Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker columnist, will be the opening speaker at NECC. I have read a couple of his books (Outliers, Blink, Tipping Point). I wasn’t that impressed by Blink, but I found many of the concepts advanced in Outliers to be interesting and well reasoned. It has taken me a while to identify the approach – I have decided that it reminds me of Freakomomics – the type of logical analysis that makes sense in hindsight, but that only some folks are capable of seeing when looking forward. For whatever reason, Gladwell seems to address educational topics from time to time and I guess this is what prompted the invitation to address NECC. Not a researcher. Not an educator. Gladwell is an individual with some challenging ideas and an entertaining way of presenting them.
As an example, take a look at a recent New Yorker article regarding the futility of predicting performance at the next level (pro quarterback and classroom teacher). As I understand the argument the skills necessary to succeed are difficult to teach, but they can sometimes be spotted in the wild. The proposal then seems to be to LOWER the barriers to trying, offer a low starting salary with heavy mentoring, but heavily reward those who seem to have IT because IT can make a larger enough difference in student achievement to be worth the process and the extra incentives. I hope I have caught the gist here. This type of article frustrates me. Not because the conclusion seems to indicate that what those of us who work to prepare teachers matter little, but because the logic of the analysis relies on positions offered by individuals in fields I do not follow (e.g., economics) without citations. I have no way to evaluate whether it is true that a great teacher is worth a year and a half in student achievement compared to a poor teachers generating half year gains without the opportunity to evaluate the data. Am I to believe that the Journal of Educational Psychology and the American Educational Research Journal would not be all over carefully measured effects of this magnitude? Is this supposed to be some kind of conspiracy? Perhaps someone will send me the references.
P.S. – This post popped up several weeks later – comprehensive summary and interesting discussion