Bill Gates has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in
search of an answer to the question: “What makes a good teacher?”
Arne Duncan, building on his record in Chicago, knows what makes a
good teacher: It is the teacher who raises test scores, and he has
spent billions of dollars to induce every state to agree with him.
Here, the students of Madison,
Connecticut explain what makes a good teacher. What do
they look for? Someone who is kind and patient. Someone who helps them. Someone who encourages them. There, that was easy, and it
didn’t cost billions of dollars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“There, that was easy!”
Diane, I adore your sharp concise sense of humor! Keep it coming!
Should we send Bill Gates an “EASY” button? I do have one in my classroom that the kids get to hit as they leave the room IF they have completed all of their classwork for the day. Works very well with them. Might it work with Mr. Gates too?
Did you miss, “Blows stuff up”?
My personal favorite.
We would call that “hands on” learning. :0)
chemtch, my youngest son’s “Blows stuff up” chemistry teacher keeps my boy’s 16 year old brain focused and interested in science. Thank you for what you do!
Wonderful. Thanks, Diane, for sharing this.
Reblogged this on Blog of an e-marketer by Main Uddin.
Yes, but the problem remains, how do you profiteer on kindness, patience and encouragement?
Did I miss something or did this video have little if any ethnic diversity?
Does the lack of ethnic diversity detract from the message?
Watch this video of a teacher who students describe as happy, crazy & unpredictable. His giftedness as a teacher is obvious, especially because he’s not afraid to blow stuff up. He is also a gifted parent of a son with multiple disabilities. By sharing with his students his deepest feelings about his son’s life, he teaches them a real lesson in life with love.
The title of the video is Wright’s Law
http://www.cpoy.org/index.php?s=WinningImages&c=260
This is too easy for Gates et al and too on the point of reality. Those kids know better than the adults what is going on and needed. So don’t listen to them, I know it all, I am who I am and they are nothing. This is the attitude. In 1970 when Richard Arthur took over the most criminal and violent high school in the U.S. at the time Castlemont High School in Richmond, California, yes, the same one you see in the press right now with the housing crisis mortgage game thing right now. So, Richard knows the students know who the good teachers are and so the next year after he takes over teachers have to get students to sign up for their classes. Students know who is good and sign up. End of message.
If you are going to rate teachers in a district like LAUSD or N.Y. where there are wealthy and poor sections in the same district I think the only way to fairly rate them is to take the teacher from the high income school and put them in the low income and take the low income teacher and put them in the high income school and then see what happens. Two different requirements and stress levels to deal with. We have to make the evaluations, if they are to exist, fair. Not like they are proposing where all due process rights are also taken away. I have a friend in L.A. right now with a data base of 6-800 teachers falsely charged and terminated or about to be terminated without due process of any legally required kind. Today, since the start of school he is receiving 4-5 calls a day from new people 7 days a week who are having these same problems. This is why I had this issue audited by the California State Auditor, Oct. 1997, 96121, of falsely charging teachers with child abuse for whistle blowing. Today, it is worse than in 1997 and the game they run is the same. No creativity, just plain hammering.
The influence of a teacher is as unpredictable, as apparently random, as the effect of throwing a stone in the water. There’s no way to predict which gesture, comment, conversation will take root in a student’s imagination, nor if or when it will blossom into an idea, nor what the context will be.
This is illustrated in a beautiful essay by Clive James on one of his great teachers at university. (I know that college teachers have more freedom than K-12, but trust me, the mania for measurement is making itself felt here too.)
http://www.clivejames.com/books/even/russell
What does James admire in Russell? His forbearance, support, hospitality and interest – even though James was, in his own words, “the worst student he ever had.” Russell had the rare teacher’s clairvoyance to realize that a bad student might “be carrying the seeds of literary life.” Today, Russell would be worrying about whether or not the callow James was showing mastery of the “student learning outcomes.”
How did Russell influence James? From the classroom, James recalls one specific moment:
“I can remember now being impressed even at the time by George’s grave humility as he introduced a discussion of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, by Ernst Robert Curtis. ‘This,’ said George, his hands poised above the volume as if he were about to break bread, ‘is a great book.’ Then he opened it. It hardly needs saying that I had neither the preparation nor the spare time to corroborate his opinion, but the moment stayed with me.”
Now in his seventies, James describes reading Tacitus:
“…humanism, the thirst for concentrated meaning that turns a classic text into a fountain of refreshment, has by now become as vivid for me as the river of light became for Dante… When I closed the book I held my hands above it as if to touch it might burn them, and only later realized that the gesture had been an echo.”
Today’s college teachers must often worry about offering courses with clearly defined outcomes, and with inventing metrics to measure these outcomes. “Education” is a process to be completed in three to five Carnegie units, and it should lead to clear, demonstrable and immediate gains in ‘critical thinking’ and ‘skills.’ All of which is so completely and utterly false.