Great teachers make a difference. So do bad ones.

Manning, good. Leaf, bad.

Two great college quarterbacks. One makes it in the NFL, one doesn’t.

Yesterday’s post discussed a short essay by Malcolm Gladwell that highlights what some call the quarterback problem. A simple question with a difficult answer.

What college quarterbacks will succeed in the NFL?

Gladwell uses the problem faced by NFL general managers to extend the question into K-12 education.

What does a great teacher look like? And how do we find them?

Why worry about great teachers? Gladwell cites research documenting that great teachers transfer 1.5 years worth of content in a typical school year. Poor teachers? Barely 0.5 years worth.

About a year ago, NY Times journalist Elizabeth Green wrote Building a Better Teacher.

When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to.

Green asks the same question Gladwell does.

There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try.

Gladwell has a solution.

Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers – that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible.

But Gladwell spent time with a variety of people, including Bob Pianta at the University of Virginia, and he began to realize that great teaching is incredibly complex. And now

this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.

So:

we shouldn’t be raising (teacher) standards. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree . . .

I’ve said before that we need higher standards for teachers. Ed programs should be more selective in who they let in – if they do, we’ll get better teachers on the other end. But Gladwell’s got me thinking about the quarterback problem. The best pre-service teachers may turn out to be the educational equivalent of Ryan Leaf.

The solution I’m starting to buy into?

Accept everybody. Anybody with a pulse. But judge them after they’ve started their jobs, not before.

That means the profession needs an “educational boot camp” –

. . . an apprenticeship that allows teacher candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

Find the best one by having them teach – then hire the great ones, get rid of the bad ones and train the average ones to get better. And you find the great ones in part by using some of the work that Doug Lemov has done.

Founder of Uncommon Schools, Lemov is the author of Teach Like a Champion – a collection of deliberate and intentional instructional techniques that he observed over time in the classrooms of great teachers.

. . . he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise.

We need to observe the boot camp teachers and document who uses these techniques. Keep those. With those left, document who is willing to learn these techniques. Train those. If boot camp teachers don’t have these techniques and aren’t willing (or able) to use these techniques, they need to go.

As a profession, we need to stand behind the great teachers and be willing to push the poor ones out.

This may mean changing how we as teacher groups negotiate This may involve changing tenure. This may mean paying the great teachers more.

Both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly become a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

It may mean changing how we do a lot of things.

But great teachers make a difference. So do the bad ones.

K-12 Education has a quarterback problem

It was not an easy decision.

Both players came to the 1998 draft with impressive college numbers, high expectations and tons of buzz among NFL scouts. Both were All-Americans and finalists for the Heisman Trophy. In fact, both were seen by many NFL experts to be equal in ability and potential. One NFL general manager said

you really can’t go wrong with either one of them.

A year later, after a full season as a starting quarterback in the NFL, one had thrown for 3,739 yards with 26 touchdowns, set five different NFL rookie records, including most touchdown passes in a season, and was named to the NFL All-Rookie First Team.

The other?

Skipped a series of mandatory meetings required of all drafted players, was benched after nine games, threw just two touchdown passes and fifteen interceptions, passed for 1,289 yards with a terrible quarterback rating of 39.

The first? Drafted by the Indianapolis Colts, Peyton Manning continues to start, has been selected as an All-Pro ten times, was Super Bowl MVP in 2007 and named Player of the Decade in 2009.

The other?

Ryan Leaf appeared in just 25 games over four years at San Diego, Tampa Bay and Dallas. He completed 317 of 655 passes for 3,666 yards, with 14 touchdowns and 36 interceptions.

So . . . we get it. Manning good, Leaf bad. The point?

It’s incredibly hard figuring out which great college quarterbacks will develop into great NFL quarterbacks. Everything seemed to suggest that both Manning and Leaf would be successful. One was. One wasn’t.

It’s the quarterback problem. Who do you draft?

In his short essay Most Likely to Succeed, Malcolm Gladwell of Blink, Outliers and The Tipping Point fame uses the quarterback problem to illustrate a similar problem in K-12 education.

How do we know which college kids will become great teachers?

And

should we care?

The research seems pretty clear, Gladwell claims. With enough data, it becomes easy to identify both poor and great teachers. Eric Hanushek of Stanford University says that students of great teachers learn the equivalent of 1.5 years of content every year. Students of poor teachers learn 0.5 years of content in the same amount of time.

For the mathematically challenged, that’s a difference of a year. A year.

