What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students

How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers?

Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad.

Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores, according to a progress report on the research.

Financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the two-year project involves scores of social scientists and some 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa; Memphis; New York; and Pittsburgh.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a23

This should be interesting...

:sarcasm:

100% of his patents have insurance so they have access to affordable health care. All have kept immunizations current, most have healthy diets and exercise regularly.

Now let's compare that doctor to one who treats the uninsured. Many of his patients haven't had a complete physical in years, struggle with dental issues because they have no access to affordable dental care, are on food stamps and don't have healthy diets, and die at a higher rate than the previous doctor's patients.

Could you keep a straight face and say the first doctor is better than the second?

Who is it fair to rate? Anyone?

I am old enough to remember when we taught critical thinking in our schools. Sigh.

That's when you've lost the argument you know.

Been down that road with you, my friend. Many times.

It is also apparent that I need to define ad hominem attack for you. But as a teacher (even on Saturdays) I am kindly requesting that you look that term up in the dictionary before you use it again.

I think you need to look it up.

It is true that I am rejecting your argument but it's because it isn't really an argument. It's also not based on an irrelevant fact about you. You have continually attacked teachers here and have not attempted to discuss education issues rationally. And you have posted snarky replies when others tried to have rational adult level discussions with you. That's hardly irrelevant.

Now run along and have a pleasant day. If you go shopping, remember that a teacher taught you to count money. If you do some holiday baking remember that a teacher taught you to understand and use fractions. :)

Somebody might get their feelings hurt, and we sure wouldn't want that. :sarcasm:

It used to be that esteem was something you earned with your accomplishments. Now the attitude is that everyone is born deserving esteem even if they accomplish nothing. It seems to be a popular thing to say that everyone is special, but if everyone is special then the very word "special" means nothing.

In any randomly selected population it is a statistical certainty that approximately half of the people will make below average teachers. That follows mathematically from the very definition of "average". That's reality. If it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that fact and make teacher selection based on such criteria then you are saying that reality itself is politically incorrect.

Having been married to an elementary school teacher I've met and socialized with a lot of teachers. From what I've seen the most critical factor in what makes a good teacher good is attitude, devotion, and genuine concern for the welfare of the students. It's not about I.Q. as much as it is about how much they care about their students. And I would be dishonest if I said the ones I've met all care. There are those who really don't give a damn as long as they get their paychecks. Those people should not be teaching our kids.

Maybe they just need more medical training and they will be fine? Or maybe they need more assistance from their nurse and their office is too shabby. Or worst yet they couldn't afford the latest technology.

a ratings system devised by bill gates.

Yes, let's score the teacher, that is a given. No other job in this nation gets 100% autonomy and zero accountability. That is a recipe for failure. So, of course, we need to start evaluating teachers and -I'm sorry if this offends some here- we need to remove teachers who should never have been in the classroom, with the lives and fates and futures of so many children at their mercy.

BUT! Let's bring logic and intelligence into the scoring of teachers. (I hear all you school administrators out there getting ready to throw a hissy fit at the thought that YOU would be forced to use logic or intelligence, let alone BOTH!) If the scoring system is to mean anything other than a convenient excuse to axe teachers the administrators don't like --teachers who force them to do their f*king jobs, teachers who call them on the idiocy of program after program being instituted with the claim that it will "fix" the failure of education and then switching out the programs before their results can be properly measured (some administrator might get fired if their stupid ideas that caused student achievement to go down so these programs have to be swapped in and out so quick that no one could possibly pin the blame)-- then we have to take into account the varying starting points for teachers. Don't use an ignorantly applied policy to bludgeon good teachers just because the raw material they had to work with was different than some other teachers' raw materials.

The doctor analogy is absolutely apropos to the discussion of scoring teachers. In all other objective measures we tend to adjust the bar based on the raw materials or the starting point for all; there is no "typical student" that can be used as a yardstick so no test score taken alone can shine any meaningful light on the success or failure of a teacher.

One would never think it right or fair to judge two assembly line workers solely by their product output when one worker receives all the right parts arranged in their proper order but the other worker has to first rearrange or even manufacture many of the parts before even starting the assembly process. We all know which assembly line worker is going to win that lopsided competition!

