I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state.
Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing.
Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook.
Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology".
----------
A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria:
+--------------+------------------------+
| Scale number | Scale score assessment |
+--------------+------------------------+
| 1 | Far below standards |
| 2 | Below Standard |
| 3 | Meeting standard |
| 4 | Exceeding standard |
+--------------+------------------------+
Use the chart below to answer the question that follows:
According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project?
----------
Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking...
The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."
This answer made me unreasonably angry. Apparently to become a teacher in New York, you're not allowed to use your brain. "We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score." means exactly the following when you're talking about a playground: "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately they're all at the hospital."
I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is.
The correct answer is obviously "insufficient information"
Maybe company 4 is the best, but I don't see why no information on weights implies equal weights.
Edit:
After thinking about this phenomenon for a while, I think there is an argument for testing implied or unstated prompts.
It is frustrating to have to read minds, and quess what expectations are in different contexts. However, building a mental models of other people is an important skill.
I dont know that I would want to hire someone entirely incapable of it, who routinely required complete and explicit instruction.
That said, I dont think this kind of cognitive test is what they were going for
> We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score.
This is extra hilarious because, if you don’t know the weighting (or even that each score is linear), then adding the scores in the first place is an invalid operation.
Company 4 is a reasonable answer. What's the point in having a scoring system if you're going to use personal judgement to determine the winner? Of course company 4 would be a bad fit. But the problem is the method that was originally chosen to evaluate the companies. The key is "according to the evaluation detailed in the chart". In reality, the company should look at these results and realize that they need a new evaluation method.
Is that a choice question? Or does it require a subjective answer? If it's the latter, then the question is reasonable to some degree, I guess?
“Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.”
I think this is a good question for discussion, because a child might answer “Company 4” at first just by looking at it and averaging it as anyone without any context would, but then you could say something more about it. But, I don't think it was intended to be analysed or answered this way. Either way, dumb question to ask for a qualification exam IMO.
Seems about right for "Science and Technology", a variant of this question also shows up in German IHK (chamber of commerce) exams for software developer certifications, with a similar expected answer.
Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.
How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?
IIRC during my own IHK examination this was worth around 5pp, which is almost enough to drop you an entire grade.
What’s the point of a question like this? Somewhere someone will have written down something they want teachers to be able to do and that will have been translated into a question like this. Was the original requirement bad or the translation into the question? What kind of system would lead to a better question?
As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)).
That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.
Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!)
But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote:
> Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.
Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone.
Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.
I promise you, this site is not as special as you think it is.
The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in.
It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.
Makes sense to me. I attended public school all my life. Everyone I knew more or less had the same out look on formal education, means to an end, can I just get the spark notes, thanks.
In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.
I am a home educating parent. There is no way I could teach a classroom without learning how. Teaching one to one, encouraging and mentoring does not need as much skill. Most of us do it somewhere (e.g. at work). On the other hand I am sure the skill can be learned on the job, but teaching a classroom is still definitely difficult.
I also did not spend much time teaching as such: when they were young, lots of learning through play (even things like learning to read can be turned into games) and as they got older they taught them selves more. We have used tutors a bit for exams (GCSEs - British exams taken at 16 in schools though my kids sat most younger) but even then very little (two to three hours a week at most, and even that for just one year).
Home educating is a lot more flexible so kids can follow their interests. You can do a vast range of subjects (my younger daughter did Astronomy GCSE and is doing Latin, did Physics but not Biology). That combined with the study skills and self-discipline from teaching themselves more leaves them more motivated and better prepared for further study (and work too).
all the best teachers I had in public school were people who got into teaching after having an actual career because they had actually lived in the real world. Most of the "teaching" is just stuff mandated by the government and taught via lesson plans created by the book companies.
another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students
The long-term impact is much more ambiguous to measure.
I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications).
Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building.
This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.
Good point. In short, I would rephrase it as "if your measurement doesn't show the difference between trained and untrained teachers, maybe your measurement is wrong?"
There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores:
1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive.
2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.
Some additional context from TFA, which is actually pretty insightful.
> One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory.
> There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children.
I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery?
And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?