Teacher effects impact learning much more than school effects. A great teacher in a bad school is better for kids than a bad teacher in an excellent school. Robert Marzano’s research makes this clear:

Eric Hanushek says that simply replacing the bottom 10% of poor teachers with average ones could close any achievement gap that exists between the US and other countries.

And after years of worrying about standards, funding levels, class size and curriculum design, many are beginning to say that nothing matters more than putting great teachers in US classrooms.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it?

What do potential great teachers look like?

Tomorrow? Great teachers, how to find them and how to get them into the classroom.

Are Ed classes really “guts?”

Okay . . . I hadn’t heard the term “guts” actually used before. We used the word “cake” as in “easy as cake” and “cakewalk.” We also used “mick” for . . . that’s right, “mickey mouse.”

And, yes, all three terms describe many of the education classes at my school of choice (aka Harvard of the Plains). I especially remember some sort of multimedia class where the most difficult task was mastering the mimeograph machine.

Several years ago I wrote a quick post (apparently while in a grumpy mood) describing my thoughts about how college kids who would make great teachers choose not to become teachers – in other words, kids who should not be in teaching become teachers because it seems easy.

We’ve all heard the stories about how college athletes who want to become coaches go into the education field and don’t worry too much about becoming great teachers as long as they have time to work on game plans. And unfortunately, many of us have seen those coaches in our schools.

Now . . . before I get tons of cards and letters from social studies teachers / coaches complaining about stereotypes, let me say that there are many very good teachers who also happen to coach. But I still believe that many enter the education field for lots of reasons other than wanting to become a great teacher.

A recent article by Jonathon Zimmerman from the Christian Science Monitor  supports what I was saying in 2008. Jon’s basic thesis? We don’t challenge our pre-service teachers enough.

No matter what we call these classes – or what teaching skills they transmit – they don’t challenge students’ intellects as much as other courses do.

Pre-service education students are not asked to do as much as others:

. . . just 45 percent of students in education and social work reported taking a course in the previous semester requiring more than 20 pages of writing, while 61 percent took a class with more than 40 pages of reading per week. By comparison, 68 percent of social science and humanities students took a class with 20 pages of writing, and 88 percent had a class with 40 pages of weekly reading.

And so they don’t work as hard:

. . . students in education and social work reported studying less, too: 10.6 hours per week, as opposed to 12.4 hours in the social sciences and the humanities. The hardest workers are science and math majors, who study 14.7 hours a week.

The result?

. . . education students show significantly lower gains than these other groups during their undergraduate careers on the College Learning Assessment (CLA), an essay-only test measuring complex reasoning and written expression. As ed schools should be the first to acknowledge, the only way to cultivate these higher-order skills is to practice them. And our students appear to do that less than most other undergraduates.

The problem is that there seems to be multiple people to blame. Colleges allow ed classes to be easy. Ed profs don’t work very hard to make their classes rigorous. Weaker kids know this and take those classes.

. . . ed schools have made it boring, by stripping it of its intellectual edge – and by letting our students slide along.The students know it, too. That’s why weaker ones flock to the subject – and the more able ones stay away. In each of the past four decades, as my colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining fraction of America’s top college students have chosen to become educators.

The solution? Not as easy as it sounds. More rigor. More willingness to push weak pre-service kids out of ed programs. More willingness to push out ed profs without some sort of actual knowledge of what it’s like in the K-12 world. More real mentoring of student teachers. More classroom experiences for pre-service teachers very early in their college years.

My pipe dream?

Make getting a teacher license more like getting a medical license. Make the ed program one where the smart kids fight to get in and we get to pick and choose who moves into K-12 classrooms.

But I’m still curious. What was your guts ed class?

Zhao, education and globlization

I had the chance to listen to rising star of educational reform Dr. Yong Zhao last week and am still working to wrap my head around what he had to say.

So far, here’s what I got:

• Innovation creates entrepreneurs
• Entrepreneurs create jobs
• Jobs equal higher quality of life
• NCLB and other forms of testing kill innovation
• Current US education system is actually pretty good, especially when compared with other countries
• Other countries such as China and South Korea are working hard to create an educational system modeled after the US
• The US is working hard to create an educational system that looks like China’s

Mmm . . . where to start?

Many in the US use international tests like the TIMMS to show how far the United States is behind educationally. But Zhao cited statistics showing that countries that scored low on those sorts of international tests have the highest levels of creativity, quality of life, democracy, wealth, economic growth over time. The opposite is true of the countries who scored highest on those types of tests.

