Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)

Written by Elizabeth Green

Narrated by Karen Saltus

We've all had great teachers who opened new worlds, maybe even changed our lives. What made them so great?

Everyone agrees that a great teacher can have an enormous impact. Yet we still don't know what, precisely, makes a teacher great. Is it a matter of natural-born charisma? Or does exceptional teaching require something more?
Building a Better Teacher introduces a new generation of educators exploring the intricate science underlying their art. A former principal studies the country's star teachers and discovers a set of common techniques that help children pay attention. Two math teachers videotape a year of lessons and develop an approach that has nine-year-olds writing sophisticated mathematical proofs. A former high school teacher works with a top English instructor to pinpoint the key interactions a teacher must foster to initiate a rich classroom discussion. Through their stories, and the hilarious and heartbreaking theater that unfolds in the classroom every day, Elizabeth Green takes us on a journey into the heart of a profession that impacts every child in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469090856

Elizabeth Green

Elizabeth Green graduated from the University of the Arts with a BFA in theater arts. They have contributed to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Hobart, Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, fwriction : review, and others. Their hobbies include native gardening and aikido. Hailing from Upstate New York—Greenwich, to be specific—Elizabeth now lives outside Philadelphia with their husband and two cats.

Reviews for Building a Better Teacher

[dmturner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A clear, readable history of US teaching reform since the mid-20th century. A candid look at efforts such as charter schools, TFA, accountability, No Child Left Behind, and Common Core. A discussion of the Japanese jugyokenkyu process, and the way that the Japanese made the American reform of NCTM work so well when the Americans couldn't that researchers in the US thought it was an entirely Japanese reform. A biographical tracing of the work of Magdalene Lampert, Deborah Ball, David Cohen, and Pam Grossman. And an argument that teachers are made, not born, and that good teaching can be taught.

American public education by its nature lacks an infrastructure for learning to teach, an agreement on what to teach, a set of central subject-matter competencies, and a consistent agreement about what makes for good teaching. David Cohen calls it the "coherence problem." And most of the reforms are of the "black box" variety - changing the input and assessing the output, without looking at what goes on inside the box.

I highly recommend the book. It ought to be a first reading for anyone who wants to teach or supervise teachers, and for administrators who want to help their faculty improve. It is probably too optimistic, and perhaps a little too easy to read, but it gets some important main ideas right and doesn't misrepresent the history of teaching reform in the US.

[benuathanasia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing. It spends hours (I read the audiobook) building up a particular education style as being the end-all be-all in educational perfection, only to tear it apart at the last moment without offering too much on how to improve upon it. The Japanese style/culture of education is the only one that didn't get this treatment, but there wasn't much to model off of.

[bzbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The thesis of this book is that teaching in America overall is ineffective not because of insufficient spending, lack of teacher autonomy, or lack of accountability, but because of inconsistent teacher education infrastructure. While other more educationally successful nations, such as Japan, and some schools in the United States, such as certain charter schools, have a consistent curriculum, testing, and effective teacher education culture, including a emphasis on feedback and improvement, the United States as a whole is incoherent in it's approach leaving many teachers effectively winging it. Without this infrastructure in place, neither autonomy, in which teachers are treated as professionals and left to use their best judgement, nor accountability, in which teachers are promoted and fired based upon such measures as "value-added" statistics, provide a solution to the deficit in teaching effectiveness that the United States experiences today. The author outlines how the Common Core standards and education researchers in the United States are driving towards a solution that incorporates such a educational infrastructure while pushback from teachers and states rights proponents are harming the effort. She provides extensive examples of what effective teaching and effective teacher education looks like both in the United States and Japan as well as some pitfalls and historical details of the development.

At the end of the book, the problems appear unresolved and I would have liked to have seen more on what the author thinks is the likely outcome over the next few decades. The core of this book could be boiled down more succinctly and still have been effective in getting its point across. I would have also liked the author to elaborate on why other countries seem to have figured out how to roll out educational infrastructure decades ago while the United States has not. She does this briefly by blaming the federalist system in the United States but this doesn't seem satisfying to me as an explanation.

[susan.macura · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

As a future teacher I mistakenly thought this book could offer some insights into how teaching works and how everyone could learn to be a better teacher. After all, this is how the book was promoted – see its cover. I read it, but wish I had not wasted my time. I got nothing out of it.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book at war with itself. It wants to believe that charter schools are committed to improving education (and not to dumping students who don’t do well with their formats, as public schools can’t do, and to producing investor returns), but its own story is about how the basic thrust of the big charter proponents has been wrong. By focusing on controlling student behavior and measuring “outcomes,” American school reform has managed to alienate teachers without changing teacher behavior in the ways that the practices of other countries and the evidence from empirical research show actually helps teachers teach and children learn. We’ve yelled at teachers, dumped new methods on them without coherence or sufficient training, and devalued professional development, when mentoring and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge are what’s needed. We’ve pretended that teaching is a natural gift that you either can or can’t do, and not something that requires more than loving children to succeed at. As one of Green’s interviewees points out, you wouldn’t train doctors by dumping a bunch of them into a hospital and firing the bottom-performing 10% at the end of the year. Despite the account of methods that do work to help teachers succeed, this ends up being a really depressing book; it’s hard to believe that America will commit to the necessary support, when it’s so much easier to test students and declare their teachers successes or failures.