STUDENTS KNOW who the good teachers are!


There's a very interesting article in the October 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine. It's by Amanda Ripley.


Ripley is reporting on the study by Harvard's Ronald Ferguson (a decade ago) and the Gates Foundation's recent interest in it. The Gates Foundation undertook a massive study of 3,000 teachers. In addition to looking at their credentials, their students' test scores, and their supervisors' observations, they asked THEIR STUDENTS to give an opinion on the classroom experience with that teacher.

In one classroom, kids said they worked hard, paid attention, and corrected their mistakes; they liked being there, and they believed that the teacher cared about them. In the next classroom, the very same kids reported that the teacher had trouble explaining things and didn’t notice when students failed to understand a lesson.

"The survey did not ask Do you like your teacher? Is your teacher nice? This wasn’t a popularity contest. The survey mostly asked questions about what students saw, day in and day out. Their survey answers, it turned out, were more reliable than any other known measure of teacher performance - including classroom observations and student test-score growth.



Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the FIVE that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:



1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.



When Ferguson and Kane shared these five statements at conferences, teachers were surprised. They had typically thought it most important to care about kids, but what mattered more, according to the study, was whether teachers had control over the classroom and made it a challenging place to be. As most of us remember from our own school days, those two conditions did not always coexist: some teachers had high levels of control, but low levels of rigor.



I'd really recommend reading the Ripley article. (link above)



So how do we get our students to treat us with respect, and get them to behave the way they ought to? How do we get them to stay focused on the hard work of learning to play an instrument?

The answer is in: the Myth of "Classroom Management" further ahead...