Sounds like a good reason to continue the experiment. As long as we continue to insist on paying teachers as little as possible, it makes sense to lower the ridiculous educational requirements just to teach elementary school.
I have a family member who was hired as an Emergency teacher over 20 years ago. They've since become fully credentialed, obtained their masters in education, taught masters students, and organized a particular program/subject at the district level.
Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success.
Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.
Those few who are willing to go take a low salary to go deal with all the issues of the modern education system are just as good as those who are willing to go take a low salary and deal with all the issues of the modern education system, but have to jump through a few more hoops. I'm shocked.
Let's face it, those who are willing to teach, and are probably leaving decent careers to do so, have a decent chance of being an okay teacher, because they probably have an idea of what they're getting into, and are willing to work hard. ie they WANT to be teachers.
Of course, if we just paid teachers more, you'd probably have a higher number of qualified candidates, but that seems like that's too hard of a thing to do?
The school district I went to had a policy that the teachers are required to have a related masters degree in the subject they’re teaching. It was a great school district since the teachers were all formerly non teachers at one point. My social studies teacher was a lawyer before, physics teacher actually published some papers as a physicists. The downside is the property tax ballooned out of control but I got a great education.
A state or a small country can afford maybe a few schools like that. You need state sponsorship, endowment money or a district where property values ballooned out of control. And with a lot of money at stake, it's very likely that school administration compensation will be ballooning instead.
Connecting schools with a university system could be a more viable option. Make it easy to teach in a nearby school, pay reasonably for tuition and a university can be a source of PhD students and postdocs that could get some easy pocket money as guest lecturers. I think, it's also refreshing for PhD students and postdocs to give classes to younger kids.
Entire states are like this, and it doesn't work out that way at scale. Teachers get degrees to teach, and are buried under a mountain of debt while not being paid for it. On top of that, they need to take "continuing education" credits, which ostensibly is a way to stay on top of teaching trends but is really a racket for the teaching-adjacent industry.
I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay scales definitely were weighed in favor of it. It certainly didn't make for better teachers.
In every category, emergency/provisional licensed median values were lower than licensed teachers, including performance evaluations, although these results didn't reach 95% statistical significance of rejecting the null hypothesis. Even if they didn't reach P < 0.05, when all of the results point in one direction, I am not so sure I would completely agree with the top-level headline as it is stated.
It seems to me that we've already gutted the requirements for a teaching degree -- it's one of the easiest college majors. The primary hurdle is surviving the first couple of years in the classroom.
This is good news for me personally. I'd like to make money in tech for perhaps 10 more years and then teach music (and comp sci?) in a public high school. I have advanced degrees in music but no education degree. Under current rules I'd have to stick to teaching at the college level which doesn't appeal to me because the degree is a bad financial decision for the students working towards it.
"Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors."
That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.
Assessing educator effectiveness is not a solved problem. For instance, the Gates Foundation made a full throated effort to research and develop a quantifiable measure and failed. In the end, they released a set of holistic, observable behaviors/practices that they believe are associated with teacher effectiveness. It’s a hard problem.
The UK always had a program that allowed you to become a teacher without a degree. It involves a diploma followed by gaining QTLS (Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills) status I believe. Is this not the case in the USA?
For me personally, I learned and performed much better under teachers that I knew had some passion for the subjects they taught. Unfortunately that’s more difficult to measure.
Whatever can be measured can be managed, but not everything that counts can be counted. I'd be interested to see international comparisons and closer attention paid to more subjects than English and maths, as well as psychosocial development, classroom environment, and student mental health.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing.
Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook.
Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology".
----------
A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria:
Use the chart below to answer the question that follows: According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project?----------
Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking...
The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is.
[+] [-] throwaway421967|2 years ago|reply
"standard" usually implies that it's an outside rule from a regulatory body/certification agency that you need to conform to.
It's such a weird question to ask in the first place.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|2 years ago|reply
Maybe company 4 is the best, but I don't see why no information on weights implies equal weights.
Edit:
After thinking about this phenomenon for a while, I think there is an argument for testing implied or unstated prompts. It is frustrating to have to read minds, and quess what expectations are in different contexts. However, building a mental models of other people is an important skill.
