Like all students, my daughter has had good teachers and bad teachers. While I count my blessings that the majority of her teachers have been good ones, I’m finding their positive effects are negated by the bad ones. My measure of where a teacher falls on the good-bad scale is not so much my daughter’s report card, but rather her entire attitude toward school and homework.
The teachers I define as good are the ones who: respect their students; have expectations for each student, based on the student’s abilities and strengths; really celebrates a student’s breakthroughs; and are encouraging when a student makes mistakes; and recognizes when one of their students is struggling. But most importantly, a good teacher does not punish a student for what they don’t know or are having trouble learning. When my daughter has a teacher like this her attitude toward school is a good one and she is motivated to work hard and do well. She actually shows enthusiasm about what she’s learning by talking about it with me and her father over dinner.
But when she gets stuck with a bad teacher, it’s a nightmare. The bad teachers my daughter has had all had a God Complex and blamed her academic struggles on her and me. These are the teachers who: have no respect for students who are not excelling in their class; expect all students to learn at the same rate and through the classic lecture method; never consider their methods of teachings may be lacking; don’t understand inconsistent performance; who think all students not getting A’s and B’s are lazy and “just need to apply themselves;” and who are always focused on what a student can’t do, hasn’t done, and what they have done wrong. My daughter quickly loses respect for teachers like this and who could blame her? Once she loses respect for the teacher she just shuts down and has no motivation to attempt any of the work on her own. She doesn’t see the point in trying when all the teacher does is make her feel stupid. She goes into self-preservation mode and covers her feelings of inadequacy and fears with a snotty, “I don’t give a crap” attitude.
The crux of the bad teachers experience occurred when my daughter was in 6th grade. That year both she and I vacillated between depression and rage and the fights over homework were destroying our relationship. All of my dealings the teachers were met with blame on my daughter’s “poor work ethic” and my failure to force her to do her homework, work they just wouldn’t believe she was incapable of doing. It was clear something had to change and it certainly wasn’t going to be the teachers. So I shifted the focus of my daughter’s life from academics to horseback riding, an activity that made her shine. In order to counter the negative effects school was having on my daughter; I felt I had no choice but to downplay the importance of school.
My daughter’s good teacher/bad teacher experiences are explained best by the findings of Bob Pianta, the dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, and his team who developed a system for evaluating the various elements of teacher-student interaction. (I came across this information while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, What the Dog Saw.) One of these interaction elements is “’regard for student perspective’; … a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom.” (p.325) Gladwell describes a video of a preschool school teacher during circle time:
“Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.
‘A lesser teacher would have responded to the kids’ leaning over as misbehavior,’ Pianta went on.
Bridget Hamre, one of Pianta’s colleagues, chimed in: ‘These are three- and four-year olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it’s not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They’re leaning forward and wriggling. That’s their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn’t interpret that as bad behavior. …’” (p. 325)
Pianta and Hamre also explained teacher-student interaction element that is most closely linked to academic success is:
“feedback – a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student . . . High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get deeper understanding. … The … thing that happens a lot is the teacher will just say, ‘You’re wrong.’ Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning.” (p.326)
Gladwell then went on to describe Pianta’s video of the pinnacle in good teaching:
"Then there was the superstar – a young high-school math teacher in jeans and a green polo shirt. ‘So, let’s see,’ he began, standing up at the blackboard. ‘Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.’ He drew two triangles. ‘Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.’ He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. ‘See what you can remember, Ben,’ the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: ‘I’m going to give you a way to get to it.’ He made a quick suggestion: ‘How about that?’ Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. ‘That’s all right!’ He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson – the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer [reference to a previous video where a teacher’s planned PowerPoint presentation was delayed because she forgot to turn on the computer] he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
‘In a group like this, the standard MO would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,’ Pianta said. ‘But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.’ Pianta and his team watched in awe." (pp. 328-329)
The difference in academic performance between the students of a good teacher vs. the students of a poor teacher is so huge (an entire school year’s worth of learning huge) it has stunned the world of education. Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, has estimated that kids with a poor teacher will only learn about a half of year’s worth of material in one school year as opposed to the kids in a good teacher’s class who will learn a year and a half’s worth of material in the same school year. (p. 318) And what, typically, has been school boards answer to that difference? To raise taxes of course, because we can’t have smaller class sizes without more teachers. But Hanushek goes on to state that:
“[y]ou’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers." (p. 318)
Something to keep in mind next time you go to vote on your school budget.
Hanushek also points out that focusing on teacher quality would boost our country’s ranking in academic performance across the world. Currently the US “is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. … the United States could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom 6 percent to 10 percent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.” (p.318)
Seems simple right? Hire good teachers. But how can you tell a good teacher from a bad teacher before they are hired? Well, that’s a problem that cannot be addressed under the current system. So far the educational branch of government has addressed the poor teacher problem by imposing higher academic and cognitive requirements for those looking to enter the profession. (p. 329) Gladwell highlights the problem with this reform: “after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.” (p.329)
It’s so peculiar that Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress looked into whether having a teacher’s certificate or a master’s degree were helpful in determining good teachers. (p. 330) They found neither made a difference in the classroom. (p. 330) The two credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire have no usefulness in predicting the success of a teacher in the classroom, no matter how much they seem to be related to “teaching prowess.” (p. 330)
Gladwell offers a way districts could be sure they hiring good teachers. The solution was found in the field of financial advice. Ed Deutschlander, the co-president of North Star Resource Group, in Minneapolis has a very rigorous hiring process. While he starts out looking for the same general traits that all corporate recruiters are looking for, he goes further by putting recruited candidates through a four-month ‘training camp.’ (p. 332) Those who make it through training camp are then hired as apprentice advisors where the nitty-gritty sorting takes place over the next 3 to 4 years. (p. 332) Even as Gladwell offers this solution, he knows it’s not feasible for many reasons, one being that “[t]eachers’ unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement.” (p.333)
Whenever I read something like the teacher studies mentioned above, I find myself wondering, “Do the policymakers in Washington and Albany know this? And if they do, why are they not incorporating it into the education laws?” In this particular case the teacher unions are in the way. Even so, just adding video footage of each candidate’s student-teaching time to the already existing list of teacher requirements, would give hiring committees more concrete information. Districts could use Bob Pianta’s system for evaluating the elements of teacher-student interaction to weed out the poor teachers during the search phase of hiring. Yeah, yeah I know, there’s already a trial period built into the system with the three year tenure track. But look how good that’s working.
Another solution would be to get rid of the teacher unions altogether. I know I’m going to lose popularity points here, but . . . I’ve got to wonder how much money districts would save if they were actually able to fire poor teachers? Well, when it comes to building new classrooms and hiring more teachers to bring class sizes to compensate for poor teachers then I’m willing to say millions. Districts would save millions of dollars if they had firing power. By saving millions of dollars in construction costs alone districts would actually have money for special education. Oh but wait, they wouldn’t need to spend more on special education if they were allowed to fire poor teachers. Eric Hanushek also found that the students of poor teachers fall so behind they begin to look like they have a learning disability, yet they make up 95% of the special education population. (www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/hanushek.htm#Learned_Learning_Disabilities:)
Since this one simple change is not going to happen, at least in the school years our kids, I will continue to use the time at home to focus on things my daughter can do. Even though I have caught a lot of crap over the years from my family and friends for my lack of respect for school I make no apologies. They can’t or won’t understand why I find it impossible to stand behind an institution governed by laws that focus not on education, but on money over my daughter’s over-all well being. They think I’m anti-education, but that’s only because they are confusing school with education.
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