GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

1. 

   leonie haimson

   February 18th, 2009 10:59 pm

   great post! It’s about time that someone put a scalpel to the great teacher hocus-pocus that has come to dominate the standard cant about how to improve our schools

2. 

   Ken

   February 19th, 2009 9:32 am

   Hey Aaron,

   I agree that the “great teacher” argument often gets silly. I prefer focusing on “great schools”, a concept that, though also prone to abuse, seems to be more appropriate from a public policy standpoint. I would prefer to leave it to a diverse group of competing schools held accountable to parents and sensible government oversight to figure out the most effective manners in which to educate kids. I have no doubt that the quality of teaching would be high on their list of issues and I am guessing that some would look to schools of education for assistance, but I think the government often gets excessively involved in the details. To me, for example, the current teacher certification requirements in New York are a big drag on the productivity of our system.

3. 

   ceolaf

   February 19th, 2009 11:20 am

   Two points:

   1) The link to the McCaffrey reports has some extra stuff at the end of it, so it doesn’t work. The correct link — an easy fix for someone — is:

   http://www.performanceincentives.org/data/files/news/PapersNews/McCaffrey_et_al_2008.pdf

   2) I have a quibble with Aaron’s argument. He is essentially granting Kristof’s assumption that a teacher who consistently increase test scores by a lot of a great teacher, that the tests we have are good measures of what we want teachers generally to focus on.

   I agree with trying to show that someone else’s argument fails even under its own assumptions, and think that Aaron does an excellent job of this. My quibble is that he does add any note or indication that the tests might not even be good measures in the first place.

4. 

   NYC Educator

   February 19th, 2009 1:22 pm

   Yes, Ken, it’s awfully difficult to get teacher certification. I’ve gotten it in three different areas, not to mention having faced the NYC Board of Examiners in the bad old days when their requirements were the highest in the state (rather than the lowest). I have to tell you, every time I mailed that check to the state, my hand got tired. Sometimes my fingers ached. Be glad you didn’t have to suffer as I did.

   I think it’s much better to drop the requirements and let absolutely anyone with a degree teach anything, as NYC did for thirty years. I’ll never forget Joel Klein going to Albany and begging for the right to retain 14,000 teachers who hadn’t pass a basic competency test, some of whom had failed it dozens of times. How dare we prevent those people from teaching children? I’ve no doubt you’d want them to teach your kids.

   After that grand experiment, we were left with a system that was absolutely perfect in every way. It’s about time we replicated it. Odd though, that neither Meryl Streep nor Colin Powell applied for a job, as Kristof suggested they would in a previous column. There were, of course, those 14,000 worthy individuals, some of whom had failed this test dozens of times. Now, due to those darn requirements, if they haven’t yet passed, they’re out of work. I’m glad to see someone pointing that out.

   Clearly it’s well-known to experts like you, and Kristof, and Bill Gates that what we need are lower standards for teachers. Thanks for standing up and spreading the word. Oddly, here where I live, we’ve worked under those nasty regulations, never hired teachers who failed competency tests, and no one talks about charter schools, vouchers, union-busting, and what have you.

   There are even crazy people like me who think we should raise standards for those who’d teach our children, rather than lower them.

   Go figure.

5. 

   NYC Educator

   February 19th, 2009 1:25 pm

   Should say “hadn’t passed.” Excuse my sloppy editing.

6. 

   Matthew

   February 19th, 2009 3:01 pm

   Aaron,

   So is it as Leonie posits that you’re putting a scalpel to the “great teacher hocus-pocus” for which that poor Nick Kristoff seems to have fallen?

   I guess I took your message to be that teacher quality may matter, but Kane and Co. have not yet proven this. In the same way that class size probably matters, but no to the extent that some advocates of CSR would claim.

   In the field, one certainly observes parents maneuvering hard to get their kids into the classes they perceived to be led by better teachers. Parents’ judgment as to what makes a strong teacher may be suspect, but teacher quality seems to be something they value, no? On the other hand, I know Doug Harris has claimed that parents value CSR because it is much more easily observed, where as teacher quality is harder to measure.

