There was an article that Malcolm Gladwell had in The New Yorker several weeks ago, in which he made the case, and I think he's right, that no one knows how to predict who's going to be a good teacher. You can't look at credentials, they're just not predictive. You can't look at college grades. Some people are fabulous and some people aren't and you don't know until they start teaching. So what that would imply is that you have a system where lots of teachers get hired and most of them aren't retained, because you essentially learn, by watching them, who's good and who isn't.
The system we have is exactly the opposite. You know, you get tenure after two years. There's virtually no evidence about how good you are, nor do you have much of an opportunity to learn how to be good, so all this effort is put into the initial screening. Then, once you get the job, it takes dynamite to get you out of it.
(The New Yorker, Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?, December 15, 2008) (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell)
Kall: My son is 19; he's a freshman in college. He has already learned, because he took some college courses while he was in high school, not to take a course without checking out ratemyprofessors.com.
Schwartz: Well, that's... The quality of teaching is critical, but I'm not sure that ratemyprofessors.com is the way to find out about qualities, other than how entertaining the course is. Again, the easy way to evaluate is a bunch of bubbles on a form, but it probably doesn't tell you much about the actual quality of the teaching.
Kall: So there's really not anything in place within the teaching system to do a proper evaluation of a teacher, then?
Schwartz: Here's an interesting thing: Swarthmore is a school where the emphasis is on teaching. They expect us to do our own research, but the emphasis is squarely on teaching. We have no institutionalized course evaluations. If you want to give them out, you can, each professor, and they're for you, they're not published anywhere. On the other hand, when people come up for promotion, they solicit 40 or 50 letters from students - open-ended, discursive accounts of the strengths and weaknesses of the teacher.
Kall: The administration does that?
Schwartz: That's correct. That's the way you get tenure, that's the way you get promoted to full professor. So, instead of relying on the easy evaluation, the so-called objective evaluation, of checking boxes on rating forms, they want students to write narratives about what your strengths and weaknesses were, and those letters are scrutinized. I've done this now many times when junior colleagues of mine have been up for promotion - those letters are scrutinized to try to develop a sense of what each individual's strengths and weaknesses are. So there are standards, very high standards, but there is not standardization. We can afford to do that, it's a small school, we have a lot of money, it's time consuming, it's effortful, we can afford it, but I think going for what's easy is never going to get you the excellence that we aspire to.
I think the same thing is true in other professions. There is a slow sort of revolution building in medical training, because you develop these people now with unbelievable technical skills who don't know how to treat patients. They know how to treat organ systems. How do you teach smart people to be doctors?
There are several places now where you get assigned a patient right at the start of your medical training - there's always someone looking over your shoulder, but you see that patient all year long. You get involved with that patient, the patient's life circumstances, the patient's family, and so on, so you know how to be a doctor to people rather than a doctor to organ systems.
Students shadow doctors. You'll spend six weeks shadowing a family doctor, six weeks shadowing an obstetrician, six weeks shadowing an oncologist, looking over their shoulders as they deal with the problems that real-life people present, rather than just organ systems. The aim in all of this is not to increase people's technical skill, which presumably is high, it's to increase people's wisdom in dealing with people who live complicated lives that are full of constraints and problems. The presumption is that this will dramatically improve the quality of medical care.
So we can do that. We have a sense of the ways in which training has gone off the rails and how we can put it back on the rails. It takes will to make these changes and probably it takes some financial support, since changes of these kinds are never easy to implement, so greasing the wheels a little bit with... lubricating the process with some money might encourage more places to change what they do.
Kall: So you're talking about investing in teaching wisdom.
Schwartz: Well, I'm talking about investing in reshaping systems so that people can learn wisdom. I don't think you can give lectures in a classroom on how to be wise. You can make sure people who are coming into professions are mentored by wise, experienced practitioners and have experiences that enable them to start to develop wisdom themselves. The hope is that with enough such experience and enough examples and enough mentoring, you'll end up with, not just technically skilled practitioners, but wise ones.
Kall: So this is really where you're talking about taking this new look at the way that education is done. I've read a bit of John Paul Gatto, who won an award for Best Teacher in New York at one point, and then he just got disgusted with the system. He describes how schools today are really based on a model that was designed to create good factory workers and obedient soldiers.
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