“Mind you, that’s not great feedback...The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha’s name card, point to the letter “V,” show her how different it is from “C,” and make the class sound out both letters."
Unless, of course, all the other kids start calling out their own names, then other words, and she does lose control of the class.
It's an excellent article. But the problem I've always had with the kind of analyses portrayed by the UVA team is that it's too easy to sit there and sound smart by making these kinds of criticisms. Similar criticisms could be made about the math teacher, whose style is more like mine was in the community college physics classes I taught, but I'll spare you, dear readers of this comment.
I think that it's better to think of teaching like trying to find the best-fit line through a cloud of scattered points. You can stand there and say, "the shortest distance to the next point is actually over here..." but completely miss the idea that if you are trying to maximize a long-term result, you may not want to draw your line in that particular direction.
I remember being asked to "criticize" papers in college. These papers were always classics in the field, in many cases standing up for decades. It always made me uncomfortable, though I eventually settled into a rhythm of simply automatically and mindlessly "criticizing" that "they should have done more". Dress that up in three paragraphs and you're done.
And this is the same thing. Criticizing that somebody should have done more is a null criticism. What needs to happen in any environment where you have limited resources (limited pages the journal will publish, limited time with the children) is that if you're going to say somebody needed to do "more", you need to also criticize what should be removed to make room for this "more".
By that standard, I doubt this teacher could have done much better. There's a balance to reacting to the kids, but you also need to get through the curriculum, which ultimately is there for a reason. (Most of us would probably agree there's too much emphasis on curriculum today, but the solution is not to completely ignore it.) Reacting endlessly to the students comes with its own problems.
I should have been nailed for my formulaic criticisms. But then... students "criticizing" the top 0.01% of papers shouldn't be expected to produce useful results anyhow, any more than this criticism of the teacher does. There's only so many pages and so much time.
I must admit the part about those people criticizing the videos really doesn't sit well with me. Do they assume there is one perfect way to teach? Are they working towards establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to?
Maybe pulling out the letter V would have distracted too much from the letter C, or whatever. I am afraid such people are just parasites to society, somehow they managed to tap into tax payer money and get paid for just sitting on their ass all day talking bullshit. Probably standing in front of a class directly they would be miserable failures. Sorry for sounding so harsh, but my spouse is a teacher, so I guess I am a little too emotionally involved...
They're trying to systematically determine what works and what doesn't. They've got to review a lot of different teachers in the same and different situations. A teacher who wants to do better would greatly benefit from specific, actionable recommendations. Creating tools that can be used for deliberate practice is useful work, especially if the results can be widely distributed.
Unless, of course, all the other kids start calling out their own names, then other words, and she does lose control of the class.
It's an excellent article. But the problem I've always had with the kind of analyses portrayed by the UVA team is that it's too easy to sit there and sound smart by making these kinds of criticisms. Similar criticisms could be made about the math teacher, whose style is more like mine was in the community college physics classes I taught, but I'll spare you, dear readers of this comment.
I think that it's better to think of teaching like trying to find the best-fit line through a cloud of scattered points. You can stand there and say, "the shortest distance to the next point is actually over here..." but completely miss the idea that if you are trying to maximize a long-term result, you may not want to draw your line in that particular direction.