DailyDirt: Learning How To Teach Teachers
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
As the school year in the US begins, students are getting their class schedules and teacher assignments — and some teachers are going to be better than others. One school can be ranked higher than another, but if your kid has a great teacher, school rankings may not be a meaningful measurement. But how do we find or nurture a growing pool of good teachers? That’s a tough task that some folks are looking into, and there may be better ways to teach teachers. Here are just a few links on improving teaching skills.
- Tenured professors aren’t better teachers than non-tenured professors, but further conclusions are tricky to make. It does make sense that professors who spend more time teaching than on research and publications would be able to hone their teaching skills a bit more. [url]
- Over the course of a school year, the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher can be the amount of material students learn. Bad teachers barely cover half a year’s worth of material, whereas a good teacher can cover 1.5 years of a subject. [url]
- Good teachers aren’t born. They’re taught to be good teachers. It takes effort and skill to diagnose a student’s problems for learning various material, and this skill doesn’t just appear out of thin air — nor can it be created by putting teachers into a Darwinian accountability game of standardized test scores. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: education, learning, professors, school, students, teachers, tenure
Comments on “DailyDirt: Learning How To Teach Teachers”
Lets just let kids take a GED test whenever they feel like it — and when they pass they don’t have to go to school anymore.
Re: Re:
If cheating wasn’t a thing, I might be in favor.
Re: GED
That’s exactly what I did actually. I got my GED 6months into high school, and started college at 16years old.
SO glad I was able to!
is to larf...
“Bad teachers barely cover half a year’s worth of material, whereas a good teacher can cover 1.5 years of a subject”
that’s precious…
its ALL teach to the test, baby… oh, in spite of the fact that EVERYTHING *IS* oriented to teach to the test (because of the dire consequences attached), you are NOT ALLOWED -SERIOUSLY- to MENTION the phrase ‘teach to the test’, EV-FUCKING-ER…
THAT is the on-the-schoolground reality…
talk about tests and vital statistics, there is ONE stat which is a near 100% accurate predictor of the academic success of kids in amerika: socio-economic status, with the emphasis on economic…
the home atmosphere and economic level tracks perfectly with economic performance, and it is hardly surprising, it simply makes sense on a number of levels…
kids that come from homes where there is not ONE book in the household (and my better half has a LOT of kids in that cohort in her remedial reading classes… oh, they’re remedial reading classes (but you can’t call them that any more, or the precious snowflakes will feel bad), but they are doublespeaked some other bullshit term i can’t recall), do worse on literacy tests than kids who have college-educated parents, have always been read to as tots, have immediate access to books, magazines, etc, not to mention a usually highly involved and motivating parent or two… (not to mention generally better access to nutritious foodstuffs, pleasant, stable home environment, medical care, etc…)
ALL the NON-SCHOOL problems which DOMINATE the lives of teaching kids of lower socio-economic status compound so quickly and deeply, that it can wreck a family before any real or imagined ‘safety net’ bullshit can kick in…
they are also -just as your economic puppetmasters would nod approvingly- likely to move around a lot in search of jobs, living with relatives, etc, and thus *that* instability contributes to all kinds of family problems, including the educability of kids living in such circumstances…
hell, even heretofore secure upper middle class people can feel that pain; only they generally have resources, relatives with money, some sort of contingency that allows them to recover, while our poorer brothers and sisters have no such wellspring of helpful resources…
*can* *some* kids (almost ALWAYS with parents VERY big on education), rise above their circumstances and perform well ? of course, but a large number can not…
if you believe in social darwinism, i guess that is no big deal; if you believe the greatest good for the greatest number, and that you are your brother’s keeper, then maybe you feel differently than allowing a jungle metaphor to inform our social contracts…