14 ms·

Can good teaching be taught?

196 points by MarkMc 8y ago

zombie2 8y ago
yes but you have to have the personality for teaching
- badrabbit 8y ago
  Personality can't be taught?
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    There are innate character traits in each of us. Of course education/training/practice can move the needle a little up or down, but you can't really turn a very introvert person into a very extrovert one, for example.
    - badrabbit 8y ago
      Why not? I am extremely introverted, I became that way as a result of adapting to and learning from my life experience. Why can't I be taught through experience and having to adopt to uncomfortable situations, to become extremely extroverted? There is a reason the military has a bootcamp,it's to break your personality so they can form a new personality that can take orders and lives without hesitation.
      - ekianjo 8y ago
        Being able to obey and follow discipline does not mean it changes your personality. Proof is, once men return to the civil life, nobody in their family says that they are a different person or something. The core personality remains. Unless they have developed PTSD or something but that's trauma, not training.
        badrabbit 8y ago
        The military made an ondemand killer out of them,how would civilians measure that change. The military doesn't make you a different person,nicer or meaner,the change they instill is simple -- your personality will obey lawful orders and work in a team.
  - shawn 8y ago
    Not without being fake. People can change over time, but the core "being" of a person – what they're really like – tends to stay static. Here's a specific example. You can be taught to overcome a fear of getting up onstage. You can't be taught to love and relish when you find just the right metaphor to convey an idea to a class. The latter gives you a dopamine hit, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, then you have an uphill battle. From Mathematical Writing, on Donald Knuth: > Don’s secret delight, he confessed today, is to “play a library as if it were a musical instrument.” Using the resources of a great library to solve a specific problem—now that, to him, is real living. One of his favourite ways to spend an afternoon is amongst the labyrinthine archives, pursuing obscure cross-references, tracking down ancient and neglected volumes, all in the hope of finding the perfect quotation with which to open or conclude a chapter. Don takes great pleasure in finding a really good aphorism with which to preface a piece of writing. So many people have written so many neat things down the ages, he said, that it behooves us to take every opportunity to pass them on. Don has been known to take such a liking to a phrase that he has written an article to publish along with it. > So how are we to find that wonderfully apposite quotation with which to preface our term paper? Serendipity, said Don. Live a full and varied life, read widely, keep your eyes and ears open, live long and prosper. You will stumble across great quotations. For example, Webster defines ‘bit’ as “a boring tool”—Don was able to use this when introducing a computer science talk. Of course, this isn't necessarily applicable to high school teaching, which is more about legally-mandated babysitting than about teaching. But the core question is an intriguing one.
    - badrabbit 8y ago
      > Here's a specific example. You can be taught to overcome a fear of getting up onstage. You can't be taught to love and relish when you find just the right metaphor to convey an idea to a class. "to love and relish" ,that's they key phrase here. Why can't I be taught to love and relish _____? For example,you need a specific personality to be a truck driver. The lifestyle of a driver is extreme and demands that you enjoy some of those extremes. Why can't a person be taught to enjoy sitting in a truck for 8 hours and driving along a boring rural route all day long and waking up in a different state every morning? Why can't a person be taught to enjoy planting ideas in people's minds? It may fall under "psychological education" as opposed to "academic education",but I don't understand why it can't be taught.
  - mathattack 8y ago
    You can’t teach someone to care. Teachers that don’t care deeply can’t push through all the barriers to succeed.
    - badrabbit 8y ago
      Why can't you teach someone to care? Why can't you explain to someone why exactly you care and help them to understand and accept your reasoning? As an example,there are lots of health care workers that get into it for the money and start caring about patients(and vice versa). I for example care,I would love the process of teaching but I would be terrible at everything else. To be a good teacher,the biggest requirement imo is to be a good student. Much like how you need to be a good worker before you become a manager and how you need to be a good soldier before you give orders to other soldiers. I just think "can't" is too strong of a claim that demands a clear and logical rationale to back it up.
      - mathattack 8y ago
        I concur that teachers should be good students, as well as your analogy that managers should be good workers. In both cases it’s necessary but not sufficient.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Not the way a physical technique, programming, cooking, etc., can. There's an intangible aspect what cannot even define, much less teach. We can just mimic some external trappings. That said, you can try and influence towards a certain personality/passion/etc. But it's not like "follow this X,Y and you'll get the Z result" guaranteed like teaching regular stuff. It requires innate drive.
    - badrabbit 8y ago
      I agree,the methodology might need to be tailored for the individual,much like a treatment by a psychotherapist. But if it can be taught,it's worth teaching every teacher.
  - Kagerjay 8y ago
    Not really. Unless you love teaching you will always be a mediocre teacher at best. E.g., most teachers who say "Just google it" or "It is what it is" or "Its beyond the scope of this lecture" are generally not very good teachers. A good teacher is always inquisitive in knowing his/her audience, and formulating strategies to bridge that gap. The best teachers know exactly what the students struggles are, generally because they were in that same position as well. Great teachers formulate 100's of ideas and processes to identify which knowledge is worth telling at that moment, and which should be deferred for later. These same people will plan out exactly what the whiteboard will look like, before even lifting their marker. I personally am not a great teacher... it doesn't excite me really. Partially because I have had to teach too many people that are not very good at picking up things, despite how many different methods I try. Also, because I've had to do a lot of sales work in my life... teaching is not that far different, having to repeat myself all the time can get frustrating. Plus, you don't get a return on investment on every student some are beyond help... and it makes you less inclined to want to teach others that are more capable. There was a phase where I really enjoyed teaching but I am past that point now. I used to teach Elementary School/2nd grade at University, and did alot of tutoring from highschool to college. The passion might come again in the future, but its not today. You don't have to be extroverted to be a good teacher, but you have to really enjoy planting ideas/seeds in others. Great teachers are also great storytellers too. I wouldn't enjoy teaching unless it was paving a means for me to practice on making youtube tutorials, etc - where that content lives forever, and you no longer have to repeat yourself.
    - badrabbit 8y ago
      You mentiones mostly methodologies,those can be taught. Enjoying the method or process is the personality aspect. I am of the opinion that you can be taught to enjoy just about anything.
      - Kagerjay 8y ago
        You can copy and learn methodologies, but great teachers are also great innovators in teaching methodologies. A good teacher always seeks a simpler analogy to explain just about everything. Someone who just copies things verbatim will have a harder time coming up with original ways of explaining difficult concepts.
  - jayalpha 8y ago
    Pick up skills can be learned, leadership can be learned, why not personality? "If you don't like yourself, invent another one."
jimhefferon 8y ago
It is hard to see how many children could possibly succeed: > Most of all, Gunner worried about her students, most of whom lived in four low-income apartment complexes, which saw a lot of transiency. Thirty-seven percent of the school’s students arrived or left midyear. The day before, a family showed up looking to enroll and was so poor that both the adults and children were barefoot and hoping for a free school lunch as much as classroom seats. When a school-board member asked Gunner at a district event early in the year what she needed as a new principal, Gunner immediately said a washer and dryer, so she could wash the clothes that many students wore day after day. Many students had experienced trauma — the violent death of a loved one or homelessness or physical, sexual or verbal abuse — and arrived in the mornings in emotional distress, easily dissolving into tears or erupting in fury. Over long weekends, students sometimes went untended or had little to eat, which made returning to school both welcome and difficult. Yet the school had only one full-time social worker and a counselor for more than 450 children.
- deleted 8y ago
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- scarejunba 8y ago
  Reading Evicted, I got the same picture. These kids are going to be constantly changing schools. They're not going to be able to learn reasonably.
- turingcompeteme 8y ago
  Exactly. It's not about the teachers. My sister was an award winning teacher when she was at a good school. Now that she teachers on the edge of a reserve she has suddenly become "low performing". Take 50 ideal teachers who have all the best training and have learned all the best techniques, and put them in a low scoring school. The test scores of the school will not improve. Most of the teachers will be focused on surviving until they can transfer elsewhere.
coldtea 8y ago
I'd say as much as having a nice/interesting personality can be taught. Because most of what constitutes good teaching is in fact the teacher being passionate about the subject and having an approach that reflects it. I don't think it can be replaced by someone that just goes through the same motions. That said, better teaching (that what teachers in average do) can surely be taught.
kryogen1c 8y ago
It depends on what you mean by "good". In the US nuclear navy, instructors are taught many things that make them better instructors: peppering the crowd with questions, active listening, elimination of crutch words (um, uh, like, etc), changing volume levels when speaking, practicing in front of peers who's purpose is to immunize the speaker against bad crowds (pen clicking, sleeping, tapping, talking, etc). They are better. Does this make them good? Pull learning is better than push learning in basically every case. Most people recall teachers that _inspired_ them to learn, not the ones with good oration skills. Objectively, what results in "better" learning?
