Building a Better Teacher
How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
"A must-read book for every American teacher and taxpayer." —Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World
Launched with a hugely popular New York Times Magazine cover story, Building a Better Teacher sparked a national conversation about teacher quality and established Elizabeth Green as a leading voice in education. Green's fascinating and accessible narrative dispels the common myth of the "natural-born teacher" and introduces maverick educators exploring the science behind their art. Her dramatic account reveals that great teaching is not magic, but a skill—a skill that can be taught. Now with a new afterword that offers a guide on how to identify—and support—great teachers, this provocative and hopeful book "should be part of every new teacher’s education" (Washington Post).
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Journalist and cofounder of the news organization GothamSchools, Green promises to reveal how better teaching works and how everyone (or at least every teacher) can be taught how to do it. Unfortunately, the book promises more than it delivers. Green's primary argument concerns the need for better teacher training (less attention to "teachers' effect," more attention to successful classroom practice), and one of her most insightful observations concerns the shifts that occurred when "universities... began to add the lucrative teacher-training business to their repertoires." The material she cites most heavily comes from two distinguished specialists in training teachers to teach mathematics (Magdalene Lampert and Deborah Loewenberg Ball) and "from the world of educational entrepreneurs" (Doug Lemov, managing director of the Uncommon School charter network). Much of her content is classroom reportage that shows how teachers resolve the arithmetic problems of individual students. While this material will be of practical use to budding or aspiring teachers, it makes for dry reading. Japanese schools, charter schools, and national programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are assessed as well. The book is best-suited for education specialists and working teachers.
Customer Reviews
Important Book About Important Topic
Public education is a political hot potato that has been the epicentre of raging battles in the United States for the past two decades. These battles are not just about schools, they are fundamentally ideological in nature. Although frequently portrayed as being about ways to improve publicly funded schools, the turmoil in public education involves beliefs about who is best qualified to run school systems, and about removing schools from traditional school board control (although still funded publicly). Children and teachers seem like afterthoughts in these battles.
In the middle of these battles are the teachers, who almost seem to be collateral damage, casualties in the proliferation of charter schools, demands for reform, accountability, and other factors. It often seems that teachers are only discussed in terms of the shortcomings of the students they teach, and how their students' failings must be the teachers' fault.
Very little of the often overheated public debate concerns what teachers actually do, what it means to be a teacher, what goes into successful teaching, whether there is any skill to teaching, or if teachers make any difference in the greater scheme of education.
In this book Elizabeth Green argues that there is such a thing as effective teaching, and explores what means. She takes the position that teaching is not just or solely an innate talent, but that it involves skill, which of course entails that people can indeed learn to be effective teachers.
Green walks readers through the evidence in favour of this view, discussing in detail the pioneering research of Magdalene Lamphere, Judith Lanier, and Deborah Ball. The discussion of their work is genuinely interesting, and it's obvious that their research on teaching is truly valuable and enduring. Also interesting is Green's discussion of the teacher education methods used in Japan, which focus on extended practice, feedback, and strong support of skill development for aspiring teachers. Green's discussion makes it clear that teaching is truly complex, and her nuanced presentation convincingly shows that the training of successful teachers is an important activity that requires a great deal of support.
Green then turns to charter schools, the political tools for wresting control of education from school boards. She shows that the simpleminded approach to teaching that charter schools started with has of necessity evolved to reflect more of the concerns that have long preoccupied traditional schools. Charter schools have always dismissed mainstream teacher education programs, but Green shows how charter schools have been forced to focus on skill development of the type advocated by Ball and others.
It is striking to learn that charter schools slowly came to the realization that their efforts to get their students to succeed on standardized tests only result in superficial learning on the part of their students, and that they needed to evolve. It seems that some of the charter schools have indeed tried to do so but Green makes it clear that many still focus on 'teaching to the test.'
Green discusses the evolution of accountability measures such the No Child Left Behind legislation, Common Curriculum, and teacher evaluation measures. This is an area that continues to evolve, and this is where the book ends.
Green mostly stays away from the political complexities and background of the debates over public education in the United States. A full exploration would require a separate book. While this is perhaps understandable given that her focus is on how to develop and sustain high quality teaching, much of what has happened in the United States since the 1990s make little sense without an understanding of the broader context. The demolition of public education and its partial replacement by charter schools makes little sense to outsider, and it seems that teachers are little more than bystanders as public education in the United States continues to unravel.
Green's discussion is measured but it is hard not to have a sense of foreboding about the often harsh and punitive measures that legislators appear happy to direct at teachers. It is also hard not to see the hyperbolic and seemingly irrational public discussion as not really focussed on education but rather as a means to larger political ends.