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It seems silly to have 1,000 teachers who range from first best to 1,000th best all teaching roughly the same number of students a year. Why not give the top 10

It seems silly to have 1,000 teachers who range from first best to 1,000th best all teaching roughly the same number of students a year. Why not give the top 10 best teachers all the resources they need then let them teach everyone?

rixrax 6y ago
Monoculture? I don’t think teaching is binary. There are of course universally really awesome teachers, as well as terrible ones. But between them, there are all kinds of teachers with all kinds of teaching styles and crazy experiments. It may not be equal for everyone, but I think it’s much better than monoculture.
- hnracer 6y ago
  Then include heterogeneity of approach in your ranking system. Even if we do this we still have a rank order from which we can select the N best and give them a scalable platform through which they can reach large numbers, and be better off than under the archaic approach of a bijective mapping from random teacher X to Y students (Y less than 200), where the quality of X is probably dominated in a Pareto sense by any single teacher in the top N. Caveat here that I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I would also say that this fits well with the part of the teaching process that can be scaled with no downsides, eg lectures. But TA sessions etc can't be scaled as well and such an approach wouldn't fit.
- Jipazgqmnm 6y ago
  Just a little empiricism: During my studies, 95 % of the teaching was somewhere between "not good" and "horrible / comically bad". There were just one or two persons in the whole faculty known for good teaching. This was acknowledged by all students I came in touch with. --> There is a kind of teaching that is uniquely perceived as "good" among the people I came in touch with. The same holds for teachers known for really bad teaching. That written, teaching _was_ mostly perceived binary. There was fairly little overlap where teaching styles were perceived "good" from some and "bad" from others.
mulmen 6y ago
I think that's like asking why nine women can't make a baby in a month. Who defines best? Why not give all the resources to one teacher?
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Students (or their families) could choose the definition of best they wanted. Some teachers are better at adding value for less intelligent pupils, some better at pushing the more gifted, some best for the hardworking, some best for the ill-motivated ... take your pick. It can even come down to relatively inane factors like one teacher's diction being too difficult for some to follow but fine for others. Re your 2nd question: bus factor. And the same answer as the first - that you can have different definitions of best depending on the pupil.
iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
Why not the top 1? I don’t know tbh. Feels wrong though. Firstly, bus factor. Then robustness. How do you train new teachers? How do they get experience? Then theres diversity of thought, where do you get that from if everyone has the same progenitor of thoughts? Then what happens politically when you give such a few number of people such power. Would fundamentally change politics. What abuses of power? Let the wrong person into those few teachers and give them lots of control over millions of children's day to day lives? Thats a lot of children to screw up if you get it wrong. That aside, it goes against my personal belief about how the world and humans work so I can’t get down with it.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Not at all. One of the major concerns in schools is student to teacher ratio and small classroom sizes are considered a plus. All the well-meaning but naive plans to turn education into mass media would with up with all the wealthy zip codes having teachers and everyone else relying on glorified youtube. At this point, if there’s an education problem where technology would be useful, it’s probably something subtle like collaborating to publish an affordable textbook as a way to break monopoly pricing.
watwut 6y ago
Good teaching of kids is not lecture - relationship and reacting to kids as individuals matter and does not scale.

rixrax 6y ago

Monoculture? I don’t think teaching is binary. There are of course universally really awesome teachers, as well as terrible ones. But between them, there are all kinds of teachers with all kinds of teaching styles and crazy experiments. It may not be equal for everyone, but I think it’s much better than monoculture.

hnracer 6y ago
Then include heterogeneity of approach in your ranking system. Even if we do this we still have a rank order from which we can select the N best and give them a scalable platform through which they can reach large numbers, and be better off than under the archaic approach of a bijective mapping from random teacher X to Y students (Y less than 200), where the quality of X is probably dominated in a Pareto sense by any single teacher in the top N. Caveat here that I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I would also say that this fits well with the part of the teaching process that can be scaled with no downsides, eg lectures. But TA sessions etc can't be scaled as well and such an approach wouldn't fit.
Jipazgqmnm 6y ago
Just a little empiricism: During my studies, 95 % of the teaching was somewhere between "not good" and "horrible / comically bad". There were just one or two persons in the whole faculty known for good teaching. This was acknowledged by all students I came in touch with. --> There is a kind of teaching that is uniquely perceived as "good" among the people I came in touch with. The same holds for teachers known for really bad teaching. That written, teaching _was_ mostly perceived binary. There was fairly little overlap where teaching styles were perceived "good" from some and "bad" from others.

mulmen 6y ago

I think that's like asking why nine women can't make a baby in a month. Who defines best? Why not give all the resources to one teacher?

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Students (or their families) could choose the definition of best they wanted. Some teachers are better at adding value for less intelligent pupils, some better at pushing the more gifted, some best for the hardworking, some best for the ill-motivated ... take your pick. It can even come down to relatively inane factors like one teacher's diction being too difficult for some to follow but fine for others. Re your 2nd question: bus factor. And the same answer as the first - that you can have different definitions of best depending on the pupil.

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago

Why not the top 1? I don’t know tbh. Feels wrong though. Firstly, bus factor. Then robustness. How do you train new teachers? How do they get experience? Then theres diversity of thought, where do you get that from if everyone has the same progenitor of thoughts? Then what happens politically when you give such a few number of people such power. Would fundamentally change politics. What abuses of power? Let the wrong person into those few teachers and give them lots of control over millions of children's day to day lives? Thats a lot of children to screw up if you get it wrong. That aside, it goes against my personal belief about how the world and humans work so I can’t get down with it.

coffeefirst 6y ago

Not at all. One of the major concerns in schools is student to teacher ratio and small classroom sizes are considered a plus. All the well-meaning but naive plans to turn education into mass media would with up with all the wealthy zip codes having teachers and everyone else relying on glorified youtube. At this point, if there’s an education problem where technology would be useful, it’s probably something subtle like collaborating to publish an affordable textbook as a way to break monopoly pricing.

watwut 6y ago

Good teaching of kids is not lecture - relationship and reacting to kids as individuals matter and does not scale.