- ouid 8y ago
  The teachers I remember the best are the ones who lectured well. I learned more from them.
wallflower 8y ago
If you want to be a good teacher, first, you have to manage the classroom. This is important if you are coming to teaching from a non-teaching background like software development. Having had experiences dabbling in teaching in actual classrooms, the most difficult part for me was my weak classroom management skills. I am always in awe at my teacher friends who command the classroom, sometimes without saying a word or very little.
- neonate 8y ago
  Can you give some examples?
  - wallflower 8y ago
    Like tormeh said, it is really about situational awareness. The best teachers I've seen have a constant vigilance and constant banter. Not complete military drill control like Mastery Charter Schools but not chaos. Somewhere in between. And, yes, they all called out the student by name. They, as tormeh said, knew each student's weaknesses and strengths intimately. Tough love. One example: One great teacher I know would go up to the whiteboard/blackboard, turning his back to the class, and, if he sensed "mutiny" in the making, he would randomly call out one of his student's names and ask them a question. He also said he had eyes in the back of his head, and I think the students believed that in the sense that he knew when they were trying to mess around. My own example: Teaching 10-12 girls CS which required laptop usage. It was really hard to stop girls from messing around on Facebook when I was on the other side of the "U" table, working the rounds. A better teacher would have managed that situation. As an aside, this is why programs like ScriptEd work so well. They give "training wheels" to people who would like to teach CS to kids. ScriptEd has a system where everyone gets a chance to teach in front of the classroom. When you are not teaching, you are learning from the side/back of the room.
    - alexashka 8y ago
      My 2 cents - the classes that had the least (if any) mutiny were classes like woodworking, where everyone came in, and got to working on whatever their task was. I built a chair, made some shovel handles etc. When people are actually doing something, these problems don't exist. The skill of keeping people from going crazy through intimidation/fear tactics seems like a necessary skill, only because the school system is structured like a detention center, rather than a place to help people learn and discover themselves.
dschuetz 8y ago
Teaching is also a talent. Much like in singing or dancing there are people who excel in teaching, because they not only use the correct methods, but also manage to improve them, or adapt to circumstances when necessary. Very few people are capable of that, and you cannot train that. The problem is that there are teachers who do not want to teach at all. And those who want to teach are rare, and those excelling at teaching are as rare as people like Richard Feynman.
adamnemecek 8y ago
I feel like in the future, there needs to be a move away from teacher based education to some sort autodidactism. The current models waste so much time.
- ddingus 8y ago
  The hard truth is not everyone can do that. The current models are broken, but something like them is necessary. I think what you really reach for here is Teachers as mentors when the door is open. We used to allow for that. We don't very much today.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - dorchadas 8y ago
    I honestly think the best way might be the method advocated by Sal Kahn. [1] Basically, instead of students going over a lesson in class then taking home work to do to master it, they reverse that. They watch the lesson at home the night before, answer a few questions as an "exit slip" and then sleep on it. The next day they go to class and work on problems/ask questions with the teacher present to help them. While it does have its issues, such as making sure students actually watch the videos, I think this is the best approach for certain subjects, especially math. It allows the students to do the problems where they can get feedback and guidance, instead of struggling with something they're failing to comprehend, which just leads to demotivating them. It also allows them some time to come up with questions related to the topic that might further their learning. There will likely be abuse from students who don't pay attention, and there are plenty of other issues (internet access being a huge one), but I could see some hope in this method. [1] https://blog.blackboard.com/why-salman-khan-thinks-students-should-do-their-homework-in-class/ https://blog.blackboard.com/why-salman-khan-thinks-students-... is a nice write-up about it.
    - anonymous5133 8y ago
      That method is far superior to the current method but teachers don't like it because it takes "resources" away from the teacher. That's the argument I've heard on other forums when discussing the flipping the classroom method. The teachers say that it is better if they explain the material in the classroom and answer questions immediately. So expect to get quite a bit of push back on the flipping the classroom method. That's the reality. I've noticed that there are quite a few teachers that are basically fearful of some new technology or method popping up that replaces them. Education has become far too political from what I've seen.
raverbashing 8y ago
While there is an art/talent to it, there are a lot of basics that are not followed by a lot of teachers. Like ENUNCIATING. Like not putting students on the spot or saying "this is wrong, what is the matter with you" when given a wrong answer. Balancing strictness with the level and audience. Balancing between getting to a point and explaining some other details that might be important. Trying to find a best way of explaining some concepts, maybe explaining it differently to different students. Usually the higher the study level the worse the professors/instructor are at pedagogy.
- jayalpha 8y ago
  "Like not putting students on the spot or saying "this is wrong, what is the matter with you" when given a wrong answer." A wrong answer should never be a problem. Students are there to learn. If they know everything they can stay at home. They are in school to MAKE mistakes.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  While there is an art/talent to it, there are a lot of basics that are /not followed/ by a lot of shitposters. Like READING THE ARTICLE. Like not assuming that one has all of the answers (or even all of the questions) for a complex, thorny problem.
  - japhyr 8y ago
    That wasn't a shitpost. I've spent my life teaching, and a good part of my work has been trying to undo the damage done by teachers who say things like "this is wrong, what's the matter with you". I became a teacher because I love math and science. When I was in college I noticed how many people hate those two subjects. When I started asking around and trying to figure out why so many people hate these subjects, it almost always came back to how they were taught. Some people are resilient enough to hear things like this and let it slide. But many young people who spend a year or more with a teacher who tells them there's something wrong with them are significantly affected by that experience.
    - 8y ago
jayalpha 8y ago
There are good teachers and bad teachers. Government tries to make bad teachers good teachers by an ever increasing administrative burden. This does not make bad teachers good teachers but burns out good teachers.
- Pulcinella 8y ago
  Administrative burden has become a problem at my school. Teaching has become a small part of my actual job. Now I run an entire beaurocracy within one person. For example, we have to submit attendance multiple times a class. Apparently our attendance system isn’ good enough and we also have to submit attendance through different google forms and on paper. We can’t do anything without documenting it. I spend more time documenting than doing the things I am documenting. We can’t meet with other teachers to lesson plan unless we draw up an agenda, a list of goals for the meeting, and take minutes of what we discussed and then submit it to admin.
  - jayalpha 8y ago
    "We can’t meet with other teachers to lesson plan unless" When I worked as a teacher I had to create a curriculum, monthly plans, weekly plans and lesson plans. The "lesson plan" was a multiple page bullshit orgy. I worked for two years in one of the best schools in the US. They had no "lesson plans" (yet, the best teachers). If you go to teach a lesson you should be prepared and have a plan. A good teacher is also able to immediately cancel the plan and just to a review. You may have planed to teach a new complex science topic but the kids walk in from a math test into your class room and are "dead". I have seen the worst teachers sticking to their "lesson plans". I miss the kids. But the administrative bullshit will prevent that I ever teach again.
    - Pulcinella 8y ago
      “I miss the kids. But the administrative bullshit will prevent that I ever teach again.” Yeah it’s not the students that make my job difficult, it’s the administrators.
    - 8y ago
lacker 8y ago
Third were the teachers “who can but won’t,” in Gunner’s phrase; these teachers had the capacity to become more effective educators but appeared to have no interest in doing so. They were already set in their pedagogical ways or didn’t think change at the school was necessary or possible or didn’t want to put in more effort. There is a fairly simple solution here. Rather than improving the skills of people who aren't interested in improving, just fire them.
- willart4food 8y ago
  > There is a fairly simple solution here. Rather than improving the skills of people who aren't interested in improving, just fire them. Well, depends on the absolute quality level of these teachers: according to your statement, you would fire a good-but-not-great teacher who is not willing to improve and retain a mediocre teacher who is willing, but not capable, to improve.
  - lacker 8y ago
    Yeah good point. It's also discouraging how much the principal has to deal with staff turnover - it seems like there are constantly problems like "This teacher isn't very good, but it's so hard to hire good teachers, if they quit I'll probably get a worse one."
    - dorchadas 8y ago
      I know that one of my colleagues got tenure solely because they had an issue with teacher retention in the math department. They weren't recommended for rehire after their first year, even from the person who supervised them, who was a friend. But, the school was struggling to fill the math spot that it already had open, and so they, of course, didn't do anything to her. This was repeated several years. In fact, I think they've had to hire a math teacher each of the past 5/6 years due to various things.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  This is addressed in the article; turn over in these schools is a huge problem, especially mid-year, where students dealing with lots of instability in their lives suddenly have another major change. There's no guarantee that the replacing teacher will be any better: indeed, given the stress and low pay, it seems a decent chance you'll end up in the same place you started. Furthermore, firing a third-to-half of the teachers (even during the off season) will create a pretty trash work environment, where /everyone/ is fearing for their jobs. I thought the principal in the article did a great job of managing the issue. She made it clear that she was building a new culture of higher expectations. When confronted with the higher expectations, low-performing teachers can try to get with it (which is a win), or quit, as many did.
