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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.

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Yes, as always, we like people to be good at their jobs instead of being bad at their jobs.

But, I think teaching skills, juuuust like any other skills can be taught and improved. So if we want good teachers and educators we need to build them up, not just relie on a few good ones to carry the day.

I personally reject the notion of competency in this as a matter of "giftedness", as something you either have or don't have. I think it's something you cam build. It's something you can teach. But you need to specifically aim for it.

You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.

> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers

…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.

> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence

What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.

So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.

> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.

I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.

There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.

Oh yeah I mean theoretically possible, not practical, haha.

Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.

> Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036.

Yes? I don't understand what you're trying to argue here. Rising standards does shift expectations. But this all sounds good. So I really don't understand what you're trying to get at.

> if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough

There are several confounding factors. It might be that teachers getting better led to better students, it might be that universal access to information led to better students. I think you're overreaching with the claim that if students get better, it means instructors got better. But, sure, let's imagine I agree. So? I am of the belief that there is a ton of room for improvement.

I think that your post stems from the belief of 2 things. That education is zero sum. And that education has a filtering function not a quality improvement function. Both of which, I deeply deeply disagree with.

I do agree in the abstract that the "human social ranking" will be just as stratified as today. But that does not preclude many many classes of improvements.

Again, sorry if I am reading too much into your position, but I feel as if you run on a set of assumption here that you expect I share with you and that to me, feel alien.

who will train them ? average trainers. it's a chicken/egg problem

I think in this case, it was a teacher who is motivated, committed and focused on efficient, effective direct instruction followed by practice.

But I believe your point is great — we usually focus on average vs non-average student, and you are absolutely right that we need to focus on an average teacher just the same: what is the most effective way for a possibly non-motivated, less capable teacher to provide instruction with?

There’s a massive amount of duplicated effort in curriculum creation.

If the really gifted are documenting their lessons and publishing the framework other really good teachers can pickup where they left off.

Having those curriculums in a standard format would go a long way to making components interchangeable and remixable.

Just like in learn-by-doing, I believe some of it has to be done by the teacher themselves — by feeling where the pain is, they'll better focus on what matters.

Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)

the market also prices out these gifted teachers.

you either struggle to pay the bills and teach -- a thankless job, often -- or you take those gifts and double your pay working in industry.

I agree. We seem to enjoy getting excited about ways of improving education in our heads, but somehow keep forgetting or think lightly about the actual teachers in reality.

Teachers are always going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks: no matter what fancy perfect education method people come up with, it's still not going to be any better than what an average teacher can teach. Or equivalently, what an average teacher understands herself. And in fact, the greater the discrepancy between the theory and the teachers, the worse the actual outcome will probably be...

If we still want to introduce some new fancy ways, at the very least, we have to begin by teaching the teachers, not the students. I think this is true even if we suppose that all the teachers are "gifted" so to speak. Otherwise, teaching isn't a science so each teacher will just do things their own way, which again will probably be a mess. Even gifted people are not all the same. Or if we say that's ok, then we wouldn't need an education system to begin with: just let each teacher teach in their own way and the world should still be great a place-- but I doubt it.

On a side note, I've come to see textbooks as a great invention in that sense: the students can learn a bare minimum even from the dumbest teacher as long as you make sure they follow the text book. Put another way, the textbook is like a baseline meta-teacher teaching the teacher along with the students.. I'm not a teacher myself but I have a lot of teachers around me including family members from whom I've heard this.

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