Global Achievement Gap: Chapter 4

Chapter four was about reinventing the education profession. Wagner talked a lot about how we need to make improvements on how our teachers are being prepared and evaluated for teaching.

I personal agree with one of his quotes in this chapter, "To improve students learning we much first work on improving teaching and the coaching of teachers." I think we all need someone to give us input and let us know how we are doing and what we could do better. That's the only way we will know if what we are doing is working and whether or not to change what we are doing.

He also talked about the evaluation systems our schools have. For the most part, principals come into the classroom to observe your teaching for maybe about 10-15 minutes then review the evaluation later on. Wagner talked about how he was excited for his first evaluation because he really wanted some insite on what he's doing and well and what he could work on, but he later found out all the evaluation was going to be was a bunch of cateogories were the principal circles satisfactory needs improvement and there's a few in between there. In no way did his principal give him valuable and useable feedback. This is a clear example of why evaluations and observations are not improving our teaching.

"Learning walks" were also mentioned in this chapter. He stressed the importance of talking about what we see and what we want for the students. Teachers need to do these learning walks and get insight from each other to find "good instruction" for their students. Along with the learning walks video taped evaluations were also mentioned so we could actually see ourselves teach or even go into other classrooms to help improve your teaching.

We also need a clear definition of rigor. What we excpect our students to know and be able to do. For example: colleges want essentially the same skills-critical thinking, but this brings up the question, how many teachers actually know how to teach that. When it comes to the k-12 classes there really is no clear definition of rigor, no essential goals for the students besides passing the standardized tests.