chongli 8y ago
I've had a number of different people tell me I should become a teacher, that I'm really good at explaining things, and I'm still skeptical of the impact of teaching in general. I don't know how we're supposed to measure it. Controlling for the individual variation of the students themselves is a non-trivial problem. The best schools tend to be highly selective in their admissions and the worst students seem mostly unteachable. I challenge anyone to take the best teacher they've ever met and put them in charge of a class full of students from the first percentile of test scores.
- dasil003 8y ago
  Not everything can be quantified, and I think it's a dangerous line of thinking to equate impact with measurability. Particularly in education, the focus on standardized testing has had real negative impact in the fuzzier areas like critical thinking and the joy of learning. Of course I can't quantify this, but that doesn't mean it's not true. I get that standardized tests are necessary to some extent, but I would not equate the things that led me to do well on them as the most impactful events of my education. One-on-one human interaction and empathy has been what elevated me past the hoop-jumping to a higher level of agency and self-motivated productivity.
jccalhoun 8y ago
This article seems more like a profile than actually addressing the question raised in the headline. It is an interesting profile and I would guess that it is enlightening for people that haven't taught high school. To answer the headline's question, as a former high school teacher and current college professor, I know that while a lot of teaching is about learning how to teach, I did have a leg up on a lot of my grad school cohort because I had a BS in English Education and had taken a number of education courses. That gave me some (admittedly limited) background in educational psychology and pedagogy that my peers who had never taught did not have. However, there is a big gap between theory and practice and I think I learned the most about teaching by trying things and seeing what worked and what didn't. The most important thing is to resist the temptation to get lazy and just keep teaching the same things and the same way semester after semester and year after year.
japhyr 8y ago
I've been teaching for over 20 years, and I've loved it. One of my biggest frustrations over the years, though, has been this notion that good teaching can't be taught. There's this notion that you have to be born a teacher, which is ridiculous. Certainly talent has a role in the profession, as it does in any profession, but there's a whole lot that can be taught. Here's a few ideas that can be taught: - Relationships are important. Students learn best from people they trust, and you can do things in a school and in a classroom that develop trust between students and their peers, and staff. - Formative assessment is critical to growth. Formative assessment is assessment for the purpose of growth and learning, not for the purpose of grading. It's written and verbal feedback. - When conflict arises, restorative approaches are more effective than punitive approaches. Restorative approaches look at what happened, why it happened, what harm was caused, and what can be done to address the actual harm that was caused. Restorative approaches are not weak if they are done well. - Classroom management is important, but if you go at it by being too controlling you won't be a good teacher. A healthy amount of interaction is more effective than a silent classroom where everyone is afraid to talk. - There's no place for zeroes in a grade book. A zero doesn't represent a student's learning, and it throws off all other measures of learning. I could go on, but the bigger point is that there are many techniques and ideas that can be taught and modeled in the school and in the classroom. I think many student teachers get pulled into old, ineffective ways of teaching because of how it's modeled to them. They're taught many good approaches to teaching, but their ed school teachers just lecture at them. They're told to use well-researched, effective techniques, but then they're paired up with a mentor teacher who only uses an old-school lecture style, an overly strict approach to grading and assessment, and a punitive approach to discipline.
- lisper 8y ago
  Another item that I think it vitally important but often overlooked: put yourself in the mindset of your audience, particularly with respect to vocabulary. For every word you choose, ask yourself: does the person I'm speaking to know what this word means? It's really easy to lose sight of this because you (obviously) know what the word means, and so it's easy to assume that your audience does too. But they may not, and if they don't, then as soon as you say the word, you will lose them because you'll be going on but they'll be back on that word thinking, "What the heck does that mean?" This is particularly important in STEM education. Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) is a master at this. He will go out of his way to coin and define new vocabulary in order to sound less intimidating. My favorite example is his invention of "squishification" as a synonym for eccentricity when talking about ellipses. It's a much better word because it's friendlier, it doesn't have semantic baggage related to weird mental states associated with it, and no one can ever forget what it means.
deleted 8y ago
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sagefy 8y ago
Hattie's effect size list is a good place to start if you're interested in what teaching practices leads to better learning results: https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/ https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effec... I few others I'd recommend: - How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles by Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman - How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, Cocking, & Pellegrino - Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley - Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Ericsson and Pool Discloser: I wrote https://sgef.cc/tldrideas https://sgef.cc/tldrideas and am building Sagefy, a learning platform
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  Thank you for the resource links/recommendations.
lurquer 8y ago
This title brings to mind the Paradox of the Court. A famous rhetoritician/lawyer in Greece taught his craft to a student. The student never paid his bill, claiming the teacher sucked. The teacher sued the student for the fee. The student represented himself. The teacher pointed out that if the student wins, he must pay up as it would be proof he had learned the craft of lawyering. And, if the student lost, then he should have to pay as well. The student argued the opposite: regardless of the verdict, he shouldn't have to pay for similar (but opposite) reasons. In short, if s teacher cannot teach one how to teach, then the teacher was by definition not a good teacher.
jaequery 8y ago
a good teacher is a good motivator. it's simple as that.
camelite 8y ago
It's a lot easier than many people believe: you give them a good script, and a year or two of training in how to deliver it.
lutorm 8y ago
This is a ridiculous question. Of course teaching, like any other skill, can be taught. I'm sure there are differing aptitudes among people, but unless you think that "good" anything can't be taught, it's hard to see why teaching would be this snowflake skill that's unlike any other...
DoubleCribble 8y ago
Sure it can. Here's the formula: Good teaching = subject mastery + good public speaking + good classroom management + lessons designed with a low floor and high ceiling (allowing for a wide range of zones of proximal development)
- watwut 8y ago
  Your great teacher formula assumes one way communication where students are talked to but ignored. That is suspect.
  - DoubleCribble 8y ago
    That's actually completely the opposite. Low Floor High Ceiling lessons are the antithesis of monologues. Here's a primer:[0] [0]https://nrich.maths.org/7701 https://nrich.maths.org/7701
    - watwut 8y ago
      Still, there is nothing about ability to listen or interpret human children - no expectatin about understanding of brain development (that is not just difficulty, there is way more to it) nor how their emotions affect their behavior. Nor ability to figure out which particular thing it is they don't get and need to be told to move on. I can't recall good teacher thet would not had that.
      - DoubleCribble 8y ago
        What you describe falls under the good classroom management skill set. Maximizing student engagement and time on task requires some familiarity with concepts in child development, educational psychology, emotional intelligence and group dynamics. I'd also sprinkle in a little conflict resolution training for extra credit.
        watwut 8y ago
        No it does not falls there. Not at all. Engaged studen on task does not imply what I wrote about.
alexnyc 8y ago
Can anyone think of an article or book that explains how to be a good teacher (in the classroom, military, etc.)?
- DoubleCribble 8y ago
  Article, no. Graduate degree programs, yes.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    I say the graduate degree programs are highly variable. I'm currently in one for a MAT, and it's really just mostly busywork that's useless. My classes are either all geared towards elementary/middle school or, the one that is on secondary schools, the teacher hasn't taught in a public school for about a decade, and has never taught in the state that most of us are based in, or in a rural area. I'm sure there are some good ones, yes. I feel like the in-person one near me here would be better, since they can tailor to our needs, but it's also much more expensive. And still doesn't deal with the fact that a lot of the professors aren't in the classroom, or are in more privileged schools. It's the same issue I have with a lot of the professional development stuff you see, too.
    - DoubleCribble 8y ago
      The number-one-most-powerful tool that I can recommend in teacher development is getting mentored by a Master Teacher once you are in your own classroom (ie, not student teaching). The good news is that you will likely get exposure to many/most of the big ideas in any graduate program. However, it's very difficult to integrate those big ideas into your own classroom without a guide. Having somebody regularly observe your work and hold you accountable for your choices can make an enormous difference in outcomes (and often very rapidly). If a formal mentorship program is not available, then I would recommend seeking out an informal one.
