Do You Know Good Teaching When You See It?
Do you know good teaching when you see it? John H. provoked some interesting comments on the subject recently when he asked the TLN discussion group:
Is there a difference between an effective teacher and a good teacher? When I think of a good teacher I think of the teacher who tries to changes lives (e.g., Frank McCourt). The effective teacher is the heavly research based teacher who knows how to reach the hardest to reach kids with knowledge and skills in a way that they will remember and use what they learn. Where would we place aspects of teaching in a Venn diagram that had "Good Teaching" and "Effective Teaching"?
Linda E. replied:
Interesting you should bring this up. Tony Wagner recently did a "bit" where he showed an audience 10 minutes of someone teaching a lesson. He asked those in the audience to score/grade the quality of the teaching on an A-F scale. For 15 minutes, while he tallied the scores, he had the audience members in small groups discussing what grade they gave and what criteria they used.
The audience was teachers, administrators, and district people, who all had opinions and ideas and who VASTLY varied on the criteria they used. When the scores were posted, they were naturally all over the place.
His point: If a group of highly skilled professional educators don't have a common set of understandings about what "good" and "effective" teaching looks like, how can we expect others to know? How can we teach all our students to high standards if we don't have a common agreement on what those standards look like — in many different contexts and models of showing what one knows? Doing that Venn Diagram might be a good place for school teams to get the conversation going, so that they can make some common agreements — at least about the teaching and learning at that school site.
Nancy had another perspective:
Ah, the amazing power of standards. And clear, consistent, convincing evidence--and leveled rubrics-- that make evaluating what really matters much easier.
I, too, used to think that good teaching was like the Supreme Court definition of pornography — I knew it when I saw it. Turns out I was wrong. We do now have national standards for professional teaching, and a means to reliably measure teacher performance (plus validity studies to ensure that teachers believe that we are measuring the right stuff). They are the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Inter-rater reliability is extremely high in the scoring of NBPTS assessments. If Tony Wagner were to show that video to National Board scorers, they would be able to tell him whether the teacher was meeting standards, and to what degree — in a variety of school contexts, with students across a wide range of ability.
If Tony Wagner's point was that professional educators don't know what good or effective teaching looks like, we should all be terrified, because then we have no tools but test scores to assess teaching. We need to get rid of personal opinions and use the great gift of the national standards (which were developed by practicing teachers). Otherwise we're at the mercy of people who know nothing about what we do.
