
Building a Better Teacher (2010) - mercer
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
======
stanleydrew
Not that this is particularly relevant, but this was written by my high-school
ex-girlfriend and she turned the article into a book:
[https://www.amazon.com/Building-Better-Teacher-Teaching-
Ever...](https://www.amazon.com/Building-Better-Teacher-Teaching-
Everyone/dp/0393351084)

She now runs a non-profit educational news network called Chalkbeat:
[https://www.chalkbeat.com/](https://www.chalkbeat.com/)

She's pretty smart regarding journalism and media stuff generally so if you're
working on something related shoot me an email (in profile) and I'll try to
make an intro if it seems interesting.

~~~
projektir
Unfortunately, it seems that the book provides a more historical account
(similar to the article) rather than specific teaching advice. Perhaps one
would be better off just going to Uncommon Schools[1] directly.

[1]: [http://www.uncommonschools.org/](http://www.uncommonschools.org/)

------
lr4444lr
This article was written in 2010. We have some standardized test data now on
one of the major case studies on merit pay and highly demanding hiring
criteria, which was featured in this article - The Equity Project school.
Results over the last 3 years have been tepid at best:

[http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2013-14/School_Quali...](http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2013-14/School_Quality_Snapshot_2014_EMS_M430.pdf)
[http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2014-15/School_Quali...](http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2014-15/School_Quality_Snapshot_2015_EMS_M430.pdf)
[http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2015-16/School_Quali...](http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2015-16/School_Quality_Snapshot_2016_EMS_M430.pdf)

~~~
projektir
The article doesn't really present it as a success, though:

> Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite
> teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably
> improving student learning.

Yet, I imagine you'd find it odd to suggest that better programmers shouldn't
be better compensated in some sense.

I think merit pay (or just higher pay) and high demands are too different
things, and the latter often destroys the benefit of the former. I recall
reading an article where teachers were measured on many different axes with
insane expectations. I imagine that works about as well as micromanaging a
programmer's time.

I don't know how the Equity Project was ran, exactly, but it's trivial to mess
that kind of thing up. Compensation is absolutely relevant to teacher quality:
_it has to be_. Pay and other factors (respect, benefits) influence how people
choose their profession, do they not? So it will influence who becomes a
teacher, so if we posit that teachers matter, this will have an effect. A
study is not required here.

And as I've noted in my other post, this didn't seem widespread or covered
well. Having one small program esoterically targeting some teachers and giving
them more money a large shift does not make. I'm not going to become a teacher
all of a sudden because one small program shows up that could theoretically
offer someone money anymore than I'll become a professional StarCraft player
because a small city in Canada is experimenting with basic income.

~~~
eastWestMath
Is Teach for America the one that recruits Ivey league grads and drops them
into classrooms in inner city classrooms? I always thought it was a wonderful
microcosm of everything wrong with the US system. The exact situation where
you need experienced teachers with deep ties to their community is where they
put Ivey league grads with no training, experience, or shared life experiences
with the students due to their wildly different socioeconomic class. It even
has the "white saviour" complex baked into it.

~~~
douche
Yes, it's that one. It's largely a glorified gap year (s) for Ivy Leaguers en
route to law school. They recruited hard at Dartmouth and I knew a score or so
who did that for a little while...

They don't even require rudimentary training or experience with teaching to
apply, nor even a plausibly applicable major.

------
Iv
One of these short story articles...

Any brave soul to provide a tl;dr? I understand that some journalists love to
write but for the love of God, if you have a point to make, make it! No need
to disguise it as a life story full of characters.

~~~
projektir
The article's point is that teaching is a skill that has not been taught well.
It talks about sets of skills that can be developed to manage a classroom as
well as skills that need to be developed to teach a given subject, with the
claim that these are not natural or automatic things, so if you don't teach
them to a teacher, they won't be able to, well, teach.

~~~
douche
My mother is a elementary special ed teacher with thirty years of experience,
and in addition to going back to school to get her masters a decade or so ago,
regularly takes on student teachers from the local state university.