- MarkMc 8y ago
  Doug Lemov's book "Teach Like a Champion" is great: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118901851/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118901851/ref=dbs_a_def_r... I'd also recommend "Teaching as Leadership": https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achievement-ebook/dp/B00340ESC4 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achi...
codr4 8y ago
I'm sure it can, but it takes longer and works differently than we like to believe. Empathy, sensitivity -- the ability to connect to other people on their level and feel what kind of nudges they need to evolve. But of course you can't expect that to happen if you treat teachers like garbage and stuff them in sterile rooms with 30 over stimulated kids.
yodsanklai 8y ago
I'm both a CS professor and former ski instructor (in Europe). As I was reading this thread, I realized that I've never had a single lesson on how to teach CS, and besides my students, nobody has ever gave me any feedback on my teaching. On the other hand, to become a ski instructor, I went on a rather extensive training with a lot of emphasis on pedagogy.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  No one has ever gave you feedback on your teaching because you've never surveyed your students.
  - ascar 8y ago
    He said he got feedback from his students, but not from anyone else (e.g. more senior professors).
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    Not the OP, but when I was teaching, surveying my students was a technique that a colleague introduced to me. It was probably the best thing I ever did. I handed out a small sheet of paper to all the students at the beginning of class with some multiple choice questions and a space for general comments and asked for it back at the end. They didn't have to fill it in. I just told them if they get bored in class, just jot down whatever. Usually I think about 20% of the forms were filled in any class, but the info on them was really amazing. Since I did it every class, the students soon got used to it. Kills a lot of trees, though :-) In defence of the OP, though, students can seem some parts of the teaching process. They can't see all of it and they definitely do not have the experience to provide good advice. Looking at surveys, you've potentially got good data, but you need to translate that into good action. What a student imagines will work and what will actually work is often very, very different. This is why you need help from experienced teachers. I was lucky to work in a situation where I did "team teaching" a lot -- two teachers in the same class room. It's incredible what you can learn in that situation -- either just watching the other teacher handle a situation, or getting feedback on what you are doing.
- 8y ago
codingdave 8y ago
Another challenge in education is that every area has different problems, and needs different solutions. In Utah, for example, our problem is teachers sticking with the job. There is a trend of young women graduating school, teaching for a bit until they get married, having kids, and walking out of the classroom having taught sometimes as little as only one year. On an individual level, I respect the choice to leave a job that isn't right for you, but its does leave us with an abundance of young inexperienced educators.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
50 8y ago
This reminds of this good read: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/what-classrooms-can-learn-from-magic/425100/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/what-c....
mncharity 8y ago
"Computer" used to be a job description. That bundle of roles no longer exists. The roles have been partially automated, and moved elsewhere. Jobs that use spreadsheets for instance. Surgery once did far more harm than good. Then took killing people for granted. Now it's discovering checklists, and teams, and crew resource management. Surgeons are discovering their roles of skilled technician and team manager conflict. Medical error is still a major cause of mortality. For a given condition, there's a very very broad spread of institutional competence. The best, are learning organizations with an intense focus on continuous process improvement and on not failing each and every one of their patients. The worst... don't wash their hands going from bathroom to ICU. Instructors at first-tier universities describe incoming introductory science students as expecting to be "spoon fed" - lacking both the skills and willingness to wrestling with a body of knowledge to extract understanding. With wealth, they've had such "good teachers", they haven't needed to. Consider a country with a focus on memorize-and-regurgitate - even more so than the USA. When a school fails to teach memorization, it's at least easy to recognize the failure. But what might equitable and effective science education look like? If every freshman class resembled incoming Ivy, a question might then be: "ok, we've nailed equity... now when are we going to make a start on effective?" Chemistry education research describes pre-college chemistry education content as "incoherent", leaving both students and teachers deeply steeped in misconceptions. With science education at least, we're currently failing badly and pervasively. Tech is coming. VR/AR, hybrid human-computer teams, ML, spoken dialog system, etc, etc. "Classroom teacher" is bundle of roles of breathtaking difficulty and scope. As with surgeon, those roles are now being specialized and rebundled. Like barber surgeon, it was a bundling that required accepting that we would pervasively fail our patients. Perhaps decades from now, we'll end up with something like a "classroom teacher", but with a vastly greater support system. Or perhaps people will forget that "classroom teacher" was once a job description.
MarkMc 8y ago
There seems to be a strong divide on whether excellent teaching can make a significant difference to poor kids. Typically this mirrors the left-right political divide. To quote from the article: "While teacher effectiveness may be the most salient in-school factor contributing to student academic outcomes, it contributes a relatively small slice — no more than 14 percent, according to a recent RAND Corporation analysis of teacher effectiveness — to the overall picture. A far bigger wedge is influenced by out-of-school variables over which teachers have little control: family educational background, the effects of poverty or segregation on children, exposure to stress from gun violence or abuse and how often students change schools, owing to homelessness or other upheavals." "Teaching does matter, and it can improve. But there is little evidence — at least to date — that it can counter the effects on children of attending neighborhood schools that remain racially and economically isolated." I find this attitude difficult to reconcile with other things I've read about teaching poor and minority kids. For example, here is a summary of a few studies as reported in Teaching as Leadership [1]: "The schools that are highly effective produce results that almost entirely overcome the effects of student background" [2] "Having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap" [3] "Differences in this magnitude -- 50 percentile points in just three years -- are stunning. For an individual child, it means the difference between a 'remedial' label and placement in the accelerated or even gifted track. And the difference between entry into a selective college and a lifetime of low-paying, menial work" [4] Many charter schools use a lottery to determine which students are enrolled, and many studies have taken advantage of such 'natural experiments'. This paper [5] represents a good overview of such studies. It seems that some charter schools can have significant effects on learning. In a Boston study, "Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011)...find very large average effects: charter school attendance increases state-level English/language arts and math performance test scores by 0.2 and 0.35 standard deviations per year respectively. Given that that the achievement gap between black and white students in Massachusetts is about 0.7 to 0.8 standard deviations, these estimates suggest that three years of charter school attendance for blacks would eliminate the black-white performance gap." However, the same paper also says that at KIPP charter schools, "School hours are extended typically to between 7:30AM and 5:00PM and include occasional Saturdays and summer weeks, and tutoring is also offered during these times." so I wonder to what degree the 'value added' by top charter schools comes simply from teaching more. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achievement/dp/0470432861 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achi... [2] Marzano, R. J. What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 2003, p. 7 [3] Kane, T., Gordon, R. and Staiger, D. Identifying Effective Teachers Useing Performance on the Job Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2004, p. 8 [4] Peske, H. and Haycock, K. Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Short-Changed on Teacher Quality: A Report and Recommendations by the Education Trust. Washington, D.C.: Education Trust, 2006, p. 11 [5] http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/JEPChabrier2016.pdf http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/JEPCh...
Pica_soO 8y ago
The best base for good teaching, is a feeling of self-worth of the teacher, one of mental independence. The idea, that you can quit any time and return to the profession you started out from. This mental independence allows for the creation of discipline - because you radiate subconscious signals that you are a free agent, able to leave those unwilling behind at any time. The kids see that, they can taste fear. This is why teachers, who studied directly after school- basically never leaving the school Eco-system, are often less respected.
JackMorgan 8y ago
As a former middle school teacher who escaped into programming, I think the problems of teaching are systemic to the education system itself. Teaching to a test is short-sighted and a phenomenal waste of effort and money. Some rare teachers can use a combination of persuasion, charisma, fear, and group dynamics to be very successful at teaching to a test. They can make students jump through the hoops, remembering just enough to get it all out before summer hits and they forget it all again. The current model of education is a "push" model, where the skill of the teacher is the defining measure, and the goal is temporary memorization of facts. Instead we need to move to a "pull" model, where students learn to love learning, and through this teach themselves fact checking, research, critical thinking, and civic responsibility. I believe this is the obvious next step for a world where any fact is freely available inside one's pocket or library. I do not believe this is possible with grouping by age or with lecture and test based classes. The Sudbury school is one such attempt, and it apparently is quite effective. We need to start moving all our schools this way! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

