What makes a great teacher?

"On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.

One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor’s math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked.

The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so.

At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools—not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it’s worth noting, not a very hard one).

After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.

As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.

This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever."

What makes a great teacher?  The answers may surprise you.

Over 2/3 of the living genious of the planet lives in  China or India. To see the regressive policy visited upon these little minds sickens.

It's a really interesting article.  Thanks for posting it.  But I wouldn't use it as an excuse for knee-jerk anti-union sentiments, although there is a hint of that in the article.

I think that what they're doing in this article is expecting teachers to be miracle-workers and saints, who spend a lot of their own money, and a lot of unpaid time, making up for all the things that society does not provide for these children.  Who pays for that bacon-and-egg breakfast that Mr. Taylor feeds the kids on the morning of their standardized test?  My guess is, Mr. Taylor, who also cooks it on unpaid time.  Which is fine if you aren't a single parent with your own kids at home to look after and feed on your own time.

The pedagogical stuff is very, very interesting, though.  I think a lot of attention should be paid to that.

The other thing about this article is that I can understand the teachers' unions feeling threatened by this idea that their teachers could be fired if their students underperform on standardized tests, as long as it's not completely clear WHAT teachers need to do to help students facing overwhelming social issues that cause underperformance, or as long as schools and governments refuse to compensate the "miracle-worker" teachers who use tons of their own money and time on teaching and becoming substitute parents.

The whole article was talking about how Teach For America was completely stumped about what creates a good teacher, and how teachers' colleges don't teach new teachers the kind of pedagogical methods that will include all students.  So how on earth are teachers supposed to know how to become a bunch of Mr. Taylors, if even Teach For America still isn't sure what goes into making a Mr. Taylor? 

Are they going to fire everyone except for the occasional superstar like Mr. Taylor until they all somehow magically figure out his secret?  Are they going to compensate every teacher who spends hours of their personal time (most teachers do this anyhow) and tons of their own money on their classrooms?

Michelle, what I found most interesting about the article was what happens even before an individual becomes a teacher (i.e., the focus TFA puts on screening applicants for certain personal characteristics which TFA has found, over time, to be closely correlated to classroom success).  In other words, rather than just focus on what to do with the bad teachers that are already in the system, also focus on the type of individuals coming into the system in the first place.

I suspect that great teachers get shuffled over to schools in higher income neighborhoods.

Every year we receive invitations to attend the Great Teachers Seminar.  I never apply; I just don't feel comfortable with the name of the conference, as it sounds arrogant to my ears.  When someone comes up with a "Pretty Decent Teachers Seminar," or a "Not Bad Teachers Seminar" I'll consider attending.

Ah, Sven, so all the teachers at one school perform poorly while all the teachers at the other school perform well.  If that is the case, one should focus on the administration leaders who set the direction and tone in each school.  Yes, teachers belong to a professional community.  However, if the administration is not favourable to new ideas from the teachers, then things may stagnate in a school.  In Ontario, while the administration members are teachers, they do not belong to a union.

I would also be wary of checking the standardized test results for one year.  There may be lots of variances between years even if the same teacher is in the same grade classroom.  Also, in Ontario, the school results may be skewed in that students who do not write the tests are recorded as scoring zeros.  A few are from parents who refuse to have their children write the tests.  Others children who do not write the tests may be some in special education who are unable to write these tests.  Their scores are recorded as zeros.

From our own school experience, we all know, subjectively, that there are both excellent and poor teachers in the system.  For the sake of the students (and, after all, that's the whole purpose of having an educational system), I think we can all agree that we want to minimize the number of poor teachers in the system.

And, from our own school experience, we know too that you and I found some teachers really good, while other students found the same teacher not so good. 

I don't think we want to minimize the number of poor teachers in the system.  I think we want to maximize the benifits of education to as many students as possible.  Minimizing the number of poor teachers in the system is perhaps a factor in that, but making that the thrust, and assuming that improvement to education will follow isn't an assumption I'd make.

First, one has to start at the start, and ask what we want the purpose of education to be, and then move on from there.

