Changing how teachers improve
It can be a lonely journey, learning to become a better teacher. “Imagine that you were getting essentially no feedback on the work you were doing. And now imagine that you had one of the most important jobs in the world. No, I’m not talking about President Obama, because even he had the midterm elections. That’s what it is like to be a teacher.” Despite that grim assessment, Harvard’s Tom Kane hopes to radically change that public school paradigm as head of a national initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in the fall of 2009, the Measures of Effective Teaching Project is the largest effort of its kind to collect video, student perceptions, and assessments of student achievement and teacher knowledge. The project’s goal is to learn what effective teaching looks like. The early findings, which were released recently, indicate students are very much in tune with who is effective...