Lloyd Morrison shared a great article from the New York Times on what helps students learn better.
Surprise, surprise not more testing – it is bettter teachers.
Lloyd Morrison shared a great article from the New York Times on what helps students learn better.
Surprise, surprise not more testing – it is bettter teachers.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 6:09 am and is filed under education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
It is hard to sort out better teachers when there are no standards to judge them by.
its like picking an olympic team from athletes who havent competed.
Labour have long been against assessing teachers so the best get rewarded and the worst get removed
only read first 3 pages so far, but sounding pretty good. Will find time to read the rest shortly.
hardly surprising is it? What you’ve been telling Tolley since she was made Minister is once again, proven true,
mark m nonsense. Labour funded the tools which are useful and beefed up the teachers council.
I would love better teachers as well. It is such a shame that poor teachers enjoy the protection of the Teachers Union so they can remain in their job. It is also a shame that good teachers cannot be rewarded with more pay (reward and incentivise teachers to perform to a higher standard).
Finally as a parent I am being told exactly how my children are doing in school – we are not receiving the PC bull in reports that has been the standard since my chioldren started school. Do not forget Trevor that despite your best efforts, the vast majority of parents are supporting National Standards – why do you think that is????
NY times good
, NS – bad 
Thanks Monty for acknowledging the work I did to ensure you are getting informative non PC reports. Anything that happens this year is a result of the (too slow) implementation of mid decade testing and reporting reforms.
Great article. It may be worth highlighting, for those in the TL;DR category, that the article quickly ascertains that financial incentives don’t appear to be effective.
The key (and the bulk of the article) is better teacher education – skills in “holding the floor”, and better training in the teachers’ selected disciplines.
There is no doubt that better teachers are needed and less testing, however I would add that more help is needed from parents/guardians at home in their own time, i.e., after school hours.
In the last couple of years, I have taken young children (8 and 9 year old) of relatives, families and friends and coach them math in the evening twice a week. I do this because I want to help since their parents didn’t have a chance to succeed in education and also it’s something that I am passion about, i.e., coaching math & science to high school students. In fact these young 8 and 9 year old kids are currently learning 5th form level math, such as they can solve simple algebraic linear equation as the following:
5 = 17 – 3*x
We know that the solution is x = 4 ;
These kids are not what others called gifted kids, because they’re not. It’s just that I have a better way of showing & explaining to them how to solve algebra equations, which such topic (algebra) are way too advanced for them, since they’re still at primary school. I have also use incentives such as giving a dollar to every algebra question that each child can solved correctly. I had written a small computer program that generates algebraic equations every time a child clicks for a new equation, therefore every problem is different from previous problems. They’re motivated by learning (its fun) and also the money rewards, the more correct equations they solved. I have given these kids some motivations to learn, which they become self-driven, i.e., they keep solving equations at their homes even though it’s not a tutorial night. That’s what their parents have reported to me.
One of the kid’s math teacher from his school told me that it is pointless to teach kids of that young age advanced stuff like those, because their math knowledge is still fragmented. I told her, it’s true, but as the material from the curriculum that they teach at school is starting to merge (integrate) with advanced ideas that I have shown these kids, these kids will excel their learning at a faster rate. I mentioned to her that such learning is called parallel learning, ie, you start with fragmented knowledge, then slowly merge them together and at the end, once the learner integrated all the fragments, they can now see things at a much deeper level compared to if they learn these fragmented knowledge in a procedural way, i.e., one topic first, then the next topic, and so forth. After all, this was one way of learning that great Nobel Laureate Physicist late Richard Feynman adopted. Feynman knew how to solve complex calculus equations by the age of 12. Hehe, perhaps one of these kids that I am coaching math will turn out to be a Feynman one day.
So, the overall point is that help from outside the school, i.e., home or community group tutorials will be an added bonus on top of all the quality teaching given to students by better teachers from school.
So how exactly do we tell which are the good teachers if we don’t use standards to measure them by?
Please would someone suggest vouchers, they have has miraculous results from America to Sweden. Level the playing field for us good parents with smart kids who get NO choice unless we can buy a palace in the right school zone. Its an appalling elitist system to save that awful Christine Fletcher for the Nats.
Sorry David vouchers are bad ok
Didn’t you know that there are no bad teachers or good teachers (according to the teachers union) so you’ll just have to send your kids to your local school and hope for th best
Mark – teachers were being assessed and assessment mechanisms have been in place all over NZ BEFORE National Standards. Sure, National is telling you, or letting you believe, there was no previous teacher assessment, but sorry, dude them saying it doesn’t make it true. You will find SOME schools dont actually have to change much if anything to make way for Nat Standards because they already had a similar assessment method. Oh sorry, they can no longer use the new curriculum so they are worse off under Nat Standards, and by them I mean, our children.
You are perpetuating a lie by stating that teachers were not assessed prior to Nat Standards. If you are right (and you’re not) you should be DEMANDING the dismantling of ERO and heads to role for it even existing prior to Nat Standards, for not doing one of its roles.
@Tracey
Bollix
Well it is clear that Mark has had little contact with the education system recently and when he did it was at a point where it was not working well.
The NY Times article is written from the USA style of teacher dominated dissemination of knowledge, behaviourist model. NZ has favoured a constructivist model which realises that every individual has a different perspective and a different pace of learning and a different method of learning.
The question of what makes a “good” teacher is an open one. Unresolved.
To me the “good” teacher is the one who sets fire to imagination and a thirst for finding out more. Which is not limited by testing or extrinsic rewards. (Falafulu – great stuff. To inspire your pupils thus is the essence but you might find that the money rewards are not needed.)
I agree about money rewards not needed. Or a lesser evil of raising teacher salaries across the board.
I’m reserving my judgement until my children are in school as for me currently, both sides have valid arguments; there are definitely plenty of schools in my area that are well under par in terms of overall performance.
@ David – you don’t have to buy a palace, you can just move to a small cheap, but very good suburb in the Hutt Valley where you will find you are lucky enough to be in the zone for 2 of the best primary schools around. Intermediate isn’t too bad either, but high school, well private seems to be the only good (but unaffordable) option at the moment…
Hi Spud. Makes me think our NZ is a pretty good place to be. Especially given the shorthand of smiley faces! (Shorthand? Incidentally I found just how hard it is to tie shoelaces or hang out the washing- one handed!)
Rebecca you stated “there are definitely plenty of schools in my area that are well under par in terms of overall performance.” – Could you expand on how you assessed them as under par?
Tracey: ERO reports & loads of word of mouth
@ Ianmac LOL