What Makes a Great Teacher Continued: Building a Better Teacher
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Identification of successful teachers is one of the key components of many new federal and state programs to improve education. The Obama administration’s Race for the Top standards require outcome-based assessments that measure the abililty of teachers to move students successfully through a year or more of benchmarks. While merit pay for teachers that meet high accountability standards is proposed–financial incentives may not be able to create the success needed on a large scale. While assessing the ability of teachers to meet high achievement goals is quantitatively possible, discerning the qualities these successful teachers possess is far more difficult–and may make replication of outstanding teaching difficult to achieve.
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The New York Times has published a fascinating in-depth article that looks at efforts to identify the qualities that make successful teachers. The article points out that in a study in Tennessee, “[t]eachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.”
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The article features two education researchers, Doug Lemov and Deborah Loewenberg Ball. Lemov has conducted a study of teachers working in high poverty areas with high student performance. He has identified forty-nine teaching techniques that contribute to excellent student outcomes.
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Ball has focused specifically on math creating a set of standards codified as Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (M.K.T.) representing, “[t]he idea that just knowing math was not enough to teach it….” Ball and Heather Hill tested the theory by creating , “a multiple-choice test for teachers. The test included questions about common math, like whether zero is odd or even (it’s even), as well as questions evaluating the part of M.K.T. that is special to teachers. Hill then cross-referenced teachers’ results with their students’ test scores. The results were impressive: students whose teacher got an above-average M.K.T. score learned about three more weeks of material over the course of a year than those whose teacher had an average score, a boost equivalent to that of coming from a middle-class family rather than a working-class one.”
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The story concludes that, “[b]y figuring out what makes the great teachers great, and passing that on to the mass of teachers in the middle…’we could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today.’”
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To read the full article go to:
Building a Better Teacher, New York Times, March 2, 2010
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In January 2010, AEN reported on the widely debated topic of what makes a better teacher by featuring an article from Atlantic monthly on Teach for America. The article, What makes a better teacher?: Teach for America may have the answer, discussed efforts by the Teach for America organization to identify characteristics using data compiled by the organization.