Atlantic what makes a good teacher

Once hired, many teachers are left to sink or swim. This spring, the Obama administration announced plans to begin rating teacher-training programs. Consensus on what makes an effective teacher, however, remains elusive. Even particular personality traits, such as an extroverted willingness to ham it up in the classroom, appear irrelevant.

Yet her account suggests that implementing this vision may entail a bigger transformation than she quite realizes. Green begins by profiling an array of educators who have been inspired by Deborah Ball, now the dean of the University of Michigan School of Education.

In the early s, she was a charismatic math teacher in East Lansing, Michigan, who developed a successful approach to teaching even very young children sophisticated concepts in math.

Instead of relying on rote memorization or repetitive skills practice, Ball shepherded children through in-depth discussions of a single mathematical conjecture—for example, do two odd integers always add up to an even number?

The students, steered along by their teacher, deliberated together to derive proofs for their various hypotheses. Green likens the approach to the Japanese practice of jugyokenkyu.

The rollout of the Common Core State Standards appears to be replicating this dispiriting pattern in many places. She focuses on Doug Lemov, an entrepreneurial-minded educator who started a charter school in Boston in the mids and later became a managing director and teacher trainer with the Uncommon Schools charter network. As part of his job, he began compiling an inventory of effective teaching techniques.

Technique No. Green takes a more nuanced approach, emphasizing that there is no single magic method that can transform any teacher. Instead, she argues for the teachability of teaching with a host of case studies, research findings, and cross-cultural comparisons.

Her conclusions are persuasive, but only to a point. A huge gulf still separates competence from excellence. Can we expect that even the best training will transform a significant number of teachers into the pedagogical equivalents of Kobe Bryant?

It's a worthwhile question, especially since a comparison between teachers and pro athletes runs throughout Green's book. Athletes analyze game film to study what worked in different situations and apply that knowledge when similar circumstances arise in the future. Green tells stories about teachers in Japan who engage in frequent and intense scrutiny of their own practices, arguing convincingly that structured weekly study of filmed lessons would benefit American teachers tremendously.

Some teachers, however, will learn more deeply and effectively than others. These twin processes—developing relationships with students and reflecting on practice—are most essential to good teaching, according to the educators I spoke with. Read: The art of teaching writing. T he educators I met told me they prize learning from other teachers , as well as from their students. When they struggled—and all of them told me they did—they conferred with colleagues at the school or teachers in professional associations or online communities.

And together, these teacher groups acted intentionally to identify the challenges students were facing and come up with personalized plans. They surveyed their colleagues, asked them to describe their strengths and weaknesses, and hired outside coaches to address gaps in skills. They combed through classroom assessments, grades, test scores, and other data to identify challenges and design action plans to overcome them.

Within a few years, Moore said, standardized test scores, graduation rates, and outcomes on written and oral exams improved. Their work increased the numbers of Black and Latino students in advanced and honors courses, improved the quality of written assessments, lowered suspensions, and raised graduation and college-enrollment rates. And Rebecca Palacios —an early-childhood educator in Corpus Christi, Texas, for 34 years before she retired—collaborated with her peers to create a program that coached the largely Latino parents of her 4-year-old students on how to help their children develop strong reading skills at home.

But they constantly faced disruptions and challenges from the educational directives raining down on them. Moore remembers that when the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted in , the teachers at her school received letters from superintendents asking them to stop assigning presentations and research papers to English seniors—and to use that time instead to prepare students for tests.

Once, an outside consultant arrived, armed with a large binder that included a curriculum and step-by-step instructions on how to teach it. When our test scores went up, the consultants took credit for it. Maybe those teachers just popped in a video on many days; perhaps they never gave homework.

Another interpretation, then, is that measures of teacher effectiveness based on test scores leave out important dimensions of what makes a good teacher—such as caring for students, something that might show up in happiness surveys.

Blazar emphasizes that while the correlation was negative and statistically significant it was not strong in size, meaning that there were certainly teachers who succeeded in improving both test scores and happiness. Past research has generally shown that test-based measures capture some, but not all, of the components of effective teaching. Test score results tend to be only modestly related to other measures of performance, like classroom observations or effects on student attendance.

In fact, there is usually a small positive association, including with regards to student surveys.