Teaching
Teaching
JULY 28, 2014
Joe Nocera
I’m starting to wonder
if we’ve entered some kind of golden age of books
about education. First
came Paul Tough’s book, “How Children Succeed,”
about the importance of
developing noncognitive skills in students. It was
published in September
2012. Then came “The Smartest Kids in the
World,” by Amanda
Ripley, which tackled the question of what other
countries were getting
right in the classroom that America was getting
wrong. Her book came out
just about a year ago.
And now comes Elizabeth
Green’s “Building a Better Teacher: How
Teaching Works (and How
to Teach It to Everyone),” which will be
published next week, and
which was excerpted in The New York Times
Magazine over the
weekend. The first two books made the New York Times
bestseller list. My
guess is that Green’s book will, too. It certainly ought to.
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
onthejob 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 bestcase scenario, students
are being shortchanged
by rookie teachers who are learning on the job. In
the worstcase 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
handul 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
“naturalborn” 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.
One of Green’s central
characters is a woman named Deborah
Loewenberg Ball, who
began her career as an elementary school teacher
and is now the dean of
the University of Michigan’s School of Education.
“Watching Deborah teach
is like listening to chamber music,” Green
quotes an admirer. But
she didn’t start out that way. She struggled as a
young teacher, and, as
she became a better teacher, she began to codify, in
her own mind at first,
the practices that made her successful. And she
asked herself, “Why
hadn’t she learned any of this before?”
Green has a chapter
about why schools of education value things other
than the actual teaching
of teachers. But the University of Michigan under
Ball is one place that
is trying to reverse that trend, not just at Michigan
but across the country.
Ball is pushing the idea that teachers should be
prepared to teach — that
they should have the tools and the skills — when
they walk into that
classroom on the first day on the job. That is rarely the
case right now.
“We need to shift
teaching to be like other fields where you have to
demonstrate proficiency
before you get a license,” Ball told me not long
ago. “People who cut
hair and fly airplanes get training that teachers don’t
get.”
One thing that Ball and
Green both stress is the importance of scale.
I’ve also come to see
the ability to scale successful programs as the single
biggest issue facing
public education. It is great that there are charter
schools that give a
small percentage of public schoolchildren a chance for
a good education — and a
good life. And it’s all well and good that
Michigan graduates maybe
100 or so teachers a year who genuinely know
how to teach by the time
they get out of school.
But these smallscale
successes won’t ultimately matter much unless
they are embraced by the
country at large. You can’t teach every kid in a
charter school. And
schools of education need to change their priorities.
Learning on the job just
shouldn’t cut it anymore.
