What learning impact does an honest teacher have?

 

Teacher quality is one of the foremost important things in education. Here's how an honest teacher can change our measures.

Countries around the world are committing immense resources to middle and grade school reform and education outcome improvements. Globally, a trillion dollars are spent on education reform within the last 10 years. The main target of such reform has been variables like student incentive, school accountability, charter schools movement, standardized testing, smaller classrooms, curriculum development, technology in classrooms, etc. However, any school reform would be a futile exercise without highlighting one of the strongest variables in student performance - teacher quality.

Impact of an honest teacher on educational outcomes research indicates that an educator with high value-add over years features a high correlation of conceptual understanding of her/his students (Gates Foundation, 2010).

A bottom quartile teacher and a top-quartile teacher can create a lead of 10 percentile points in a mean student during a single year (Gordon et al, 2006).

A good teacher also has a tremendous impact on the value which will be earned by a student.  If the bottom quarter of bad teachers were eliminated, student grades would increase by 14 percent.

And after 12 years of schooling, the scholar has a further earning potential of $72,000 to $169,000 (Gordon et al, 2006).

 

 

Good Teacher Vs. Bad Teacher

Traditionally, an honest teacher was identified together with the proper qualifications, educational credentials, and requisite certifications. This credential-centered approach is predicated on the premise that teacher effectiveness is directly correlated to paper qualifications.

 However, a significant study in more than 9,400 classrooms and 150,000 students over three years showed that despite the statistical examination results, there was no significant difference in student performance between certified and non-certified teachers (Gordon et al., 2006).

However, significant differences in student performance were found between certified and non-certified teachers. The difference between 75th percentile and 50th percentile teachers in any group of teachers (certified or not) is five times larger due to the difference between certified and non-certified teachers.

Thus, a teacher’s effectiveness isn't correlated to his/her paper qualifications but rather to traits and competencies the teacher possesses.

How to predict if an educator is going to be good or not

There are no simple way to predicting a teacher’s effectiveness. As per the Gates Foundation, a teacher’s past years ‘value-add’ is one of the strongest predictors of student achievement gains in other classes and academic years.

Gordon et al. (2006) also propound that the teacher’s performance (in terms of useful add/student achievement) within the first two years more accurately predicts the teacher’s performance within the subsequent years.

There also are interesting studies of some traits that enable teachers to exhibit higher value-add within the first two years. Gladwell (2008) indicates that prime performing teachers have some unique classroom management traits.

Doug Lemov (feels that an honest teacher has three strong traits that set her/him aside from a mean teacher subject understanding, methods of teaching (classroom management), and subject knowledge for teaching (subject-specific classroom management).

In a two-year study of classrooms across the USA, Lemov identified 49 key classroom management traits that enable an educator to supply better value-add to her/his students. These traits aren't subject-specific.

Thus, an educator with average domain/subject understanding but superior classroom management techniques can deliver superior value-add as compared to an educator with superior domain understanding but average classroom management techniques.

Thus, the sole accurate way to assessing teacher effectiveness are to measure the value-add of teachers within the first two years and not before hiring (Gordon et al, 2006).

A better approach would be to possess an open system where any college degree graduate with a pulse for teaching is allowed to teach; she/he should be observed and mentored for the primary two years before being awarded tenure (Gladwell, 2008).

The current system of awarding tenure to all or any teachers regardless of their value-add should be slowly phased out. The highest quartile of teachers must be rewarded while rock bottom quartile teachers must be removed from the schooling system within the interest of youngsters and therefore the society at large.