In other news, the equator is really hot.
A headline like “Better teachers help children read faster” seems to be stating the obvious, doesn’t it? Getting past the headline (reporters do not write headlines and spend a lot of time trying to get past them), journalists at Associated Press and Education Week had solid reasons to cover a new piece of work about teacher effects in the primary grades, especially given the current debate on value-added—hey, how often do we get a twin study in education research? And they did a good job explaining the work.
Even given its apparent methodological strengths, though, I’m not convinced that the original report in Science magazine, Teacher Quality Moderates the Genetic Effects on Early Reading, is telling us something anyone truly contests. People disagree on how much teachers can compensate for student deficiencies and how to measure their influence. But would anyone really predict that if one twin spends the year with that teacher everybody wants and the other with the teacher everyone dreads, they would come out in June reading at exactly the same level?
Even given its apparent methodological strengths, though, I’m not convinced that the original report in Science magazine, Teacher Quality Moderates the Genetic Effects on Early Reading, is telling us something anyone truly contests. People disagree on how much teachers can compensate for student deficiencies and how to measure their influence. But would anyone really predict that if one twin spends the year with that teacher everybody wants and the other with the teacher everyone dreads, they would come out in June reading at exactly the same level?
posted by Linda Perlstein at
3:12 PM
2 Comments:
I laughed so hard at YOUR headline. You gotta scratch your head with the "breakthrough" nature of these stories. Of course teachers matter. Of course teaching "quality" matters. Agree about what most people "disagree" on : how to measure influence and how much teachers can compensate for student deficiencies. I also might add "what is an effective teacher?" which also brings in how great teaching can maximize strengths & interests, challenge kids to higher levels, and even spark an interest/talent in something the student never even knew they had. In other words, great teachers have a way of going beyond the baseline. We all had a teacher like that - the lucky ones had more than one -
Your last line pretty much says it all! Duh!
We will always have a shortage of good teachers as long as Teacher education remains a myth.
We have yet to identify the Best Practices that Teachers should be trained in.
The Search for Best Instructional Practices is Frightening Since It Could Re-Open Many Slammed Doors
There are some things that every educator should know and be able to do at a technical level that equal our more rhapsodic philosophical narratives on the value of Education to individuals and society. In some cases these technical things are so remote from the standard practices that they do not even include Best Practices they are closer to being only practices. For example, how many teachers know how to teach an inquiry-based lesson; or a lesson in self-discovery that continues in a student’s mind even when class is over; or a lesson in how to design one’s own individualized, i.e., best reading-study strategy; or a lesson in thinking about something in 360 degree fashion, or in how to interpolate not merely simple inference but finding meaning deep between and beyond the lines? Far fewer than are needed. Yet knowledge of how to do these things is in our literature, it is in a word known albeit in a quasi to fully tested way but ready for deployment. The process of trying to identify Best Practices would tell us more about what we know, don’t know and need to know. In this way the process not only immediately transfers latent knowledge to actionable classroom practices but it acts as a catalytic agent lending direction to our Research & Development agenda, which unfortunately has been hijacked by a broad spectrum of ideological views more so than cognitive quests.
This is an orphan cause with no natural constituencies. Please join the narrative at: http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/main/invitation/new?xg_source=msg_wel_network And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Anthony V. Manzo, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus avmanzo@aol.com
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