Crystal Brakke, for example, is a teacher who in her first year teaching eighth grade in Henderson, North Carolina, took her students from almost 70% failing the state literacy assessment to over 80 percent passing it.
A good teacher can certainly work wonders with students. But it's never as simple as making one change in a vacuum; when I read the anecdote that you've presented, it's pretty clear to me that we're dealing with a good teacher. Even if she's young, she's clearly attentive to the students, and she's smart enough to tailor her approach to best fit what she sees from them.
That's a pretty good sign that she's an exceptional teacher overall - it's a level of attention that you don't often see in schools (it's also one that fades with age, but that's another matter). I'm skeptical that the one technique she happens to credit this particular success to is a silver bullet that would help all students, especially those whose teachers are nowhere near as bright or caring.
Further, having spent some time in the trenches, I'd say a large part of this student's achievement gains are simply due to the fact that he was put in a room with better students, so he was uncomfortable and he fell in line with the way they behaved and acted in the class. That's easy to do for one student, but it's not a trick that scales.
Show me that a simple change in expectations can get an overpacked classroom of 35 disinterested, loud, and sometimes violent C-level students to step up their game and care about Romeo and Juliet (esp. when a sizable percentage of the class can't read at all), and I'll be impressed...
Change the environment, change the person. It can be done en masse, though it's not as east. The reason the KIPP schools work, even though they take children randomly from extremely substandard environments, is that they completely control most aspects of the students lives. The school itself enforces a discipline that spreads like a contagion through the children from the start. In addition, they keep the kids there from 7 AM till 5-6 PM, before they go home, and for the most part keeps them in summer as well. So you can recreate this effect, but you need complete control from the top down, at least at the start.
Very interesting! I had never read anything like that before. Truthfully though, it makes me like the KIPP program even more, as I am glad that tools of mass persuasion can finally be used for good.
A good teacher can certainly work wonders with students. But it's never as simple as making one change in a vacuum; when I read the anecdote that you've presented, it's pretty clear to me that we're dealing with a good teacher. Even if she's young, she's clearly attentive to the students, and she's smart enough to tailor her approach to best fit what she sees from them.
That's a pretty good sign that she's an exceptional teacher overall - it's a level of attention that you don't often see in schools (it's also one that fades with age, but that's another matter). I'm skeptical that the one technique she happens to credit this particular success to is a silver bullet that would help all students, especially those whose teachers are nowhere near as bright or caring.
Further, having spent some time in the trenches, I'd say a large part of this student's achievement gains are simply due to the fact that he was put in a room with better students, so he was uncomfortable and he fell in line with the way they behaved and acted in the class. That's easy to do for one student, but it's not a trick that scales.
Show me that a simple change in expectations can get an overpacked classroom of 35 disinterested, loud, and sometimes violent C-level students to step up their game and care about Romeo and Juliet (esp. when a sizable percentage of the class can't read at all), and I'll be impressed...