I just finished reading this article,”What Makes a Great Teacher?”, from The Atlantic for the second time. Lots of good stuff…yet, at the end, I still feel like punching somebody in the nuts.
Here’s what I’m taking away for my own teaching practice:
- “[G]reat teachers…set big goals for their students. They [are] also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.”
- “Great teachers…constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”
- “Superstar teachers [have] four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruit[] students and their families into the process; they maintain[] focus, ensuring that everything they [do] contribute[s] to student learning; they plan[] exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they work[] relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”
- “[O]ne way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ does not work…”
- And as one interviewee said, “…it’s the mind-set that teachers need—a kind of relentless approach to the problem.”
OK, great! I like it. I’m for it.
And at the same time, the article is titled “What Makes a Great Teacher?”
The ONLY criterion used to evaluate teachers as great or non-great is student performance on standardized math and reading tests. The author, Amanda Ripley, concedes in one sentence out of the whole article that “the data could never capture the entire story of a teacher’s impact”. Damn straight! What about the kids’ citizenship? creativity? tolerance? interpersonal skills? self-expression?
I want my students to perform well on standardized tests. I do. I think they have value: they show whether students can read certain materials and answer certain types of questions about said materials and calculate and fill in bubbles. But if my students have high growth and achievement scores on standardized tests, that makes me Effective at Getting My Students to Perform Well on Standardized Tests. It does not make me a Great Teacher.