[Sanders' study is part of] the ongoing search for the characteristics of the effective teacher. A definitive list of such characteristics is the holy grail of teacher policy. If we only had that list, so the thinking goes, we could do all kinds of important and useful things. We could reshape education schools to impart those characteristics. We could set up certification systems to filter out teachers who don't have those characteristics. We could design compensation systems that pay teachers with those characteristics more money.... My strong suspicion is that this whole way of thinking will ultimately turn out to be profoundly wrong.... [W]e could double, triple, or magnify tenfold our efforts to refine and expand things like the NBPTS and still never get close to identifying the effective teacher, for the simple reason that she doesn't exist.That reasoning conflates screening instruments with teacher education and professional development, and it fails to address the fundamental weakness of much of this research, the search for a general qualification of teachers based on a global credential (not usually immutable characteristics). Then Carey went into some weird stuff about Dell's reversal of the usual production-before-sales process. (Never mind that car customers who were willing to wait could custom-order cars years before.) I think it has something to do with being satisfied with identifying effective teachers and not worrying about helping teachers (and prospective teachers) get better. Maybe I'm misreading that entry, but it sure sounded like that.
And, if so, Carey is wrong. Suppose we could identify with 100% accuracy who the good math teachers are. (Incidentally, neither Bill Sanders nor I will ever claim this, regardless of our differences otherwise.) Do we then fire those who are weaker and pray that their replacements are better, on average? As far as I'm aware, there has never been a period of time when you had 100% perfect teachers, when a system didn't need to work with the teachers they had because, well, they were the teachers there at the moment. It makes no sense from a decency, fairness, civil rights, morale, or human resources standpoint to sit there and let an inexperienced, less-skilled, or overwhelmed teacher flounder just because the research on national certification or masters degrees isn't conclusively in favor of those as screening/pay increment policies.
In my own research on special education history, there are several points (including today) when administrators have griped about the lack of trained specialists. The expansion of special education meant that there has always been a shortage of specialists, and often regular teachers were pulled into special education. Lo and behold! these "retreads" (as one former Peabody College professor termed them) were pretty sharp folks and were able to learn new tricks just fine, thank you (again, to the pleasant surprise of my informant). To borrow from a certain Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young classic, if you can't have the ones you want, help the ones you have. They'll probably be just fine.
2 comments:
Yes, and speaking of conflating, those who see Sanders as a guru are the same ones who have already conflated learning and school with test-taking and tests. And even though Sanders, himself, remains an advocate for NBPTS, that point is lost, just as the value of NBPTS credentialing is lost, when we concede that stupidification through testing constitutes the reason we have schools.
Too, I remain a little suspicious of research that determines that high test scores result from good teaching, and good teaching results in high test scores. Is there a reference point outside this tight vortex I can focus on--I am getting dizzy.
People just can't tell you about stuff they don't understand. Whether or not they are good at conveying it is a second issue. Talk about conflation!
If I may add something about high performers? Sometimes asking for too much can be as bad as asking for too litttle.
The fact is we are talking about average human beings. Identifying high performers can be a bad thing because there are only a few of them in any profession. The average person may be able to 80% of the "special" behaviours. So when you put all of the behaviors into a little book and tell the rest of the people they have to do all or die, they in turn adopt new behaviors of their own so as to avoid poor evaluation. Things don't improve as a result and other unpredictable things happen that may be bad in general.
Post a Comment