Malcolm Gladwell, Choosing Good Teachers

I've been doing a lot of reading on what makes up a good teacher. The hardest part is, that there really is not simple check list to go down, and then know that someone is going to be a good teacher. You actually have to watch them teach, see how they interact and relate to the studnets, and see how they present the knowledge that they have. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting artilce in the New Yorker, about choosing good teachers.  To read the whole article click here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.


Read here about the what happens if a child has a good teacher, and what happens if they have a bad teacher. We need to focusing on getting good teachers in our schools, and keeping them!

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.








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