Malcom Gladwell, a best-selling pop-sociologist and the 2007 winner of the American Sociological Association's first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, has become my #2 favorite thinker on education, after Jonathan Kozol. I would not mind following in his footsteps and being his protege. In his article, "Most Likely to Succeed," he has articulated what is even elusive to practicing teachers themselves: what makes a teacher effective?
The sociologist in me jumped at his early statement that “teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.” So what makes a good teacher? For one, providing personalized feedback: anchoring the lessons around what the students think, guess and ask, instead of ignoring these attempts and delivering them an unbending version that the teacher thinks ought to appeal to them. A second quality of a good teacher is giving students constant individualized feedback. As I read this article about my vocation, I felt like I was in a classroom with Mr. Gladwell, learning something new with the break of each new paragraph. I want to be off the charts with individual feedback! I thought as I read about the hyperactive trigonometry teacher who had checked each student’s work in a two-and-a-half-minute sweep around the room, before resuming to the next step of the lesson.
I appreciated Gladwell’s point that children in the classroom of a distinguished teacher are “active, but somehow the class [doesn’t] become a free-for-all.” Regarding and interpreting students’ perspectives does not mean a teacher is out of control. I have found that allowing kids to be engaged does require me to stop having a stranglehold on classroom management. At times, such as during literature circles (group work) and a class-wide writer’s workshop (the revision unit in October), this has made me very self-conscious. As I walk past colleagues completely silent classrooms, I worry that the quiet banter in my room is a sure sign that less learning is going on. And yet, I cannot deny that I feel that the material seeps into their brains better when they discuss it with each other, and my role as teacher becomes less leturer than one who circulates the room, listening to ideas, giving clues in response to their questions. A classroom where the teacher regards the students’ perspective encourages participation like I could not believe. In this setting, kids whose voices were never heard before suddenly started showing off their literary prowess and becoming inquisitive with the material. So this portion of the article reassured me that I ought not interpret a non-silent classroom as a hopeless one teeming with off-task, bad behavior.
There is one flaw in Gladwell’s theory, however. He says that lowing the barriers of entry into the teaching profession would help our society capture the truly qualified teachers, which degrees and fixed-tenure-tracks fail to find. Based on the prestige that no doubt attracks so many candidates to give the NFL and financial advising a shot, I think teaching needs to have an increase in barriers of entry. It should not be open to just anyone; that’s part of the reason why the profession has such high turn over. If teachers’ occupational prestige score were to rise – meaning, they saw themselves as having a distinct corporate/vocational identity instead of being alienated/isolated from each other (the egg-crate model of teaching, each to his/her own, as it was called in my soc of ed classes), and as being highly skilled and non-interchangeable (securing a progressed DOL with organic solidarity), then they would not want to leave their job because it is a hard one. Also, middle class parents would stop discouraging their children from entering the teaching field as a career. As it is, these 2-year programs for invigorated young education enthusiasts may give a glimpse of how great classrooms can be with excited teachers…but how can the profession claim these young professionals for good? I am bit wary of graduated incomes that pit the superstar teachers against the mediocre teachers. Is internal competition really the solution to finding and securing the best teachers?
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