want to take the risk of a repeat incident bringing more
bad publicity.

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

The following article:

[http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
teachers3-2009may03,...](http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
teachers3-2009may03,0,5765040,full.story)

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

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

~~~
roc
As with most every human organizational construct: They were created for good
reason and have done good things, but are inevitably perverted over time.

------
patio11
Teach for America recruits smart, young graduates and aggressively researches
and optimizes what works so that they can teach kids better. They're covered
extensively in the article and they're one of my favorite organizations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
boredguy8
OK, having read the whole article, it seems like energetic people who buy in
to what they're doing are more likely to be successful than people who despair
at their ability to control their outcome. People highly energetic about where
they're going are more likely to work harder at it, so that's not all that
surprising.

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

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

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

Sounds like software development, too.

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

Way to miss the point. :/

------
edw519
_Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor
reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in
hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another
has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You
know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your
hand._

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

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

~~~
boredguy8
He's also a pretty cool cat. Not like I'm making a fan club or anything, but
yeah.