   In either case, I fear NYC Educator has equated certification with qualification. I’d agree it’s phenomenal that 14,000 people couldn’t even pass that exam. But that does not prove the converse that those who did pass the exam are all equally well qualified, does it. Aaron, you pointed out the flaws in Kristoff’s logic using Kane’s paper as proof of the impact of teacher quality, but what about the literature on the value of certification? Or does this fall victim to the same issues of lack of cumulative impact?

7. 

   Ken

   February 19th, 2009 3:03 pm

   Hey NYC Educator,

   I agree with you in that I support subject competency exams for teachers. I think, though, that requiring potential teachers to spend substantial time and money to take courses and get degrees that have no demonstrated or, in many cases, intuitive relationship to teacher effectiveness both discourages many people from entering the field and wastes time and money once they do enter the field. I would prefer a system in which certification requirements were greatly streamlined and gave schools more flexibility to hire the teachers they think will do the best job. I would hold schools accountable for their decisions through parental choice and government oversight of their performance. Again, though, I think competency exams make a lot of sense.

   I think my viewpoint is shared by a large number of teachers and school leaders, not just Bill Gates and Kristof, both of whom I frequently disagree with.

   I would love to hear your further thoughts.

8. 

   NYC Educator

   February 19th, 2009 4:03 pm

   Actually, Ken, crappy impractical courses are by no means unique to the education field. Ask a nurse, for example, how much time there is to apply what’s taught in nursing school during a typical day at the Bellevue ER. It’s a poor idea, though, to dump, rather than improve, teacher education.

   It is indeed inconvenient to go to school, or pay for it. In fact, I’m sure the expense of becoming a doctor discourages a great many more people, yet I never read Mr. Kristof complaining about it. Nor do I notice folks like Kristof or Bill Gates engaging unlicensed lawyers and doctors.

   I certainly noticed thirty years of underqualified teachers, though, which apparently eluded both you and Mr. Kristof. It’s been done. Oddly, I think we’d find common ground on the results. It behooves both you and Mr. Kristof to investigate them more thoroughly before we repeat this experiment.

9. 

   Ken

   February 19th, 2009 4:23 pm

   Thanks NYC Educator. If and when you have time (or maybe you can refer me to your blog), I would be interested in your thoughts on these two questions:

   1. What do you think were the main factors that caused thirty years of underqualified teachers? Was it a lack of testing? Or the quality of schooling? Or something else?

   2. How would you characterize the manners in which they were underqualified? Did they lack general competency? Content knowledge? Pedagogical skills?

   I am very interested in your thoughts on this sort of thing.

   For what it’s worth, I have many complaints about our approach to doctor and lawyer licensing as well!

10. 

    NYC Educator

    February 19th, 2009 4:52 pm

    One factor was the city’s insistence on paying the lowest wage in the area for the toughest job in the area. And the disparity, for a long time, was outrageous. Another was the city’s decision to fire thousands of teachers in the 70s. Another may have been the demise of the Board of Examiners, whose tests, I can tell you, were tough. At one point, there was a writing test for temporary teachers. This requirement was dropped when too many teachers failed the test.

    As for certification, it certainly does not ensure a good teacher. I’m certain it doesn’t ensure good doctors or lawyers, or good anything whatsoever. Lowering standards is simply not the answer. I can’t tell you for sure whether my MA gets my kids higher test scores, but aside from some stupid ed. courses, I learned an awful lot about what I now teach. For example, I listen to Margaret Spelling make pronouncements about language acquisition, and I know instantly she hasn’t studied it at all.

    Does that make me teach better? Do more of my kids pass the English Regents? Maybe not. But because I understand it, I understand my kids a little better. I’m glad I took that MA, even if Bill Gates thinks it’s worthless.

11. 

    Woodlass

    February 19th, 2009 5:14 pm

    Ken, Kristof — why do you keep speaking in gross generalities.

    Ken, your first question with its reference to “thirty years of underqualified teachers” — what on earth do you mean? Some very great teachers have done some very great educating in them thar’ 30 years.

