This is my second post on this excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker titled “Most Likely to Succeed: How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?”
Today’s response is about how difficult it is to measure what makes a good teacher. Anyone who has spent time in front of a class knows that there’s a certain magic to teaching that’s difficult to name, even by the teacher who’s doing the magic!
Gladwell share the following in his article:
A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
This truth is self evident. It’s one thing to teach math. It’s another thing to teach it to a child whose parents are going through a divorce. It’s one thing to teach commas. It’s another to teach it to a class of 30 kids, all of whom arrive each day with their own “dramas and traumas.” That’s the magic of good teaching.
And it’s also the challenge of measuring the effectiveness of teachers. It’s nearly impossible to train people for this skill set. Gladwell states it bluntly: “But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.”
To those of you who might hire educators, how do you measure that which can’t necessarily be measured?
For those of you who teach, how do judge your own performance and that of your colleagues in such a heavily nuanced arena?
And for students and parents, when do you know you are in the presence of a great teacher?
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