Zhao noted that in his State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned that the US has the strongest economy, the most productive workers, the most patents, etc. Zhao asks “If what Obama and others say about our educational system is true, how can our economy be so good?”

He suggested very strongly that we’re worried about fixing things that don’t matter.

Zhao highlighted what the federal DOE and others are attempting to do to “fix” the current system – things like Race to the Top and Common Core standards. Boiled down, these efforts are designed to:

• centralize the system
• standardize the system
• make the people in the system more accountable

Simply stated, all of these attempts to “fix” our system are designed to improve our chances to compete with others like China and India. And Zhao says that’s stupid.

He pointed out that Asian countries started with this sort of system and discovered that it doesn’t work. Zhao cited all sorts of documents that demonstrate that China, South Korea, Japan and Singapore are working to de-centralize and de-standardize – with the goal of increasing creativity and innovation.

Chinese concerns have included:

• Overemphasis on simple knowledge transmission
• Too many required and uniform courses
• Excessive coursework burden on students

In response, China has actually reduced the number of required hours for math and other core classes while increasing the number of hours for art, PE and other elective courses.

South Korea is moving along the same path:

All this energy has been spent on raising test scores, not nurturing creativity of any other aspect of human nature – it’s our biggest challenge.

Lee Ju Ho
Minister of Education, Science, and Technology
Chronicle of Higher Education
January 23, 2011

Among other things, Singapore is working to focus more on “the explicit teaching of critical and creative thinking skills” and a greater emphasis “on processes instead of on outcomes when appraising schools.” Japan has a three-pronged approach focusing on “enhancing emotional education,” creating a diverse, flexible educational system that “encourages individuality and cultivates creativity” and “decentralizing educational administration while enhancing local autonomy.”

Exactly the opposite of the kinds of things that the US is trying to do.

Why is this a big deal?

Because the research on creativity and innovation is pretty clear.

Zhao cited a recent book titled The Rise of the Creative Class that describes why some areas become economically powerful and other places do not. Zhao and the book’s author, Richard Florida, agree that for a place to become economically powerful (or truly compete with China), that place needs to focus on three things:

• Appropriate use of technology
• Diverse talents
• Tolerance of ideas, attitudes and lifestyles

His non-example? Michigan since the 1980s.

Zhao did talk briefly about what he sees as the solution;

• Teach global competencies including what he calls culture intelligence (knowledge of economics, problems, languages and cultures)
• Cultivate digital competencies
• Personalized learning
• Professional autonomy, support and development for teachers

I agree with a lot of what he has to say. I’m especially intrigued by what he had to say about how a place becomes economically powerful. There’s some interesting tie-ins to Jared Diamond’s ideas. I also like his comparisons between the current US system and those in Asia.

While I’ve read some of his stuff before, this was really the first time I had the chance to hear Zhao articulate his ideas. And I’m still working what he said into my own world view. But I’m pretty sure I’ll find a place to put it.

—————–

Update 2/28

Ken Robinson gave a talk last fall that is related to this topic. Feel free to browse through it.

14 Things Great Teachers Do Differently

What is great? A couple of things come to mind:

• Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson (Kansas City Chiefs 1962-1975)
• The Beatles
• Homemade chocolate chip cookies with walnuts
• A hammock, cold beverage, cool breeze, Sunday afternoon and just about any Tom Clancy novel
• Christmas

I’m sure your list looks different. But we all know great when we see it.

Teachers are like that. Some are good, some are average. And every so often, you run into a teacher who’s great. Jim Tomayko and Billy Landes were great. You just knew.

But great is hard to define. How do you quantify greatness in a teacher? What do they do differently? What’s the secret formula?

Todd Whittaker, in his book What Great Teachers Do Differently: 14 Things That Matter Most, tries to describe what makes a teacher great. After years of teaching middle and high school, Whittaker is now at Indiana State University and does a pretty good job of explaining how someone can become a great teacher.

The book describes the behaviors and attitudes that form the fabric of life in our best classrooms and schools. It focuses on the specific things that great teachers do . . . and that others do not.

It answers these essential questions:

• Is it high expectations for students that matter?
• How do great teachers respond when students misbehave?
• Do great teachers filter differently than their peers?
• How do the best teachers approach standardized testing?

So what are the fourteen things that great teachers do differently?

1. Great teachers never forget that it is people, not programs, that determine the quality of a school.

2. Great teachers establish clear expectations at the start of the year and follow them consistently as the year progresses.

