What makes a good teacher?

The BBC article published this past Saturday, “What makes a good teacher?”, says “sometimes the simplest questions in life are the hardest to answer.”

That’s true.

And one of the huge problems with mainstream discourse on educational reform is that it asks simplistic questions and offers simplistic solutions.

The testing craze in the USA and Canada illustrates the point. In BC, the Fraser Institute, a neoliberal think tank, and it’s allies at the Vancouver Sun promote the notion that schools can be ranked, good to bad, using standardized test scores. A practice that follows the lead of the NCLB induced test mania in the USA, where teachers in New York City are being judged based on their students’ test scores and Exxon-Mobil is now sponsoring a program in seven states that amounts to bribes for test scores. Other examples of the test score madness include:

•Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso last week promised to spend more than $935,000 to give high school students as much as $110 each to improve their scores on state graduation exams.

•In New York City, about 9,000 fourth- and seventh-graders in 60 schools are eligible to win as much as $500 for improving their scores on the city’s English and math tests, given throughout the school year.

•In suburban Atlanta, a pair of schools last week kicked off a program that will pay 8th- and 11th-grade students $8 an hour for a 15-week “Learn & Earn” after-school study program (the federal minimum wage is currently $5.85).

Test-driven educational reform is based upon psychometric malpractice, inhibits learning and deskills teachers.

What’s really interesting in the BBC article is the question of whether after years of deskilling (and an “apprenticeship of observation” in schools where they are little more than conduits for others’ ideas) if teachers are in the position to act like professionals and take control of their practice:

The new curriculum for 11-14 year olds, due to start in September, puts much greater emphasis on teacher innovation and local adaptability to pupils’ needs.

The big question now is whether – after 20 years of being told exactly what and how to teach – there are enough teachers ready to be “creatively subversive”?

Also, after years of being told in precise detail how to teach, will teachers feel ready both to devise their own way of teaching and engaging students and also constantly to evaluate and adapt their own teaching methods.

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