Critiquing Jay Mathews' take on Diane Ravitch

Tim at AssortedStuff has a nice post criticizing Jay Mathews' review of Diane Ravitch's new book.

Diane Ravitch's new book

Reviews are pouring in for The Death and Life of the Great American School System, by education historian Diane Ravitch. Here are a few:

New York Times
Joanne Jacobs
Education Policy Blog
Core Knowledge Blog

I'm about halfway through so far. For someone like me who doesn't know a whole lot about the educational history of the past few decades, it has been very informative so far.

Training Teachers

Elizabeth Green has a long article in the New York Times Magazine about training teachers. The basic idea is that there are too many teachers needed in the country to fire a huge number of them and rehire new ones. The alternative is to do a better job of training the teachers we have.

Green reviews two different broad strategies to improve teaching. One is to teach teachers better techniques, such as how to hold students' attention better. The second is to teach teachers more content, specifically content that helps teachers understand how students think.

(3/7/10 -- Read a negative review of Green's piece at Schools Matter.)

Doug Noon at Borderland, on good teaching

Doug's article includes a few quotations from J. Krishnamurti, a writer previously unknown to me. The main idea is that teachers should do more than raise their students' test scores; they should teach the whole child, which crucially means respecting their differences and helping them be the best of what they are, rather than vainly trying to make them all into little copies of ourselves.

My favorite part is this quotation from Krishnamurti's book called Education and the Significance of Life.

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.

Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. It takes many subtle forms; and in its self-righteous aspect, it is very obstinate. The desire to ‘’serve” with the unconscious longing to dominate is difficult to understand. Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those whom we seek to control?

Larry Cuban on what makes great teachers

Larry Cuban talks about what makes a "great" teacher. He make a distinction between a good teacher and a successful teacher.

But for many other parents, practitioners, and researchers, a “great” teacher goes beyond high achievement. They want their children’s teachers—reflecting another age-old tradition of teaching—to work daily for the wellbeing of the child, see students as whole human beings, believe in active learning, create structures for students to collaborate and explore.