Towards a Higher Quality Teaching Service
Let us suppose that you wanted to create a higher quality teaching service. What then would you decide to do?
The obvious thing, I would say, would be to develop the quality of teaching; that is, the ability of a teacher to teach — to make things easily understandable, to develop students' understanding of these things, and to develop student ability to understand any future material that they might have to understand. But this has not always been so obvious.
There is one very deep and profound approach that I've unearthed (from where it has been hiding in plain sight). You can start by picking people who can (by some proxy measure) be said to understand things better. They are therefore (this is the implicit argument) likely to be able to teach people; that is, make these things easily understandable (since they seem to have found them so), develop students' understanding of these things (because they themselves understand), and develop student ability to understand future material (which they themselves may or may not have encountered). Then you can pay them more.
Really? Yes; the evidence is here. About eleven and a half years ago, pay was explicitly raised for teachers in a certain city-state, but only if they had a good honours degree. This was supposed to create a higher quality teaching service.
It seems a dubious argument to me. It is a bit like saying, "Since you know so much about restaurant menus, you must be a good cook too."
The obvious thing, I would say, would be to develop the quality of teaching; that is, the ability of a teacher to teach — to make things easily understandable, to develop students' understanding of these things, and to develop student ability to understand any future material that they might have to understand. But this has not always been so obvious.
There is one very deep and profound approach that I've unearthed (from where it has been hiding in plain sight). You can start by picking people who can (by some proxy measure) be said to understand things better. They are therefore (this is the implicit argument) likely to be able to teach people; that is, make these things easily understandable (since they seem to have found them so), develop students' understanding of these things (because they themselves understand), and develop student ability to understand future material (which they themselves may or may not have encountered). Then you can pay them more.
Really? Yes; the evidence is here. About eleven and a half years ago, pay was explicitly raised for teachers in a certain city-state, but only if they had a good honours degree. This was supposed to create a higher quality teaching service.
It seems a dubious argument to me. It is a bit like saying, "Since you know so much about restaurant menus, you must be a good cook too."
etched with acid at 7:37:00 pm
2 Comments:
If such is the case, do you have alternative suggestions? Determining a person's understanding from his graduate qualifications will have its drawbacks, since it merely indicates that the person has given sufficient right answers to taken examination papers and handed in a dissertation, if any, that has passed muster. Would inspection of all coursework and exam answers whilst in university and perhaps vivas held for incoming teachers be more effective?
Well, the point is not so much to determine his understanding as to determine his ability to teach. Since you don't need to know much more than your students to teach them, it's much more important to evaluate skill in teaching a subject rather than knowledge of a subject (as long as some minimum standard is reached).
I think inspection of an incoming teacher's academic record would be pretty pointless. As long as the person has passed one level of complexity higher than the level to be taught, it should be sufficient. Don't be misled by the claims of academia and academics... :)
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