It seems silly to have 1,000 teachers who range from first best to 1,000th best all teaching roughly the same number of students a year. Why not give the top 10 best teachers all the resources they need then let them teach everyone?
There were just one or two persons in the whole faculty known for good teaching. This was acknowledged by all students I came in touch with.
--> There is a kind of teaching that is uniquely perceived as "good" among the people I came in touch with.
The same holds for teachers known for really bad teaching.
That written, teaching _was_ mostly perceived binary.
There was fairly little overlap where teaching styles were perceived "good" from some and "bad" from others.
Caveat here that I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I would also say that this fits well with the part of the teaching process that can be scaled with no downsides, eg lectures. But TA sessions etc can't be scaled as well and such an approach wouldn't fit.
Who defines best? Why not give all the resources to one teacher?
Re your 2nd question: bus factor. And the same answer as the first - that you can have different definitions of best depending on the pupil.
I don’t know tbh. Feels wrong though.
Firstly, bus factor. Then robustness. How do you train new teachers? How do they get experience? Then theres diversity of thought, where do you get that from if everyone has the same progenitor of thoughts?
Then what happens politically when you give such a few number of people such power. Would fundamentally change politics.
What abuses of power? Let the wrong person into those few teachers and give them lots of control over millions of children's day to day lives? Thats a lot of children to screw up if you get it wrong.
That aside, it goes against my personal belief about how the world and humans work so I can’t get down with it.
All the well-meaning but naive plans to turn education into mass media would with up with all the wealthy zip codes having teachers and everyone else relying on glorified youtube.
At this point, if there’s an education problem where technology would be useful, it’s probably something subtle like collaborating to publish an affordable textbook as a way to break monopoly pricing.