Some points made about the following article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwellWrote some comments in another blog and then I said to myself- hey ! this is what blogs are for!
I think the primary points of Malcolm Gladwell’s article are as follows:
· Qualities of excellent teachers (like quarterbacks) can be identified.
· It is not easily determined which individuals will exhibit the qualities of an excellent teacher (or quarterback) in a real life situation.
Secondary points:
· The current process of selection for a teacher (or quarterback) does not directly correlate with the selection of excellent teachers (or quarterbacks)
· This matters because (according to some research ) teacher quality matters more than any other factor for success in the classroom. (which is also true for the quarterbacks on the football field).
On an anecdotal basis, my wife – the teacher – notes that most practicing teachers, even the bad ones, know who the good teachers are, who the bad teachers are and who has the potential to become a good teacher, even after 10-15 minutes watching someone teach. One of the interesting assumptions of the article is that effective pedagogy is not easily taught and transferrable and there is an element of instrinsic talent involved.
The remaining question, politics and dogma aside, is what does one do about this situation? In my educational policy fantasies, I have long advocated an apprenticeship period for teachers before they become credentialed. They would work under a master teacher and practice teaching and classroom management in subsidized universal aftercare programs and only become a teacher after proving their ability to a board of master teachers. I also think that teachers should work for a district and should be assigned to specific schools. Thus, experienced teachers (with adequate compensation) would have to work in more difficult classrooms for a set period of years, where they could have the most impact. Like I said, fantasies.
If you are a parent trying to decide between several different school options and academic performance was your main criterion, one of Gladwell’s assertions in his essay is that you would be better off trying to select the school with the greater number of ‘good’ teachers and trying to make sure that your child is in those classrooms rather than looking at API scores, PTA involvement or enrichment opportunities. How you determine ‘good’ teachers and frankly, whether or not you accept the proposition is up to you. Perhaps the internet community should develop a version of what they have in college campuses; where the students anonymously review the professors for the quality of their teaching and the students can make course choices based on that information. The professors hate it, and probably so would the teachers – but if the greatest determinant of student success is teacher quality – then such reviews would be invaluable.
The second issue being discussed is more political and philosophical. Are teachers’ unions good for education? Conservatives of a certain type hate teachers’ unions because they generally support Democratic candidates - but that is an ideological opposition. I would argue that teachers’ unions definitely benefit the teachers and may benefit society at large but it is open question in my mind whether or not teachers’ unions benefit education. If you actually ask teachers, I think a lot of them would probably agree to some extent. All of them have horror stories of do-nothing teachers who teach using concepts from the previous age or have some resentment at being paid the same wage as a teacher who mails it in everyday while they work late on lesson plans and go the extra mile.
I personally think that teachers’ unions as currently organized negatively impact education but that this is not an intrinsic quality of unionism. I believe that the teachers’ unions themselves recognize that they need to be involved in the solutions at the risk of being swept aside as obstructionist. They do not want to be in the position, whenever an educational reform is mentioned from either the right or the left, of being the cause of its failure because “you could never get the union to agree”. I am not an expert in the subject, but it seems that the nurses’ union would be a better model to follow than the autoworkers’.
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell
