How To Build A Better Teacher

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent piece profiling Doug Lemov, previously a teacher, charter school founder and currently an educational consultant to help teachers become more effective. With so many failed attempts in the past by the government, Lemov took it upon himself to make a change:

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently.

Although my experience is limited to that of a student, effective classroom strategy seems to always be a priority of educational organizations but rarely one that shows any progress. Why is this?

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting...But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

The question I keep coming back to is: do we help the teachers or the students? The answer floats somewhere in between. The temporary solution is outlined as this:

Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. And there is still a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math. The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching.

Thus, the responsibility rests on the teacher. This is one reason we have profiled various teachers on this blogs with their tips for improving. If you have any tips, please leave them in the comments.