6 ms·

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing what one researcher calls "withitness."

57 points by robg 18y ago

dhimes 18y ago
“Mind you, that’s not great feedback...The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha’s name card, point to the letter “V,” show her how different it is from “C,” and make the class sound out both letters." Unless, of course, all the other kids start calling out their own names, then other words, and she does lose control of the class. It's an excellent article. But the problem I've always had with the kind of analyses portrayed by the UVA team is that it's too easy to sit there and sound smart by making these kinds of criticisms. Similar criticisms could be made about the math teacher, whose style is more like mine was in the community college physics classes I taught, but I'll spare you, dear readers of this comment. I think that it's better to think of teaching like trying to find the best-fit line through a cloud of scattered points. You can stand there and say, "the shortest distance to the next point is actually over here..." but completely miss the idea that if you are trying to maximize a long-term result, you may not want to draw your line in that particular direction.
- jerf 18y ago
  I remember being asked to "criticize" papers in college. These papers were always classics in the field, in many cases standing up for decades. It always made me uncomfortable, though I eventually settled into a rhythm of simply automatically and mindlessly "criticizing" that "they should have done more". Dress that up in three paragraphs and you're done. And this is the same thing. Criticizing that somebody should have done more is a null criticism. What needs to happen in any environment where you have limited resources (limited pages the journal will publish, limited time with the children) is that if you're going to say somebody needed to do "more", you need to also criticize what should be removed to make room for this "more". By that standard, I doubt this teacher could have done much better. There's a balance to reacting to the kids, but you also need to get through the curriculum, which ultimately is there for a reason. (Most of us would probably agree there's too much emphasis on curriculum today, but the solution is not to completely ignore it.) Reacting endlessly to the students comes with its own problems. I should have been nailed for my formulaic criticisms. But then... students "criticizing" the top 0.01% of papers shouldn't be expected to produce useful results anyhow, any more than this criticism of the teacher does. There's only so many pages and so much time.
- Tichy 18y ago
  I must admit the part about those people criticizing the videos really doesn't sit well with me. Do they assume there is one perfect way to teach? Are they working towards establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to? Maybe pulling out the letter V would have distracted too much from the letter C, or whatever. I am afraid such people are just parasites to society, somehow they managed to tap into tax payer money and get paid for just sitting on their ass all day talking bullshit. Probably standing in front of a class directly they would be miserable failures. Sorry for sounding so harsh, but my spouse is a teacher, so I guess I am a little too emotionally involved...
  - pchristensen 18y ago
    They're trying to systematically determine what works and what doesn't. They've got to review a lot of different teachers in the same and different situations. A teacher who wants to do better would greatly benefit from specific, actionable recommendations. Creating tools that can be used for deliberate practice is useful work, especially if the results can be widely distributed.
    - Tichy 18y ago
      In theory yes, but it just seems too easy to criticize in that way. But I admit I don't know enough about their work to give a fair judgement...
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
mattmaroon 18y ago
As usual, Gladwell is cherrypicking data to display something unrelated to reality. Let's look at the first QB picked since 1999. 2000: Chad Pennington, this year starting qb for the Jets, doing well. 2001: Michael Vick, who was one of the top few QBs in the league. Of course talent scouts can't predict animal cruelty. 2002: David Carr: Playing backup to Eli Manning. Started for 6 years until an injury sidelined him. Not a McNabb, but far from a Tim Couch 2003: Carson Palmer: 2 pro bowls with the Bungles. 2004: Eli Manning: Superbowl MVP (here's where players are still too new to tell much about) 2005: Alex Smith: that one hasn't worked out yet and may never. 2006: Vince Young: Promising backup on the Titans. 2007: JaMarcus Russell: Starting for the Raiders 2008: Starting for the Falcons. Either way, in any non-Gladwellian universe, I'd say college QB scouts are doing pretty well.
- twampss 18y ago
  Bungles. I see what you did there... ;)
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    I'm from Browns territory, sorry.
    - twampss 18y ago
      Oh I'm not a Bengals fan - just never heard that clever team name before. Well played!
      - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
        "just never heard that clever team name before" You obviously haven't been watching ESPN for, oh, the past decade.
        twampss 18y ago
        Ha! I'm a programmer, what can I say? ;)
dpapathanasiou 18y ago
While I'm not a fan of Gladwell's analysis (I agree that he has a tendency to pick data that supports his point, while ignoring evidence that contradicts it), I did like the message of this piece. I.e., we should let more people try their hand at teaching, with the idea that most will probably not be good at it. This assumes, of course, that none of the failures are allowed to be tenured, and that teaching can be made an attractive career choice.
- newt0311 18y ago
  Currently the biggest opponents of performance testing of teachers is the teachers union. Good luck getting rid of them.
  - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
    True, it's not likely to happen, given that the union is both politically powerful and responsible for the way things are now. It would be a worthwhile thing to try, though.
    - newt0311 18y ago
      A lot of people already have. The fact that school voucher systems and charter schools exist in some areas is testament to their heroic effort. However, it is too little and maybe too late.
      - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
        He's suggesting something subtly different: allow people to become teachers more easily (i.e., within the existing public school system). I don't think that's ever been tried.
      - pchristensen 18y ago
        too little and maybe too late Definitely too late for kids already in school, but I would wager that humans will be educating their kids in schools for hundreds more years (maybe more). This would be like Edison giving up on the light bulb because it was too late for the kids who had to go to bed at sundown.
