Hollis Robbins: evaluation

Transcript context

…To improve the job that you’re trying to do, if you could have better data on something, what would that something be? I’ll have to think about that… I’d like to know what makes a really good teacher. In looking at the literature, the quality of teaching is measured primarily on student outcomes, on student test scores. But it’s hard to say that that is the best measure or that’s the best measure of how a teacher teaches. There’s an Alfred North Whitehead quote that he said: “Sometimes I give a student an A or B instead of a C or a D because they’ll earn it 20 years from now. ” A good teacher will lodge education in a student’s mind that may not bear fruit for 10, 15 years. How do we measure that? Is it possible to be measured? How do we measure the delivery of information — per hour, per comment? How do we figure out who’s good and who isn’t good? Right now, the only way that we can study teachers are studying those who have decided to go into the field of teaching. What are your intuitions? They’ll be some obvious correlates, such as putting time into being a better teacher. But the obvious correlates aside, what do you think are the hidden correlates with people ending up being excellent teachers?…

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