    Even if one were to acknowledge there are some good teaching qualities and some less good ones, you can’t always find them in the same teacher. More than that, those very same qualities may work better on some kids than on others.

    Some miraculous teacher “performers” do a great job conveying content. But, these very same people can also be teachers who refuse to check homework and mark papers. Kids learn a lot when their papers are marked: every day, not just once a fortnight, and thoroughly, not just ticked off on a roster. So who is the “better” teacher? It would be a toss-up and in essence, undefinable.

    Don’t fall into any traps, if indeed you are a legimate blogger and not a shill (like Socrates).

    The NYC school system has great teachers in it. Ask them how they do it, instead of relying on pseudo-educators and non-educators like Klein and Co. to set the parameters.

12. 

    Ken

    February 19th, 2009 5:25 pm

    Thanks NYC Educator. This is really helpful.

    Perhaps this plan makes sense to you:
    1. Pay teachers a reasonable amount.
    2. Create an environment that leads to better school management such that teaching is a more attractive job.
    3. Require teachers to pass reasonable competency exams to receive certification.
    4. Remove certification requirements that are highly speculative in value.

    Of course, the devil is in the details.

    Nothing would stop teachers from taking additional coursework or stop school leaders from favoring the hiring of teachers with more formal education. Ed schools would become more accountable to create offerings that were viewed as worthwhile to teachers and school leaders.

    In any case, thanks for your time.

13. 

    Ken

    February 19th, 2009 5:32 pm

    Hi Woodlass,

    Check out my earlier dialogue with NYC Educator to better understand the context of my comments. The “thirty years of underqualified teachers” was a direct quote from a comment by NYC Educator. I agree that that statement could read like an inappropriate generalization, although I didn’t intend it that way and I am guessing NYC Educator didn’t either.

14. 

    ceolaf

    February 19th, 2009 6:53 pm

    Ken,

    You wrote, “I would prefer a system in which certification requirements were greatly streamlined and gave schools more flexibility to hire the teachers they think will do the best job.” Do you feel that way about doctors and hospitals? Engineers and construction firms? Lawyers and DA offices?

    I think that there is widespread confusion between the possibility that we have ineffective certification requirements and a more general problem with the sheer existence of certification requirements. We have problems with what we require, and how those requirements are met.

    And this gets to the larger question of what certification means. It should be a license to practice independently, and it should be a mark of some degree of proven ability. Not a huge degree of proven ability, but some.

    I don’t know of a single teacher who was prepared for the first day of school their first year. This is CRITICAL day, one where the tone and expectations are set. Students feel the teacher out and the teacher demonstrates what’s important. And yet we all know that each teacher will face this.

    I understand that I am blurring the line between teacher prep and teacher certification, but I think that that anti-certification crowd and the anti-teacher prep crowd are making the same arguments for the same reasons.

    So, I understand why people want to get rid of many aspects of teacher certification. But that doesn’t mean that it’s actually a bad idea in the first place. Certification, like all regulation, serves NOT to guarantee high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality. (This was pointed out to me by Richard Rothstein, btw.) If our certifications system is failing to do the former, well, it wasn’t ever meant to do that. If it is failing at the latter, we should address that. But we should not give up the latter simply because it cannot do the former.

    (So for the lack of coherent focus on this one.)

15. 

    NYC Educator

    February 19th, 2009 7:18 pm

    Personally, I’d like to see courses that actually tell teachers what to do that first day, and how to control classes thereafter. I’d also like to see these courses taught by people who have experience doing so, rather than professors who’ve written a book on how to do so but have not the remotest notion what goes on in public schools. I agree with Rothstein’s sentiments about certification, and we could certainly do better.

    Kristof, who thinks Meryl Streep and Colin Powell are being held back by their lack of teacher certification, hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about. Perhaps Kristof is frustrated because he himself can’t jump in a classroom and take that huge pay cut he’s looking for. Still, I’ve seen who comes when you drop all reasonable requirements, and Kristof isn’t even in the ballpark.