I wouldn't say I'm vehemently pro union when it comes to teachers.  As a union guy, I find the role teachers play as part of the union movement-- if they are part-- a perfidious one indeed.   

When I was a union rep at our plant, my job-- and legal requirement-- was to represent the workers or worker to the best of my ability.  It was not my job to do management's work.   You know what is behind every "bad" worker?  a lazy supervisor or manager who didn't want to deal with that person when they should have, or didn't deal with them in a way that left me no room to manouver-- when they damn well could have.

Perfidiousness of teacher's unions in the union movement aside, you can't blame a union for not managing properly.  That blame is with the administration, Timebandit.

Although there are "only" 700 teachers occupying them in NYC, what other profession would tolerate the idiocy of "rubber rooms"?

Are you deliberately misreading what I said?

The only way your question makes any sense is if you view the classification called "teachers" as a homogenous monolith.

I said:

Blaming a system which allows a subset of teachers to remain in that system (i.e., those teachers who are mediocre) is far different than this broad-brushed statement: "Teachers are the cause of the failures in schools," which is what your question implied I was asserting.

From my own experience, it was a desire to talk to students, not to teach them. The latter will come surely if you can communicate and engage people, even wee little people, in matters you care about.

In the spirit of the article and naming the good, I just wanted to send a giant amount of love and respect to one Jack Miller, who tought at Windermere High School back in the '90s. I never really cared before I met you, I just moved through the system. You helped me find my own path, in education and in life. You have a rare gift.

I hear you and understand your anger.  But if you think of unions like you might think of, say, defence lawyers, it might help.  Everyone in a union has the right to representation by their union, no matter how in the wrong they were, no matter how guilty they are, no matter what.

It is the job of the manager to set the rules at work and enforce them, and to document it when rules are not followed, give warnings, giving correction, and then ultimately, apply progressive discipline until firing.  If the principal was not documenting and applying progressive discipline, then this is not the union's fault.  The union can't save someone who commits a firing offense.  They can only demand that the employer provide reasonable proof that the teacher did it, and that they refused or were incapable of improving.

If your daughter's school or school board refused to do that, this is not the fault of the union - they are in the role of ensuring their members' rights are respected by the employer.  For all they know, that teacher could have simply been someone who was being persecuted and lied about, unless the employer provided iron-clad documentation to support their contention that the teacher is abusive.

Your're right a BEd is not enough. Of the 1000s of teachers that Ontario schools will graduate this year a very, very small fraction will find employment as a teacher. Most of those will be supply, long-term occassional or teach outside their subject of interest/specialty. They will all need to rely on their personal connections with administrators to get those jobs. Teaching in ontario has become extremly competitive.

i think that when Michelle mentioned the fact that "great teachers" are those that spend countless un-paid hours working and countless dollars of their own money on students she hit the issue on the head. If it is only these teaches, who go well beyond the job description, who are able to make an improvement on student's "performance" than there is a systemic problem, not a problem with teachers.

Not to mention, if we start grading teachers on their ability to get students to parrot the right answers on these anti-intellectual standardized tests than we will see a new era in crappy education of young people.

I'm not a big fan of directly disagreeing with people online. I think its much more productive to just build on what you agree with and let everyone else decide what they believe/don't believe. I think this conversation is going a little off topic too, so I'm just going to put in my two cents about what makes a good teacher.

Simply, a good teacher propels students to move up in life. This can be done within the curriculum and just as importantly outside of it.

Teachers can inspire by modeling (this is probably why teachers who were active extracuricularly themselves tend to be good teachers), they can create good classroom environments with their emotional tone and by saying the right things at the right times, they can be caring people which will tend to get students to open up to them, they can spend tons of time preparing awesome lessons catered to the students in the class, they can be patient...

My point is some of these things can be measured, others can't. I can go in an interview and say I am caring, patient, foster a good learning environment... and even tell stories about how I've done this. Regardless of what is claimed in this article, many of the most important qualities of a good teacher are not readily measurable.

If you want to reform education, you need to reform society, so that we make people who are caring, compassionate... all those good immeasurables. No amount of standardized testing and luring with money will ever do the trick.

