What makes a great teacher? Part II

Can you elaborate what you mean here by poor classroom management skills?    While I do see how one student who gets the mind to can ruin it for everyone I cringe when I suspect someone is correlating good disipline to good teaching.  I am hoping this is not what you mean.  This attitude on my part comes from working with one teacher in particular who was adept a keeping the students quiet and bored.  She was good at teaching obedience, which is fine if that is your goal.  Personally I feel the best classroom managment you can do is to make the learning experience truly engaging(easier said than done I know),  for me there is a very important distinction between teaching a respect for learning and teaching obedience.

In general I think being conscious of what we are teaching is an important piece of information missing from this discussion(I'm guessing anyway as I haven't read all of the old thread.).   I Just don't know how you can decide what qualities make a good teacher unless you decide what it is you want to teach.  Even if you decide you want to teach addition you are always also teaching something else through whatever approach you might use in teaching addition.  Let's take individualism vs. co-operation for example.  How many people do you know that hated group work in school?  How many of them had more than just the occasional token group work assignment in school?

edit: Ok, I read some more, I see Tommy_Paine mentioned it way back around post 15 of the original...but then the union thing became more interesting to everyone. I award 500 points to Tommy.

by way of explanation I grew up with this hanging in my bedroom.  I wonder what that was intended to teach me?

Does it have a place in the heirarchy of of skills/competencies/qualities to be fostered in any of the curriculums throughout the country?  Is there any kind of prioritization of skill/competencies/qualities to be taught? 

Is group work being given more attention now than it has been in the past? I don't remember very much of it during my schooling in the 80's/90's? How far have we come?  How effective do you estimate(assuming this would be a terribly difficult thing to objectively test) we general are in nuturing co-operation skills within the public school system?

I am a teacher, and I agree that student learning can and should be evaluated in order to evaluate teachers.

The problem is that effectively evaluating student learning costs time and money. By way of example, I evaluate my students' reading levels at three points during the year. Each time requires three solid days of nothing but one on one assessment - me and a kid, reading aloud, one at a time. I get excellent data from this. The state-mandated standardized reading assessments are complete crap, and test nothing of value. But they are cheap, hence they are used. The state can't or won't pay for an army of teachers to come in and assess students individually, but that is really what is required in order to get accurate data.

I'd love to be able to submit my own data for an evalutation of my effectiveness, but I understand that's the fox guarding the henhouse. I wish the state would send in independent teachers to evaluate my kids thoroughly, so that I could get some independent validation that I'm doing the right thing!

I fight against using standardized tests to measure teacher performance. I don't disagree with the concept of evaluating teacher performance by evaluating student learning -- quite the opposite, I embrace that concept wholeheartedly. But fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests are cheap and inaccurate and no one, least of all professional teachers, should be evaluated on the basis of the crap data those tests produce.

deleted.

I can respect you're desire to be anonymous. Can you at least appreciate my feelings that I haven't actually learned much in this thread?

Can you explain what the metaphorical 'weeds' might be in or did you intend to keep it ambiguous?

What's Up with All the Teacher Bashing?

A few days ago I had a conversation with a teacher from Ontario who told me that she and her colleagues are facing similar attacks, as if Mike Harris had never left.  Things don't seem so bleak here, although our union and management aren't negotiating right now.  There are grumblings that we might be out on the ol' picket line come September.

I think that people are very disappointed with the results of public education, particularly in urban areas.

And, it's not due to a lack of funding.

Education spending over the few decades has far outstripped inflation.  Between 1984 and 2004, per-pupil spending in real dollars in the U.S. increased by almost 50% (per-pupil spending exceeded inflation by 49%).  In 1970-71, per-pupil expenditures were about $4,000 (in 2006 dollars) and about $9,200 in 2006 (again in 2006 dollars) - that's a 130% increase in real per-pupil spending.

In Washington D.C., total expenditures on public schools a couple of years ago were $1.212 billion for an official enrollment of 49,422 students (that's about $24,000 per pupil - an amount that would pay almost half of a college degree [tuition, books, fees, and room & board] at the University of Minnesota).

Throwing money at the problem will do no good if there are systemic problems.  And, a key systemic problem is that teachers are not paid for performance.  If two teachers with the same number of years' of experience and the same education qualifications are teaching at the same school, the teachers will likely be paid the same thing, even if one teacher is a stellar instructor and the other teacher only puts in the absolute bare minimum effort to keep his or her job.  That's not so much a problem with the teachers as it is a problem with a system which doesn't reward the stellar teachers and doesn't flush out the marginal teachers.

Probably the biggest factor (for good or ill) is parental involvement in their kids' education.  But, that's hard to control or even influence.  What can be determined is the structure of the system within the four walls of the school.  And, the current system, despite gobs of money being thrown at it, is unlikely to deliver the results we should be expecting.

So, I don't think the focus should be on "bashing teachers".  Instead, we should be bashing a bloated, inefficient, and ineffective system of teaching.

Actually, it's not.  The aim is to get the best possible educational results for the dollars spent.

Performance-based renumeration - based on putting human and child development ahead of market idolatry - for conservative politicians would, however, be a great idea. They'd all be fired. And that would be a good thing.

Actually, that observation would be correct if teachers were irrelevant and the only factor dictating school outcomes was the degree of parental involvement.  But, that is clearly not the case.

With that I totally agree.

I don't disagree with that and, so, let's stipulte that social class significantly affects (but is not determinative of) educational outcomes.

That may be an argument for why lower class sizes (as an example) may be more appropriate in schools which serve low-income populations (relative to schools which serve higher-income populations). But, that's not an agrument for having stellar teachers compensated at the same rate as slug teachers (or for not getting rid of slug teachers).

I think the quality of a teacher depends on both quantitative and qualitative factors.

Making a qualitative assessment is not easy but it can be done.  It's not a lot different than making a qualitative assessment of a lawyer's abilities.  After working with a lawyer for a while (either as a colleague or across the table from her), I can tell whether the lawyer is skilled, average, or a moron (most are just average).  The same is true for physicians, engineers, architects, and, yes, teachers.

We all know from personal experience that there are teachers who are idiots and who have no business being in a classroom.  Is that assessment quantitative?  No.  I had one teacher who, quite properly, ended up being named the Minnesota Teacher of the Year.  He was unquestionably superlative as an instructor.  At the same time, I had a teacher who did virtually nothing but use up vital classroom oxygen.  Everyone who dealt with those two teachers knew what their relative qualitative skills were.  It wasn't a big secret.

Making teacher assessments is not easy but it's not even remotely close to being "virtually impossible".

I have a B.Ed. and have taught at the university level. What sort of advice are you looking for Fidel?