16. 

    skoolboy

    February 19th, 2009 8:22 pm

    ceolaf: Thanks for calling me out on not questioning a definition of good teaching that relies solely on test scores as an outcome. I posted about this issue last year here
    Matthew: I’ll have a bit to say about teacher certification—and the recent study contrasting traditional and alternate routes to teacher certification—in the next few days.
    By the way, I was in error in claiming that Nicholas Kristof has discovered education. More like rediscovered it, as he’s written two idiotic columns about teacher certification in the past couple of years. NCY Educator’s response is here.

17. 

    eduwonkette

    February 19th, 2009 10:50 pm

    As always, bravo!
    And I love the identity shift from citizen to wonk.ceolaf alludes to how differently we think about the issue of certification in law and medicine. Interestingly enough, certification was the subject of this month’s lead editorial in the Archives of Surgery. Addressing periodic recertification for surgeons, the editorial was called, “For the Protection of the Public and the Good of the Specialty.” Of course, the sentiment couldn’t be more different than Kristof’s. The final paragraph: “We will continue to protect the public and enhance our ever-changing profession. As the field has evolved, so have our expectations. As surgeons, we should expect nothing less for our patients; our families, who will certainly be patients at some point; and ourselves.” Perhaps ceolaf said it best, “Certification, like all regulation, serves NOT to guarantee high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality.”

18. 

    Woodlass

    February 20th, 2009 10:04 am

    Ken, you’re right. NYC Educator used the phrase about 30 years of underqualified teachers first. Was reading too fast.

    I get the feeling, though, that he meant for 30 years there was the possibility of installing underqualified teachers, whereas you believe that using underqualified teachers was the actual norm during all that time.

19. 

    Ken

    February 20th, 2009 10:52 am

    First of all, I am really excited to be discussing the topics of teacher certification and teacher preparation. As much attention as these issues sometimes get, I don’t think it is enough.

    Ceolaf, I agree with just about all of your comments. “Certification… serves NOT to guarantee high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality.” I like that a lot. Of course, I think we need to consider the costs of certification, not just the benefits:

    1. The time spent on meeting certification requirements.
    2. The money spent on meeting certification requirements.
    3. The loss of high-quality candidates that are deterred by the certification requirements.

    To me, then, the “best” certification requirements would be the result of an optimization that considered both the benefits you refer to with these costs. My concern is that some parts of the current requirements do very little to accomplish the benefits while hitting the system quite hard with respect to the costs.

    Separately, I intend to write a post that deals with the interesting and important comparison between teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. with respect to licensure issues.

20. 

    Ken

    February 20th, 2009 10:53 am

    Woodlass, I agree with your interpretation of what NYC Educator was referring to. That’s how I read it and, in addition, what I meant when I quoted it. By the way, I probably should have put the phrase in quotes to be clear.

21. 

    ceolaf

    February 20th, 2009 12:01 pm

    Ken,

    Of course we need to consider the costs. No question. But other fields also see the loss of high quality candidates because of their far far higher entrance requirements, and yet no one raises that as issue.

    Let me take up and apply Ingersol’s point. It’s not that we have a shortage of candidates entering the field. The problem is attrition, because we lose so very many teachers after then enter. It’s a leaky bucket, he explains, that we keep filling up.

    * We wouldn’t need that many candidates, or that many high quality candidates, if we could keep people in the profession and turn them into good teachers. With less turnover, we’d need fewer new teachers each year.

    * We need to all accept the fact that first year teachers know almost nothing and are not good teachers. Some of them make up some of their lack of expertise with lots of hard work, but that can only accomplish so much. Teaching, like all other work, is something that even the best get better at over time. (Even Michael Jordan got better over time. At 23, he had major flaws in his game and had a lot to learn.)

    * Putting the previous two points together, we lose huge numbers of teachers before their peers in law even finish their formal education. (Lawyers do not get get their licenses until more than 3 years after they enter law school, and it takes even longer for doctors to be certified!) Of course our teaching corps is not what we would want it to be; we lose them just as they might be getting good. Making entry into the profession easier does not actually address the true reasons for our teacher quality problem.