196 points by MarkMc 8y ago

zombie2 8y ago

yes but you have to have the personality for teaching

badrabbit 8y ago
Personality can't be taught?
- ekianjo 8y ago
  There are innate character traits in each of us. Of course education/training/practice can move the needle a little up or down, but you can't really turn a very introvert person into a very extrovert one, for example.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    Why not? I am extremely introverted, I became that way as a result of adapting to and learning from my life experience. Why can't I be taught through experience and having to adopt to uncomfortable situations, to become extremely extroverted? There is a reason the military has a bootcamp,it's to break your personality so they can form a new personality that can take orders and lives without hesitation.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      Being able to obey and follow discipline does not mean it changes your personality. Proof is, once men return to the civil life, nobody in their family says that they are a different person or something. The core personality remains. Unless they have developed PTSD or something but that's trauma, not training.
      - badrabbit 8y ago
        The military made an ondemand killer out of them,how would civilians measure that change. The military doesn't make you a different person,nicer or meaner,the change they instill is simple -- your personality will obey lawful orders and work in a team.
- shawn 8y ago
  Not without being fake. People can change over time, but the core "being" of a person – what they're really like – tends to stay static. Here's a specific example. You can be taught to overcome a fear of getting up onstage. You can't be taught to love and relish when you find just the right metaphor to convey an idea to a class. The latter gives you a dopamine hit, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, then you have an uphill battle. From Mathematical Writing, on Donald Knuth: > Don’s secret delight, he confessed today, is to “play a library as if it were a musical instrument.” Using the resources of a great library to solve a specific problem—now that, to him, is real living. One of his favourite ways to spend an afternoon is amongst the labyrinthine archives, pursuing obscure cross-references, tracking down ancient and neglected volumes, all in the hope of finding the perfect quotation with which to open or conclude a chapter. Don takes great pleasure in finding a really good aphorism with which to preface a piece of writing. So many people have written so many neat things down the ages, he said, that it behooves us to take every opportunity to pass them on. Don has been known to take such a liking to a phrase that he has written an article to publish along with it. > So how are we to find that wonderfully apposite quotation with which to preface our term paper? Serendipity, said Don. Live a full and varied life, read widely, keep your eyes and ears open, live long and prosper. You will stumble across great quotations. For example, Webster defines ‘bit’ as “a boring tool”—Don was able to use this when introducing a computer science talk. Of course, this isn't necessarily applicable to high school teaching, which is more about legally-mandated babysitting than about teaching. But the core question is an intriguing one.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    > Here's a specific example. You can be taught to overcome a fear of getting up onstage. You can't be taught to love and relish when you find just the right metaphor to convey an idea to a class. "to love and relish" ,that's they key phrase here. Why can't I be taught to love and relish _____? For example,you need a specific personality to be a truck driver. The lifestyle of a driver is extreme and demands that you enjoy some of those extremes. Why can't a person be taught to enjoy sitting in a truck for 8 hours and driving along a boring rural route all day long and waking up in a different state every morning? Why can't a person be taught to enjoy planting ideas in people's minds? It may fall under "psychological education" as opposed to "academic education",but I don't understand why it can't be taught.
- mathattack 8y ago
  You can’t teach someone to care. Teachers that don’t care deeply can’t push through all the barriers to succeed.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    Why can't you teach someone to care? Why can't you explain to someone why exactly you care and help them to understand and accept your reasoning? As an example,there are lots of health care workers that get into it for the money and start caring about patients(and vice versa). I for example care,I would love the process of teaching but I would be terrible at everything else. To be a good teacher,the biggest requirement imo is to be a good student. Much like how you need to be a good worker before you become a manager and how you need to be a good soldier before you give orders to other soldiers. I just think "can't" is too strong of a claim that demands a clear and logical rationale to back it up.
    - mathattack 8y ago
      I concur that teachers should be good students, as well as your analogy that managers should be good workers. In both cases it’s necessary but not sufficient.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Not the way a physical technique, programming, cooking, etc., can. There's an intangible aspect what cannot even define, much less teach. We can just mimic some external trappings. That said, you can try and influence towards a certain personality/passion/etc. But it's not like "follow this X,Y and you'll get the Z result" guaranteed like teaching regular stuff. It requires innate drive.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    I agree,the methodology might need to be tailored for the individual,much like a treatment by a psychotherapist. But if it can be taught,it's worth teaching every teacher.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Not really. Unless you love teaching you will always be a mediocre teacher at best. E.g., most teachers who say "Just google it" or "It is what it is" or "Its beyond the scope of this lecture" are generally not very good teachers. A good teacher is always inquisitive in knowing his/her audience, and formulating strategies to bridge that gap. The best teachers know exactly what the students struggles are, generally because they were in that same position as well. Great teachers formulate 100's of ideas and processes to identify which knowledge is worth telling at that moment, and which should be deferred for later. These same people will plan out exactly what the whiteboard will look like, before even lifting their marker. I personally am not a great teacher... it doesn't excite me really. Partially because I have had to teach too many people that are not very good at picking up things, despite how many different methods I try. Also, because I've had to do a lot of sales work in my life... teaching is not that far different, having to repeat myself all the time can get frustrating. Plus, you don't get a return on investment on every student some are beyond help... and it makes you less inclined to want to teach others that are more capable. There was a phase where I really enjoyed teaching but I am past that point now. I used to teach Elementary School/2nd grade at University, and did alot of tutoring from highschool to college. The passion might come again in the future, but its not today. You don't have to be extroverted to be a good teacher, but you have to really enjoy planting ideas/seeds in others. Great teachers are also great storytellers too. I wouldn't enjoy teaching unless it was paving a means for me to practice on making youtube tutorials, etc - where that content lives forever, and you no longer have to repeat yourself.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    You mentiones mostly methodologies,those can be taught. Enjoying the method or process is the personality aspect. I am of the opinion that you can be taught to enjoy just about anything.
    - Kagerjay 8y ago
      You can copy and learn methodologies, but great teachers are also great innovators in teaching methodologies. A good teacher always seeks a simpler analogy to explain just about everything. Someone who just copies things verbatim will have a harder time coming up with original ways of explaining difficult concepts.
- jayalpha 8y ago
  Pick up skills can be learned, leadership can be learned, why not personality? "If you don't like yourself, invent another one."

jimhefferon 8y ago

It is hard to see how many children could possibly succeed: > Most of all, Gunner worried about her students, most of whom lived in four low-income apartment complexes, which saw a lot of transiency. Thirty-seven percent of the school’s students arrived or left midyear. The day before, a family showed up looking to enroll and was so poor that both the adults and children were barefoot and hoping for a free school lunch as much as classroom seats. When a school-board member asked Gunner at a district event early in the year what she needed as a new principal, Gunner immediately said a washer and dryer, so she could wash the clothes that many students wore day after day. Many students had experienced trauma — the violent death of a loved one or homelessness or physical, sexual or verbal abuse — and arrived in the mornings in emotional distress, easily dissolving into tears or erupting in fury. Over long weekends, students sometimes went untended or had little to eat, which made returning to school both welcome and difficult. Yet the school had only one full-time social worker and a counselor for more than 450 children.

deleted 8y ago
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scarejunba 8y ago
Reading Evicted, I got the same picture. These kids are going to be constantly changing schools. They're not going to be able to learn reasonably.
turingcompeteme 8y ago
Exactly. It's not about the teachers. My sister was an award winning teacher when she was at a good school. Now that she teachers on the edge of a reserve she has suddenly become "low performing". Take 50 ideal teachers who have all the best training and have learned all the best techniques, and put them in a low scoring school. The test scores of the school will not improve. Most of the teachers will be focused on surviving until they can transfer elsewhere.

coldtea 8y ago

I'd say as much as having a nice/interesting personality can be taught. Because most of what constitutes good teaching is in fact the teacher being passionate about the subject and having an approach that reflects it. I don't think it can be replaced by someone that just goes through the same motions. That said, better teaching (that what teachers in average do) can surely be taught.

kryogen1c 8y ago

It depends on what you mean by "good". In the US nuclear navy, instructors are taught many things that make them better instructors: peppering the crowd with questions, active listening, elimination of crutch words (um, uh, like, etc), changing volume levels when speaking, practicing in front of peers who's purpose is to immunize the speaker against bad crowds (pen clicking, sleeping, tapping, talking, etc). They are better. Does this make them good? Pull learning is better than push learning in basically every case. Most people recall teachers that _inspired_ them to learn, not the ones with good oration skills. Objectively, what results in "better" learning?