Speaking with her, it sounds like teaching theory and technique has as much
churn and reinventing the wheel as software engineering. Everything old is new
again, eternally. Particularly with her students, in an economically
depressed, rural area, no amount of teaching skills can offset disinterested
parents, dysfunctional family life, hunger, and poverty. At least the poor
buggers get breakfast and lunch provided through the federal free and reduced
lunch programs; for a staggering number of her kids, those are the only hot
meals they get regularly.

~~~
clort
> Particularly with her students, in an economically depressed, rural area, no
> amount of teaching skills can offset disinterested parents, dysfunctional
> family life, hunger, and poverty.

Surely the endgame is that an effective teacher can, despite all of this,
still attempt to engage with the student and engender some kind of interest in
learning the basic skills that they need to survive in the adult world? Maybe
every student won't get it but the better that the teacher is at doing this,
the better results they will have, with any population.. if this skill set is
not natural then teaching the teachers to develop these skills will in turn
increase their effectiveness?

Identifying the skill set is the difficult part, I think .. and the churn in
teaching theory is in part because nobody really is able to define what is
successful or not and an election cycle is far shorter than the time needed to
prove any particular method.

------
EGreg
Why not flip the classroom? Why not motivate students by giving them freedom
in exchange for achievement? Why not foster in them a sense of self-direction
and responsibility?

School should be for socializing, working through problems together, study
groups and tutoring!!

~~~
jawbone3
Students are a heterogenous group of individuals, not all students take well
to being given freedom and just perform poorly. Likewise, not all take well to
rigid instruction and rebell or slide into apathy. But most try to adapt and
struggle through it.

------
projektir
Wow, this is a great article. This is the first time I'm reading an article
about teaching that actually makes the profession _more_ attractive. I read a
good amount about teaching but have never come across this. First time that
I'm reading about proper teaching techniques in general, let alone Lemov's
taxonomy.

> As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban
> Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in
> part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t.

The idea that only a select group of individuals possessing a certain voodoo
are capable of performing a certain task effectively is very pervasive. It
also kills the desire to work on one's approaches, learn new things, and
otherwise develop skill. I would say it should be considered harmful, whether
we're talking about teachers or programmers...

> They decided that rather than buy talent, they would try to build it.

It's fairly rare to see anyone actually bother _building_ talent. The
expectation generally is that the person is either ready or useless.

> Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the
> average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’
> students left with below-average results year after year.

This seems is not congruent with what I've been reading about teaching in the
past few years: that student outcomes have mostly to do with the student's
aptitude, and that teachers have a limited effect[1].

Intuitively, I feel that teachers (and other environmental factors) /should/
be able to have a large effect, and anecdotes about highly influential
educators abound, yet other studies seem to make teachers look close to
irrelevant compared to IQ.

Of course, these things are kind of related. The belief in the idea that you
can train teachers implies that you should be able to train students.

> Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn
> as much as $130,000 a year.

Haven't heard about this, either. Both myself and people I talk to continue to
perceive teaching as a low paying profession. Given that the article is from
2010, perhaps those programs have died out by now.

Awarding high salaries only to amazing teachers may not be terribly
productive, though, especially if the measure is not reliable and people don't
feel confident about it. Measuring teachers too much or too strictly causes
all sorts of problems[2]. But I could scarcely imagine if teaching was overall
perceived as a respected profession with a high salary ceiling and decent
autonomy that it wouldn't have a large community of people to work out
something similar to Uncommon Schools. Correct incentives absolutely align
people to solve problems.

A lot of the techniques seem like they could have more general application as
communication skills. Communication and social skills are still one of those
things that are perceived as "voodoo" and haven't been documented terribly
well.

> Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math
> teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might
> understand (or misunderstand) it.

This point is one of the reasons I could never agree with the idea that if a
person understands something, they can teach it. Those are just not the same
thing and being able to teach is its own skill.

[1]:
[https://rogertitcombelearningmatters.wordpress.com/2015/01/0...](https://rogertitcombelearningmatters.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/closing-
the-gap/)

[2]: [https://disidealist.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/im-not-an-
outst...](https://disidealist.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/im-not-an-outstanding-
teacher-nor-is-anyone/?wref=tp)