    It might seem counter-intuitive, but raising standards, increasing the time to full licensure and requiring full licensure for full responsibility could well be the better path to solving our apparent teacher shortage. Putting underprepared high potentials on the firing line so often leads to frustration and abandonment of the classroom, if not the entire profession.

    Of course, I am talking about making it MORE expensive and time-consuming, with real induction programs that gradually increase novice’s responsibility and gradually decreases their level of supervision until they are actually ready (i.e. until they have demonstrated) that they are deserving of the kind of license that would permit them to operate independently — as most teachers today do virtually all the time, even first year teachers. That model would set them up for success, and successful people are more likely to stay.

    We should realize that the “alternative” paradigm of setting up warm bodies for failure doesn’t get us a high quality teaching force.

    ****************************

    I believe that the federal government subsidizes medical residency training, and it’s not chump change. That’s not for med schools, but for the kind of supervised and scaffolded on the job training that a professional needs.

    http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=17&type=0&sequence=1 (an old link. I don’t know what the current numbers are.)

    ****************************

    I would like to clarify and again give credit to Richard Rothstein for the regulation line. The purpose of regulation is NOT to ensure high quality, but to prevent the lowest quality. I heard him apply this to the issue of charter schools. I have not heard of him applying it to teacher certification, however. I’ll take credit for that.

22. 

    ceolaf

    February 20th, 2009 12:13 pm

    NYC Educator,

    >I’d also like to see these courses taught by people who have experience doing so,
    >rather than professors who’ve written a book on how to do so but have not the
    >remotest notion what goes on in public schools.

    I would like to make sure that you are not setting up a false dichotomy. You might not be, but I want to make sure.

    There are many people who are very good at doing things, but are not that aware of how they are doing it. And there are many who are aware of how they are doing it, but cannot explain it to others. And there are those who can explain, but still cannot teach it to others — which requires recognizing where the others are, their misunderstandings and figuring out how to help them to get to the point where the do understand.

    I firmly believe that people can understand how to do something, without actually being able to do it well themselves. For example, the Van Gundy brothers never played professional basketball, or even the highest levels of college ball, and yet both have been excellent coaches in the NBA. I can imagine someone who couldn’t handle the enormous demands of teaching in real time (and therefore could not do it effectively) and yet understands the issues, dilemmas, pressures, problems and techniques in a way that allows him/her to teach others to do it far far better than s/he did his/herself. And it might not even take personal experience to get that kind of understanding. Does a great film director have to have been even a decent actor in order to help actors give better performances?

    Sure, there are professors who never taught k12, and don’t know what they are talking about. No doubt. But it is a myth that only an expert practitioner can teach others, or that all expert practitioners can teach others what they themselves do so well.

23. 

    NYC Educator

    February 20th, 2009 12:58 pm

    ceolaf,

    Perhaps you’re right about NBA coaches who understand what must be physically done but lack the physical skills to do it. Personally I’m wary of all comparisons of teachers to sports figures.

    In any case, as a beginning teacher, I worked in a Bronx classroom with little experience, no textbooks, no course outlines, no assistance, and the very least desirable classes. There was the time-honored philosophy of, “You can’t teach, and they can’t learn, so you’re a perfect match.”

    I sat through classes with a very nice college professor who urged us to do things like taking all our resources and creating a classroom library, based on the wholly erroneous assumptions we had books, or classrooms. There was absolutely no consideration given to how to control classes, and I suppose they just assumed we’d learn on the street or something.

    These people were wasting my time, though I needed the credits. I am not at all surprised when teachers tell me their time is similarly wasted today, including those who go through the much-ballyhooed Teaching Fellows program. It can be done a whole lot better.

    I find it possible that those without the physical dexterity to play pro sports can show talented candidates how to develop their skills. Still, I find it hard to believe that anyone who can’t control a classroom of kids can effectively demonstrate to young teachers how it’s done. In my view, and in my experience, those who can’t do this, who don’t know this, can’t teach it either.

