StudentsFirst.org. Building a Better Teacher. Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson Benjamin Norman for The New York Times Doug Lemov, left, observes a fifth-grade class at True North Troy Preparatory Charter School, a school he helps run in Troy, N.Y. Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions.
This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. The Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices | Uncommon Schools. Lemov’s 49 Techniques: Transforming Student Outcomes « Christine Scott Cheng. I discovered something new a few months ago: my toddler, Miles, responds *extremely* well to praise. He would do all sorts of things to get us to praise him. My husband and I found out that the term “little helper” is a really neat trick for teaching your child to control his own behaviour. I originally picked this up from an article on “training your husband” the same way you would train an exotic animal.
But I just read that this particular technique works really well in classrooms as well. For teachers, this is one of the tricks of the trade. Interestingly, little techniques like these have the potential to transform the entire education system– in a cost-effective manner to boot! In an NY Times Magazine article, Building a Better Teacher, Elizabeth Green provides a concrete critique of a basic flaw in the existing American education system– teacher training– and recommends a very solid solution. Here is the puzzle that Green lays out: Teaching Techniques– the Missing Ingredient. Teacher Training and the Multi-Billion Dollar Question « Christine Scott Cheng. It seems like the question of how to produce good teachers has not only been covered by the NY Times, but also by The Atlantic in their Jan/Feb 2010 issue.
In light of my recent post on Doug Lemov’s teaching techniques, this article is aptly entitled: What Makes a Great Teacher? In her take on this question, Amanda Ripley, poses a similar puzzle to that in Elizabeth Green’s article on Building a Better Teacher: [Teach for America's] founder, Wendy Kopp, had begun to notice something puzzling when she visited classrooms: many Teach for America teachers were doing good work. But a small number were getting phenomenal results—and it was not clear why. Kopp made it a priority to find out what was going on. [Steven] Farr was tasked with finding out. Six Important Characteristics jumped out at him from the data about the best of the Teach for America teachers. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. Some Teaching Techniques Here is another technique: I do, we do, you do.
Ed Reform. The Jesuit Post.