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Comment by kabisote | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you were building an online school, how do you find great teachers and how do you convince them to create and offer their lessons online?

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You pay them handsomely rather than the pittance they receive from most schools. Great teachers are worth it.

This. And give them autonomy, and extra time for training/curriculum development/introspection when they want it.

How do you do that? Isn't it true that with the way teachers are organized you pay everyone the same based on some blanket criteria like seniority? So you can't pay the good ones handsomely without also paying the bad ones well, which breaks the bank. If you try you get some combination of union/legal/government action that ties you up.

In principle the solution is trivial. You raise the bar for becoming a teacher (supply will grow as well if salaries are much higher and there are these benefits like respect and autonomy). And then if some bad teachers do get in, the institution uses personalized oversight (in the form of "good" teachers observing and critiquing "bad" ones), and any problem teachers are given a smaller load with additional training. In other words, you invest to make all the teachers good.

The question is whether public schools have the funding to do this, and that's a more political question.

So far "raising the bar" has just meant more hoops to jump through and make-work/rubber stamp masters programs just for teachers.

I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect a math teacher to be on par with the average person who gets a math Bachelor's. The reality today is that math teachers take special "watered down" math courses with lowered expectations and less work. I know because I witnessed it first hand.

Funding is not really relevant. You can't do that in a big institution. Much less with fixed grants from government.

"If you were building an online school", you could do that. But if you manage a public school, you have no chance.

Right. It's political because school funding is tied to land and house taxes and such.

Teachers are not all organized like that. Just the ones for public schools.

Isn't that the majority of them? I don't know the numbers. That's why I'm asking.

"If you were building an online school", by definition you'd be organizing the teachers yourself.

Another thread said it. Pay them well.

You pay me a nice salary and let me interact with students who want to learn and I will gladly develop great curriculum and deliver excellent results.

> ... let me interact with students who want to learn

the key to being a great teacher is engaging the ones that don't want to learn.

I respectfully disagree that motivating students and educating them must necessarily be done by the same person. The best teachers should be reserved for the best students if we want to get the best results. Forcing your best teachers to babysit wastes their time and drives them into better careers.

That'll entirely depend on how you define the word "great", and just means you and the GP are talking about different kinds of teaching, done by different teachers, aimed at different students.

I have been nominated for teaching excellence awards by students who didn't want to learn when they entered my classroom. I am considered by many to be a great teacher based on my student evaluations and peer feedback.

But it's tiring and taxing, and it takes time away from interacting with the people who do want to be there.

These little quips like yours usually come from people who have never taught a diverse group of students before, and they are condescending to people who dedicate their lives to teaching others.

> These little quips like yours usually come from people who have never taught a diverse group of students before, and they are condescending to people who dedicate their lives to teaching others.

I've been a high school teacher the past 12 years.

Then you should know how condescending it sounds to have someone say the equivalent of "Well if you were good at your job you could make everyone learn."

> "Well if you were good at your job you could make everyone learn."

I never said this.

At BetterLesson[1], we have found them and made all their excellent lessons available online for free (Grades K-12). These lessons are mainly for teacher consumption, but have some great teaching strategies for all to learn. Some examples: http://betterlesson.com/lesson/432502/intro-to-trigonometry-... http://betterlesson.com/lesson/448934/adding-and-subtracting...

[1] http://betterlesson.com/master_teacher_projects

I think you'll find this already happens: http://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/teacher-makes-1-million-se...

In short, implement a free market system! Elaboration, let the students choose teachers, and based on the data you get from that, pay the teachers, and have this data out in the open, so teachers can see what influences their remuneration.

That just creates a system to be gamed. :-(

Would this not reward teachers who give the students the best experience, rather than the best education. I think it would be naive to expect students to be rational actors* in this market.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice-theory.a...

Freedom and money.

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