So You Think You Can...Teach?

I will admit, I'm a huge fan of So You Think You Can Dance, affectionately abbreviated as SYTYCD. In trying to read an article on teacher education while watching last night's show, an observation bubbled up: The judges on SYTYCD often speak about a dancer's potential, and cite this potential for future growth as a reason to select a certain dancer to remain on the show. The converse is also true; wonderful dancers (last week's loser, Asuka, being a case in point) are often sent home not because they were the worst dancer, but because they aren't showing that they are growing with the show.

This made me think about teachers (and I don't just mean K-12, but teachers at all levels), and whether we look at potential for growth when evaluating candidates--or, indeed, if we should do. I think anyone who has ever taught would agree that when you first start out, you're just trying to keep your head above water. (And hope you don't screw up the students too badly.) I just wonder if there's any thought given at various points along the path to teacher-dom to a candidate's potential for growth--the corollary being, I suppose, potential to become an excellent teacher versus a merely adequate one. [I refuse to use the term "qualified" on general principle.]

On the other hand, looking at potential and growth is a tricky thing. Who would be assessing these qualities? How could they be subjectively assessed? Because while a choreographer's personal preference and body type and who you worked with in the past are all valid criteria in the world of dance, I don't see that flying so well in selecting a chemistry teacher. We educators like our objective criteria. We like our rubrics. We like at least the appearance of fairness.

Perhaps it's just too big a stretch to bring potential for growth or excellence into recruiting, preparing, and hiring teachers. Perhaps I would just like to think that there is room in between our rubrics and criteria referenced assessments for a little bit of subjective softness and talk of personal growth...

A New Future of Education?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the education system--specifically the PK-12 system--and various proposals floating out there to improve student performance. Many of the proposals are about fixing the system, yes, or "reforming" the system, and throw out ideas like pay for performance, charter schools, closing low-performing schools, increased accountability, national standards.

In a recent New Yorker article, The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. Atul Gawande makes the argument that instead of reforming the health care system, we need a whole new model for how medicine works. To wit:

And that will mean rewarding doctors and hospitals if they band together to form...accountable-care organizations, in which doctors collaborate to increase prevention and the quality of care, while discouraging overtreatment, undertreatment, and sheer profiteering.

What if what we really need, rather than fixing or reforming the system, is a whole new system of education? One where teachers and administrators, rather than working in isolation as individual teachers, individual schools, individual districts, banded together in more cooperative ways?

I'm coming from the world of education. Virtually my entire professional life has been in education. I believe in things like experience-based learning, student-centered classrooms, assessing student progress with projects and portfolios. I believe in teacher education programs and the importance of having well-educated and well-prepared teachers in the classroom.

And yet, something is obviously going wrong--continuing to go wrong--in many schools today where far too many students are dropping out or not meeting progress standards, and the students are disproportionally from low-income or high-minority schools. And while reform in various ways is one answer, perhaps thinking critically about more comprehensive, perhaps more radical, changes to education is another answer.

Thoughts?