Little advice goes long way, even for teachers

It was 1998 and only the third time a modern PGA golf tournament had come to Vancouver, so I took my 11-year-old golf-enthusiast son to see the “biggies.”

There, on the practice putting green, we found the unmistakable figure of three-time major winner Payne Stewart.

As we watched, Stewart missed several 10-foot putts, and we heard him ask his caddy: “What am I doing?”

Without speaking, the caddy gently moved Stewart’s right elbow closer to his body. Now Stewart’s putts began to roll across the green and into the hole. “Thanks,” he said. Here was one of the best player on the planet asking for advice from someone whose judgment, experience and discretion he trusted.

I couldn’t help but think of the times in a classroom I would have, just once in a while, benefited from having someone whose experience might have helped me get a lesson back on track when what I was doing wasn’t working.

Even for lessons that were working, having a trusted observer there every now and then, someone who might have picked up on some minor technical glitch that was inhibiting the delivery of a really good lesson, well, that would have been welcome.

Was it the way I was asking questions? Was I waiting long enough for a response? Was I teaching to the boys but not the girls? Had I not initially explained the purpose of the lesson in a way that brought everyone on board? Was I talking too much? How often did I pause the lesson and check for understanding before proceeding?

An experienced observer would not have deluged me with advice, but, like Stewart’s caddy, would have zeroed in on one aspect of my practice and given me something that would make a difference.

Teaching is a performing art. It’s part technique, part experience, part commitment to the mission a teacher takes on — the growth and development of the kids with whom he or she meets for 185 or so days each year.

Assessing the quality of that performance cannot be simply reduced to some kind of statistical scoring system, any more than the quality of Stewart’s golf game could be judged entirely by the score.

Reducing the assessment of teaching to some mathematical certainty has been tried, and always falls short of understanding what teaching is really all about.

Thirty-five years ago, William S. Sanders, a statistician, tried to do that, and his teacher-assessment method attracted a host of reformers and lawmakers while leading to some of the most bitter conflicts in American education.

To evaluate teachers fairly, Sanders argued, it was necessary to calculate an expected growth in performance for each student in each subject, based on past test performance, then compare those predictions with their actual growth. Outside-of-school factors such as talent, wealth and home life were included as “value added” factors in each student’s expected growth or lack of same.

But predictably enough, when Sanders began calculating valueadded scores en masse, he immediately saw that the ratings fell into a “normal” distribution, or bell curve. A small number of teachers had unusually bad results, a small number had unusually good results, and most were somewhere in the middle.

In other words, in assessing teacher performance just by the numbers, no matter how many factors were included and how sophisticated were the calculations, nothing new emerged — at least nothing educational leaders did not know before.

Closer to the reality of teaching is the Toledo public school system, which has achieved national recognition for its Intern-Intervention Program. The Toledo plan provides a performance tool based on peer coaching and evaluation.

The program, which was started in 1981, provides both a foundation for professional development of beginning teachers and an evaluation system that detects and screens out those who show little aptitude for the classroom. Additionally, experienced teachers who are severely deficient in performance are given intensive peer assistance to bring their work to acceptable standards.

For these individuals, peer intervention delivers the experienced professional help from peers who are themselves excellent teachers.

The Toledo system is not without critics, who want to include some aspects of Sanders’ “value added” system alongside the peer-assistance program.

But had Stewart just counted his missed putts and not turned to his caddy for practical advice on his putting stroke, he would have spent the rest of that day missing makeable putts and not added his top-three finish to his remarkable but regrettably short career. Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.