Other than an article in the right wing "Atlantic" .. what inspired you, Sven, to pose this question?

So you couldn't be bothered to put your own views forward first? Why  is that, if, as you claim, you have "an interest" in education?

Why, because I didn't respond to your question within 12 minutes?

I would add perserverence and an ability to creatively solve prolems.

But, that all being said, the purpose of education, of course, is to actually deliver results.  So, a "great teacher" delivers results.  Period.

The question that TFA is trying to answer is: What are some common, and key, characteristics that are shared by great teachers (i.e., those teachers who deliver results)?

That does not mean that every new teacher who exhibits those characterists is automatically a "great teacher".  Instead, by identifying those characteristics shared by teachers who actually deliver results, we can better screen potential new teachers so as to increase the probability that any particular new teacher will be a great teacher.

And, the teachers who actually turn out to be great teachers should be paid very well.  Middling teachers should be paid at a middling rate.  Poor teachers should be fired.

Absoute right wing shit. Not that Im surprised. There's a whole range of non-testable things that teachers do. and, ... going by your above fundamentalist view, such things are irrelevant.

its just as i thought. this is simply a platform for you to spout garbage. no wonder you quoted the Atlantic article.

Anyone genuinely interested in what makes a great teacher, I would suggest checking out the BCTF website.

maybe start with ONE TEst Does not fit all

And never mind the crap on this thread. its practically hate propaganda. HTFG.

Do you basically agree with the view I criticized in post #36?

Here are some solid left wing education sites.

The little education report

The Rouge Forum

And, of course, here in Canada, and connected to the CCPA is Our Schools, Our Selves

oh yea.

Who cares about right wing propaganda. So you hate seniority. whoopie shit.

Actually, that remark says a lot more about you than it does about me. And what's the point of spouting this shit on a left wing site like rabble?

Poisoning the well?

It's a well established fact that the results of the work that teachers do is notoriously unpredictable. Teaching is an activity that involves not only the teacher but the students as active participants as well. 

Anyway, this propaganda is simply posed as a way to cut someone's salary based on such unpredictable results.

nice try, loser. What do you do for a living, by the way? ha ha

It doesn't surprise me that your "argument" has ultimately devolved to this:

Sven: Yes, and your fundamentalist testing ideology, which you have completely failed to defend, is a stinky mess in the corner. Anytime, lightweight.

Another fine example of Fidel's famous non sequiturs.

Lemme ask you a very straight-forward question, N.Beltov: Do you believe that teachers are either "qualified" or "not qualified" and that there are no varying degrees of "qualified" such that if two people are "qualified" they should be paid the same (unless, of course, one has been occupying the job for more years than the other)?

OK, so you`ve conceded that this view of education that is characterized by a zealotry for testing is, well, a failure. You don`t want to defend that view, anyway. Can`t say as I blame you.

When it comes to teachers, let me ask you a reply in the form of a question. Don`t you think that the rates of pay of workers - any workers -  especially those represented by a bargaining agent, should be something worked out between the two parties? 

My understanding of teachers is that they bargain for more money for more years of experience. simple, really. That way, favourtism and all that crap goes out the window. lots of workers, not just teachers, want objective standards for their pay increases. And you`ve conceded, (wisely), that the results of the testing of students is not that objective standard. so they use years of experience. why not?

This enthusiasm for ranking, testing and the like is an imported idea from the US. Like a lot of ideas from that country, they can keep it and stop polluting our country. weve seen the horrible- not to say worsening - situation in the US educational system.

Actually, I've not conceded that.  Testing -- any testing -- is imperfect.  But, unless a student's mere presence in the classroom, by itself, is a sufficient indicator that the student understands a subject, we are going to have to evaluate the student's knowledge.  So, the question becomes: How do we evaluate students' understanding of a subject?  We give them tests (both standardized and non-standardized tests).

But, if you think tests are terrible indicators of what students are learning and if we should, therefore, stop giving students any tests, how would you propose schools evaluate students' progress?

Or, like teachers, do you think students should simply not be evaluated?

