What makes a great teacher?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
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!)
Randall Munroe (xkcd) has make a similar observation.
There are a number of levels in teaching (and learning). You learn the basic facts (or processes), you learn to apply them in simple situations, and you learn to apply them creatively. This can be tested by multiple-choice tests, or more in-depth tests, but multiple-choice is fairly reliable and very cheap.
Besides, the difference between a "good" and "bad" student is pretty easy to measure, if you look at the broad population.
Yes it is, by definition. Once people are "smart", in the Feynman sense, there's no need for anyone to teach them a subject - they're self-motivated learners that will seek them out on their own.
You learn the basic facts (or processes), you learn to apply them in simple situations, and you learn to apply them creatively.
Although somehow intuitive, I don't think that's a good model. What are "basic facts"? What is a "simple situation"? What does it mean to "apply facts creatively"? All of these are vaguely intuitive but not well defined, with no epistemological basis. There is a much better definition of learning - the ability to create models of our experiences, test, and refine them. I know of no reason a cheap test can't be devised to test such learning, nor of any attempts to create one.
1 - I'm focusing on basic proficiency (a bottom up approach - you learn the basics then the hard stuff is easy), you are focusing on learning through break-through discoveries (the top-down approach). (I may be creating a false hierarchy, but I'm going to run with it).
2 - I am focusing on teachers directly teaching students, while you focus on teaching students to be self-motivated learners.
Now, I can't think of any way to teach self-motivated break-through learning. The closest thing I can think of is to make subjects interesting (getting teachers who are enthusiastic about the subject, and providing interesting text books (yeah-right)), and give the students free time to pursue their own interests (which is why I half-jokingly suggested outlawing homework). The other model I've seen (don't teach properly so students have to learn) seems a little perverse to me.
(oh, the basic facts -> simple application -> creative use? Fact - past tense. Simple application - what did Spot do? Creative (or complex) use - Why did Spot do it?)
Addition and multiplication can easily be self-discovered, and, if they are, expanded to exponentiation, tetration, and Knuth's up-arrow notation [1]. The recursive relationship between x+...+x, x...x, x^...^x, etc isn't beyond most kid's minds.
Regarding #2, again, let's not be vague. Let's define teaching as creating motivation to learn - through grades, or social rewards, or whatever. Let's define "learning" as the acquisition of models. Using this model, the role of a "great teacher" becomes obvious - it isn't transplanting a models from one mind to another, but motivating the creation and evaluation of one's own models.
I'm glad you brought up "past tense" as an example of a "fact". I'll agree that we have a common experience of time (and hence, "the past"), but will note that communicating about past events is innate (no need to learn it). However modeling verbs as "past tense" or "future tense" is a trivial linguistic model - a intuitively comfortable model, but without much evidence - incapable of describing reality - in this case, our innate abilities for language.
Proof that one goal necessarily excludes the other? Right now we are getting neither, in most cases in most schools, so what Teach for America is looking at seems to be progress to me.
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.
The following article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers3-2009may03,...
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.
Teaching under Teach for America is a 2-year volunteer gig with unsustainably long hours.
If the unions were to disappear tomorrow I just don't think you'd be able to generate enough enthusiastic effective young people at that burn rate to fill out the entire system.
In many suburban schools, it's actually pretty easy for a group of involved parents to pressure the district to not renew the next year's contract of a new teacher they don't like, as long as it's done before the teacher is tenured (~three years in my state). Maybe this is one reason schools without a critical mass of involved parents suffer under the current system.
The TFA program itself is volunteer, but it's not like these people are teaching for free.
Bashing unions is a popular right-wing ad hominem, but there are two equally recalcitrant partners in education equally to blame for educational deficiencies: school boards and parents.
This is well known to the most eminent economists of education. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)
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.
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.
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.
Way to miss the point. :/
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.