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
- What is value added analysis in the story?
- How does the author compare the effect of class size and teacher quality?
- What is a back of the envelope calculation?
- Why do good teachers have a holding space for students?
- What’s the difference between good and bad feedback?
- Describe the features that made the math teacher a good instructor?
- Why are test scores, graduate degrees and certifications poor indicators of a teacher’s success?
- How do great teachers effectively handle desist events?
- What is withitness?
- 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.
Stereotype threat is a kind of pressure. In situations where people’s actions confirm a negative aspect of a group, people tend to think too much to avoid failure.
Failure can also be traced back to the test environment if it reinforces stereotype threats, Consider, for example, the impact on a poor student if a math teacher says to the class, “I’m sure you already learned this in a math academy.”
POSSIBLE HYPOTHESES
- the greater the explicit thinking under pressure, the greater the chance for failure
- the more experience we have, the less likely we are to panic under pressure
- the more powerful the stereotype threat under pressure, the greater the chance for failure
- the more we second guess under pressure, the less we use our intuition
- sometimes the harder students work, the greater the chance for failure