With so many interesting things streaming on line from this year's TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in California, I was searching for some relevant design-oriented content which might be useful in inspiring our D&T pupils when I stumbled upon this. "How do you make a teacher great?" research findings presented by Bill Gates himself.
Apart from Bill Gates' well known philanthropy work in the area of healthcare, one of the main goals of his foundation is to improve the quality of education in the American public schools. The research in this area has gone on for years and his sharing of the findings has been really interesting and useful for us to reflect on our practices.
Below is the link to the video presentation, please scurry through the video to 8:00 to watch the part where he presents this.
Some key points which I captured in his presentation.
1. Once somebody has taught for 3 years, the variation in teaching quality afterwards is very small.
2. The practices of the most effective teachers who have impacted most greatly on academic performance have not been passed down to the other teachers.
3. An interesting list of the attributes of these top-performing teachers.
4.The importance of assessment performance accountability for each teacher.
5. The importance of using assessment information in gauging performance.
6. The use of existing technology to increase the accessibility (of both pupils and teachers) to these information.
After thinking about what he had said on the above, which I totally agree, even more gaps in our existing structure surfaced. Point 4 and 6 looks like good starting points to work on.
I am really glad that technology has shrunk our space so much that such talks by inspiring people are readily accessible to us while we look at the screens of our laptops. It has also benefited those of us who will never be invited nor have pockets which are deep enough to fork out US$6,000 for an entrance ticket to be there.
The book which he mentioned titled "Work Hard. Be Nice." by Jay Mathews sounds like a worthy investment too.
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3 comments:
Interesting to note that there are 2 points on assessment; assessment on teachers' performance, and using the assessment information.
As we currently struggle to understand the role, function and construct of assessment, we need to grow our community of learners so that #2 does not become the reason for the erosion of our professionalism. We must strive to generate a Professional Learning Community where learning and sharing, adoption and experimentation takes place safely.
Sorry I was drawn to this post because of the reference to the TED website.
With due respect, I disagree that the point 4 & 6 should be the starting point. But before that, let me post the transcript of the portion that is relevant in his speech.
Here goes :
"Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don't. Let's start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak; it's getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There's many people working on it. We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you'd say, "Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people." But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master's degrees. They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability -- or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, "Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it's a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools -- mostly middle schools, some high schools -- and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "Hey, you caused this amount of increase." They're deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. What's going on?" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years -- fifth through eighth grade -- keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment."
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me -- when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there's a book actually, about KIPP -- the place that this is going on -- that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote -- called, "Work Hard, Be Nice." And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill -- it's interesting -- the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But I -- I'm optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There's a lot more problems like that -- AIDS, pneumonia -- I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things.
So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved -- and you're helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)
"
One thing to note is that he is talking about the america system .. where it appears that teachers in normal school does not have access to the test scores and other datas which might be relevant to their performance. And the management is hobbled in their ability to assess the teachers.
But I digress. Personally, I think that point number 2 is the key to the problem. In his speech, his point is not so much that the teacher's knowledge is not been passed down, but that teachers in the public school doesn't even have to tools to know what great teaching is about. But the different is mere academic.
Because in the end, the conclusion is still the same : the quality of the teachers and their ability (and opportunity given) to groom the next generation of teachers have the most important impact on the quality of the teaching service. This should be evident from the context of the speech and the emphasis and examples given.
So the crux of the matter still boil downs to the quality of the teachers. So how can a teacher be great?
What struck me most about the transcript is his description of the cluster of KIPP schools. He described them as being full of energy, motivated and engaged as well as engaging the students in their teaching. They teach in teams and share their successes and gives credit to each other. And he also mentioned about the use of videos and feedback sessions between the teachers.
In fact, if you look at other videos related to teaching (I can provide the link if you like), you always see the team of teachers sitting down and having a review session there after.
What his described is a teacher's version of heaven. But in order to do that, how much time was the teachers given to prepare their lesson and materials? How much time was given to them to customise their resources to the need of their particular group of students? And how much time did they spend on collaborating and coaching the other teachers in the team?
Because, at the end of the day, I think that if a teacher does not the support/skill/time/resources to plan his lessons and inject some fun and interest, no amount of assessments and review and appraisal and procedure can make his students really really want to learn during the lesson.
O, and one more thing to note. The group of KIPP schools described in his speech is not without their distractor and one of the key point they make is that the admission criteria and the "commitment" they foist upon the parents of these students favours the admission of students who are self motivated with supportive family.
But this, as many things in america, is high partisan (with each side sticking firmly to their own idealogue and famously not listening to each other) and should be taken with a pinch of salt on both side. At least until we read enough to form our own semi-informed opinions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIPP
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/07/jonathan-alter-on-kipp-distortions.html
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/07/jonathan-alter-on-kipp-distortions.html
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=13077989&postID=136668194819996355
For the full transcript of Gate's speech, please refer to http://blog.ted.com/2009/02/bill_gates_talk.php#more
The video is at http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
That's the great thing about sharing, of both practices as well as experiences. With that, there is hope that the best learning experiences can be felt by more pupils across a wider spectrum of teachers.
Certainly the construct of these overseas schools are very different from ours. But I believe that there are more than a few universal truths about their findings. So let's look at the opportunities out there that we can tap and adapt on so that we can also benefit of it in our context.
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