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Ron Bancroft: Effective teachers are the solution to the crisis in education

Researchers are using mounds of data to document the impact of teachers on achievement.

By RON BANCROFT

America needs good teachers. Maine needs good teachers. Good teachers make an enormous difference in a student’s learning. Nothing revolutionary here, you might say – and you would be wrong.

Two remarkable articles have been published recently that will likely change the way we think about teaching. The first is “What Makes a Great Teacher” by Amanda Ripley in the January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine. The other is “Can Good Teaching be Learned?” by Elizabeth Green in the March 7 New York Times Magazine.

If you access the New York Times article online you will be treated to several videos of good teachers at work.

Over the past 10 years, there has been considerable research on what makes a difference in improving student learning. Testing and assessment has gotten much better and, thanks to the No Child Left Behind legislation, much more ubiquitous. While some decry testing, it often can be helpful and constructive in assessing how much a student has progressed in a given subject or skill level over a school year.

As we have begun to gather more student data, we have learned much about the effectiveness of teachers. Researchers have been able to document the impact of different teachers on student achievement in ways we were never able to before.

As both of these articles make clear, the impact on student learning of other factors such as class size or per-pupil funding pale in comparison to the impact of a good teacher.

One of the best sources of research on good teaching is Teach for America, the nonprofit that recruits new college graduates to teach for a minimum of two years in low-income schools.

Teach for America gathers significant data on its 7,300 teachers. Using student test score data, it has been able to identify teachers who move their students one and a half grade levels or more in a year.

The researchers have analyzed these teachers, observed them in action, and detailed how they approach teaching.

Certain traits emerged. These teachers set high goals for their students and they tend to continually re-evaluate what they are doing to be more effective. They are detailed planners and have great perseverance.

When Teach for America talked to these high-performing teachers about these results, they tended to say OK, but give me concrete actions that will help me get better.

This is where Doug Lemov, whose work is the focus of the New York Times article, comes in. Lemov is the leader of Uncommon Schools, a network of 16 charter schools in the Northeast.

Lemov observed the same kind of impact of high-performing teachers that Teach for America had observed. He resolved to find out specific, teachable techniques that can transform an average teacher into a high-performing teacher.

Lemov has come up with 49 techniques that he believes can significantly enhance the quality of teaching. He has written a book on his findings that will be released in April titled “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College.”
Lemov describes a few of these techniques, and they are surprisingly ordinary-sounding.

At a Boston workshop described in the Times article, Lemov shows a video of a high-performance teacher named Bob Zemmerli. It is a clip of the start of a fifth-grade class, mostly boys and all black. When he starts, few are paying any attention.

Within two minutes he has them all focused on him with clear desks, ready to learn. He does this with clear instruction, individual recognition and persistence.

It seems, on one level, so simple. On another level, it is a critical element of readiness to learn – and it works.

The story also relates the effectiveness of a first-year teacher who had gone through Lemov’s training program. She is impressive. As they are leaving her classroom, Lemov remarks to the Times writer, “You could change the world with a first-year teacher like that.”
Indeed, you could. We need many more like her.

The breakthrough here is that, after all these years, we are beginning to get a sense of how to make great teachers.

To bring this kind of training into the mainstream, we must overcome the teachers unions’ aversion to student assessment as an indicator of teacher effectiveness, we must overhaul the way we educate teachers, and we must find more Doug Lemovs.

Ron Bancroft is an independent strategy consultant based in Portland. He can be contacted at:
ron@bancroftandcompany.com