Your problem, Sven, is that you are completely uncritical of status quo education but remained focused on "bad teachers". You take for granted that students know nothing until they enter the classroom and are filled with "knowledge". The amount of knowledge that they have been filled with surely must be able to be measured. You view students as empty beakers and schools as great jugs of knowledge, you are searching frantically for the measurement on the beaker so you may determine which teacher has filled which student with the right amount of knowledge juice (so you may determine teachers' proper pay scale).

Basically, you are just like all the politicians who frequently completely re-arrange how teachers are asked to teach. You know nothing about education, pedagogy and have obviously never set foot in a classroom as a teacher. Your fundamental understanding of what school is has been completely taken apart in literature but you are ignorant of the body of literature around education. Despite your ignorance you have appointed yourself inquisitor of "bad teachers", who must be the cause of all educational faults, a conclusion that could only be reached by someone who holds an uncritical perspective on education and has not read any literature on standardized testing, socio-economic levels and schooling or race and colonialism in schooling.

Actually, I'm highly critical of the status quo.  Under the status quo, there is a virtual absence of rational evaluation of teacher performance...and poor teachers remain, like sticky garden slugs, firmly embedded in the educational system.  All, of course, to the grave detriment of the students they are responsible for.

So it is, in fact, really time to look at radically changing the status quo.

A while back I ran into a retired former colleague who asked, "How are things at the factory?"  He's a little bit bitter, I suppose.  We instructors are constantly at odds with gnomish administrators who view what we do as the production of graduates who will be able to enter the work force.  They seem to have no clue about education.

I see what I do in class as a form of theatre.  On the other hand, marking is a type of creative drudgery.

I really dislike the term "empowerment."

I'm just going to give my own personal experience, which is really all I can do anyway:

My son is in Gr. 4 this year, and his first year in a gifted program.  He has had both wonderful and horrible teachers in his time at school; not wonderful or horrible overall, or for all students, but just for him.  My wife and I are both very involved in his education, and we have a good understanding of what he enjoys, what comes easily, and what is difficult or just plain boring.  So when we get a report card or have a teacher interview, we don't consider it so much an indication of how he is learning, but a measure of how well his teacher understands him, his type of learning, and his strengths and weaknesses.  As my wife puts it, how much the teacher "gets" him.

So in my opinion, a "good" teacher is the teacher that "gets" your child, and teaches in a way that your child finds enjoyable but still challenging.  A "great" teacher is one who can do this for a variety of learning and personality styles.  Those are few and far between, and I don't know how we make more of them.

Cheers,

Following "rules"?  The fixation with "rules" seems to come from unions (i.e., very complex and intricately-defined "work rules," which have everything to do with protecting teachers but approximately zero to do with educational outcomes).

I'm not interested in "rules"...and I don't think teachers should be judged on whether or not they "follow the rules".

As professionals, teachers should be given very wide latitude in their classrooms to achieve overarching performance objectives, objectives that are rooted in increasing student performance.  The precise manner in which a particular teacher accomplishes those objectives should be left to the teacher's professional judgment.  And, as professionals, they should be accountable for the results they achieve or fail to achieve.

It's a great music video, and I think most primary and secondary school teachers earn their pay. I'm more worried about kids being able to access higher education today. Grade twelve level of achievement used to be a ticket to a good job. A college diploma or B.A. were once considered to be tickets to a decent job not so long ago. Our kids are now competing globally for jobs of the future, and there is no shortage of well educated young Asians who've never known student loan debt and high interest paid on those debts like young Canadians have had to deal with since the 1990's. I can see where there need to be labour agreements between countries. We need to raise the bar in this country, and I think US economist Dean Baker has an excellent idea to create a free labour market in teachers and doctors to bring down the cost of higher education and health care etc. Then again, I think the lack of interest-free money in our economies is a root cause of this current debt crisis. According to some economists, there will be significant change over the next ten years wrt economic theory and how we finance the important things around the western world. But for now I think teachers and college professors are the future as much as young people are. Children are the future, and I see teachers as those who pass the torch to them for them to hold high. The important stuff is happening in our schools every day.

