Withitness

Out of all the articles I have read so far during this class, the one I understood the most was out of The New Yorker, Most Likely to Succeed, by Malcolm Gladwell, dated December 15, 2008. The article is based on the single question: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? Mr. Gladwell says there are certain jobs where almost nothing you learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching. He talks a great deal about predicting success in football with success in teaching through several stories.

Mr. Gladwell states one of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Just today we received the scores for our fifth grade students from the Terra Nova standardized tests taken earlier in the year, so this article hits even closer to home for me.

The story goes on to say suppose teacher A and teacher B both teach a classroom of third graders who score in the 50^th percentile on reading and math tests on the first day of school. When these same students are retested, at the end of the year, teacher A’s class scores at the 70^th percentile, while teacher B’s students have fallen to the 40^th percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective teacher A is as a teacher that teacher B. I disagree with this theory.

Malcolm states, “It’s only a crude measure, of course.” He believes a teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. There are so many other factors involved when it comes down to how much is learned in a classroom in this day and age.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. My question is who decides what a “very bad” or a “very good” teacher looks like?

Another educational researcher, Jacob Kounin, once did an analysis of “desist” events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior. He talks about a few different events, and concludes with how a teacher desists – her tone of voice, her attitudes, her choice of words, appears to make no difference at all in maintaining an orderly classroom. After reviewing the videotape of a chain of misbehavior, he noticed what was really significant was not how the teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability “withitness,” which can be defined as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: “I know what you are doing”) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial “eyes in the back of her head.”

It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. 

Trish Lacey