Building a better teacher

What Hacker News says

1. GavinMcGJul 2020
   > Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.

   Absolutely. And actually, the breakdown starts with teaching education, where many classroom teachers are taught how to teach broadly, but not the sort of (more specialized) subject knowledge that lets you get inside a student's head to see where the errors are coming from. Elizabeth Green's book "Building A Better Teacher" was eye-opening to me.

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2. dalkeSep 2016
   First, a couple objections to your phrasing.

   I dislike the term 'reach their full potential'. That would require precognition. Perhaps you do study topic X, but your full potential would have been better reached by going for a walk, where you ended up meeting a group of like-minded people who support and challenge each other to do better. (For that matter, there are many worthy paths in life. You can't take all of them, so will never reach your 'full potential'. Perhaps I could have been a great figure skater, had I tried, so I'll now never reach my full potential.)

   I also dislike the term 'grit', because it has so many meanings. It's often interpreted needing an internal quality of perseverance and resilience. But what's also important is external support. This could include teachers or trainers, but also a community which doesn't resort to "LOL, N00B - RTFM!" when someone comes with a beginner question.

   Most people don't like feeling ignorant. Even fewer like it when others highlight that ignorance. As a personal example, years back I went to buy a new iPod and brought in my old one for a trade-in. The Apple store staff pointed out it was an old model "is it 3rd generation"? I had no clue, and didn't like the feeling like I was supposed to know this information.

   Now, as to your topic, there's an entire field of learning science. For example, Greg Wilson, at Software Carpentry, recommends (http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2016/09/small-teaching.ht... ):

   > Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher changed how I think about teaching, and sparked some good discussion in our community. Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know had a similar impact a few years earlier, and now there is James Lang’s Small Teaching. As its title suggests, Lang’s book focuses on little things that teachers can do right now to improve their teaching, rather than on big, systemic changes that might have larger impact, but which require larger effort (and probably buy-in from other people). To be included, a practice had to: have some foundation in the learning sciences, have been shown to have impact in real-world situation, and have been used or observed by the author. ... Frequent low-stakes quizzes to prompt recall, interleaving different material, having students write a one-minute thesis or draw a concept map, making the assessment criteria clear, setting aside time for self-explanation and peer explanation—none of these should be new to anyone who has been through our instructor training course

   Perhaps reading the literature from that field would help more than random HN commenters? As the Software Carpentry instructor training page points out at http://swcarpentry.github.io/instructor-training/ :

   > "Over the last hundred years, researchers have discovered an enormous amount about how people learn and how best to teach them. Unfortunately, much of that knowledge has not yet been translated into common classroom practice, while many myths about education have proven remarkably persistent."

   It's likely that people here may repeat those same myths.

   This also gives you the chance to ask yourself if you want to spend the time and energy to learn that topic enough to really be able to answer your own curiosity. And if not, perhaps that same answer can be applied to others?

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3. MaysonLMay 2016
   Another fix would be to train teachers better: give them actual training in classroom techniques. See "Building a Better Teacher (NYT)[0] & Teach Like a Champion 2.0 [1]

   [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

   [1]http://smile.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/d...

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4. tokenadultNov 2014
   This is a very good article. The reference to the newly published book Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them by Mark McClusky prompted me to request that book from my friendly public library. I like how the article looks at the absolute skill levels among professional competitors in chess and professional performers in orchestral music and shows that the skill level in those and many other domains has been steadily rising in my lifetime. There is still a lot of untapped potential in most individuals alive today that can be developed even at adult ages.

   As the article reports, "What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball. The golfer Ben Hogan, who was said to have 'invented practice,' stood out at a time when most pro golfers practiced occasionally, if at all. Today, practicing six to eight hours a day is just the price of admission on the P.G.A. Tour. Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good." This kind of cultural change can still go a lot further in a lot of fields on human performance. A culture of continual efforts at self-improvement has hardly even begun in many occupations.

   The article's conclusion about improving the performance of elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States is thoughtful, and also refers to good new books, Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green and The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein. Studies of educational effectiveness in the United States consistently show that the variance in teacher quality in any one school swamps the variance in school quality between one school and another, so any child in any school district is at risk of getting an ineffective teacher. (Although schools in poor neighborhoods of the United States, on the whole, have the greatest difficulty in hiring and retaining good teachers.) Anything that can help teachers learn to teach better before or after they began working in the classroom will have massive social benefits. An economist who has studied teacher effectiveness for years shows that the best teachers are almost literally worth their weight in gold, while the worst teachers have negative added value for their pupils.[1] Bringing a culture of continual self-improvement in America's schools is a project of crucial national importance.

   [1] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h...

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5. MaysonLJan 2013
   Evaluating teachers is all well and good, but the key to improving our educational system is not that. What is needed is improving teachers. See "Building a Better Teacher"[0]

   [0]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

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6. MaysonLApr 2012
   The way to fix the American educational system is to teach teachers better ways to teach. Teaching is a learnable and teachable art, even though like all arts, some people will be better (sometimes much better) than others. See "Building a Better Teacher": http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...
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