3. When a student misbehaves, great teachers have one goal: to keep that behavior from happening again.

4. Great teachers have high expectations for students, but even higher expectations for themselves.

5. Great teachers know who is the variable in the classroom: THEY are.

6. Great teachers create a positive atmosphere in their classrooms and schools.

7. Great teachers consistently filter out the negatives that don’t matter and share a positive attitude.

8. Great teachers work hard to keep their relationships in good repair–to avoid personal hurt and to repair any possible damage.

9. Great teachers have the ability to ignore trivial disturbances and the ability to respond to inappropriate behavior without escalating the situation.

10. Great teachers have a plan and purpose for everything they do.

11. Before making any decision or attempting to bring about any change, great teachers ask themselves one central question: “What will the best people think?”

12. Great teachers treat everyone as if they were good.

13. Great teachers keep standardized testing in perspective.

14. Great teachers care about their students and understand the power of emotion to jump-start change.

It’s a bit scary to go through the list but you have to ask yourself . . . which of the 14 do I need to work on?

We’re #11! We’re #11!

A recent issue of Newsweek focused on answering the following question:

If you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous and upwardly mobile life?

Newsweek editors and writers chose to focus on five areas – education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness and political environment – and then applied data from each of those areas across 100 countries.

The overall results?

The US finished 11th behind such countries as Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Australia (sigh) but ended up way ahead of Uganda, Yeman and Cameroon (yea!). Newsweek did break stuff out a bit – they created smaller lists comparing similar sized countries by category. We did better on some of those lists.

The article noted some interesting trends. Some obvious, some not. Most obvious? Being small and rich (Switzerland) is much better than large and poor (South Africa).

Perhaps not so obvious was their observation that your educational system can make a huge difference in where you ended up on the list. And while this is a very wide-angle view of 100 countries, the authors of the article were also able to notice a few educational trends in those countries at the top of the list.

One of the first things that they noted was that family circumstances impact success more than any other factor. By age three, the authors suggest, children with professional parents are a full year ahead of their peers. Kids know twice as many words and score 40 points higher on IQ tests.

By age 10?

The gap is now three years.

And if nothing changes, many of those already behind will not master basic skills. As in . . . never.

So what successful international educational trends can we steal?

Get kids into school early

“High-quality preschooling does more for a child’s chances in school and life than any other educational intervention.” Pre-schooled kids earn more, had better jobs, are less likely to be in prison and more likely to remain in stable, long-term relationships.

And don’t forget the parents in that equation. Kids aren’t the only people who need an education at that point. We also need to train parents how to parent.

Keep kids in school longer

Current US educational policy is currently focused on creating longer school days and a longer school year. But the economy is making this difficult – schools are cutting back on student contact time to save money.

But I gotta tell ya. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Unless the instruction is of high-quality, more time spent in school doesn’t seem to make much sense. Longer days with poor teachers, poor resources and out-dated methods will do more harm than good.

Pour lots of effort into improving teacher quality

“Studies have shown that kids with the most effective teachers learn three times as much as those with the least effective.”

Now this I can get behind. Great teachers make a huge difference. I would gladly send me kid to school longer if I knew they would spend that time with quality people. We need to spend more time and effort recruiting teachers, invest in more and better staff development, provide constant feedback and provide bonuses for top performers.

Of course, that’s the real challenge, isn’t it? How do you document the top performers? Of course, we all know who’s good and who’s not. It was the same when we were in school or sports . . . we all knew who was number one. It’s the documenting that we need to work on. And I don’t know what that looks like. But we, the system, needs to spend time fixing that.

Recognize the value of individualized instruction

This is one of the benefits of programs like MTSS or RTI. We are taking a much clearer look at individual kids and what their needs are.

——————

And while these ideas all make sense, they are systemic and institutional. What can I as an individual do?

Not much I can do in my classroom about the preschool stuff. But I can

• Provide high-quality homework that will extend learning outside of class. This is not an easy thing but what we ask kids to do should involve more problem solving activities, more video games and group activities that incorporate online collaborative tools like Google Docs, Edmodo, Skype and Delicious.
• Become a better teacher. Get involved in creating and participating in a Personal Learning Network. Join Ning networks like Classroom 2.0, get on Plurk or Twitter, join a book study, subscribe to more blogs, travel more, read more books in your content area.
• Purposefully plan to differentiate your instruction. Don’t hope that kids learn. Figure out what they need and deliver your stuff in ways that guarantee that they learn. Plan for individualized learning.

Martin Luther King once said

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

Be the minority.