No. I’m trying to get you to tell me what makes teaching success not random and completely out of the hands of the teacher.
Here’s the conversation up to now:
Me: What do we need to do to achieve educational success?
You: Hire quality teachers.
Me: OK, great. So how do we determine whether someone would be a quality teacher.
You: We see if they achieve educational success.
Me: But we are trying to determine who to hire to achieve that educational success. We need a way to determine whether a potential teacher is more likely than another potential teacher to achieve educational success.
For example:
Let’s go with this analogy. I can identify some characteristics I think would make a good poker player: patience, understanding odds, and understanding player tendencies. If I could develop a way to screen for those abilities, I think I could build a better poker team than I would get if I just took random people.
So, what are the tendencies you think you can screen for to get better teachers than just picking them randomly?
Malcolm Gladwell actually had a very good article about this in, I believe, “What the Dog Saw.” In fact, they CAN tell what makes good teachers and what makes bad ones.
The problem is that, IIRC, it’s the sort of thing where you’d have to film a student teacher teaching class and have experts pick over the film to find the weaknesses and strengths. And that’s assuming you’re screening for people who’d be willing to work on their weaknesses. In other words it sounded crazy expensive.
But to be honest, I suspect that in MANY professions people are chosen for bad reasons. In another business book, Lewis’s “The Big Short,” he notes over and over how many of the employees and managers of major investment banks and ratings agencies appeared to be hopelessly inept and to lack the skills they actually needed to do their jobs well. Actually, several of Lewis’s books are about that sort of thing, and it fits with my own experience; firms tend to hire to resumes and later often find the person lacks the skills to do the job or fill the role in ways that weren’t explained on the resume.
The unfortunate answer to this is “depends almost entirely on grade level, local culture, and in extreme cases individual variation within classes.”
Case in point–my brother’s first teaching job was in a poor black area of Washington DC. As a gangly idealistic white guy, his fellow teachers were basically 100% sure he was going to get destroyed like the last few idealistic white guys who tried to jolly a class of inner-city ninth-graders.
As it turned out, among the tendencies required for success in THAT classroom were “convincing basketball ability”, “fan knowledge of the NBA”, and “ability to laugh honestly at shameless race-baiting from either direction”. (“Yo, your hair look terrible, Mr. ZerBro. You get it cut by a white guy or a black guy?” “A black guy.” “No wonder, you stupid cracker–brothahs can’t use scissors!”) The primary problems in that classroom were discipline-related, and unlike a lot of teachers he was able to get them to at least consider sitting down, learning, and reading the assignments, even if their test scores were still objectively bad (but up, compared to last year’s).
Totally different from his current job teaching rural farm-family 10th graders in a heavily football focused school–although I understand he’s adapted, and has turned their junior high basketball team from a 4-14 team to a State Championship Tournament team.
That might be your first few traits–“adaptability”, “cultural sensitivity”.
Perhaps “willingness to work with the kids on meeting him halfway” rather than just trying to teach past the disruptions like a lot of teachers apparently did.
Now the real problem is–from my seat, “adaptability” is as hard to test for as “teaching ability”, and “cultural sensitivity” is almost trivially easy to fake in a hiring process.
What you are not getting is that while the selection process is semi-random (teachers are still going to have to meet some standard) the retention process is much less random. Yes, that means that you are going to have to deal with some mediocre teachers and even some shitbirds until you wash them out. And there will be some shitbird teachers who aren’t actually any good but appear to meet standards because they get an unusually high percentage of bright students sent their way.
Big fuckin’ deal; if the friggin’ military and Hollywood can’t do better than that I don’t see how anyone will, so it’s a useless thing to get worried about.
And what if you can’t screen for those abilities? When you’re picking high-GPA graduates of economics who were in some sort of intellectual competition club, how are you going to effectively determine that they have these things? It doesn’t matter if you know what qualities you’re looking for in an unknown, if you don’t know how to determine if they have them before they display them then it’s pointless whether you know it or not.
I can identify a ton of factors that will determine whether a teacher will be a success or not before they get into the classroom. Patience, being able to connect with children, empathy, etc.. This of course brings up the question of whether those things are even important if I can’t even seem to identify them other than hazy untested common sense, but if I can’t measure them faster than it would take to evaluate class performance it’s a waste of time putting these out as criteria.
Who knows; we may one day be able to measure things like creativity and empathy in a non-useless way. Until then though you’re just going to have to look at new hires closely and do your damnedest to keep the ones that do bring results.
I took a pay cut to leave the Private Sector (where my salary *was *tied to time in service) and start a teaching job.
Which was reason enough for my mom to start worrying about how I could “feed my family”. Until she started turning off all news except Fox… now she makes snide comments about how I’m “slobbering at the public trough”.
I’ve considered retiring before our contract’s up (Wisconsin), and she says “Oh, great, then us taxpayers will be paying you to do nothing!”
There’s some pretty good research on what makes a good teacher. Read this article about how one guy identified good teacher outliers in struggling schools, videotaped them and analyzed the videotapes exhaustively, and identified a lot of specific strategies that good teachers use.
Hiring is difficult for almost every job out there. You’re always going to get duds. Sometimes lots of them. They get fired. It’s not like you’re stuck with the team you hire forever . . . except that you are for teaching. Get rid of (at least early) tenure, and it becomes much more like any other job.
For your poker team, you can spend a lot of time trying to develop an algorithm to find the best poker players, and you might hedge things a bit, but you’re still going to have to wait and see who is actually good or not and keep the good ones.
Have you never hired people who seemed perfect but ended up sucking? Hired lackluster candidates who shined? Passed over a candidate who benefited the competitor who was lucky enough to pick her up? Happens all the damn time. Yes, it’s a waste. Yes, it would be better if we could hire more accurately.