In your zeal to disagree with the concept of holding teachers accountable for delivering educational results, you seem not to understand that I agree with you that it is silly to micromanage teachers by imposing a myriad of complex rules on them.

What needs to be done is to set educational objectives and then let teachers determine the best way to accomplish those objectives.

N.Beltov, what you're basically saying is that teachers' performance can't (or shouldn't) be evaluated and, even if it can be evaluated, there should be no adverse consequences for failing to perform (nor even positive consequences for superlative performance).

Is that correct?

Not a bad idea. In fact it's been done. A professor at a Canadian University is currently appealing his layoff/dismissal under these circumstances. His arguments are pretty good ones, too.

But my point was a much smaller one. Simply, that trying to measure all important learning is impossible. But the learning still takes place. The issue of grading is, therefore, of secondary importance.

Learning is more important. That's it.

But, if there are no evaluations, you won't even know if learning is occurring!!

If your goal is to discipline students so that they can replicate a set of practices, then yes, this criticism is valid. Am I going to go to a welding class for the purpose of learning by exploring my own experiences and their relationship to the rest of the world?

I think this is a grave conflation between being trained and education.

I also think you are trying to be antagonistic to labour issues today. Do you think your contribution isn't an obvious siding with the antipathy towards educators and their goals for producing learners - not standardized products of the currriculum?

How is testing or not testing students a "labour issue"??

More specifically, how is expecting that students will be tested on what they may or may not have learned "antagonistic" to labour??

I think you're crying wolf.

What is presumably "antagonistic" to labor is that student evaluations could be used to evaluate teacher performance -- which is, of course, something to be avoided at all costs (even if the costs include less-educated students).

Teacher jobs über alles!!

Yawn. Got any more articles under that greasy jacket of yours that you want to import from the US?

Did I say that evaluations should be focused on to the exclusion of all else.  No.

You said yourself that:

The sole purpose of schools is learning -- you won't get any disagreement from me there.

But, as I said earlier, without evaluation it is impossible to determine if any learning is occurring!

Surely, you must agree with that?

So, j.m., you agree (unlike N.Beltov, apparently) that student performance can be evaluated?

No, I believe that student and teacher performance are exhaustivley evaluated, and they skew the learning process dramatically (unless administrators protect their teachers from the bombardment of evaluations, but even still this is merely palliative).

If you are looking to produce some yardstick that I am willing to compromise with, you are truly mistaken.

Thanks

We need to churn out more bizness and finance school graduates. We don't have enough plastic people wearing chalk stripe suits in this world to deal with the bloated paper pushing liberal-fascist economy.

Waiter: Would you like to hear today's specials?
Patrick Bateman: Not if you want to keep your spleen.

You are taking an "article" from The Onion seriously?!? Although I wasn't the one posting the link, I think Snert meant it as a joke.

I disagree, but what you think I think is not really relevant.

How would you proposed student learning be evaluated?  And, critically, how would you propose such evaluations be done such that one teacher in a classroom is not using a completely different standard for that evaluation than the standard being used by the teacher standing in the classroom next door who is teaching the same subject to the same grade?

Of course not. I was mearly pointing out that you and Snert think that "testing" is an important part of education. That is the essence of the disagreement in this thread in my opinion. You and Snert are applying a theory of education that says that students come to school knowing nothing, are given knowledge and can then be tested on how well they have retained this knowledge. This is training not education. This is what you would do to someone who was going to be doing root canals for instance.

I would ask teachers to develop their own forms of evaluation and feedback with their students. You should question your desire for some form of objective testing of learning. It doesn't exist, it is a falacy. People have repeatedly told you this in the thread and included links, there is a huge literature on the subject. Read up.

Actually, I tend toward being more of a Constructivist than a Behaviourist or Cognitivist, so I don't support the idea that learners are empty vessels who must be filled with the wisdom and knowledge of the teacher.

But no matter how you teach or learn, I do think it's crucial that this be demonstrable. What could possibly be the use of any learning that cannot be demonstrated? Does it make any sense to say that Bob took a course and learned all kinds of things, but is completely unable to demonstrate or use any one of them?