eli_s 18y ago
I am a high school teacher and I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. I don't know anything about NFL so I don't know if the comparisons are accurate, however the observations about good teaching are spot on. There is no denying that those studying under a good teacher learn more than those studying under a poor/average teacher. There has been a lot said about "withitness" in the literature over the years and it is a quality that one either has or doesn't have. There are lots of conclusions you can draw from observing teachers and it's quite awe inspiring to see a truly excellent teacher do their job. @Tichy: Nothing in this article had anything to do with 'establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to'. The good teacher qualities that were mentioned included questioning, providing direct responses to student questions and treating learning as a team effort (teacher and student learning together). These are qualities that every good teacher exhibits and all poor teachers struggle with.
newt0311 18y ago
Interesting article but I wish the author would be a little more concise. Rambling on about football picks when the topic was teaching was a bit annoying even though he tried to tie the two together.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  The topic was inability to measure and rate people for a given profession. The recent (and ongoing) discussion about why great programmers don't get paid more is equally relevant. It's about information asymmetry which prevents efficient allocation of resources. But my sentence there was nowhere near as entertaining as Gladwell's anecdotal writing.
michaelneale 18y ago
Does it bother anyone else that a researcher has to use "withitness" when other words or definition would have sounded better and read less like pop-psychology noise?
- create_account 18y ago
  He's hoping to coin a phrase like "tipping point" and turn it into a best-seller. (I don't like it, either, but it does make sense from a marketing perspective)
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    Yes I could see how someone might try to do that. I need to coin something - any ideas?
  - ig1 18y ago
    Withitness is actually a standard term in the research it was coined by educational theorist Jacob Kounin in 1970.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      really? I will assume so as I am too lazy to google this time of the morning. In that case I take it all back !
jlhamilton 18y ago
I like what this guy had to say. http://juggdish.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/how-to-be-as-smart-as-malcolm-gladwell/ http://juggdish.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/how-to-be-as-smart-...
jonknee 18y ago
I guessed that this was a Malcom Gladwell article before I clicked on it. He's got a formula.
marvin 18y ago
To the other commenters, this article isn't about college football. Most of the substance here is really obvious to anyone with a modicum of interest in teaching, but unfortunately that is what happens when you deal with politics and bureaucracy. You have to state the obvious, again and again and again. Teaching is one of my secret passions. I have always been able to make people understand difficult things by talking to them and watching how they respond. When I study, people often ask me for help instead of the teacher/lecturer. I love it. The thing is, being a teacher would be an incredibly stupid profession for people like me. I will earn twice as much money doing something else, navigating a tenth of the bureaucracy and being able to call the shots without bothering with twenty sorts of political correctness. There is no room in a normal Western school for my style of teaching. I'd be surrounded by imbeciles (imbeciles with authority) and not get paid for my effort. There is something deeply wrong with our system when it deters people who actually want to do good. There is definitely a business opportunity here if I'd want to start teaching privately or start some private school. Rich people see what's wrong here, and are probably willing to pay to fix it. Here's what needs to be done: Pay more to the best teachers (at least twice as much as they get today), abolish cartels and unions among current teachers, measure results, remove bureaucratic barriers to alternative styles and techniques, and drop all requirements of political correctness. Most of these requirements are, for different political reasons, impossible to achieve in a publicly funded system. But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.
- youngnh 18y ago
  > But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos. I'm a miltary brat, so I've been in and out of a half-dozen public and private schools in my K-12 education. Everywhere I went there were private schools significantly better than the public ones. The chaos seems to be confined along socioeconomic lines. The best teachers in the world can't teach kids that don't show up for class, and I'd say America is pretty split as to whether showing up for class is strictly necessary for future success.
  - marvin 18y ago
swombat 18y ago
I'm sure his points are interesting, but I'm inclined not to bother to read an article concerning a researcher who hasn't taken the time to learn to speak English. "withitness" indeed. What about "awareness"?
fbbwsa 18y ago
Wow, that is one of the worst articles I have ever read by Gladwell. I generally think Gladwell is overrated, but at least provides interesting anecdotes. I was sorely tempted to quit reading it about 2/3 through, but then I thought "maybe he'll tie together the 'football quarterback selection' story with the 'teacher selection' story in a meaningful way." But no. This would have been more interesting as a piece about either just college football quarterback selection or just the question of incentivising a high level of primary/secondary school education. In the context of the article, they're really not the same question I'm not against open ended questions and unresolved endings, but the analogy was strained, lacked interesting content. And I am interested in both college football and the "quality of US secondary school education" debate... The Gladwell love-fest is getting out of hand. I've enjoyed his writing to date for the most part, despite thinking that it was not quite as groundbreaking as some people seem to insinuate. But now, anyone will publish him just because he's Gladwell.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  It wasn't really about teaching or football. It was about how being unable to measure performance causes a poor allocation of human resources. Top programmers not getting paid for the value they produce is the exact same problem.