Students have different learning styles. In my experience, kids tend to like teachers who are young and attractive and energetic. But some of the best teachers are older and calm and unattractive but experienced.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has a bias. I would not trust the study they commissioned.

of donations & investments as well as his class position.

administered in an objective way. The people giving the test were, I suspect, trying to get a particular result. It is easy to frame questions about which teachers you like so as to get a result that slants in a particular direction.

I know this is a shocking thought, but maybe every once in a while a kid should have a teacher who is less than the best. We have to learn to work with people no matter how good they are at what they do. In school we learn much more than just how to pass tests with flying colors. Sometimes we learn from our mistakes, and often we learn from the mistakes and inadequacies of others.

Teachers now are much better than they were when I was in school. But my parents did not put up with complaints about teachers. They told us that we had to learn and study and respect our teachers no matter what. I am grateful to them for that.

I went to high school in Mobile, Alabama before desegregation. I was cringing in many of my classes because I was so offended even as a child by the racism and Southern view of the Civil War. But I had to learn to deal with it, and it caused me to be all the more opposed to racism and the Southern view of the Civil War. I probably learned just as much from teachers I could not stand as from those I liked.

Life is not about getting what you want. It is about making the most of what you get. This nonsense criticism of teachers sounds like the whining of spoiled kids.

I am not a teacher although I trained to be one and taught privately for some years (music).

I hear you! I was in a fourth grade classroom with 60 kids and one nun who told us that the sun orbited around the earth. Granted, that was way back in the early 1950's but even that long ago I'm pretty sure we knew that the earth orbited the sun and not the other way around. But I got my knuckles whacked for disagreeing with her.

they just like easy graders who pass them through - thats why college teachers of all stripes get evals from students :rofl: Its as stupid as asking patients to evaluate their doctors!

this is ridiculous. They like teachers who show videos and who give them 15 minutes of work a day. But if the study is asking the students about specific lessons or types of lessons/ways of teaching that they learn best from, and can provide support for that, I would find THAT interesting.

That does not relate to teachers, though.

Students will rate a "well liked" teacher higher. Handsome, young, pretty, or tall teachers will be rated higher. That is human nature and any person in the education system should be intimately familiar with human psychology and its affect on so-called objective measures. Tall people generally make more money than people who are of below average height, doing the exact same job. There are a number of built-in predispositions that are hard wired into our brains. The symmetricalness of your facial features has a great deal to do with how "popular" or "well liked" you are. These factors cannot be left out of the equation unless you want to end up with a de facto beauty contest.

Second, students will rate an "easy" teacher higher than one who actually makes them work hard. In the long run, the students will have a better future if all their teachers make them work hard, push their boundaries. So we are going to fire all the teachers that will actually be better for the students. When I was in college I had a tough teacher who almost got fired because a group of lazy students complained to the school administration. I gave him a written, personal recommendation and (humble lil' me) I believe that I was helpful in his keeping his job. His class was the hardest I'd had up to that point, I'll grant you that, but he gave all the information in class and his lectures followed the two texts for the class to the letter. His tests were taken straight from the end-of-chapter questions so anyone who actually read the book and did the quiz at the end of the chapter could get an "A" in that class. The lazy students who didn't read the material and didn't take good notes in class did poorly on the tests. Duh!

So let's not make this a race to the bottom style popularity contest.

I know students like those too, because they often ask for them and express pleasure when they are available. I guess no one is going to pay me thousands of dollars for that observation though.

I am now feeding a growing number of students two meals a day. They've changed the requirements for free lunch qualifications and we have quite a few kids who have eaten free for years and now have to pay. And their families can't afford the $75 a month fee. So of course, the teachers have stepped up and are now feeding kids.

But I suck cause I have tenure and low test scores. Bill Gates said so.

These yuppies are so out of touch with what is going on here on the ground that it is flat-out frightening. That anyone listens to them and puts their views ahead of ours...well, it reminds me of something you would read in 18th century satire, not something you expect from your government. Here we have an obvious problem, kids are hungry and not getting fed. This makes it incapable for them to learn. You have the solution...feed them. But no! cry our technocratic betters, it can't be something so blisteringly simple! We must fund a several-pronged study!

:pals: