Pianta’s ploy: Catch the teachers who pay attention
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Robert Pianta studies “withitness,” even if he doesn’t call it that.UVA PHOTO BY DAN ADDISON
What if classroom size, education spending, and even school quality aren’t really important? What if all of a teacher’s fancy degrees and years of service mean nothing? And what if the only truly important predictor of classroom success is something unknowable at the outset of a teacher’s career?
This is the premise of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in the New Yorker and one which is sure to provoke terror among teachers unaccustomed to objective measures of their abilities.
One person not terrorized is Robert Pianta. The dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, he plays a starring role in Gladwell’s story, “Most Likely To Succeed,” which appears in the style/idea mag’s December 15 edition.
Using the example of professional football quarterbacks— whose NFL performance often bears no resemblance to their college play— Gladwell paints a picture of teaching skill as a great unknown, but something that Pianta and other Curryites are trying to assess using CLASS, their Classroom Assessment Scoring System.
CLASS attempts to measure what Pianta calls a teacher’s “regard for student perspective.” But that’s what others might call “eyes in the back of their head,” “a gift for noticing,” or a term coined by another educational researcher which Gladwell seems to fancy: “withitness.”
In recent years, Gladwell has become the go-to guy for rethinking conventional wisdom. A year ago, he subtly challenged the entire field of criminal profiling with a devastating New Yorker article called “Dangerous Minds,” and his new book, Outliers, which challenges the great man historical theory, currently rests atop the best-seller lists.
Pianta isn’t the first UVA prof to inspire the über-journalist. Gladwell credits Strangers to Ourselves, by UVA’s Timothy Wilson, which appears to have fueled much of Gladwell’s best-selling 2005 book Blink, as “probably the most influential book I’ve ever read.”
One gets the sense from reading Gladwell’s latest tale that Pianta might be on to something, that “withitness”— despite the funny name— might be the next big thing in education.
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Parents and students would universally agree with Pianta’s theories. Just hope the decision makers catch on. I spent a good deal of energy trying to convince the administration of my daughter’s school to get rid of a bad teacher and it was close to impossible.
” students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.
and all this applies to parents too, they’re kids first teachers
great article!
“One of the things the teacher is doing is creating a holding space for that. And what distinguishes her from other teachers is that she flexibly allows the kids to move and point to the book. She’s not rigidly forcing the kids to sit back.”
too bad our great school administrators choose to move lousy teachers rather than booting them. why continue the pattern of poor teaching and administrating? accountability in government schools is lacking!
The New Yorker is a style/idea mag? Sounds like the writer hasn’t read The New Yorker much.