Speculating on the Secrets of Teaching

Interesting conversation between Amanda Ripley and Elizabeth Green. A few highlights:

… I have close friends and family members who are teachers, but my appreciation for the work was skin deep. I thought about the physical challenge — like, you have to get up so early, and you have to blow kids’ noses. But it’s actually really cognitively challenging …

… Once you believe kids are quite capable and actually more capable than adults when it comes to learning, then that opens up a whole cascading realm of possibilities…

… In the US, partly because of federalism, we have no central government that can really create coherence. The Feds just keep pushing the one button they have—which is accountability. This idea that if we can just put more pressure on schools, they will produce…

… When you have not done the serious work of selecting and training teachers thoughtfully, you end up having to do all the work on the back end—which is unfair to teachers…

… Why not a reality teaching show? The idea of getting people to watch a teacher teach in a really masterful way and then talk about what she did…

Read the entire conversation here.