Morgans wrote:
"Matthew S. Whiting" wrote



When I was in school there were teachers able to motivate almost any
student and teachers that couldn't motivate anyone.


Matt



When did you graduate from high school? Not recently, I'll bet.

Not recently. 1977. However, there are still good teachers and bad
teachers and students who can be motivated. This has been true since
the time of the Greeks.


How do you measure motivational abilities?

By how well the students in a given teacher's class learn and perform.


It is all objective. I teach carpentry. I am the only one teaching that
subject at my school. How am I to be measured against other teachers? How
do teachers of other subjects get students into their classes, equally
capable of being motivated? The different levels of students are in
different classes, to appropriately challenge their abilities, or to bring
up performance levels of lower performing students. How do you compare the
teacher's motivational abilities, now?

If only it were all objective. Much of it is subjective, but that is
life. If you are a teacher that doesn't know the difference between
objective and subjective, then I can make a pretty quick assessment of
your competence. :-)

You measure the performance of students after they graduate from high
school and move to college or trade school. If all of your carpentry
students go on to carpentry vocational school and flunk out, then I'd
not rate you very highly as a carpentry teacher at the high school
level. I'm not claiming that performance evaluations are easy or
pristinely objective, but they are better than using "seat time" as an
evaluation metric. I evaluate a dozen scientists and engineers every
year. They all do different things in different areas of expertise.
However, I solicit feedback from their peers, from their subordinates
and combine that with my own observations. Not a perfect system, but
far better than using service time.


You will say, you "just know" who the teachers are that are the better
motivators. That is simply too objective, and too able for unfairness to
work its way in.

That would be too subjective. I agree that isn't the best way to do it,
but there are many other tools to use to get a reasonably accurate and
fair assessment.


There are no easy answers. When you have them, come and be our state
superintendent.

Never said they were easy. I'm not looking for easy, I'm looking for
better. Almost anything is better than using service time. That is the
easy way out. Requires no work at all on the part of the
administrators. What a cop out.


Matt