57 points by robg 18y ago

“Mind you, that’s not great feedback...The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha’s name card, point to the letter “V,” show her how different it is from “C,” and make the class sound out both letters." Unless, of course, all the other kids start calling out their own names, then other words, and she does lose control of the class. It's an excellent article. But the problem I've always had with the kind of analyses portrayed by the UVA team is that it's too easy to sit there and sound smart by making these kinds of criticisms. Similar criticisms could be made about the math teacher, whose style is more like mine was in the community college physics classes I taught, but I'll spare you, dear readers of this comment. I think that it's better to think of teaching like trying to find the best-fit line through a cloud of scattered points. You can stand there and say, "the shortest distance to the next point is actually over here..." but completely miss the idea that if you are trying to maximize a long-term result, you may not want to draw your line in that particular direction.

jerf 18y ago
I remember being asked to "criticize" papers in college. These papers were always classics in the field, in many cases standing up for decades. It always made me uncomfortable, though I eventually settled into a rhythm of simply automatically and mindlessly "criticizing" that "they should have done more". Dress that up in three paragraphs and you're done. And this is the same thing. Criticizing that somebody should have done more is a null criticism. What needs to happen in any environment where you have limited resources (limited pages the journal will publish, limited time with the children) is that if you're going to say somebody needed to do "more", you need to also criticize what should be removed to make room for this "more". By that standard, I doubt this teacher could have done much better. There's a balance to reacting to the kids, but you also need to get through the curriculum, which ultimately is there for a reason. (Most of us would probably agree there's too much emphasis on curriculum today, but the solution is not to completely ignore it.) Reacting endlessly to the students comes with its own problems. I should have been nailed for my formulaic criticisms. But then... students "criticizing" the top 0.01% of papers shouldn't be expected to produce useful results anyhow, any more than this criticism of the teacher does. There's only so many pages and so much time.
Tichy 18y ago
I must admit the part about those people criticizing the videos really doesn't sit well with me. Do they assume there is one perfect way to teach? Are they working towards establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to? Maybe pulling out the letter V would have distracted too much from the letter C, or whatever. I am afraid such people are just parasites to society, somehow they managed to tap into tax payer money and get paid for just sitting on their ass all day talking bullshit. Probably standing in front of a class directly they would be miserable failures. Sorry for sounding so harsh, but my spouse is a teacher, so I guess I am a little too emotionally involved...
- pchristensen 18y ago
  They're trying to systematically determine what works and what doesn't. They've got to review a lot of different teachers in the same and different situations. A teacher who wants to do better would greatly benefit from specific, actionable recommendations. Creating tools that can be used for deliberate practice is useful work, especially if the results can be widely distributed.
  - Tichy 18y ago
    In theory yes, but it just seems too easy to criticize in that way. But I admit I don't know enough about their work to give a fair judgement...

