A Reflection on Deborah Ball's Presentation: (How) Can All Children Get Great Teaching?
After a conversation at work that pit two ideas against one another--teacher development to support teaching effectiveness versus talent pipelines to replace ineffective teachers--I found myself particularly engaged by Dr. Deborah Ball who stated, “We must reframe the problem of teacher quality and educational inequity.”
Such reframing includes moving away from simple teacher replacement, which generally falls in the wake of poorly developed professional development systems toward finding out what the top 20% of high-performing teachers do and teaching others how to do it. The problem, according to Dr. Ball, is a “predominant focus on recruitment, outcomes, and sorting—instead of training. This does not augur well for redressing educational inequity and uneven quality. Without training, the teaching profession is undermined and the notion that teaching comes natural to some and not to others perpetuates the belief that effective teaching is based on the individual. This notion reinforces style over skill." If true, skillful instruction is lost on most individuals whose skill sets do not adequately prepare them for the profession.
Dr. Ball furthers this argument with several rather comedic comparisons between the ways in which one becomes a teacher to how pilots and surgeons are trained. The gist of it was if the expectation is for pilots and surgeons to pass rigorous examinations, performance tasks or participate in residencies to determine their qualifications for practice, teachers--much like individuals who fly airplanes and perform operations—ought to have strong training so they, too, can engage in responsible practice.
From Dr. Ball’s perspective strong training for responsible teaching practice would have three facets: 1) “clear specification of skills, capabilities, and qualities of performance necessary for independent practice, 2) detailed developmental clinical training, progressing from observing to simulations to supervised apprenticeship to supervised independent practice, and 3) performance assessment of individual competence before allowing independent practice.” According to Dr. Ball, next steps toward training that promotes responsible practice would include “identifying key practices of teaching and high-leverage content, developing specific approaches to training beginners to carry out those practices, and developing performance assessments of specific practices and content required for entry.”
The night I sat in the audience to witness Dr. Ball’s presentation there was no better example that demonstrated why we (as a country) need clear parameters that describe and determine effective instruction than when Dr. Ball showed a video of a math teacher. She asked the audience of at least 100 educators to turn and talk about the type of feedback we would give the teacher. Then we were asked to raise our hands to determine whether or not we would rate the teacher highly effective, effective, ineffective or highly ineffective. Although folks appeared initially reluctant to do so—which was probably out of fear that Dr. Ball would deem some of us wrong and others right—her point was well taken. “Even in this room,” she said, “our ratings are pretty evenly distributed—some rated the teacher highly effective and others highly ineffective, but the majority of you rated the teacher either effective or ineffective. That’s because there is no common professional metric of looking at a piece of teaching.”
Discussion Questions:
1) If given the opportunity to train ineffective teachers or replace them, which would you choose and why?
2) Are there clear expectations or performance tasks that determine improved performance in your organization? If so, explain the process or experience. If not, describe the impact on performance in the absence of a common assessment to measure and promote responsible practice.
3) Why is it necessary for there to be an objective perspective about effective teaching?
Click here for Deborah Ball’s Personal Page
Also, see Deborah Ball’s The Work of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education
Great reflection/recap Natasha. I had the opportunity to catch the last 3/4 of Dr. Ball's presentation. I'm glad I attended. It was comprehensive and she did a wonderful job in my opinion of framing some extremely important and relevant questions.
ReplyDeleteResponding to your first question: "If given the opportunity to train ineffective teachers or replace them, which would you choose and why?" My inclination would be to invest further in teacher development and training. I just believe that over the long-term this would yield much higher ROI than the current national trend of recruiting "new" talent into our teaching pipelines to combat the perceived ineffectiveness many feel is taking place within the teaching profession. I tend to take a long range view when looking at systems change and improvement. Investing the necessary time and resources toward "beefing" up our professional development systems for teachers could have a much greater impact on improving teacher effectiveness over the long haul in comparison to the short sighted strategy of quickly fixing our nationally perceived problem of teacher ineffectiveness by removing current teachers that are not "measuring up" and infusing mass quantities of a new and better breed of teacher, teachers that are more intelligent, more talented, and more motivated than our current crop of teachers already in schools. This infusion model toward tackling ineffective teaching practices is highly unrealistic to me and I seriously doubt that there is this large cadre of "super teachers" out there just waiting to be recruited so that they can enter our schools and ultimately save the day. Whether it be new talent entering the teaching profession or practitioners with several years of experience under their belt all of our teaching professionals will need, but better yet deserve, training and development that will allow them to gain the competencies, skills and capabilities needed to be the most effective they can be in their practice.
I did not attend the conference, but I think any teacher can relate to this summary provided by Natasha. Dr. Ball sounds like a presenter I would like to see in person. I also appreciate Randy's comment, as I feel the same way about training and working with the resources we have. I think that while teacher preparation courses may or may not be adequately teaching educators about current issues in schools and the populations we teach, much of the "training"teachers need to "be good teachers" comes from the field itself. I know that teacher education programs may be improving (or trying to) to adapt to new movements and curriculum, but I am against clearing out established teachers each time a new trend or evaluation tool comes into play. It is interesting, because being a "newer" teacher myself, I still find myself worrying that I can be replaced in the eyes of the central office. This stems more from the politics and subjectivity (like the math teacher example) that comes along with the role of teacher. I agree that training can provide the movements needed, but I also seen that just because training is offered doesn't mean teachers will come. I discussed this in our class with Dr. Burke. My district offered training in differentiated instruction, specifically to our growing ESL population, and 6 out of 900 plus teachers attended. I had already gone through the training myself and when I asked about attendance, our curriculum leaders were disappointed of course. I don't necessarily think it is a lack of teachers not wanting to be "good" or "better" teachers, but possibly the past experiences with trainings not always being focused on the classroom that may skew teachers from not coming. I think that is another discussion in itself. I'd love to hear others' ideas of what is hindering this training process when it is offered?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post Natasha!