    Maybe I’m not an expert either. But honestly, while I’ve had great college professors as far as underlying subject matter, I can help new teachers a whole lot more than any college professor I’ve ever had. And frankly, it’s not as though experienced teachers are in such short supply or anything.

24. 

    ceolaf

    February 20th, 2009 2:51 pm

    NYC Educator,

    First, let say how ideas in your comment I agree with. There are bad education classes, and there are bad education professors. And there are LOTS of bad assumptions (e.g. in my first NYC teaching semester — not my first year teaching, btw — I taught in three different classrooms. In my second, I got it down to two. So, I couldn’t set up much in any particular room.). And there are lots of important things that are not well covered in preparation programs — or even covered at all!

    But that doesn’t mean that preparation is not important or that it cannot be done well.

    Second, I understand skepticism with analogies. But that doesn’t mean that they are useless. If you don’t like the physical analogy, how about an emotional one? Does a person have to have a happy marriage his/herself to be a marriage counselor? Could a divorced person understand the issues of marriage and tensions and pressures, and all sorts of other things such that s/he could be able to help others, even if his/her marriage failed?

    But I would I also like to get back to what I wrote earlier. Perhaps the professors did not have the mental dexterity to handle a classroom in real time (in the moment), but can help others understand what need to be considered, what needs to be managed and what needs to be done? Could s/he not help aspiring teachers to look at videos of real classrooms and help them to understand what is going on, what the teacher is doing, what data the teacher was taking in to make decisions in the moment? Film study of real classrooms can be an incredibly powerful tool for aspiring teachers — as for athletes — because the action can be slowed down and even paused. An expert can help a trainee to learn what to look for, how to process it and how they may act on it — all at a pace that the trainee can take it. The fact that the professors did not have the mental dexterity — if we might call it that — to do all of that his/herself doesn’t mean that s/he cannot help the trainee.

    In fact, I might even argue that the expert practitioner might particularly ill-suited to training aspiring novices. How is that? Well, I have never heard a principal tell a novice teachers, “Here is something that never worked for me, but I think that it will worked really well for you.” Rather, I have only heard them say, “This is what I did,” or “This is how I would would handle it.” And when I say this to other teachers, they agree with me, telling me they’ve seen the same — though they didn’t realize it. You see, an expert practitioner can get caught up in how they do it successfully, in a way that blinds them from seeing other approaches that might prove more successful for others. (And that doesn’t even address the expert practitioner who understand that s/he is successful, but misunderstands why s/he is successful.)

    Look, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down with a teacher after s/he has graciously allowed me to observe his/her class and complemented him/her on something I thought s/he did really well and been meant by a blank stare. They don’t consciously know what they are doing, or why it works.

    This is not to say that expert practitioners cannot make good teachers of practice. Rather, it is point out that they might not, and that others might.

25. 

    NYC Educator

    February 20th, 2009 3:33 pm

    I agree with almost everything you say, and all your examples about people who can do things for others they can’t do for themselves. I particularly agree that there are different approaches, and that different things work for different people. I don’t insist my student teachers do as I do, because what I do may not work for them in terms of teaching. In terms of discipline, though, college teachers are largely unaccustomed to seeing what we do, let alone dealing with it. I noticed that my colleagues, when I teach college, have problems I don’t even give a second thought to. I unconsciously, automatically drive back discipline problems while they puzzle over them.

    I’m sure somewhere, there are good ed. professors with an eye toward the practical. But personally I’ve never seen one. I think there’s a better way than the trial by fire that you alluded to when discussing first day jitters. Of course I don’t think we should jettison training altogether–that’s a very bad idea, utterly without merit, and not thought out at all by those who advocate it.

    My aversion to sports analogies has more to do with administrators who make preposterous comparisons with sports figures, asking why we complain about working in decrepit crumbling trailers when you never hear NY Yankee pitchers asking such questions. When the NY Yankees face conditions like 1.1 million public school students do, when they have to use subway ads, 800 numbers, intergalactic recruitment and job fairs to fill their ranks, then we can talk sports analogies.

26. 

