Good Teaching in the News!
I have just read a couple of very interesting and different articles on the current state of teaching in the US and they all came to my attention via Twitter. The first was a wonderful article from the New York Times, Building a Better Teacher, by Elizabeth Green, a Spencer fellow in education reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the editor of GothamSchools.org. The other from Newsweek was entitled, Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, which was a little depressing to say the least. It seems the latter article, at least, was inspired by a recent incident in Central Falls Rhode Island, USA, where the entire teaching staff at the High School were fired by the School Superintendent at the end of February. This incident seems to have sparked a major debate around the teaching profession in the USA.
Elizabeth Green’s article is worth the read – it is about 12 pages long – but it is informative and full of hope. In the article she speaks to Doug Lemov, who works of the Uncommon School organisation, which "starts and manages outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college". Lemov has developed a taxonomy, that is captured in a forthcoming book, "Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College". His taxonomy is content neutral and is designed to help teachers "succeed in capturing [student] attention and getting them to follow instructions", more commonly referred to as classroom management. The online version of the article on the NY Times website even includes some video examples that are worth watching.
The article also describes the work of Deborah Loewenberg Ball, who is Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan and who has developed a set of 19 practices designed to improve the teaching of Math. Professor Ball believes that content knowledge alone is not enough to make a teacher effective and that they also need some special knowledge for teaching. Her project is entitled Math Knowledge for Teaching and it is great to see Dr. Seán Delaney from Marino Insititute of Education is part of this project.
Both Ball and Lemov agree that great teachers are not born but made. The US is doubling its funding for "teacher training" in 2011 to $235 million. Nearer home good teachers are going to be an essential corner-stone in building the next phase of our "Smart Economy" and our "Intelligent Island" and we need to continue investing in their development, even in these tough times.
It’s more than a little interesting to see the type of ‘new, amazingly effective’ teaching strategies programmes like Lemov’s put forward; catch their attention before you speak, deal with low-level misbehaviour in a low-key way, plan transitions within lessons…
Makes me more and more convinced we undersell what the ‘ordinary’ teaching graduate in Ireland knows and can do – at BEd and even at HDip level. Irish teachers are still among the best in Europe; if only the trust and funding were there to support that, we’d be unstoppable.