One of the classic questions about education is whether teaching can be taught. Is a teacher born or made? A recently released book, Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) by Elizabeth Green, answers with a definitive, “Yes, it can be taught!”
Green’s book is another one to add to a growing list of books that say that great teachers can be made. Others that would make the list would be Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed, and Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World (which this blog covered here: https://www.coreeducationllc.com/blog2/the-smartest-kids-in-the-world/).
Here are some excerpts from Joe Nocera’s op-ed about Green’s new book:
Over the past few decades — with the rise of charter school movement and No Child Left Behind — reformers and teachers’ unions have been fighting over how to improve student performance in the classroom. The reformers’ solution, notes Green, is accountability. The unions’ solution is autonomy. “Where accountability proponents call for extensive student testing and frequent on-the-job evaluations, autonomy supporters say that teachers are professionals and should be treated accordingly,” Green writes. In both schemes, the teachers are basically left alone in the classroom to figure it out on their own.
In America, that’s how it’s always been done. An inexperienced teacher stands in front of a class on the first day on the job and stumbles his or her way to eventual success. Even in the best-case scenario, students are being shortchanged by rookie teachers who are learning on the job. In the worst-case scenario, a mediocre (or worse) teacher never figures out what’s required to bring learning alive.
Green’s book is about a more recent effort, spearheaded by a small handful of teaching revolutionaries, to improve the teaching of teaching. The common belief, held even by many people in the profession, that the best teachers are “natural-born” is wrong, she writes. The common characteristic of her main characters is that they have broken down teaching into certain key skills, which can be taught.
“You don’t need to be a genius,” Green told me recently. “You have to know how to manage a discussion. You have to know which problems are the ones most likely to get the lessons across. You have to understand how students make mistakes — how they think — so you can respond to that.” Are these skills easier for some people than others? Of course they are. But they can be taught, even to people who don’t instinctively know how to do these things.
The main question, then, that still remains is how to spread this idea about teaching effectively so that more and more teachers enter their first years of teaching equipped to succeed. It is one thing for a cohort from a certain college or program here or there to bring a change to the school that they wind up in and the students they teach, but it is another to scale this to whole districts and states.
For more information, please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/opinion/joe-nocera-teaching-teaching.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C{%222%22%3A%22RI%3A13%22}
