More on Teacher Quality

An excellent long piece by Elizabeth Green in the NY Times magazine covering some of the same ground as the Atlantic and New Yorker articles I flagged earlier:

The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years.

Which raises the question: can people become better teachers, or is it just a talent you are born with or without? So far, most of the responses to the new data have been calls to fire bad teachers and hire better ones, getting a "different caliber of person" into the classroom. But is there any way we help mediocre teachers become good teachers? Over the next decade, America's schools are going to hire about a million teachers, and one doubts there are a million people out there who have some kind of freakish natural talent for the profession.

Green's article is mostly about teacher training, and new attempts to make teachers better. One of the leaders here is Doug Lemov, who thinks that effective teaching depends on a set of techniques that almost anyone can learn. Lemov created this list by tracking down the best teachers in the country, based largely on their students' test scores, videotaping their classes, and asking them how they teach. These great teachers were full of simple techniques; one told him, "stand still when you give directions." One very common technique among the star teachers is cold calling; rather than letting students volunteer answers, they always call on someone, and usually they ask the question first, so all the students are scrambling to think of an answer.

I am attracted to this sort of thing myself. I was personally given no instruction whatsoever in how to teach before I started. Once at Indiana University the professor for whom I was a TA came and observed me, and that was very valuable to me, since he pointed a couple of mannerism foibles that probably did detract from my presentation. Since then, nothing.