Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher • Hacker News Board

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#21

Post by gnosis » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:34 PM UTC

crusso wrote: post #15

gnosis wrote: post #13

There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are. 2. How many resources the school and teacher are given. 3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home. 4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood. 5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards edu…

And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market. But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control. What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situa…

That's a very legitimate question. How can teachers do the best with the resources they're given and the the children they're working with, no matter how threadbare the resources are, and no matter how traumatized and disadvantaged their students are?

Whether standardized tests have a role in answering that question or in evaluating teacher performance is hotly debated right now.

But the purpose of my original post was to draw attention to a different question: How can society as a whole ensure that every child gets the best education possible?

In schools that have no problem attracting resources, great teachers, and children with mostly fortunate backgrounds, perhaps this second question can be answered by asking the first: how can we improve our teachers?

But in schools that lack resources, whose students live in abuse, poverty, and despair, what even an exceptional teacher can do will be radically limited, and society would probably be better off focusing on how to eradicate poverty -- the real cause behind the failure of too much education in this country.

Unfortunately, seriously tackling the issue of poverty is much harder (and even contrary to some dominant American ideologies) than simply demanding more standardized tests be given and blaming teachers and their unions.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#22

Post by elemenohpee » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:36 PM UTC

crusso wrote: post #15

gnosis wrote: post #13

There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are. 2. How many resources the school and teacher are given. 3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home. 4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood. 5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards edu…

And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market. But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control. What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situa…

> How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?

So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things that any arguments about how a particular system of measurement is ineffective should be discarded?

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#23

Post by robdoherty2 » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:36 PM UTC

I believe that studies like this are well-intentioned in that those conducting the research are truly trying to improve the state of education in the US. However, the result of their work I'm afraid is the 'quantification' of teaching as a profession.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#24

Post by mac1175 » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:37 PM UTC

crusso wrote: post #15

gnosis wrote: post #13

There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are. 2. How many resources the school and teacher are given. 3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home. 4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood. 5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards edu…

And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market. But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control. What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situa…

I think relativism does play a role on outcomes regardless of the parallels you are drawing here. However, you do make a point on a person's competence based on how well they can handle a situation but I don't think you can group one's role as a teacher being equal as one's role as a lead engineer.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#25

Post by crusso » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:37 PM UTC

madaxe wrote: post #11

"Test scores" Brilliant. Well, yes, that is the best way to measure a teacher's efficacy, if your goal is to teach students to jump through hoops and pass standardised tests rather than to think. The best teacher I ever had was my grandmother - she taught me the most important lessons I'd ever learn, such as: "Observe the world around you." "Reach your own conclusions." "What was fact yesterday may be fiction tomorro…

I don't really understand the visceral reaction against testing in this HN thread.

You're tested throughout your working life. Almost every job interview is a test. Giving a customer presentation is a test. Finding bugs in your software for a release date is a test. Memorizing that big Cheesecake Factory menu so you can wait tables is a test. Getting your General Contractor's license is a test. Getting certified as a Pilot requires passing a test.

There should be more to education besides testing, but being tested is a part of life and it's easy to measure success - that combination means that it's a useful tool for education.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#26

Post by edtechdev » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

This work is valuable, but I personally would like to put more focus on improving teaching and learning - helping teachers do better, helping students do better, creating better learning environments and curricula.

For example the budget of this study came out to about $15000 per teacher. What if instead we spent $5000 of that for professional development / training for the teacher, $5000 for a classroom set of chromebooks, and gave the teacher a $5000 raise. That alone would cause some significant improvements, I believe (not that that is ALL that is needed, and there are so many bigger issues that need to be tackled as someone else mentioned, such as poverty and inequity).

But when we talk about "good" teaching and "bad" teaching, we are treating it like it is a simple craft that is mastered or not mastered. Teaching is like engineering, it involves design, and design is about making things better (see this prezi on learning design: http://prezi.com/b44jwdgvs8nl/olds-mooc-introduction/ )

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#27

Post by the_bear » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

elemenohpee wrote: post #19

the_bear wrote: post #17

It's common for people who received good educations to say that test scores aren't an acceptable indication of learning. It's probably true that if you already have an acceptable level of education, test scores shouldn't be too important, but it seems like the people criticizing test scores haven't experienced what education is like for the children being "left behind." In middle school, the last three weeks of each…

Where did you go to school? How does this happen?

I went to the University City School District in St. Louis. It was actually a pretty strange place because it's the main district that Wash U (Washington University in St. Louis) is in, so about 10% of the students are children of (mostly white) professors and other very education-oriented professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc). Because of that, top classes (honors and AP) were actually pretty good. I, and many of my classmates went to Wash U and other top universities.

The rest of the student body was made up of poor, mostly black students who came from families where education wasn't a priority. Every single year I was in high school the state tried to revoke our accreditation and we just barely passed a state audit to keep it. I was a math tutor, and it was common for students to come in who couldn't do basic addition (in high school).

To make matters more confusing, the gap between the good students and the bad was almost entirely caused by economics (wealthier parents resulted in smarter kids, as is normally the case) but because the economic divide was almost identical to the racial divide, many of the educational issues were easily conflated with racial issues. This led to the (mostly black) teachers and administration demonstrating favoritism toward white students, and it also created tremendous social pressure on black students not to try to succeed academically (otherwise you're an oreo).

I wouldn't trade my experience there for anything. I received a pretty good education, and I experienced a part of America that more privileged kids should experience, but most of the students at my school were definitely being left behind.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#28

Post by crusso » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:41 PM UTC

elemenohpee wrote: post #22

crusso wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market. But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control. What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situa…

> How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control? So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things that any arguments about how a particular system of measurement is ineffective should be discarded?

So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things

You read something into my argument that I didn't put there, so I'm going to disregard it as a straw man.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#29

Post by Mvandenbergh » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #13

There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are. 2. How many resources the school and teacher are given. 3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home. 4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood. 5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards edu…

That's why they do value-added testing rather than just evaluating teachers based on the score of their pupils. Obviously there are confounding factors, but if a teacher can make a statistically significant difference to the the test scores - as measured by before and after testing then that is valuable to know.

Re: Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

#30

Post by dspeyer » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 1:43 PM UTC

If I'm reading the linked page correctly, these metrics were verified by correlating them with individual student improvement on a variety of standardized tests and "more cognitively challenging assignments in math and english". This is better than pure circular logic, but until those metrics are validated, these are suspect. In particular, everything seems to test for shallow understanding.