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

mattmaroon 18y ago

As usual, Gladwell is cherrypicking data to display something unrelated to reality. Let's look at the first QB picked since 1999. 2000: Chad Pennington, this year starting qb for the Jets, doing well. 2001: Michael Vick, who was one of the top few QBs in the league. Of course talent scouts can't predict animal cruelty. 2002: David Carr: Playing backup to Eli Manning. Started for 6 years until an injury sidelined him. Not a McNabb, but far from a Tim Couch 2003: Carson Palmer: 2 pro bowls with the Bungles. 2004: Eli Manning: Superbowl MVP (here's where players are still too new to tell much about) 2005: Alex Smith: that one hasn't worked out yet and may never. 2006: Vince Young: Promising backup on the Titans. 2007: JaMarcus Russell: Starting for the Raiders 2008: Starting for the Falcons. Either way, in any non-Gladwellian universe, I'd say college QB scouts are doing pretty well.

twampss 18y ago
Bungles. I see what you did there... ;)
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  I'm from Browns territory, sorry.
  - twampss 18y ago
    Oh I'm not a Bengals fan - just never heard that clever team name before. Well played!
    - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
      "just never heard that clever team name before" You obviously haven't been watching ESPN for, oh, the past decade.
      - twampss 18y ago
        Ha! I'm a programmer, what can I say? ;)

dpapathanasiou 18y ago

While I'm not a fan of Gladwell's analysis (I agree that he has a tendency to pick data that supports his point, while ignoring evidence that contradicts it), I did like the message of this piece. I.e., we should let more people try their hand at teaching, with the idea that most will probably not be good at it. This assumes, of course, that none of the failures are allowed to be tenured, and that teaching can be made an attractive career choice.

newt0311 18y ago
Currently the biggest opponents of performance testing of teachers is the teachers union. Good luck getting rid of them.
- dpapathanasiou 18y ago
  True, it's not likely to happen, given that the union is both politically powerful and responsible for the way things are now. It would be a worthwhile thing to try, though.
  - newt0311 18y ago
    A lot of people already have. The fact that school voucher systems and charter schools exist in some areas is testament to their heroic effort. However, it is too little and maybe too late.
    - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
      He's suggesting something subtly different: allow people to become teachers more easily (i.e., within the existing public school system). I don't think that's ever been tried.
    - pchristensen 18y ago
      too little and maybe too late Definitely too late for kids already in school, but I would wager that humans will be educating their kids in schools for hundreds more years (maybe more). This would be like Edison giving up on the light bulb because it was too late for the kids who had to go to bed at sundown.

eli_s 18y ago

I am a high school teacher and I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. I don't know anything about NFL so I don't know if the comparisons are accurate, however the observations about good teaching are spot on. There is no denying that those studying under a good teacher learn more than those studying under a poor/average teacher. There has been a lot said about "withitness" in the literature over the years and it is a quality that one either has or doesn't have. There are lots of conclusions you can draw from observing teachers and it's quite awe inspiring to see a truly excellent teacher do their job. @Tichy: Nothing in this article had anything to do with 'establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to'. The good teacher qualities that were mentioned included questioning, providing direct responses to student questions and treating learning as a team effort (teacher and student learning together). These are qualities that every good teacher exhibits and all poor teachers struggle with.

newt0311 18y ago

Interesting article but I wish the author would be a little more concise. Rambling on about football picks when the topic was teaching was a bit annoying even though he tried to tie the two together.

