Monday, December 6, 2010
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Is this really great teaching?
A blog post on so-called education reformer Michelle Rhee's web site led me to an article from The Atlantic about "great teachers."
The article focuses on Teach for America, an organization dedicated to finding and training "great" teachers. The video below is from Teach for America's video archives.
Not to denigrate a fellow educator (the teacher in the video may be good), but if this is one of the best examples The Atlantic could come up with, it certainly underscores the need to reassess greatness. Or, perhaps, we need to leave the assessment to those best suited for judging excellence in education.
Outdated methods
The tactics employed in the brief video below are quite the opposite of what great teachers do. Not only is writing a student's name on a board as a warning an archaic practice, but having written rules and consequences posted in a classroom creates an environment of suspicion and goes against all quality research on what motivates learning.
The teacher in the video takes pride in calling parents to complain of bad behavior and makes students remain after school for 45 minutes as punishment, pretending it's an educational time because she makes them do work, while they remain after school. (I'd love to know how this practice teaches kids to value learning.)
Real greatness
Truly excellent educators don't need rules and consequences, because the lessons and activities they create are so engaging that students don't think about misbehaving.
An inspired discussion of proper classroom conduct, including how to transition, how to collaborate and how to respect others will go a long way to creating a successful classroom. In the long run, though, the best practice is keeping students engaged with new material, interesting activities and plenty of technology integration.
Watch the video and let me know what you think.
