Education is About Knowing How to Teach

Monday, March 08 2010 -

What a novel thought. Let’s focus our education efforts on making a better teacher rather than testing a better student.

The New York Times has a lengthy article on Building a Better Teacher that talks about doing just that. As the spouse of a gifted teacher, who is able to make her students perform no matter what their learning ability is, I’m astonished at how bad some teachers are. The art of teaching has been boiled down to the process of generating acceptable test results on standardized tests.

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients [ that makes up a great teacher ], he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise.

Carol talks about this type of thing quiet frequently. It’s her “teacher voice” and “teacher mode”. Both are very different from her normal personality and they produce.

The other big issue I see, which this article covers, is teacher pay. Teachers get an essentially fixed pay based upon number of years of experience. It has nothing to do with the teachers performance or that of his or her students. What other professional organization pays its members a flat rate?