pchristensen 18y ago
The topic was inability to measure and rate people for a given profession. The recent (and ongoing) discussion about why great programmers don't get paid more is equally relevant. It's about information asymmetry which prevents efficient allocation of resources. But my sentence there was nowhere near as entertaining as Gladwell's anecdotal writing.

michaelneale 18y ago

Does it bother anyone else that a researcher has to use "withitness" when other words or definition would have sounded better and read less like pop-psychology noise?

create_account 18y ago
He's hoping to coin a phrase like "tipping point" and turn it into a best-seller. (I don't like it, either, but it does make sense from a marketing perspective)
- michaelneale 18y ago
  Yes I could see how someone might try to do that. I need to coin something - any ideas?
- ig1 18y ago
  Withitness is actually a standard term in the research it was coined by educational theorist Jacob Kounin in 1970.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    really? I will assume so as I am too lazy to google this time of the morning. In that case I take it all back !

jlhamilton 18y ago

I like what this guy had to say. http://juggdish.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/how-to-be-as-smart-as-malcolm-gladwell/ http://juggdish.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/how-to-be-as-smart-...

jonknee 18y ago

I guessed that this was a Malcom Gladwell article before I clicked on it. He's got a formula.

marvin 18y ago

To the other commenters, this article isn't about college football. Most of the substance here is really obvious to anyone with a modicum of interest in teaching, but unfortunately that is what happens when you deal with politics and bureaucracy. You have to state the obvious, again and again and again. Teaching is one of my secret passions. I have always been able to make people understand difficult things by talking to them and watching how they respond. When I study, people often ask me for help instead of the teacher/lecturer. I love it. The thing is, being a teacher would be an incredibly stupid profession for people like me. I will earn twice as much money doing something else, navigating a tenth of the bureaucracy and being able to call the shots without bothering with twenty sorts of political correctness. There is no room in a normal Western school for my style of teaching. I'd be surrounded by imbeciles (imbeciles with authority) and not get paid for my effort. There is something deeply wrong with our system when it deters people who actually want to do good. There is definitely a business opportunity here if I'd want to start teaching privately or start some private school. Rich people see what's wrong here, and are probably willing to pay to fix it. Here's what needs to be done: Pay more to the best teachers (at least twice as much as they get today), abolish cartels and unions among current teachers, measure results, remove bureaucratic barriers to alternative styles and techniques, and drop all requirements of political correctness. Most of these requirements are, for different political reasons, impossible to achieve in a publicly funded system. But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.

youngnh 18y ago
> But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos. I'm a miltary brat, so I've been in and out of a half-dozen public and private schools in my K-12 education. Everywhere I went there were private schools significantly better than the public ones. The chaos seems to be confined along socioeconomic lines. The best teachers in the world can't teach kids that don't show up for class, and I'd say America is pretty split as to whether showing up for class is strictly necessary for future success.
- marvin 18y ago

swombat 18y ago

I'm sure his points are interesting, but I'm inclined not to bother to read an article concerning a researcher who hasn't taken the time to learn to speak English. "withitness" indeed. What about "awareness"?

fbbwsa 18y ago

Wow, that is one of the worst articles I have ever read by Gladwell. I generally think Gladwell is overrated, but at least provides interesting anecdotes. I was sorely tempted to quit reading it about 2/3 through, but then I thought "maybe he'll tie together the 'football quarterback selection' story with the 'teacher selection' story in a meaningful way." But no. This would have been more interesting as a piece about either just college football quarterback selection or just the question of incentivising a high level of primary/secondary school education. In the context of the article, they're really not the same question I'm not against open ended questions and unresolved endings, but the analogy was strained, lacked interesting content. And I am interested in both college football and the "quality of US secondary school education" debate... The Gladwell love-fest is getting out of hand. I've enjoyed his writing to date for the most part, despite thinking that it was not quite as groundbreaking as some people seem to insinuate. But now, anyone will publish him just because he's Gladwell.

pchristensen 18y ago
It wasn't really about teaching or football. It was about how being unable to measure performance causes a poor allocation of human resources. Top programmers not getting paid for the value they produce is the exact same problem.