Elizabeth Green (3)

It shocked me when I taught a college course that I was on my own: My adviser handed me the textbook and left it to me to write a syllabus. He didn't see me teach and told me not to read my evaluations. Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise after sitting all those years in classrooms where my teachers went unobserved. Only since I left school did teaching teachers attract serious interest. Charter-school founders looked to Japan for models and found, in a weird parallel to industry, that show more their best practices were lifted from obscure American academics. Education reporter Green hooks readers into this story by giving us a seat in Socratic-style classrooms that encourage students to think through their right and wrong answers and teachers to coach each other. And again it shouldn't be a shock that the practice is both effective and rare. Even in the current push for accountability, value-added calculations are more likely used to find underperforming teachers than to improve them. show less

This is a book at war with itself. It wants to believe that charter schools are committed to improving education (and not to dumping students who don’t do well with their formats, as public schools can’t do, and to producing investor returns), but its own story is about how the basic thrust of the big charter proponents has been wrong. By focusing on controlling student behavior and measuring “outcomes,” American school reform has managed to alienate teachers without changing teacher show more behavior in the ways that the practices of other countries and the evidence from empirical research show actually helps teachers teach and children learn. We’ve yelled at teachers, dumped new methods on them without coherence or sufficient training, and devalued professional development, when mentoring and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge are what’s needed. We’ve pretended that teaching is a natural gift that you either can or can’t do, and not something that requires more than loving children to succeed at. As one of Green’s interviewees points out, you wouldn’t train doctors by dumping a bunch of them into a hospital and firing the bottom-performing 10% at the end of the year. Despite the account of methods that do work to help teachers succeed, this ends up being a really depressing book; it’s hard to believe that America will commit to the necessary support, when it’s so much easier to test students and declare their teachers successes or failures. show less

It mostly boiled down to "know the PCK for your topic" (pedagogical content knowledge) and "let students figure things out themselves by discussing problems that you don't give them answers to, guiding them out of rabbit holes if necessary." I think these are very useful ways to approach teaching, but it didn't really seem new or radical.

She also spent a while talking about "no excuses" schools and classrooms and seemed to think they were a good idea even while pointing out how awful it show more could be for a student to be sent home for not having their uniform just so (as if the awfulness of the punishment made it more effective?), without any thought to the implications that would have on a child's learning or development (missing classes, being humiliated in front of other students), just that it lead to more orderly classrooms. show less

Elizabeth Green is not a teacher, but while writing this book she was urged to try teaching. She learned firsthand that teaching is difficult, intellectual work. She realized that it was not so much what she would teach as to how she would manage to do it. Before she began her first lesson the teacher of the class she was going to teach said to her, "You have to look at them with love in your heart. Once they know that you care about them then they can relax a lot." Love, care--where is this show more in the teacher's job description? Or is it sort of understood like the doctor's bedside manner? My gut feeling says no, but it is certainly a concept worth discussion.

Green spent six years doing research in the U.S. and Japan on how teachers teach. She writes about two classroom teachers, now researchers, Magdalene Lampert and Deborah Ball who videotaped their classes for a year to discover how to teach effectively and to share what they learned with others. Specifically, the teachers wanted to identify the student thinking that produces an incorrect answer, anticipate student errors and figure out how to offer the best explanation for teaching new information

She explores economist, Eric Hanushek's theory from the 1970's that proposed teacher accountability with value added scores, the differences of teaching in Japan and America and how teachers in some charter schools found a successful way to teach discipline. In her quest to find out what makes a great teacher, Green’s research uncovers that good teaching is not an innate quality. Even the most talented teachers have to be taught and must regularly work on the core practice of teaching. She suggests that teachers need performance evaluation, more guidance and that money needs to be spent on time for teachers to learn. While this suggestion may not be new to our educators, it reinforces the need for professional development.
Green is the co-founder, editor-in-chief and CEO of Chalkbeat a non-profit news organization covering educational change efforts in communities where improvement matters most. Chalkbeat takes no position on what methods make better schools, but its mission is to keep local communities informed about educational decisions and policies that impact families. Their website: http://chalkbeat.org/ is worth perusing.
I admit I read through the main part of the book very quickly since I got lost in the details about how to teach math. I was on a mission to find the answer to one of our most perplexing problems—what makes a good teacher? One story Green tells that resonated with me is the story of a teacher who changed the way she got ready for class. In the past, she would come in on the weekend and clean the room and grade papers. Now she spends the same time looking for materials, reading and preparing to teach. I believe that our teachers today will need to prepare more than ever to keep up with changes, new teaching methods and technology. According to Green, more people teach in the U.S. than work at McDonalds, Walmart and the U.S. Post Office combined. Think about how much money these companies spend on training their employees. I wonder how it compares to what is spent on teacher training. There is much more in this book than what I’ve covered. Read it yourself to see what you can uncover about how to teach more effectively. show less