A Study of Good Teaching Worth Reading About

[Thanks to Karen Hamilton for this article: Good Teaching.]

In a discussion of teacher performance evaluation, there's a flood of like articles: how to teach well, how to teach better, and how to teach blah blah. The din, complacency, and the fear some feel of evaluation (full disclosure: I believe in more and better observation, interconnectedness, and evaluation), has possibly turned some away from reappraising skills, from tearing syllabi down and building anew. One argument made in these article is that the constant reevaluation of our classroom practices is a trait of successful teachers. "Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing."

This article is well worth reading over and over again--and picking up the forthcoming book based upon the Teach for America study--but here are is a nice bit:

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

From Amanda Ripley's Blog:

OK, I make my living off words. But there are some things that words can never really capture. To accompany my story on What Makes a Great Teacher, theAtlantic has posted three videos of highly effective teachers, courtesy of Teach For America. These are teachers who are moving low-income American kids forward at breakneck speeds--something many of us have quietly concluded can’t be done.

Each of the three teachers has a different style, but they all are good at the six things that Teach for America has found make all the difference in the classroom. The story explains what those six things are. But the video brings it all to life.