My thought: I loved the podcast, but I did feel bad for some of the teachers who felt attacked by it. It's true that teachers are treated like crap for the most part in the US, and some of them felt like this podcast fueled those flames without really giving them credit for all the hard work they do. The villain in the piece for me is the colleges of education who are supposed to be in charge of keeping teachers up to date with the latest research in the many hours of mandatory continuing education they have to do while working full time, but instead just recycle the same garbage they've been teaching for years and enjoy their job security. I actually was talking to a friend of mine who has been switching between public school teaching and university teaching about the possibility of doing a master's in curriculum and instruction and then maybe working in a college of education, and she told me I absolutely shouldn't, because teachers hate taking those mandatory classes, and it's very hard for them to respect education professors who haven't taught in a public school themselves in a decade or more. That's the hard thing, I was seeing it as "oh, this would be an interesting way for me to have a job I would like," but when I looked at it more closely, I realized that it's not worth it if you have enough empathy to notice that your students are overworked and under-served by your institution.
My other thought is, I think because teachers are overworked and underpaid and annoyed by useless/toxic continuing education requirements (that often turn into marketing opportunities for garbage like three cueing), they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.
However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.
But let me give you an example of what I mean. So there is this visiting scholar from Taiwan at Penn State this year, and she does these workshops trying to teach the students how to do more "extensive reading" in Chinese. Obviously learning to read in a second language is different from learning to read in your native language, but still, it's an interesting approach. So she did this one hour workshop last spring, and I attended it, and it was lots of fun. She told us about the Cool Chinese extensive reading platform, had us write some websites we like on a big poster and she told us we could try watching Chinese TV and reading the subtitles. That was basically it. Oh, and she told us to follow her on her instagram, which, by the way, she monetizes and tries to sell clothes on. Then this fall, I told her I ended up using the extensive reading platform with another teacher, and that I really enjoyed it. She said "yeah, I already told you about that, it wasn't the other teacher." And I said yes, you told us about it, but I did not end up using it at that time, and the account you gave us expired, so I had to beg this other teacher for one, and now I ended up using it. And she said, "well, I also gave you guys a lot of great reading strategies." And I was like wow, I can guarantee you that none of the other students ever used the platform again unless another teacher brought it up, because you only told us about it once, at a one-hour meeting, and then gave us accounts that expired very quickly. But somehow she turned that into a conference paper about how she's teaching American college students to read in Chinese. And I don't think she's that unusual! I think teachers take an incredible amount of credit sometimes for doing basic work, and why? Not because they naturally buy into their own hype, but because it's incentivized. It's good for her to go to national foreign language teaching conferences and tell people she's using new platforms for literacy instruction. It sounds like she's a highly engaged foreign language teacher. But it really doesn't reflect the reality. Like, she probably has taught some students very well at some point! But the story that gets told is so fake.
no subject
My other thought is, I think because teachers are overworked and underpaid and annoyed by useless/toxic continuing education requirements (that often turn into marketing opportunities for garbage like three cueing), they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.
However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.
But let me give you an example of what I mean. So there is this visiting scholar from Taiwan at Penn State this year, and she does these workshops trying to teach the students how to do more "extensive reading" in Chinese. Obviously learning to read in a second language is different from learning to read in your native language, but still, it's an interesting approach. So she did this one hour workshop last spring, and I attended it, and it was lots of fun. She told us about the Cool Chinese extensive reading platform, had us write some websites we like on a big poster and she told us we could try watching Chinese TV and reading the subtitles. That was basically it. Oh, and she told us to follow her on her instagram, which, by the way, she monetizes and tries to sell clothes on. Then this fall, I told her I ended up using the extensive reading platform with another teacher, and that I really enjoyed it. She said "yeah, I already told you about that, it wasn't the other teacher." And I said yes, you told us about it, but I did not end up using it at that time, and the account you gave us expired, so I had to beg this other teacher for one, and now I ended up using it. And she said, "well, I also gave you guys a lot of great reading strategies." And I was like wow, I can guarantee you that none of the other students ever used the platform again unless another teacher brought it up, because you only told us about it once, at a one-hour meeting, and then gave us accounts that expired very quickly. But somehow she turned that into a conference paper about how she's teaching American college students to read in Chinese. And I don't think she's that unusual! I think teachers take an incredible amount of credit sometimes for doing basic work, and why? Not because they naturally buy into their own hype, but because it's incentivized. It's good for her to go to national foreign language teaching conferences and tell people she's using new platforms for literacy instruction. It sounds like she's a highly engaged foreign language teacher. But it really doesn't reflect the reality. Like, she probably has taught some students very well at some point! But the story that gets told is so fake.