Can Good Teaching Be Learned? by Elizabeth Green in the NY Times Sunday magazine from March 7, 2010 is a fascinating account of the acquisition of techniques needed to become a more effective teacher of any subject. Their premise is that there are good teachers who are not teaching well, not because they don't know their subjects or because they are not well educated, but because they are not skilled in classroom management skills.
One of the two primary researchers in this article, Doug Lemov, has been a teacher, and a principal, and now a consultant hired by schools to help them raise scores and improve overall. He actually worked backwards, a logical step, finding classes with high scores and tying them together to see what they are doing differently. Lemov eventually discovered there was a real technique to effective teacher-student communication. Small steps, he found, that lead to big changes in the way students hear teachers. Some of these techniques I have already witnessed teacher using in public school classrooms during my observations, others seem like common sense, although common sense is often one of the first things to go when dealing with a large class of rambunctious students. He named this set of techniques Lemov's Taxonomy and has a book coming out in April based on this study.
The other researcher Heather Hill, focused almost entirely on the study of teaching mathematics effectively. Her study, based out of Harvard and other university research centers, whereas Lemov's study is almost exclusively classroom based. She named her findings M.K.T. or Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching. Teachers who scored high on her study were found to be more effective teachers and actually taught about a month's worth of extra material over the course of a year.
The truly exciting thing about these studies is that they can help all of us become more effective educators. Who can't use a little help quieting their classroom? Or teaching a complex lesson? I find that as art educators we can learn a few lessons from academic educators (and them from us as well). But these studies are the perfect way to reach those good people who aren't good instructors yet. Teachers really have such a short spectrum of time to get a huge amount of knowledge to children that we don't have time to tip-toe around trying things that may or may not work. These studies really help us to learn skills it may have taken others a lifetime of teaching to learn. Its never to late for the teacher to become the student. Is it?
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