Searching for teaching excellence is roughly akin to searching for the Holy Grail or an honest man. Where and who the excellent teachers are, is a deep mystery, at least to the teaching profession. Personally, I trained to be a teacher, I taught many years in public schools, I supervised and evaluated teachers, I taught students how to teach and taught students how to supervise teachers when I taught at the university, and I spent considerable time doing research about teaching at the university; basically, I spent a lifetime immersed in about every aspect of public education and generally considered myself somewhat of a success, when I retired; therefore, it is with a great deal of embarrassment that I must admit that there is no agreement among teachers, students, parents, or professors in regard to what an excellent teacher is?
Unfortunately, politicians give the impression that they know exactly how to determine teaching excellence, they legislate it and actually evaluate teaching; they don’t know diddly.
Of course, I actually am confident that I know what an excellent teacher is and so does every other teacher, the problem is that no one agrees. Yet every year we read about award winning teachers who are recipients of a “Golden Apple Awards”. The big question about the awards is, how did those giving the award decide on a winner? In the case of Golden Apples, it is basically a popularity contest based on recommendations of people with knowledge of a specific teacher. It is easy to determine which teachers are most popular but are they the best teachers. Losing teachers with sour grapes can come up with a myriad of ideas why a teacher is more popular than they are and it is usually determined that they are popular because they are a lousy teacher; the rationale is that popular teachers give out too many good grades, they don’t discipline students, they set low standards, or they party in class instead of studying and students do not achieve.
These critics appear to believe that being popular is a sure sign that a teacher is doing a bum job of teaching; however, the corollary of this concept would be that the most despised teachers are the excellent teachers. Obviously, the whole concept of popularity and despicability is a totally inadequate measure of teaching excellence.
In most recent years, the last two presidents of the United States, Bush and Obama, have made an attempt to establish themselves as experts in evaluating public school teachers, using Student Achievement Test (SAT) scores. Out of respect for the Presidency, there surely must be a better way of expressing the notion that both Presidents are “full of crap” regarding their concept of teacher evaluation using students’ SAT scores; but “full of crap” appears to be quite definitive in this case. A more literary terminology might be libelous of sedition.
Why is it that statisticians are able to morph themselves into Einstein look-alikes and convince a nation, including its President, that by using scientific statistical data they can absolutely prove without a doubt that Jesus Christ was the result of an immaculate conception and through the administration of Student Achievement Tests, they can absolutely evaluate those students’ teachers, as easily as sorting strawberries.
America has statues in effect today such as, No Child’s Behind Left Behind, that provides funding for schools based on students SAT scores and that includes the scores of students in classes for the mentally impaired; the rationale is that the funding is based on “teacher accountability”, which in essence is teachers being evaluated based on students SAT scores. President Obama has recently announced that he is in agreement with this practice.
The premise here is that if the students learned and could remember what the test writers believe that they should learn at school, and they could write enough answers down, then the teachers were successful in teaching what test writers believed teacgers were supposed to teach. You really have to admire the simplicity of this method of evaluating teachers because it is so scientific and simple.
The SAT tests are standardized tests which bases the results on a large population tested under identical circumstances. Scientifically, to be effective, all variables have to be considered in the testing and that is where there is a problem; it is impossible to consider all the human valuables involved in SAT testing. Physical defects are obvious human variables, but other human variables are not: temperament, environment, time of day of testing, day of the week, attitude, cultural differences, and the socio economic factors in the population. There are certainly more factors than the teacher’s ability to teach involved in SAT test results.
Imagine what goes through a student’s mind when he/she is told that they are to take a test, do their best, and this test will have no effect whatsoever on the grades they will receive; what is the students motivation? One of my favorite comic strips, “Zits”, features an adolescent young man in high school; in one strip, the student is pondering a question on a test he is taking and asking him self, “What is the funniest possible answer that I could give for this question?” I can empathize with the student.
But standardization is not the only fault in judging teachers by their students SAT scores. SAT tests measure only a small fraction of what the teacher is actually teaching and that is not the most important things that the teacher is teaching. Learning is defined as experience. A student is learning if he does nothing all day; he learns how long a day can be, for example.
There are three different kinds of learning: cognitive learning, affective learning and motor leaning. The SAT tests are only testing cognitive learning, which is probably the least important of all. Cognitive learning is knowledge recall and intellectual skills. Affective learning is learning how to actually do something and the motivation to do it (attitude); affective learning should be the ultimate goal of teaching and the teacher’s primary objective. “Motor learning is the process of improving the motor skills, the smoothness and accuracy of movements.” Motor learning is leaning physical adeptness.
In addition to teaching students the various kinds of learning, teachers are also obligated to teach social skills, motivation, self confidence, and many other things in addition to the cognitive subject matter they are assigned to teach. It would appear to me that teaching civilized behavior should rank very high on teacher performance; behavior can only be taught by the teacher serving as the role model. Behavior is taught only by having students do as the teacher does and not how the teacher says to behave. That is a big responsibility.
Congress can pass legislation that uses student SAT scores to evaluate teachers, and Presidents can harp on teacher accountability measured by the students scores on SAT tests but that certainly does not scientifically prove which teacher is the better teacher, in any sense of the word.
Personally, I have always been of the opinion that the students are the best judge of a teacher’s performance; most teachers disagree, saying students are not qualified. At the end of each term, I would have my own students evaluate me on a number of items that I deemed important in teaching process. Students would not be identified on the evaluation forms and I would not be able to see them until after I had recorded grades. I was gratified and amazed that my students took the evaluation so seriously. To me, my students’ evaluation was much more perceptive than my supervisor’s evaluation.
Teaching is a complex profession. When I was on the university faculty and teaching student to teach and supervisors to supervise and evaluate teachers, I developed a conceptual model of a teacher that was based on all the scientific research that I found applied exclusively to the specific job requirements of a teacher. It did not appear to me that teachers should be evaluated on a scale of one to ten; it seemed to me that every teacher should meet the necessary requirements and teaching should not be a competitive sport. In retrospect, it appeared to me that there was not another person in or out of the educational profession that agreed with my concept of teaching excellence.
However, I would like for President Obama and Congress to be aware that my student’s scores of the SAT was not in any way a measure of my teaching skills; the politicians who think so are “full of crap”!