    Mr. A. Talk

    February 20th, 2009 5:02 pm

    I can’t think of a single one of my ed professors who could have survived some of the middle school classes I’ve taught. Children in unruly classes don’t respond to having a Ph.D. waved at them. My sense it that ed professors mostly became ed professors because they couldn’t hack the classroom. None of this it disparage learning theory, though. Knowledge of theory does help, but it can’t replace practical experience.

    I’d like to see something more like a combination ed degree/apprenticeship. Half a year of student teaching (or less if you’re TFA or a Fellow) just isn’t enough. At least a year under the supervision of a master teacher (someone like me, for example *grin*) would be a great help. We could guide talented newbies in the right direction, and steer those who can’t hack it into something else. Of course, this will never happen, because it would cost real money.

27. 

    Socrates

    February 20th, 2009 6:53 pm

    Mr. A,

    Sounds a lot like what Malcolm Gladwell recommended in this article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

    Makes a lot of sense to me. If I would have had a proven mentor from whom to learn during my first year as a teacher, my first year would have gone much better. I stuck with it, but many people with great potential at my school did not stick around, and the profession is worse for it.

    Some people, when thrown in the deep end, can instinctively doggie paddle, and some will drown. Of the doggie paddlers, some will become truly great swimmers, but many of the drowning victims could have become great swimmers if they’d had those inflatable arm bubbles with which to learn.

28. 

    Insider Knowlege

    February 21st, 2009 12:01 am

    This is a great thread but may I add some simple logic regarding teacher certification.. It is about what you do infront of the class that makes a great teacher.. We can develop better competency tests but really all those say is that you are smart enough to take a test. The proof is in the practice of teaching and there in lies the problem..New teachers simply cannot get enough practice in teaching.. I for one would love to see the profession moved to a system where an apprenticeship was set up for the first 2 years.. Get rid of the masters requirement.. Also get rid of this silly renewel process every 5 years after completing x aamount of hours of PD.. Does anyone trust the state and a giant bureaucracy like the DOE to properly keep records on all of these teachers? Lastly as part of the certification there should be some sort of peer review because contrary to the belief of most, teachers are more then happy to rid themselves of those who screw it up for the rest of us.. We either have to continually cover their classes. reteach the stuff they messed up or deal with the kids they let get out of control.. they are a burden just like a bad office worker.. So trust us.. we know better who belongs and who doesn’t..

29. 

    Smith

    February 21st, 2009 12:04 am

    I’ve hated every minute of the certification process. It makes me feel like the system is out to get me. I don’t mean the college classes (I’m ambivalent). I mean the poring over the requirements, making phone calls to the union trying to figure out the requirements, paying hundreds of dollars for silly tests, making a video and spending $150? to have someone watch it, not being able to call Albany and reach someone, having the certification requirements change and trying to figure out what all the new terms mean, reading one thing in the union newspaper and reading something else on the NYCDOE website, finding out that permanent certification is eliminated and that I have to continue this ridiculous process for the rest of my career, waiting for an answer as to whether the professional development we do in school counts toward the required 175 hours to renew the license.

30. 

    Woodlass

    February 21st, 2009 4:22 am

    ceolaf,

    The sports analogy doesn’t work for me either, nor the marriage counselor. There’s a real difference between helping someone improve his own game (or marriage, for that matter) and trying to teach someone how to perform in a stream of endless variables. In the former, you’re dealing with the improvement of one’s own personal skills; in the latter, whatever techniques you have may or may not work in a particular group of kids on a particular day. You can only say that if you’re a good teacher, you’ve acquired a set of skills that in general, not necessarily always, allows you to adjust to a variety of situations so that most kids, not necessarily all, will learn something. Only with experience do you learn what to expect, how far you can push, which things work best for which kids, and what never produces good results.

