Leadership’s Future: Teaching Teachers
by Miki Saxon
Today’s post will be relatively short, because I want you to take time to read a NY Times article called Building a Better Teacher.
Education is an industry and from any viewpoint, it’s obvious that American education is in trouble—poor quality, low productivity, enormous turnover and bad press.
There is a raging argument about who are responsible—politicos (who hold the purse strings), administrators or frontline workers, i.e., teachers.
There is a move to shutdown underperforming plants and fire those frontline workers en masse.
Out with the old ad in with the new; the assumption being that “new” always means “better.”
In education as in any industry there are innovators and traditionalists—think Steve Jobs and the executives of the music industry.
Innovators: Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michigan State’s school of education assistant professor, part time math teacher and originator of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, and Doug Lemov, teacher, principal, charter-school founder and author of Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)
Traditionalist: Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. [because]… no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?
Hmmm, there was no market research to show that a personal music player would sell before the iPod changed history.
Read the article, it points the way to changes that will affect you no matter your age or if you have kids.
Changes that will determine America’s future.
Image credit: St Boniface’s Catholic College on flickr