ouid 8y ago
The teachers I remember the best are the ones who lectured well. I learned more from them.

wallflower 8y ago

If you want to be a good teacher, first, you have to manage the classroom. This is important if you are coming to teaching from a non-teaching background like software development. Having had experiences dabbling in teaching in actual classrooms, the most difficult part for me was my weak classroom management skills. I am always in awe at my teacher friends who command the classroom, sometimes without saying a word or very little.

neonate 8y ago
Can you give some examples?
- wallflower 8y ago
  Like tormeh said, it is really about situational awareness. The best teachers I've seen have a constant vigilance and constant banter. Not complete military drill control like Mastery Charter Schools but not chaos. Somewhere in between. And, yes, they all called out the student by name. They, as tormeh said, knew each student's weaknesses and strengths intimately. Tough love. One example: One great teacher I know would go up to the whiteboard/blackboard, turning his back to the class, and, if he sensed "mutiny" in the making, he would randomly call out one of his student's names and ask them a question. He also said he had eyes in the back of his head, and I think the students believed that in the sense that he knew when they were trying to mess around. My own example: Teaching 10-12 girls CS which required laptop usage. It was really hard to stop girls from messing around on Facebook when I was on the other side of the "U" table, working the rounds. A better teacher would have managed that situation. As an aside, this is why programs like ScriptEd work so well. They give "training wheels" to people who would like to teach CS to kids. ScriptEd has a system where everyone gets a chance to teach in front of the classroom. When you are not teaching, you are learning from the side/back of the room.
  - alexashka 8y ago
    My 2 cents - the classes that had the least (if any) mutiny were classes like woodworking, where everyone came in, and got to working on whatever their task was. I built a chair, made some shovel handles etc. When people are actually doing something, these problems don't exist. The skill of keeping people from going crazy through intimidation/fear tactics seems like a necessary skill, only because the school system is structured like a detention center, rather than a place to help people learn and discover themselves.

dschuetz 8y ago

Teaching is also a talent. Much like in singing or dancing there are people who excel in teaching, because they not only use the correct methods, but also manage to improve them, or adapt to circumstances when necessary. Very few people are capable of that, and you cannot train that. The problem is that there are teachers who do not want to teach at all. And those who want to teach are rare, and those excelling at teaching are as rare as people like Richard Feynman.

adamnemecek 8y ago

I feel like in the future, there needs to be a move away from teacher based education to some sort autodidactism. The current models waste so much time.

ddingus 8y ago
The hard truth is not everyone can do that. The current models are broken, but something like them is necessary. I think what you really reach for here is Teachers as mentors when the door is open. We used to allow for that. We don't very much today.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dorchadas 8y ago
  I honestly think the best way might be the method advocated by Sal Kahn. [1] Basically, instead of students going over a lesson in class then taking home work to do to master it, they reverse that. They watch the lesson at home the night before, answer a few questions as an "exit slip" and then sleep on it. The next day they go to class and work on problems/ask questions with the teacher present to help them. While it does have its issues, such as making sure students actually watch the videos, I think this is the best approach for certain subjects, especially math. It allows the students to do the problems where they can get feedback and guidance, instead of struggling with something they're failing to comprehend, which just leads to demotivating them. It also allows them some time to come up with questions related to the topic that might further their learning. There will likely be abuse from students who don't pay attention, and there are plenty of other issues (internet access being a huge one), but I could see some hope in this method. [1] https://blog.blackboard.com/why-salman-khan-thinks-students-should-do-their-homework-in-class/ https://blog.blackboard.com/why-salman-khan-thinks-students-... is a nice write-up about it.
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    That method is far superior to the current method but teachers don't like it because it takes "resources" away from the teacher. That's the argument I've heard on other forums when discussing the flipping the classroom method. The teachers say that it is better if they explain the material in the classroom and answer questions immediately. So expect to get quite a bit of push back on the flipping the classroom method. That's the reality. I've noticed that there are quite a few teachers that are basically fearful of some new technology or method popping up that replaces them. Education has become far too political from what I've seen.

raverbashing 8y ago

While there is an art/talent to it, there are a lot of basics that are not followed by a lot of teachers. Like ENUNCIATING. Like not putting students on the spot or saying "this is wrong, what is the matter with you" when given a wrong answer. Balancing strictness with the level and audience. Balancing between getting to a point and explaining some other details that might be important. Trying to find a best way of explaining some concepts, maybe explaining it differently to different students. Usually the higher the study level the worse the professors/instructor are at pedagogy.

jayalpha 8y ago
"Like not putting students on the spot or saying "this is wrong, what is the matter with you" when given a wrong answer." A wrong answer should never be a problem. Students are there to learn. If they know everything they can stay at home. They are in school to MAKE mistakes.
sdenton4 8y ago
While there is an art/talent to it, there are a lot of basics that are /not followed/ by a lot of shitposters. Like READING THE ARTICLE. Like not assuming that one has all of the answers (or even all of the questions) for a complex, thorny problem.
- japhyr 8y ago
  That wasn't a shitpost. I've spent my life teaching, and a good part of my work has been trying to undo the damage done by teachers who say things like "this is wrong, what's the matter with you". I became a teacher because I love math and science. When I was in college I noticed how many people hate those two subjects. When I started asking around and trying to figure out why so many people hate these subjects, it almost always came back to how they were taught. Some people are resilient enough to hear things like this and let it slide. But many young people who spend a year or more with a teacher who tells them there's something wrong with them are significantly affected by that experience.
  - 8y ago

jayalpha 8y ago

There are good teachers and bad teachers. Government tries to make bad teachers good teachers by an ever increasing administrative burden. This does not make bad teachers good teachers but burns out good teachers.

Pulcinella 8y ago
Administrative burden has become a problem at my school. Teaching has become a small part of my actual job. Now I run an entire beaurocracy within one person. For example, we have to submit attendance multiple times a class. Apparently our attendance system isn’ good enough and we also have to submit attendance through different google forms and on paper. We can’t do anything without documenting it. I spend more time documenting than doing the things I am documenting. We can’t meet with other teachers to lesson plan unless we draw up an agenda, a list of goals for the meeting, and take minutes of what we discussed and then submit it to admin.
- jayalpha 8y ago
  "We can’t meet with other teachers to lesson plan unless" When I worked as a teacher I had to create a curriculum, monthly plans, weekly plans and lesson plans. The "lesson plan" was a multiple page bullshit orgy. I worked for two years in one of the best schools in the US. They had no "lesson plans" (yet, the best teachers). If you go to teach a lesson you should be prepared and have a plan. A good teacher is also able to immediately cancel the plan and just to a review. You may have planed to teach a new complex science topic but the kids walk in from a math test into your class room and are "dead". I have seen the worst teachers sticking to their "lesson plans". I miss the kids. But the administrative bullshit will prevent that I ever teach again.
  - Pulcinella 8y ago
    “I miss the kids. But the administrative bullshit will prevent that I ever teach again.” Yeah it’s not the students that make my job difficult, it’s the administrators.
  - 8y ago

lacker 8y ago

Third were the teachers “who can but won’t,” in Gunner’s phrase; these teachers had the capacity to become more effective educators but appeared to have no interest in doing so. They were already set in their pedagogical ways or didn’t think change at the school was necessary or possible or didn’t want to put in more effort. There is a fairly simple solution here. Rather than improving the skills of people who aren't interested in improving, just fire them.

willart4food 8y ago
> There is a fairly simple solution here. Rather than improving the skills of people who aren't interested in improving, just fire them. Well, depends on the absolute quality level of these teachers: according to your statement, you would fire a good-but-not-great teacher who is not willing to improve and retain a mediocre teacher who is willing, but not capable, to improve.
- lacker 8y ago
  Yeah good point. It's also discouraging how much the principal has to deal with staff turnover - it seems like there are constantly problems like "This teacher isn't very good, but it's so hard to hire good teachers, if they quit I'll probably get a worse one."
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    I know that one of my colleagues got tenure solely because they had an issue with teacher retention in the math department. They weren't recommended for rehire after their first year, even from the person who supervised them, who was a friend. But, the school was struggling to fill the math spot that it already had open, and so they, of course, didn't do anything to her. This was repeated several years. In fact, I think they've had to hire a math teacher each of the past 5/6 years due to various things.
sdenton4 8y ago
This is addressed in the article; turn over in these schools is a huge problem, especially mid-year, where students dealing with lots of instability in their lives suddenly have another major change. There's no guarantee that the replacing teacher will be any better: indeed, given the stress and low pay, it seems a decent chance you'll end up in the same place you started. Furthermore, firing a third-to-half of the teachers (even during the off season) will create a pretty trash work environment, where /everyone/ is fearing for their jobs. I thought the principal in the article did a great job of managing the issue. She made it clear that she was building a new culture of higher expectations. When confronted with the higher expectations, low-performing teachers can try to get with it (which is a win), or quit, as many did.

