According to a recent New York article about Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson, one of Murdoch’s top editors,
thinks most [journalists] are liberals overly concerned with writing stories that will impress other liberal journalists and win prizes in journalism competitions.
Well, yes. Not everyone is a liberal, of course, but basically everyone wants to impress their colleagues. Scientists have an amusing spin on this: They call it “peer review.” The amusing part is that somehow no one else’s opinion should matter. (E.g., all journals must be peer-reviewed.) Scientists get away with this bizarre view of economics (thinking someone should pay you and get nothing in return) perhaps because it is indeed difficult to assess the quality of this or that bit of science if you’re not in the field and because science has produced huge benefits for the rest of us in the past.
As I said, this is just human nature. As far as I can tell, professors act this way — try to impress colleagues — in every academic department. In schools of education, the result is this:
Amy Treadwell . . . received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. . . . But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.
It’s no secret that many schools of education do a poor job of training their students to teach — which is nominally one of their main goals. I am just repeating what Veblen said long ago.
What’s new is this: One man, Doug Lemov, working mostly alone, has figured out how to make people better teachers. One man. Not a professor. Did he build on the work of others? No, he started from scratch. He’s made a list of about 50 techniques. They are teachable. He gives workshops about them. As far as I can tell from this magazine article, Lemov has done a better job of figuring out how to train teachers than all the education professors in the world put together. If you arrived on earth from outer space, and didn’t understand human nature, you’d think this couldn’t possibly be true, but apparently it is. It’s like something out of a comic book.
Yes, education programs don’t teach people how to teach, and English programs don’t teach people basic writing skills, like grammar, organization, and clarity. I think Stanley Fish said as much in a recent NY Times column:
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A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?
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https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/
Until now, education professors could say that what makes a good teacher was very difficult to figure out. “Great teachers are born, not made.” Whether they actually said this I don’t know.
Your mistake, Seth, is in believing “educators” have any interest in teaching, or in children learning. Their whole focus is on driving out any initiative that might lead them to disrupt class or, later, society. They’ll mostly pick up reading, eventually, but that’s no great shakes. What matters is a supply of docile proles, and that 1848 never, ever happens again.
It is disappointing. The Cold Call technique listed in the article reminded me of a moment where my Communications professor had wondered (more to himself but in front of the class) better ways to teach us. He was doing pop quizzes with us and most of us didn’t care enough to do well. I approached him the next class asking him to cold call us instead of asking us to raise hands and he regarded it apathetically and didn’t implement it in the class. I felt bummed out about it. Got an A in his class but privately have thought of him as one of the worst teachers at my university. In spite of this, he remained popular because of his charisma.
Generally, I’m incredibly skeptical whenever people say you either have it or you don’t. I think growing up in a culture filled with data has made me wonder about specific techniques which people may unconsciously use to be successful in an activity.
Given such mediocre products and processes coming from universities I wonder how a better university would work—and how to finance and start one. But I digress. I’ve got Lemov’s book marked to get from the library whenever it comes out. Thanks for pointing it out.
+1 for Nathan Myers’ comment.
There was a study published in the late 90s (can’t find the ref right now) that indicated that Education students had the lowest collective SAT scores of all undergrad demongraphics in the US.
In the UK at least, teacher trainer/lecturers tend to be highly politically motivated, and almost always on the left. They can be reluctant to subject teaching approaches to fine-grained empirical analysis or value quantitative study (they prefer qualitative studies, as they highlight the experiences of valued social outliers). On my post-grad teacher training course, I was taught plenty about working class disengagement and its relation to the teaching of reading, but received little or no indication of the comparative success of different methods.
Bear in mind that not only education students but also their professors tend to be less able than their peers in other departments.
hyperbole
I share your disdain for trying to impress one’s colleagues by doing respected work. That’s why I make sure all of my work has obvious mistakes. Makes it hard to get published in peer-reviewed journals, of course, but every now and then I sneak one through.
Phil, there’s nothing wrong with trying to impress one’s colleagues — among other goals. It’s when that’s your only goal, or almost your only goal, that there’s a problem. The reason that one person could do a better job of training teachers than all education professors put together, I submit, is that they cared far too much about impressing their colleagues and not nearly enough about other goals.
There was an article in the Atlantic on this topic the other month, whose thesis was that Teach For America had been collecting crazy amounts of data to figure out what works, and coming up with actionable guidelines. A bit confusing as the article you linked would seem to indicate otherwise.
I don’t want to be flagged as spam, so I won’t include a link, but you can find the Atlantic article by googling “what makes a great teacher.”
I’d also like to add that I find the sort of comment made by Nathan Myers tiresome in the extreme. I know a great many teachers, and while they vary in their effectiveness, they don’t vary in their lack of membership in the far-reaching conspiracy to crank out mindless drones that he describes. A pretty pedestrian set of incentives is all that is required for the generally poor educational outcomes in this country. Tinfoil hats and Illuminati can be left out of the analysis, I think.
Seth, I was trying to point out — by yanking your chain a little — that peer review serves an important purpose of making it harder for people to publish work with obvious mistakes in it. I’ve had my own struggles with peer review — twice in my career, I’ve had journals reject a paper not because they found something wrong with it, but because one or two reviewers thought it didn’t advance the field in an interesting way; my response has been to publish in other (less respected! But still peer-reviewed) journals. I don’t want to sound like I’m entirely satisfied with the normal peer review process. But I don’t have an alternative to propose, either. I certainly would have no interest in reading a journal that published whatever anyone chose to submit, because most submissions would be garbage. _Somebody_ has to serve as gatekeeper.
Phil, thanks for explaining that.’You’re right that I misunderstood. I agree, some sort of filter is needed. I think a diversity of filters is a good idea. I’d prefer a system in which, rather than every journal peer-reviewed, some journals were merely editor-reviewed (less democratic than peer review) and other journals published almost everything but had rankings based on reader response — e.g., rankings by number of times downloaded (more democratic than peer review).
I remember a few years ago, Seth’s long self-experimentation paper was the most downloaded out of all University of California published papers. Not only that, but there was a shorter paper he wrote that ranked high in downloads, at the same time. I think the rank these papers occupied were #1 and #4. Way to go! I just found out recently!
Interesting article about Lemov. Sounds like he has a promising approach. One thing that I didn’t like about the NY Times article is that I had to get to the bottom of the entire gushing article to find out that they really don’t have any real studies showing whether or not his results are replicable. It would be nice if the next steps were someone funding studies to find out whether or not his work could be reproduced on a wide scale using average teachers and administrators (and are not simply the product of an extremely gifted individual being able to lift those around him to great heights).
Albert
Shane: I have also known teachers dedicated to their craft, and (unfortunately not redundantly) to seeing their charges learn. My mother in law was one. But that says nothing about educators, a nearly disjoint population. The origins and aims of the education establishment were published openly and without shame in the 19th century, under names such as Mann and Carnegie, and it has remained true to its traditions. There are great teachers, but they never, ever become educators.
At my university, the School of Education was where people washed out into when they failed everything else. It was closed a few years after my graduation, for reasons that probably had nothing to do with that fact.
I will add (and this is true in general): it’s only a conspiracy if it’s against the law. Sabotaging American education for commercial or political gain is manifestly not against the law.