Most Likely to Succeed

Today I read a modestly dated article by Malcolm Gladwell on hiring great teachers. (Link) I highly recommend reading it. I know many of you won't, so I pulled out some of the most interesting parts (to me), divorced of their context. If there's one thing I learned from trashy campaign ads (or Fox news), it's that you shouldn't let context get in the way of making your point. Gladwell suggests that identifying the next great teacher is as hopelessly speculative as identifying the next great NFL quarterback. (If reading about football will cause your eyes to glaze over in doldrum, start reading the article at section 2.) In his words:

[M]any reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

Before Gladwell gets to this point though, he explains what great teaching is--according to some theorists--and why it is so important:

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.

One of the most interesting parts was reading the critiques of teachers' classroom performances by a team of educational researchers. Bob Pianta of UVA made a keen observation about teaching pre-K, which I think extends to middle school and high school as well:

These are three- and four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it's not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They're leaning forward and wriggling. That's their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn't interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student's perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom.

On teacher disparity, Gladwell demonstrates just how wide the chasm is between one great teacher and one not-so-great teacher:

Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

Nothing too controversial yet, right? Here's where Gladwell gets contentious:

Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.

But he follows up with a fairly astute point:

It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?

Did I say contentious? Gladwell gets downright iconoclastic:

[T]eaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. ... It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now.

Gladwell, as you may know, is not an educator. He seems to be most comfortable with social scientists and that is the lens with which he views education. He's sold me on a lot of his ideas, though I'm not so beholden to social science as he is. He makes a lot of presumptions, which I encourage you to join me in criticizing. For instance, he seems to believe that teachers are born with the ability to be either inherently great or just mediocre. I think he underestimates the ability of subpar teachers to improve, learn their craft and become great educators. Additionally, some promising first-year teachers plateau quickly and never transcend their status as "good for a first-year teacher."

One shortcoming of Gladwell's quarterback analogy is that teaching talent isn't nearly as rare as quarterbacking talent. QBs have such a tough time in the NFL because they face equally skilled opponents who have spent their lives training to make QBs miserable. The analogy would be more suitable if we pitted the world's best teachers against the world's worst students. A good teacher's hard work is not offset by the students' relentless pursuit to be utterly despicable.