Thursday, April 29, 2010

If you haven’t read enough about teacher quality this week...

I didn’t love Newsweek’s “fire bad teachers” cover image back in March, and the article itself had a critical flaw, I felt: It conflated mediocre teachers and the truly depraved into one big category of “bad.” Firing the latter should be a no-brainer; firing the former is a whole different story. (Practical? Desirable? Etc.) I feel at times like the debate on teacher quality as it appears in the national media neglects more complicated shades of grey of reality, such as how to make so-so teachers better.

This month’s Educational Leadership from ASCD parodies the Newsweek cover and has some interesting, though not groundbreaking, articles about teacher quality. There’s one piece about Generation Y and what they might need as teachers. Feedback! Lots of feedback and praise. (No surprise to me—lots of twentysomethings in my life who complain when their bosses don’t say anything to them after a day of good work.)

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