A simple observation: We live in an age where the image of science has been formed by the fantasy of space exploration,

by the magic of the medical sciences, and by the specter of environmental disaster. Yet, all too often, as we turn to the classroom, the vitality and drama of science has been reduced to a set of technical terms, definitions and answers to multiple-choice questions. It is time past due to re-think the way we teach. This web-site is dedicated to a fresh approach to the classroom, emphasizing the value ofbuilding arguments with students as they work to understand scientific ideas. We are about engaging students in substantive issues. But this is easier said than done. We are about placing students at the center of what happens in the classroom, not answers, by asking questions that are openwhere a reply might begin with I think But again this is not easy. How do you find questions that are not a quick hop, step and jump from an answer? This is a good question. It takes us into our practice as teachers as we prepare for class and as we engage our students. This is what we are about.

Introduction: The Nature of Teaching The nature of teaching has been conceptualized and explained n countless ways, one conceptualized is that teaching is the act of providing activities that facilitate learning, another view runs likes thisTeaching is something that takes place only when learning does. No matter what the teacher is doing in her classes, if the student are not learning something significant, she is not teaching, when the student fails, the teacher fails more. Quite similar to the two foregoing definitions is one attributed to a writer named Jacetot : To teach is to cause to learn. according to the conceptualization by ho howee (1970),the teacher is not a dispenser of knowledge nor a person in change of the education that goes on in the classroom. The teacher's role, in Howee view, is one of producing the climate, providing the resources, stimulating the student to explore, investigate and seek anwer, in a rich environment, the teacher becomes a guide and facilator than a director. An equally intersting conceptualized of teaching is the one formula by Brown Thornston(1979) who delineated certain ditinction between taeching and educational information giving, these authors consider both instructional functions essential but different from one another. Tn their view, information giving may usually be performed quite adequetly and economically through planned use of books, records and tapes, film or computers. Teaching, on contribution of the instruction as motivation, assigner, interrogation clarifier, illumination, evaluator, and director of the intellectual exchange that leads to learning. Also worthy of our consideration the view of teaching propounced by Silberman(1966) who states that teaching is both art and science.teaching is an art because it calls for the exercise of talent and creativity and teaching is a science for it involves a reptoire of teachniques, procedures and skills that can be systematically studied and describe

TheNatureofTeaching
5
08 Jan 2009 by Kevin Carey Categories: Teacher and Principal Quality

Before the holiday, Chad posted an item about a November 08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One? Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument, they were still only able to predict about 12 percent of subsequent teacher effectivness, leading them to conclude:

schools and school districts wishing to increase the effectiveness of their teacher workforce may be aided by the systematic use of a broad set of information on new candidates, and particularly if they gather information outside the realm of traditional teaching credentials. Nevertheless, our results are also consistent with the notion that data on job performance may be a more powerful tool for improving teacher selection than data available at the recruitment stage.
Theyre being charitable. 12 percent isnt very much. Its 12 percent. And that amount is consistent with (and in most cases, larger than) pretty much every other similar study thats been conducted. They all point to same the conclusion: the nature of the teaching profession is such that you simply cant predict ahead of time with any degree of accuracy whos going to be a good (and bad) teacher. Chads post produced pushback in the comments section, and in general this whole line of reasoning (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a recent article) has been attacked by people who are in the teacher preparation and certification business. I think theyre wrong, and in being wrong theyre putting parochial concerns ahead of the larger best interests of the teaching profession. The success of an individual in any given job is generally a function of three things: 1) Personal qualities like intelligence, motivation, diligence, creativity, discipline, organization, inter-personal skills, work ethic, etc.; 2) knowledge and skills related to the job; and 3) the nature of the organization in which they work. But the relative importance of these three factors in terms of success varies widely among professions. Once you get past a fairly minimal level of competence, theres very little difference between the best McDonalds cashier and the worst. Its a simple job requiring little training and theres no way to be great at it. Some jobs are more complex and important but still highly dependent on knowledge and skills. My uncle, for example, repairs commercial air conditioning units for a living. Its complicated work. You could plunk a Nobel-prize winning physicist down in front of a huge broken HVAC unit and, unless he had the right training, hed have no way to fix it. Nor would he be able to figure out how to fix it on his own. And if he did receive the right training, its unlikely that hed be much better at HVAC repair than my uncle, despite his (presumably) genius I.Q. HVAC units are a lot more complicated than cash registers and as

such people who repair them are more well-paid, but once you learn to fix them, theyre fixedthey cant really be fantastically well-fixed. Other professions are different. A good friend of mine, for example, finished her law degree at Georgetown a few years ago and is now practicing appellate law. It turns out that shes really good at this. But while she couldnt do her job without the knowledge she learned in law school, that knowledge isnt what distinguishes her from other lawyers. Its her personal qualitiesshes an unusually smart, analytic, creative and hard-working person. And not coincidentally, law is a profession where there is huge variance in effectiveness, where greatness is absolutely possible, and great lawyers are paid and recognized as such. The same is true in professions like medicine, journalism, business and the arts. In every case, knowledge and training matter, but its the relatively large influence of personal qualities that leads to the possibility of greatness and all that entails. The most important conclusion to draw from Kanes research is that teaching is one of those professions too. Gladwell built his article around the non-predictability of teacher effectiveness, and thats gotten a lot of attention because it has implications for certain concrete policy issues like teacher certification. But the larger, more important point is that that non-predictability flows from the large variance in teacher effectiveness. Some teachers are much, much better than others, as is always the case in professions that depend highly on personal qualitiesas Ive defined them, or in terms like expert thinking and complex communications (per Murnane and Levy), or something else. Yes, these qualities can be improved and inculcated to an extent, and the quality of the school in which people teach matters too. But think back to the best teacher you ever had. How much of their success compared to the worst teacher you ever had was a function of what they learned in graduate school? And of course theres the obvious example of higher education where there are also great teachers and terrible ones and huge variance in effectiveness in a profession where little or no formal teacher training or certification is required. The problem with the teaching profession as currently organized is that it puts too much emphasis on the things that matter less (note: Im not saying they dont matter at all), i.e. knowledge and skills, and not enough emphasis on the things that matter more, i.e. personal qualities like intelligence, work ethic, etc. By contrast, my friend wouldnt have gotten a job as an appellate lawyer if she hadnt clerked for a federal judge, and she wouldnt have gotten the clerkship if she hadnt graduated magna cum laude from a Top 20 law school, and both of those thingsthe grades and the admission to Georgetownwere in turn a function of the personal qualities that make a great lawyer. The legal profession is organized to select and filter for the things that matter in lawyering in a way that the teaching professionwhere ideas like Top 20 school and magna cum laude mean very littleis not. And that applies not just to hiring but everything that happens afterwardgreat lawyers are rewarded and recognized and credentialed in all kinds of meaningful ways that teachers arent. In other words, people who insist on maintaining the primacy of knowledge and skills in the teaching are standing in the way of a goal they often profess to hold dear: elevating teachers to the ranks of true professionals. Its understandable, in a waytheres a lot of institutional and professional prestige in the current way of things, and moving away from it involves an idea that seems contradictorythat there are severe limits on the extent to which

good teaching can be taught. But thats what the data show, and the sooner our attitudes and policies reflect that, the better off teachers will be.