The Global Achievement Gap Chapter 5

When in a workshop at the beginning of the chapter, Tony talks about how when teachers sit together and watch  a recording of another teachers lesson, the grading results are very different. All the teachers watched the same lesson and the lesson was graded from an A to a F. I thought it was interesting when he talks about why this happened. It happens because teachers have different standards of what a good lesson is,  everyone is on a different page. All teachers need to find a way to agree on what it takes to be a good teacher.


Another point of Tony's that I found interesting is when he is talking with a man who had a business degree and went back to school for teaching. He said that Educators struggle with questions that other professions have to deal with daily. We struggle to find answers to our questions when the answer might be right in front of us.


When this man said that he was officially certified by a masters program yet he did not feel prepared to be in the class room I felt upset. This surprised me because you would that that all the schooling he had gone through and his masters program that he wouldn't have this problem. It is confusing to me that professors don't know how to better educate their students, weren't the teachers once students? You would think that "teachers" would be able to teach people how to be teachers. They can use their past experience from teaching to help others understand what it takes. 


I can imagine how frustrated he must have felt never getting any feed back from the principal or while doing his student teaching. Feedback is important for any job. The principal should have the ability to evaluate him effectively.  There should be more than just a check sheet full of areas to mark satisfactory or needs improvement.  Everyone will always have an area they need improvement in, so the fact the principal gave him no further instruction or advice on how to be a better teacher is frustrating. When he is interviewing a retired CEO of a company who went back to school to get his teaching certificate. He said that you should study teaching like you would business or law, and study cases. 


I was shocked to read that "more than three out of five report that schools of education do not  prepare their graduates to cope with the realities of today's classrooms." I just do not understand why a school would not find that an important thing to teach their future teachers. Sometimes the problems with education seam so simple, for example: teach your teachers about current issues. I know they are not all simply solved, but this one seams like common sense.