Paying Attention to Teacher Training (and Quality)
My son is only 6 but I tell him all the time what my father used to tell me: if you want to succeed you have to “pay attention” and the inverse, problems will come your way if you don’t pay attention. You didn’t know your spelling test was on Friday? Well, you weren’t paying attention. Got hit in the head with the basketball? Again, not paying attention. Signed up on time, aced the exam, got a lower interest rate= I can channel my father saying to me well done, must have been paying attention.
Now to teachers. How do we know a good teacher? Based on whether the teacher’s students do well. What “do well” means matters, of course, but not so much that it should distract us from the most pressing problem in teaching: that education, as a field, hasn’t been paying attention to whether any particular teachers’ students do well on any measure, or combination of measures. Why the lack of attention to student outcomes? A couple of reasons. First, for a long time we have assumed that teachers are not responsible for their students’ success, that they couldn’t possibly change or alter the predetermined pathways of children. Now we know that’s not true, that teachers do matter and they matter a lot. Which brings us to the second reason for ignoring how well