Building Better Teachers (New York Times 3/7/'10)

Very interesting article on "What makes a good teacher?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=all

Are good teachers just magically "good?" or does well-designed teacher training make a significant difference?

An educational consultant named Lemov did a video-recording project of several hundred "good" classroom teachers to find out why they are good, and he seems to think one of the most important elements is classroom management techniques. In other words, a good teacher (or primary and secondary schools) needs to know how to get the attention of the students and hold their attention to the task at hand. Apparently that makes a big difference in whether a teacher can help the students excel in standardized tests compared to their peers.

Lemov's taxonomy of teaching techniques is going to come out as a book: “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College" Seems interesting, especially if it comes with videos.

Check out the video section:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/07/magazine/20100307-teacher-videos.html#/readingaloud

This will include techniques such as:

No. 43: Positive Framing, by which teachers correct misbehavior not by chiding students for what they’re doing wrong but by offering what Lemov calls “a vision of a positive outcome.” Zimmerli’s thank-yous and just-like-you’re-doings were a perfect execution of one of Positive Framing’s sub-categories, Build Momentum/Narrate the Positive.

No. 45: Warm/Strict, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”

No.??: What to Do. The clip opens at the start of class, which Zimmerli was teaching for the first time, with children — fifth graders, all of them black, mostly boys — looking everywhere but at the board. One is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.”

Another interesting idea was MKT, by a Professor Ball of...Michigan? Math Knowledge for Teachers. In other words, only having deep content knowledge of math or only having classroom management magic does not make a good teacher. What makes the difference is the ability to know what "only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

For teacher training of teachers for EFL like I do, I think there definitely is a need for E.A.K.T - English acquisition knowledge for teachers. I also think having a good basic training program in classroom management makes a big difference, especially if it is done on-the-job with the mentorship of a more experienced master teacher. I had very good mentors in my MA program for teachers of ESL, and working with them during my TA-ship teaching hours made a big difference in my confidence for classroom management and planning when I started teaching. I still had a lot to learn about managing a classroom during my first few years on the job, but I had a pretty good image of what I wanted based on observing expertly managed classes taught by my mentors.

Hopefully the video project that Lemov did and other video-based projects will become available to teachers to learn from!

And I should consider doing my video project -- recording my own classes to identify what went well and what didn't as well as the classes of my colleagues. I want to be able to confidently do teacher training the future and having a record of how my own teaching evolved would be invaluable. Hmm...if I could work together with some people on this, that would be even better.