After a year in Mr. Taylor’s class, the first little boy’s scores went up—way up. He had started below grade level and finished above. On average, his classmates’ scores rose about 13 points—which is almost 10 points more than fifth-graders with similar incoming test scores achieved in other low-income D.C. schools that year. On that first day of school, only 40 percent of Mr. Taylor’s students were doing math at grade level. By the end of the year, 90 percent were at or above grade level.
As for the other boy? Well, he ended the year the same way he’d started it—below grade level. In fact, only a quarter of the fifth-graders at Plummer finished the year at grade level in math—despite having started off at about the same level as Mr. Taylor’s class down the road.
Read the rest of Amanda Ripley's article on what makes a great teacher.
[HT: Arts & Letters Daily]
2 comments:
I had the pleasure of visiting a history class in a high school that serves a low income community in New York City. Here too was a teacher taht was changing the lives of kids who might otherwise never feel the thrill of learning.
His approach was to focus on helping kids learn to think broadly by using mind mapping. The day I was there, the kids were just finishing the maps they had made about the events that led up to the Revolutionary War. It was amazing to see, not dense, 10-page essays... but light, colorful maps that showed quickly that the students had understood the main drivers of the war, and how they were connected to each other.
I personally think that using these kinds of visual tools rather than sentences, paragraphs and pages of text...this better prepares students for the world they will live in. I say this as a writer who appreciates the beauty of a well-crafted sentence. But the fact is that prose is slowly disappearing in much of our discourse, as multimedia asserts its strength.
By giving our children visual ways to capture and communicate complex information, we will be preparing them for success in an increasingly complex world. Feel free to visit http://mapthink.blogspot.com/ for more info.
Take a look at the KIPP Academy website.
I heard about it several years ago and was gratified to learn lately that someone we know is soon to become a principal at one of these places. I have no idea if any ARRA funds will flow their way but that program was well in place several years ago.
In the same way that my fears evaporated (with the spread of the Web) that the next generation would not know how to read or write, this and similar efforts like the ones you linked makes me more optimistic about the future of education.
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