In the new issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on teacher quality is notable for what it’s not. Mostly, it’s not about teaching. The majority of the article is about football. Gladwell spills an inordinate amount of ink describing how college quarterbacks are evaluated and how hard it is to determine who will succeed in the NFL based solely on their college performance. Gladwell is making the same point about teachers: for all the attention to advanced degrees and other certification requirements, you can’t really know who will be a good teacher until they get to the classroom.
When he finally gets around to looking at teachers, Gladwell looks at videotapes of teachers with the Dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, Bob Pianta, who has developed a system for evaluating student-teacher interactions. “Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success,” Gladwell writes.
“Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible,” Gladwell writes. ”But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.”
Point taken. Gladwell concludes that teaching “should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.” He also estimates we’d need to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. “That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now,” he notes.
Over at This Week in Education, A-Rus says “Gladwell has no real way of getting us out of the current system of certification and tenure.” Fine, but that’s not his job. If you point out that the Emperor has no clothes you’re not a failure if you don’t throw a robe over him. Gladwell’s piece adds light, not just heat, to discussions about teacher preparation, training, certification and tenure. Perhaps most importantly, the article has precious little to say about test scores, offering instead a nuanced view of what is and is not effective practice. If articles like this also help move us past the “by their test scores shall ye know them” way of thinking about the teaching profession, and help start a conversation about what good teaching looks like, Gladwell’s done a useful service.
Bob Pianta and his quality measure (Classroom Assessment Scoring System; http://www.brookespublishing.com/store/books/pianta-class/index.htm) are getting a lot of due press these days.
The reference section of the newly updated statment of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (NAEYC, 2008) is showered with Pianta’s work. There’s a real focus in the document on the importance of teacher-child relationships and interactions.
The Office of Head Start is offering an on-demand presentation of its Webcast discussion on the regionally-based trainings being conducted on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) instrument.
For a look at some examples of what great teacher-child interactions look like, visit the “Classroom Assessment Scoring System” website (http://classobservation.com/). A picture is worth a thousand words, and there are some great examples on the site. A full look requires subscription, but there are some free examples.
How about asking the kids and parents? Bet they have a clue.
I tend to agree, Norm, and I’d add teachers and administrators too, although perception is not reality. For example, if you were to divide the teachers in my elementary school into two groups and ask the first group to name the five best teachers in the school, and the second group name the five teachers with the best control of their class, I’d bet real money the consensus of the two groups would be the same for four out of five. I taught in a school were control was the coin of the realm. While it’s easy to laugh at the idea that an experienced pro can recognize a good teacher in two minutes, I will wager that many can, if for no other reason than they are keyed in to the factors Pianta has indentified — even if it’s unconscious.
Gladwell has discovered something the union learned 30 years ago. Regardless how how well we scout out the talent, there will be a certain percentage who need to be efficiently removed from the profession.
Its not hard to identify the ineffective teachers, and data should help make the process more efficient. But its takes a collaborative relationship between the union and management in order to get rid of ineffective teachers. As long as the data tail is trying to wag the dog, unions can’t clean up our profession because we can’t sign on to an inappropriate and indefensible method of terminating teachers. Why go out on this wierd quest for a quantitative model for terminating teachers? Numbers should be a tool for humans, not the other way around.
A teacher (just like a quarterback) value is not only given by his talent, but also by how he mix up with his team, how he prepares him self and what training tehniques he’s using (anda talking about teaching tehniques and tools I highly recommend you http://www.standardstoolbox.com).