Title:
Testing New Ways to Recognize What Makes a Good
Teacher
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
In recent years, Bill Gates has given financial
support to improve American education. In two
thousand nine, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
launched the Measures of Effective Teaching project.
The project tests new ways to recognize what makes a
good teacher. Its goal is to help educators and
policymakers identify and support good teaching.The
study is being carried out in public school systems
in seven American cities. Thousands of teachers
volunteered to take part. They agreed to have their
classes recorded on video, but only for observation
by expert researchers.Last spring, the project
collected digital videos of thirteen thousand
lessons in the classrooms taught by the teachers.
They were in grades four through nine. Researchers
also collected information from students. They asked
students to report their opinions of each teacher's
classroom. Students were also tested in mathematics,
English and biology. Officials recently released
early results of the project study. The report says
teachers' past success in raising student scores on
state tests is one of the strongest signs of their
ability to do so again. This is known as a teacher's
"value-added."The teachers with the highest
value-added scores on state tests also help students
understand math or show reading ability. The results
also say students know effective teaching when they
experience it. The students gave comments on whether
or not their teachers cared about them. They also
gave opinions on how much teachers controlled or
managed student behavior in the classroom.The report
found that classrooms where students reported
positive experiences were more likely to show
greater learning gains.Another finding shows that
combining different sources of information helps
administrators provide better comments and
suggestions to teachers. In many cases,
administrators had been basing their comments on
student test scores only.The Measures of Effective
Teaching project continues through twenty twelve
when final results will be released. Researchers
plan to test a new measure that examines what a
teacher knows about how to teach a subject. Experts
say these findings could also help create better
training and development for teachers.For VOA
Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