    You mention videos of “real classrooms,” but videos by definition are fabrications, there’s nothing real about them. For one thing, the students are selected (no real classroom teacher gets to choose his students), and more often than not the classes are small, I’d say half the number of students there’d be in the real world. Then there’s the fact that most kids behave extremely well when they know they are being taped. Heck, they even behave well when someone they don’t know comes into the room for a few minutes, let alone tapes them. I’ve never seen a video that resembles a real teaching environment, and I don’t think it exists. So, what you’re going to learn is not how to deal with a classroom, but perhaps a bit of procedure here, a trick there, a kernel of a method that you could maybe shape into something useful if you experiment with it for a while.

    I’m not so hard on ed courses as NYC Educator, but I was NTE-certified. (I don’t know if that exists anymore, but 20 years ago if you had a Masters in a content area but not in education per se, you could get city certified if you had state certification, take the NTE and city exams, get 12 credits of special ed and some other kind of BoE requirement I can’t remember now, and do some student teaching.) Dabbling in the few ed courses I was required to take didn’t bother me too much. I picked up a few things, but nothing relating to classroom management. Those I got from a one-page handout an AP gave me early on, which had things in it like stand at the door and don’t let anyone in who isn’t upon entry conforming to your standards of behavior, and never fully turn your back on the class. Really practical items. I gave that sheet to someone years later, but it was the single most useful document of teacher training I ever saw. 20 items, one page.

31. 

    ceolaf

    February 21st, 2009 12:13 pm

    I don’t want to get too much into details of how a certifications system should be run and administrated, or the form that gradually increasing responsibilities/gradually declining supervision would take, at least not here. These are enormously complex topics, and while I am somewhat obsessed with program implementation, I don’t think that a comment thread is a particularly good place to work these things out.

    However, there are are a few things that I would like to comment on.

    1) Basketball is not like baseball. In basketball, there is a constant flow of changing variables. It can be an incredibly quick game. It is not just about individual skills. To be able to actually PLAY basketball, you need to be able to take in the action, figure out what is possible and engage in action to further your desired ends. And you’ve got to do it incredibly quickly. The idea of film study for basketball is slow the action down, so people can better understand what they saw — or failed to see — and take more time to figure out what is possible in that sort of situation in the future.

    2) Of course experience is needed for improvement. But we can provide scaffolds and guides so that learning from experience is accelerated. And we can perform after-action review sorts of lessons, so that experience can be better mined for learning quickly. And there IS value in learning from vicarious experience, especially because it can prime a person to learn from their own.

    2) I have filmed my classes, and my colleagues have filmed their classes. Real teachers, real classes, real students. And Woodlass is right that the first few minutes a visitor is in a room, the kids act differently. But the 5th day in a row, they act like the usually act. So, if you set up your camera(s) in the corners and record for multiple days in a row. Woodlass is right that the first day or two won’t be real useful, but if you know that and just record over those immediately — as we did — then that’s not a big problem. You use the later tapes.

    3) It is not a surprise to anyone that teacher prep does a horrible job with classroom management. We all know that. Fixing that is an important issue, and how we induce ed schools and alternative training programs to address it needs more attention. But it is a well known issue.

    4) I’ve seen lots of teachers who are great in front of the kids, keeping them engaged and managing the classroom well. But many of them have not been so good in the work they do when NOT in front of the kids. Writing meaningful comments on their work, planning lessons or units, keeping the larger lessons/objectives in mind. Yes, this comes out when they are in front of the kids, but the missing or misunderstood work is when they are not in front of the kids. How much time do teachers spend working NOT in front of the kids? 1/4? 1/3? 1/2? I spent one week one year without lesson plans — I don’t mean big formal plans, but rather what I usually did to plan the week and each day. Everyone else taught without plans at that school, so why shouldn’t I? Well, I ended up teaching like them. And the kids got less out of that week, and my larger objectives for them were not advanced.

32. 

    Woodlass

    February 21st, 2009 1:55 pm

    I see what you mean about basketball, but you’re dealing with variables at a certain level of skill. You’re never having to deal with hunger, illness, taking siblings to and from school, no lunch built into the schedule, or 34 of those bodies all at the same time.

    I agree with the rest of what you say — which is why non-educator corpocrats and political appointees cannot be trusted to determine teacher quality. If it can be defined at all.

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