If you’re hiring people to sell your product, are sales “random and completely out of the hands of the” employee? Of course not. You measure how well they do and keep the good ones. Why wouldn’t you do the same with teaching?
And your coin example from before is ridiculous. They do still teach stats in high school, don’t they? If you’re having trouble understanding how one can distinguish between a random distribution and one that’s keyed to a variable, start up and GQ thread and we can get some students to help with those hard maths.
It has nothing to do with your request to get paid like a professional. You suggested looking at other countries. When I showed you that you were being paid as well as a country with a successful school system, you responded about needing to attract the people you want to be teachers. Yet, in Japan they seem to attract them well enough with a similar or even less competitive salary. So perhaps teachers in the US are paid just fine.
kidchameleon, Japanese teachers work much fewer hours and also get paid more for their time in career. Link is on the previous page. What do you have to say about that.
Ok, so let’s go back to the beginning of the conversation on teacher quality. LHOD said essentially that teacher quality is the best predictor of student success, so we need to recruit better teachers. Others have said that there’s no way to determine whether a teacher is a quality teacher until they get in the classroom and produce measurable results. So, sounds like everýone disagrees with LHOD–there’s no use in trying to recruit better teachers because we don’t even know what better means until they’ve bee teaching for a while.
Makes sense to me. I don’t know of any useful metric for measuring teachers that doesn’t involve putting them in front of a classroom–especially as different classrooms require radically different attributes from a teacher.
I do know of a lot of piss-poor metrics for measuring teachers, like “how well do the kids do on standardized test scores when compared to a much larger non-homogenous group of students”. That might work AFTER we “fix” schools and we can expect decent baseline results everywhere, but right now all it does is punish poor schools for being economically poor by making them poorer.
I disagree with the assertion that teacher quality is the best predictor of student success. Most studies of student success find that the best predictor is more or less zipcode (are they in a ‘good’ neighborhood or a ‘bad’ one). Zipcode/neighborhood takes into account multiple socio-economic factors, which is probably why it is such a strong predictor of success.
Can great teachers overcome these problems though? To a certain extent, definitely. But even the best teachers in the world will admit to having to “give up” on some students who are so hopeless, they just can’t make a positive difference for them. These are few and far between, of course, but they do exist.
And so, I come back to your point, that yes, there is no way to know ahead of time if a teacher is going to be great until they have been in the class room for at least a year, possibly a couple more. So in a sense you are right that there is no use in trying to recruit better teachers, but there is a VERY strong incentive to keep the good ones. This was the point I was making by creating this thread. How can we support teachers and keep the good ones in the class room? The lack of support and respect for teachers drives so many of them out of the profession, that it leaves the indifferent and apathetic ones. The ones who care a lot (like me) were made to feel like shit BECAUSE we cared, but the ones with thick skin and who couldn’t give a shit stick with it year after year. Obviously just caring does not a good teacher make, but it is definitely a prerequisite.
Haha, this is another common word I tend to screw up when I am ranting in a hurry. Let me just also apologize for any comma splices, unnecessary ellipses, and improper use of etc, etc!
Really? I mean, Rand Rover is engaging in some pretty ridiculous summarizing here. My proposals include, among other things, recruiting from the top third of college students rather than the bottom third. I’m unaware of any study saying that this measure would be ineffective, and it’s one of those things that seems so common-sense that it would require some serious counter-evidence: unless grades are totally meaningless, ANY profession that relies on mental work should want to recruit from the same top third. If there’s seriously no way to predict at all who’s going to be a good teacher, that would literally mean that you could put Carol, the masters-in-child-psychology mother of three in front of one classroom, and Jill the schizophrenic heroin addict third-grade dropout in front of another classroom and make no meaningful prediction about which would be the better teacher. That’s nonsense; of course we can make such meaningful predictions. The question isn’t whether we can make meaningful predictions; the question is how similar two people may be before we can no longer make a meaningful prediction.
kidchameleon, being paid like a professional means being paid competitively to people who are professionals. Professions, in this context, is jobs where people have a great deal of leeway in how they perform the work, in which people are expected to work based on an extensive body of formal knowledge, in which people make the significant decisions for themselves. A short order cook isn’t a professional, but a head chef is. I’m really not sure how to make it any clearer than that. As others have pointed out, your comparison to Japan is fatally flawed.
I believe that you may be onto something about performance in college being a predictor of success as a teacher, as Teach for America usually picks the top students in their majors (not sure exactly what percentile, but I know it’s very competetive), and a lot of TFA candidates end up making excellent teachers, despite formal training. I agree it might be a good start, but I think we keep missing the real problem here. I honestly believe that there are large amounts of highly qualified people who could become phenomenal teachers after 5-10 years experience, if they could last. But a large percentage of people (like myself) burn out within the first 3 years because of a lack of support. I think we could see much greater gains in student achievement if we improved the teaching environment, rather than put all that focus into recruiting better teachers in the first place, because I honestly believe we are already recruiting a lot of good ones, we just aren’t keeping them for long.
Yeah, but that proposal hovers somewhere between “self-evident” and “ridiculous”. Holy shit, “only recruit the people with highest grades”? Stop the fuckin’ presses, we’re gonna DO this thing. Now all we have to do is figure out how to get them to work here for $30-40k and eat shit from disrespectful pre-teens all day, when they’re being offered Caddilacs and blow by the “Lawyer” and “Doctor” booths.
sigh Okay, I’ll add the implied “when deciding between people who meet all legal and educational qualifications to be a teacher”, but I’ll think you’re a godless couchfuck when I do.
LOL! Godless couchfuck is an epic bit of mud slinging. Did you come up with that one? Sometimes I wish I were clever enough to come up with such ingenius pejoratives.
