Talks to Teachers

1999

1985

1974

1995

Articles The thesis of this article is that working directly on improving teaching—the methods used to interact with students about content—is the most productive option for improving classroom instruction. To support the thesis, we identify three ways that educators and policy makers have worked to improve teaching: (a) recruit more talented people, (b) improve the qualifications of teachers entering or already in the profession, and (c) improve the instructional methods that are implemented in classrooms. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the combination of all three might be optimal. But our goal in this article is to highlight the value of the third approach because it is often overshadowed in policy discussions by the first approach and treated by educators as a by-product of the second approach. We argue that these priorities should be reversed. The first two approaches share a focus on the qualities of the people who teach. The first—recruiting more talented people—apparently assumes that teaching skills are innate, or at least correlated with general measures of intelligence or exceptional achievement. More talented people will somehow know how to deliver more effective instruction. The second—improving the qualifications of prospective and practicing teachers—recognizes that people need to be trained to teach well. But this approach shares with the first the assumption that improved teaching flows from the qualifications of the individuals who teach. The third approach, to focus on the methods of teaching rather than the people who teach, is unusual enough in the United States that we begin our argument by trying to make the more familiar approaches look strange and problematic. We then present a more recent version of the second approach—improving the qualifications of teachers—that resolves some, but not all, of the problems we identify. We then contrast this updated second approach with directly studying and improving the methods of teaching. Our description includes a potpourri of inconclusive evidence that we believe supports increasing the prominence of this third approach. Finally, we examine a series of reasons that explain why attention to the people who teach, despite the evidence, remains the U.S. preferred strategy for improving teaching.

2020

Qualitative Sociology, 1997

The Modern Language Journal, 2004

This is a report on a project carried out by a public university Delhi, India, with government school teachers. It was funded jointly by an independent non-government trust.