chongli 8y ago

I've had a number of different people tell me I should become a teacher, that I'm really good at explaining things, and I'm still skeptical of the impact of teaching in general. I don't know how we're supposed to measure it. Controlling for the individual variation of the students themselves is a non-trivial problem. The best schools tend to be highly selective in their admissions and the worst students seem mostly unteachable. I challenge anyone to take the best teacher they've ever met and put them in charge of a class full of students from the first percentile of test scores.

dasil003 8y ago
Not everything can be quantified, and I think it's a dangerous line of thinking to equate impact with measurability. Particularly in education, the focus on standardized testing has had real negative impact in the fuzzier areas like critical thinking and the joy of learning. Of course I can't quantify this, but that doesn't mean it's not true. I get that standardized tests are necessary to some extent, but I would not equate the things that led me to do well on them as the most impactful events of my education. One-on-one human interaction and empathy has been what elevated me past the hoop-jumping to a higher level of agency and self-motivated productivity.

jccalhoun 8y ago

This article seems more like a profile than actually addressing the question raised in the headline. It is an interesting profile and I would guess that it is enlightening for people that haven't taught high school. To answer the headline's question, as a former high school teacher and current college professor, I know that while a lot of teaching is about learning how to teach, I did have a leg up on a lot of my grad school cohort because I had a BS in English Education and had taken a number of education courses. That gave me some (admittedly limited) background in educational psychology and pedagogy that my peers who had never taught did not have. However, there is a big gap between theory and practice and I think I learned the most about teaching by trying things and seeing what worked and what didn't. The most important thing is to resist the temptation to get lazy and just keep teaching the same things and the same way semester after semester and year after year.

japhyr 8y ago

I've been teaching for over 20 years, and I've loved it. One of my biggest frustrations over the years, though, has been this notion that good teaching can't be taught. There's this notion that you have to be born a teacher, which is ridiculous. Certainly talent has a role in the profession, as it does in any profession, but there's a whole lot that can be taught. Here's a few ideas that can be taught: - Relationships are important. Students learn best from people they trust, and you can do things in a school and in a classroom that develop trust between students and their peers, and staff. - Formative assessment is critical to growth. Formative assessment is assessment for the purpose of growth and learning, not for the purpose of grading. It's written and verbal feedback. - When conflict arises, restorative approaches are more effective than punitive approaches. Restorative approaches look at what happened, why it happened, what harm was caused, and what can be done to address the actual harm that was caused. Restorative approaches are not weak if they are done well. - Classroom management is important, but if you go at it by being too controlling you won't be a good teacher. A healthy amount of interaction is more effective than a silent classroom where everyone is afraid to talk. - There's no place for zeroes in a grade book. A zero doesn't represent a student's learning, and it throws off all other measures of learning. I could go on, but the bigger point is that there are many techniques and ideas that can be taught and modeled in the school and in the classroom. I think many student teachers get pulled into old, ineffective ways of teaching because of how it's modeled to them. They're taught many good approaches to teaching, but their ed school teachers just lecture at them. They're told to use well-researched, effective techniques, but then they're paired up with a mentor teacher who only uses an old-school lecture style, an overly strict approach to grading and assessment, and a punitive approach to discipline.

lisper 8y ago
Another item that I think it vitally important but often overlooked: put yourself in the mindset of your audience, particularly with respect to vocabulary. For every word you choose, ask yourself: does the person I'm speaking to know what this word means? It's really easy to lose sight of this because you (obviously) know what the word means, and so it's easy to assume that your audience does too. But they may not, and if they don't, then as soon as you say the word, you will lose them because you'll be going on but they'll be back on that word thinking, "What the heck does that mean?" This is particularly important in STEM education. Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) is a master at this. He will go out of his way to coin and define new vocabulary in order to sound less intimidating. My favorite example is his invention of "squishification" as a synonym for eccentricity when talking about ellipses. It's a much better word because it's friendlier, it doesn't have semantic baggage related to weird mental states associated with it, and no one can ever forget what it means.

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sagefy 8y ago

Hattie's effect size list is a good place to start if you're interested in what teaching practices leads to better learning results: https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/ https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effec... I few others I'd recommend: - How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles by Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman - How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, Cocking, & Pellegrino - Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley - Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Ericsson and Pool Discloser: I wrote https://sgef.cc/tldrideas https://sgef.cc/tldrideas and am building Sagefy, a learning platform

Baeocystin 8y ago
Thank you for the resource links/recommendations.

lurquer 8y ago

This title brings to mind the Paradox of the Court. A famous rhetoritician/lawyer in Greece taught his craft to a student. The student never paid his bill, claiming the teacher sucked. The teacher sued the student for the fee. The student represented himself. The teacher pointed out that if the student wins, he must pay up as it would be proof he had learned the craft of lawyering. And, if the student lost, then he should have to pay as well. The student argued the opposite: regardless of the verdict, he shouldn't have to pay for similar (but opposite) reasons. In short, if s teacher cannot teach one how to teach, then the teacher was by definition not a good teacher.

jaequery 8y ago

a good teacher is a good motivator. it's simple as that.

camelite 8y ago

It's a lot easier than many people believe: you give them a good script, and a year or two of training in how to deliver it.

lutorm 8y ago

This is a ridiculous question. Of course teaching, like any other skill, can be taught. I'm sure there are differing aptitudes among people, but unless you think that "good" anything can't be taught, it's hard to see why teaching would be this snowflake skill that's unlike any other...

DoubleCribble 8y ago

Sure it can. Here's the formula: Good teaching = subject mastery + good public speaking + good classroom management + lessons designed with a low floor and high ceiling (allowing for a wide range of zones of proximal development)

watwut 8y ago
Your great teacher formula assumes one way communication where students are talked to but ignored. That is suspect.
- DoubleCribble 8y ago
  That's actually completely the opposite. Low Floor High Ceiling lessons are the antithesis of monologues. Here's a primer:[0] [0]https://nrich.maths.org/7701 https://nrich.maths.org/7701
  - watwut 8y ago
    Still, there is nothing about ability to listen or interpret human children - no expectatin about understanding of brain development (that is not just difficulty, there is way more to it) nor how their emotions affect their behavior. Nor ability to figure out which particular thing it is they don't get and need to be told to move on. I can't recall good teacher thet would not had that.
    - DoubleCribble 8y ago
      What you describe falls under the good classroom management skill set. Maximizing student engagement and time on task requires some familiarity with concepts in child development, educational psychology, emotional intelligence and group dynamics. I'd also sprinkle in a little conflict resolution training for extra credit.
      - watwut 8y ago
        No it does not falls there. Not at all. Engaged studen on task does not imply what I wrote about.

alexnyc 8y ago

Can anyone think of an article or book that explains how to be a good teacher (in the classroom, military, etc.)?

