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A review by banandrew
Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) by Elizabeth Green
3.0
"The Americans produced wonderful intellectual work on what teaching could look like, but they had failed to implement any of it."
TLDR: an optimistic overview of educational theory and policy in the last fifty years as it has applied to the American education system.
Elizabeth Green follows a few key American educators over the past decades, many of whom have bounced between academia and the public education system while trying to improve teaching. She weaves in the history of statistical methods, standardized testing, and educational policy changes that have been interspersed with developments in education, and explains the way they interact and, more often than not, the barriers that they create to applying educational theory more effectively. But the overall narrative is a positive, optimistic one, as the book illustrates a continuously iterating approach to how we educate and how we evaluate teacher effectiveness.
It's interesting to compare this book to the world of modern ed-tech startups. "Building a Better Teacher" makes no mention of MOOCs, Coursera, Khan Academy. Elizabeth Green simply describes the key problems we've identified in public education, typically around teaching style and class structure: how teachers keep the attention of young students, how they encourage group discussion and interactive exploration of ideas. In a nearby sphere, Audrey Watters writes and speaks about how the one problem today's ed-tech startups meaningfully solve is distribution---and while this is great for many users, it doesn't at all address the critical problems that Green describes in the American public school system.
The writing reads like a Gladwell book---with more of a storytelling bent than an academic one, it's easy to pick up and tear through the 300 pages in just a few hours. There's a little too much focus on the personalities involved in the education world at the expense of time spent on actual education theory and policy. But that only barely detracts from the main narratives that the author shares.
All that said, I'm not an educator and I'm not at all versed in the world of education theory and policy. I don't have enough context to judge the accuracy of the book or the forward-looking optimism it leaves the reader with. I'd be interested to hear from others who've read this and have other recommendations in the field.
TLDR: an optimistic overview of educational theory and policy in the last fifty years as it has applied to the American education system.
Elizabeth Green follows a few key American educators over the past decades, many of whom have bounced between academia and the public education system while trying to improve teaching. She weaves in the history of statistical methods, standardized testing, and educational policy changes that have been interspersed with developments in education, and explains the way they interact and, more often than not, the barriers that they create to applying educational theory more effectively. But the overall narrative is a positive, optimistic one, as the book illustrates a continuously iterating approach to how we educate and how we evaluate teacher effectiveness.
It's interesting to compare this book to the world of modern ed-tech startups. "Building a Better Teacher" makes no mention of MOOCs, Coursera, Khan Academy. Elizabeth Green simply describes the key problems we've identified in public education, typically around teaching style and class structure: how teachers keep the attention of young students, how they encourage group discussion and interactive exploration of ideas. In a nearby sphere, Audrey Watters writes and speaks about how the one problem today's ed-tech startups meaningfully solve is distribution---and while this is great for many users, it doesn't at all address the critical problems that Green describes in the American public school system.
The writing reads like a Gladwell book---with more of a storytelling bent than an academic one, it's easy to pick up and tear through the 300 pages in just a few hours. There's a little too much focus on the personalities involved in the education world at the expense of time spent on actual education theory and policy. But that only barely detracts from the main narratives that the author shares.
All that said, I'm not an educator and I'm not at all versed in the world of education theory and policy. I don't have enough context to judge the accuracy of the book or the forward-looking optimism it leaves the reader with. I'd be interested to hear from others who've read this and have other recommendations in the field.