I dont know that I would want to hire someone entirely incapable of it, who routinely required complete and explicit instruction.
That said, I dont think this kind of cognitive test is what they were going for
[+] [-] amluto|2 years ago|reply
This is extra hilarious because, if you don’t know the weighting (or even that each score is linear), then adding the scores in the first place is an invalid operation.
[+] [-] yencabulator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corny|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KAKAN|2 years ago|reply
“Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.”
I think this is a good question for discussion, because a child might answer “Company 4” at first just by looking at it and averaging it as anyone without any context would, but then you could say something more about it. But, I don't think it was intended to be analysed or answered this way. Either way, dumb question to ask for a qualification exam IMO.
[+] [-] indymike|2 years ago|reply
And this is why we have debacles like the 737max.
[+] [-] dilippkumar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SyrupThinker|2 years ago|reply
Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.
How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?
IIRC during my own IHK examination this was worth around 5pp, which is almost enough to drop you an entire grade.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dan-robertson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] selimthegrim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] red_admiral|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvba|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] germinalphrase|2 years ago|reply
That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.
[+] [-] derefr|2 years ago|reply
But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote:
> Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.
[+] [-] billdueber|2 years ago|reply
Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.
[+] [-] paulcole|2 years ago|reply
The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in.
It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.
[+] [-] chrisdhoover|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pard68|2 years ago|reply
In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.
[+] [-] graemep|2 years ago|reply
I also did not spend much time teaching as such: when they were young, lots of learning through play (even things like learning to read can be turned into games) and as they got older they taught them selves more. We have used tutors a bit for exams (GCSEs - British exams taken at 16 in schools though my kids sat most younger) but even then very little (two to three hours a week at most, and even that for just one year).
Home educating is a lot more flexible so kids can follow their interests. You can do a vast range of subjects (my younger daughter did Astronomy GCSE and is doing Latin, did Physics but not Biology). That combined with the study skills and self-discipline from teaching themselves more leaves them more motivated and better prepared for further study (and work too).
[+] [-] ren_engineer|2 years ago|reply
another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students
[+] [-] khzw8yyy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] growingkittens|2 years ago|reply
I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications).
Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building.
This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.
[+] [-] sesm|2 years ago|reply
There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores:
1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive.
2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
> One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory.
> There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children.
I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery?
And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?
[+] [-] rootusrootus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaw|2 years ago|reply
Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success.
Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.
[+] [-] sgnelson|2 years ago|reply
Let's face it, those who are willing to teach, and are probably leaving decent careers to do so, have a decent chance of being an okay teacher, because they probably have an idea of what they're getting into, and are willing to work hard. ie they WANT to be teachers.
Of course, if we just paid teachers more, you'd probably have a higher number of qualified candidates, but that seems like that's too hard of a thing to do?
[+] [-] syntaxing|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchichkov|2 years ago|reply
Connecting schools with a university system could be a more viable option. Make it easy to teach in a nearby school, pay reasonably for tuition and a university can be a source of PhD students and postdocs that could get some easy pocket money as guest lecturers. I think, it's also refreshing for PhD students and postdocs to give classes to younger kids.
[+] [-] zdragnar|2 years ago|reply
I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay scales definitely were weighed in favor of it. It certainly didn't make for better teachers.
[+] [-] GlibMonkeyDeath|2 years ago|reply
https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/...
In every category, emergency/provisional licensed median values were lower than licensed teachers, including performance evaluations, although these results didn't reach 95% statistical significance of rejecting the null hypothesis. Even if they didn't reach P < 0.05, when all of the results point in one direction, I am not so sure I would completely agree with the top-level headline as it is stated.
[+] [-] analog31|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|2 years ago|reply
I'm mostly going on the stories from a teacher relative; I'm 99% speculating.
[+] [-] aczerepinski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|2 years ago|reply
Today, parents routinely teach their kids things like reading and arithmetic.
The best teachers I had were professors at university, and they never had a day of teacher training. They simply knew the subject material.
What skills a masters degree in education confers is a mystery to me.
[+] [-] hnthrowaway0328|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readthenotes1|2 years ago|reply
That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.
[+] [-] germinalphrase|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhope99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepsquirrelnet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkt|2 years ago|reply