DoubleCribble 8y ago
Article, no. Graduate degree programs, yes.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  I say the graduate degree programs are highly variable. I'm currently in one for a MAT, and it's really just mostly busywork that's useless. My classes are either all geared towards elementary/middle school or, the one that is on secondary schools, the teacher hasn't taught in a public school for about a decade, and has never taught in the state that most of us are based in, or in a rural area. I'm sure there are some good ones, yes. I feel like the in-person one near me here would be better, since they can tailor to our needs, but it's also much more expensive. And still doesn't deal with the fact that a lot of the professors aren't in the classroom, or are in more privileged schools. It's the same issue I have with a lot of the professional development stuff you see, too.
  - DoubleCribble 8y ago
    The number-one-most-powerful tool that I can recommend in teacher development is getting mentored by a Master Teacher once you are in your own classroom (ie, not student teaching). The good news is that you will likely get exposure to many/most of the big ideas in any graduate program. However, it's very difficult to integrate those big ideas into your own classroom without a guide. Having somebody regularly observe your work and hold you accountable for your choices can make an enormous difference in outcomes (and often very rapidly). If a formal mentorship program is not available, then I would recommend seeking out an informal one.
MarkMc 8y ago
Doug Lemov's book "Teach Like a Champion" is great: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118901851/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118901851/ref=dbs_a_def_r... I'd also recommend "Teaching as Leadership": https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achievement-ebook/dp/B00340ESC4 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achi...

codr4 8y ago

I'm sure it can, but it takes longer and works differently than we like to believe. Empathy, sensitivity -- the ability to connect to other people on their level and feel what kind of nudges they need to evolve. But of course you can't expect that to happen if you treat teachers like garbage and stuff them in sterile rooms with 30 over stimulated kids.

yodsanklai 8y ago

I'm both a CS professor and former ski instructor (in Europe). As I was reading this thread, I realized that I've never had a single lesson on how to teach CS, and besides my students, nobody has ever gave me any feedback on my teaching. On the other hand, to become a ski instructor, I went on a rather extensive training with a lot of emphasis on pedagogy.

anonymous5133 8y ago
No one has ever gave you feedback on your teaching because you've never surveyed your students.
- ascar 8y ago
  He said he got feedback from his students, but not from anyone else (e.g. more senior professors).
- mikekchar 8y ago
  Not the OP, but when I was teaching, surveying my students was a technique that a colleague introduced to me. It was probably the best thing I ever did. I handed out a small sheet of paper to all the students at the beginning of class with some multiple choice questions and a space for general comments and asked for it back at the end. They didn't have to fill it in. I just told them if they get bored in class, just jot down whatever. Usually I think about 20% of the forms were filled in any class, but the info on them was really amazing. Since I did it every class, the students soon got used to it. Kills a lot of trees, though :-) In defence of the OP, though, students can seem some parts of the teaching process. They can't see all of it and they definitely do not have the experience to provide good advice. Looking at surveys, you've potentially got good data, but you need to translate that into good action. What a student imagines will work and what will actually work is often very, very different. This is why you need help from experienced teachers. I was lucky to work in a situation where I did "team teaching" a lot -- two teachers in the same class room. It's incredible what you can learn in that situation -- either just watching the other teacher handle a situation, or getting feedback on what you are doing.
8y ago

codingdave 8y ago

Another challenge in education is that every area has different problems, and needs different solutions. In Utah, for example, our problem is teachers sticking with the job. There is a trend of young women graduating school, teaching for a bit until they get married, having kids, and walking out of the classroom having taught sometimes as little as only one year. On an individual level, I respect the choice to leave a job that isn't right for you, but its does leave us with an abundance of young inexperienced educators.

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50 8y ago

This reminds of this good read: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/what-classrooms-can-learn-from-magic/425100/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/what-c....

mncharity 8y ago

"Computer" used to be a job description. That bundle of roles no longer exists. The roles have been partially automated, and moved elsewhere. Jobs that use spreadsheets for instance. Surgery once did far more harm than good. Then took killing people for granted. Now it's discovering checklists, and teams, and crew resource management. Surgeons are discovering their roles of skilled technician and team manager conflict. Medical error is still a major cause of mortality. For a given condition, there's a very very broad spread of institutional competence. The best, are learning organizations with an intense focus on continuous process improvement and on not failing each and every one of their patients. The worst... don't wash their hands going from bathroom to ICU. Instructors at first-tier universities describe incoming introductory science students as expecting to be "spoon fed" - lacking both the skills and willingness to wrestling with a body of knowledge to extract understanding. With wealth, they've had such "good teachers", they haven't needed to. Consider a country with a focus on memorize-and-regurgitate - even more so than the USA. When a school fails to teach memorization, it's at least easy to recognize the failure. But what might equitable and effective science education look like? If every freshman class resembled incoming Ivy, a question might then be: "ok, we've nailed equity... now when are we going to make a start on effective?" Chemistry education research describes pre-college chemistry education content as "incoherent", leaving both students and teachers deeply steeped in misconceptions. With science education at least, we're currently failing badly and pervasively. Tech is coming. VR/AR, hybrid human-computer teams, ML, spoken dialog system, etc, etc. "Classroom teacher" is bundle of roles of breathtaking difficulty and scope. As with surgeon, those roles are now being specialized and rebundled. Like barber surgeon, it was a bundling that required accepting that we would pervasively fail our patients. Perhaps decades from now, we'll end up with something like a "classroom teacher", but with a vastly greater support system. Or perhaps people will forget that "classroom teacher" was once a job description.

MarkMc 8y ago

There seems to be a strong divide on whether excellent teaching can make a significant difference to poor kids. Typically this mirrors the left-right political divide. To quote from the article: "While teacher effectiveness may be the most salient in-school factor contributing to student academic outcomes, it contributes a relatively small slice — no more than 14 percent, according to a recent RAND Corporation analysis of teacher effectiveness — to the overall picture. A far bigger wedge is influenced by out-of-school variables over which teachers have little control: family educational background, the effects of poverty or segregation on children, exposure to stress from gun violence or abuse and how often students change schools, owing to homelessness or other upheavals." "Teaching does matter, and it can improve. But there is little evidence — at least to date — that it can counter the effects on children of attending neighborhood schools that remain racially and economically isolated." I find this attitude difficult to reconcile with other things I've read about teaching poor and minority kids. For example, here is a summary of a few studies as reported in Teaching as Leadership [1]: "The schools that are highly effective produce results that almost entirely overcome the effects of student background" [2] "Having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap" [3] "Differences in this magnitude -- 50 percentile points in just three years -- are stunning. For an individual child, it means the difference between a 'remedial' label and placement in the accelerated or even gifted track. And the difference between entry into a selective college and a lifetime of low-paying, menial work" [4] Many charter schools use a lottery to determine which students are enrolled, and many studies have taken advantage of such 'natural experiments'. This paper [5] represents a good overview of such studies. It seems that some charter schools can have significant effects on learning. In a Boston study, "Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011)...find very large average effects: charter school attendance increases state-level English/language arts and math performance test scores by 0.2 and 0.35 standard deviations per year respectively. Given that that the achievement gap between black and white students in Massachusetts is about 0.7 to 0.8 standard deviations, these estimates suggest that three years of charter school attendance for blacks would eliminate the black-white performance gap." However, the same paper also says that at KIPP charter schools, "School hours are extended typically to between 7:30AM and 5:00PM and include occasional Saturdays and summer weeks, and tutoring is also offered during these times." so I wonder to what degree the 'value added' by top charter schools comes simply from teaching more. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achievement/dp/0470432861 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achi... [2] Marzano, R. J. What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 2003, p. 7 [3] Kane, T., Gordon, R. and Staiger, D. Identifying Effective Teachers Useing Performance on the Job Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2004, p. 8 [4] Peske, H. and Haycock, K. Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Short-Changed on Teacher Quality: A Report and Recommendations by the Education Trust. Washington, D.C.: Education Trust, 2006, p. 11 [5] http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/JEPChabrier2016.pdf http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/JEPCh...

Pica_soO 8y ago

The best base for good teaching, is a feeling of self-worth of the teacher, one of mental independence. The idea, that you can quit any time and return to the profession you started out from. This mental independence allows for the creation of discipline - because you radiate subconscious signals that you are a free agent, able to leave those unwilling behind at any time. The kids see that, they can taste fear. This is why teachers, who studied directly after school- basically never leaving the school Eco-system, are often less respected.

JackMorgan 8y ago

As a former middle school teacher who escaped into programming, I think the problems of teaching are systemic to the education system itself. Teaching to a test is short-sighted and a phenomenal waste of effort and money. Some rare teachers can use a combination of persuasion, charisma, fear, and group dynamics to be very successful at teaching to a test. They can make students jump through the hoops, remembering just enough to get it all out before summer hits and they forget it all again. The current model of education is a "push" model, where the skill of the teacher is the defining measure, and the goal is temporary memorization of facts. Instead we need to move to a "pull" model, where students learn to love learning, and through this teach themselves fact checking, research, critical thinking, and civic responsibility. I believe this is the obvious next step for a world where any fact is freely available inside one's pocket or library. I do not believe this is possible with grouping by age or with lecture and test based classes. The Sudbury school is one such attempt, and it apparently is quite effective. We need to start moving all our schools this way! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school