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  • Teaching Teachers

    Research shows good teaching makes a big difference in how much kids learn. But the United States lacks an effective system for training new teachers or helping them get better once they're on the job.

    August 27, 2015 | by Emily Hanford

    Teaching Teachers
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    Teaching Teachers
    0:00 | 00:52:51

    Research shows good teaching makes a big difference in how much kids learn. But the United States lacks an effective system for training new teachers or helping them get better once they’re on the job.

    This documentary examines why, and asks what it would take to improve American teaching on a wide scale. We meet researchers who are trying to understand what makes teaching complex, and how to determine whether someone is ready to be a teacher.

    We also visit U.S. schools that are taking a page from Japan and radically rethinking the way they approach the idea of teacher improvement.

    "Teaching Teachers" is an audio documentary from the Educate podcast — stories about education, opportunity, and how people learn.

    An American way of teaching

    In 1993, a group of researchers set out to do something that had never been done before. They would hire a videographer to travel across the United States and record a random sample of eighth-grade math classes. What they found revealed a lot about American teaching.


    Rethinking teacher preparation

    In the United States, teaching isn't treated as a profession that requires extensive training like law or medicine. Teaching is seen as something you can figure out on your own, if you have a natural gift for it. But looking for gifted people won't work to fill the nation's classrooms with teachers who know what they're doing.


    A different approach to teacher learning: Lesson study

    In the United States, we tend to think that improving education is about improving teachers - recruiting better ones, firing bad ones. But the Japanese think about improving teaching. It's a very different idea.


    Thinking about math from someone else’s perspective

    "What you do when you’re teaching is you think about other people’s thinking. You don’t think about your own thinking; you think what other people think. That’s really hard." -Deborah Ball


    Credits

    Correspondent and Lead Producer: Emily Hanford
    Associate Producer: Suzanne Pekow
    Editor: Catherine Winter
    Executive Editor and Host: Stephen Smith
    Digital Producer: Andy Kruse
    Audio Mixing: Craig Thorson
    Project Manager: Ellen Guettler
    Director, APM Arts & Ideas: Peter Clowney
    Interns: Ryan Katz, Minna Zhou, Emily Haavik

    The American RadioWorks team includes Samara Freemark and Sasha Aslanian. Special thanks to the Hatcher Group and Kohnstamm Communications.

    Support for "Teaching Teachers" comes from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Lumina Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Spencer Foundation. A note of disclosure: Deborah Ball is chair of the Spencer Foundation board and the Spencer Foundation has given money in the past to support research by Akihiko Takahashi. The foundation has no editorial influence on ARW's coverage.


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