Improving teaching

Really interesting piece in Slate on how we shouldn’t just fire sub-par teachers, but work harder to make them  better, as there are actually known techniques to prove teaching.  Now, there’s a hell of an idea– working with teachers to help them improve.  I think it’s safe to say most school districts don’t really budget for that.

I’ve been watching a lot of new graduate students in the college classroom for years and definitely believe that a lot of teaching abilitiy is simply innate.  Great teachers are born, not made.  Some people have it in them, others don’t.  But that said, a great teacher is someone with very good natural ability who works to become great.  And, along the same lines, a mediocre teacher can certainly work to become good (and I’ve definitely seen it happen).  And as parents and citizens, having our kids taught by good, rather than mediocre teachers would be a huge difference (realistically, not all teachers are ever going to be great).  My take has always been that one’s abilities create a natural minimum and maximum of classroom performance.  But it’s a pretty decent range and we should do all we can to help support teachers get towards the top of that range.  And, hey, if they are truly topping out at not very good, then, of course, they need to find a new profession and public policy should help make that happen.

Anyway, here’s a bit from the Slate piece:

If we take firing off the table, what else can be done to resolve America’s education crisis? The findings of several recent studies by psychologists, economists, and educators show that—despite many reformers’ claims to the contrary—it may be possible to make low-performing teachers better, instead of firing them. If these studies can be replicated throughout entire school systems and across the country, we may be at the beginning of a revolution that will build a better educational system for America.

The view that good teachers are born, not made, is based on the many studies that have found that various training credentials and certifications have no effect on a given teacher’s “value-added,” the amount by which he or she increases the test scores of students above and beyond what you’d expect based on their performance in earlier grades. A degree in education seems to make no difference. Nor do higher salaries. (Value-added measures have their ownset of critics, who wonder whether the measures—or even the underlying test scores—capture anything of use. Yetrecent research does suggest that the students of high value-added teachers go on to earn significantly more later in life.)

The view that good teachers are born, not made, is based on the many studies that have found that various training credentials and certifications have no effect on a given teacher’s “value-added,” the amount by which he or she increases the test scores of students above and beyond what you’d expect based on their performance in earlier grades. A degree in education seems to make no difference. Nor do higher salaries. (Value-added measures have their ownset of critics, who wonder whether the measures—or even the underlying test scores—capture anything of use. Yetrecent research does suggest that the students of high value-added teachers go on to earn significantly more later in life.)

But there’s a big difference between saying that we have yet to find an approach that has been shown to have a measurable impact on a teacher performance and claiming that none exists.  [emphasis mine]…

Cincinnati’s approach combines evaluation by expert teachers—who observe classroom performance and also critique lesson plans and other written materials—with feedback based on those evaluations, to help teachers figure out how to improve. The study that professor Staiger described, by Eric Taylor of Stanford and John Tyler of Brown, focused on teachers in grades 4-8 who were already in the school system in 2000, which allowed the researchers to examine, for a given teacher, the test scores of their pupils before, during, and after evaluation was performed and feedback received…

The results of the study suggest that TES-style feedback and coaching holds promise—Taylor and Tyler estimate that participating in TES has an effect on students’ standardized math test scores that is equivalent to taking a teacher that is worse than three-quarters of his peers and making him about average. The effects of participation only get stronger with time:

Sounds great to me.  Of course, this would involve more money and changing the status quo on how we approach teacher development.  I’d also love to see a study on the impact of genuine teacher apprenticeship.  6 weeks or so of student teaching is simply not enough.  When it comes to actually using education policy to improve schools, it seems that improving teacher quality is the way to go.  Time to get much smarter about that in whatever ways we can.

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