Teacher Training Class: Week 4

The Trouble with Fries

by Malcolm Gladwell

Writing Summary

Improving the health of fast food will require a new revolution in order to eliminate biases toward nutritious food, reduce costs through mass production and create mass appeal through effective marketing.

Many people have a bias about food: the higher the nutrition, the lower the taste. More factual information isn’t the solution because most people don’t seem to make smart food choices even when they know certain fast foods have poor nutrition.

In order to make healthy fast food more appealing we need to lower costs with techniques used in other areas. One factor that helped make fast food successful was the application of mass

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Teacher Training Class: Week 3

SUMMARY MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

It is possible to improve the quality of teachers, and therefore student performance, by changing traditional academic requirements, lowering entry level standards with an apprenticeship system and rewarding teachers who deliver extra value.

Traditional academic requirements, like a teacher’s certificate, do not ensure that people have the social or classroom management skills required to foster student success.

An apprenticeship system, with low admission standards and a rigorous evaluation system, would increase the pool of potential teachers and therefore increase the number of people who have the needed skills.

Teachers who have right skills should be rewarded with higher pay in order to encourage them to stay. A system of equal pay based on seniority does not encourage people to become better.

In the end, a new system is needed to find teachers who a certain withitness, a teaching skill that people don’t know they have until they get into the classroom.

Comprehension Questions

  1.  What is value added analysis in the story?
  2. How does the author compare the effect of class size and teacher quality?
  3. What is a back of the envelope calculation?
  4. Why do good teachers have a holding space for students?
  5. What’s the difference between good and bad feedback?
  6. Describe the features that made the math teacher a good instructor?
  7. Why are test scores, graduate degrees and certifications poor indicators of a teacher’s success?
  8. How do great teachers effectively handle desist events?
  9. What is withitness?
  10. What is a percentile?

FINAL THOUGHTS ON MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

SAMPLE SUMMARY PARAGRAPH

To help students succeed we have to know why people fail by understanding panic, choke and stereotype threats. Panic is failure caused by a lack of thinking. Panic occurs when inexperienced people are in stressful situations and lose short term memory.

Choking is failure caused by too much thinking. In stressful situations that require mental or physical smoothness. By thinking too much, we perform below our abilities.

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