Watch Again: Helping Teachers Improve Via Video
The Gates Foundation is spending millions of dollars to answer a very difficult question: What makes a great teacher great? The Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET, project comes at a time when education reform efforts are focused on teacher effectiveness as the best way to reach students.
The program relies in part on in-class video, and that's raised concerns about other ways those recordings could be used.
Watching a good teacher manage a classroom is like being at mission control during a rocket launch — there's a lot going on at once. Mahalia Davis, in her fourth year as a teacher at Ridgeway Middle School in Memphis, Tenn., changed careers midlife to become a teacher. But she looks like she's been doing this forever.
The first video I ever really watched and tried to tear it apart as far as what I felt I was doing — what I could have done better — made me not want to submit it. And so now I just do the taping, and I leave it alone, and I move on.
- Teacher Melony Smith Wellington
To teach her sixth-graders how to construct a five-sentence paragraph, Davis lines up five kids and gives each a role. She has a wide range of tools to get students excited — and to calm them down, including having them breathe deeply.
'It's My Goal To Be The Best'
Test scores show that Davis' students are advancing. But how does she do it? The Gates Foundation is
