Most Important Variable in Education – Teacher Quality

Agnes Stawicki

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Malcolm Gladwell, a University of Toronto graduate and author of bestselling books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outlyers, had some interesting ideas on improving education at the “Imagining Ontario’s Future” conference in Collingwood Ontario this past weekend.

While the McGuinty government has promised to decrease class sizes for elementary school children to provide a better education, Gladwell thinks smaller class sizes are “ludicrous” and a waste of money. “Even if you were to cut every class in Ontario in half, you’d improve the performance of Ontario’s schoolchildren by about five percentile points,” Gladwell said.

So what’s the solution? Improving teacher quality.

“The single most important variable in education success is the quality of the teacher,” Gladwell states, it has a “massive impact.” But not by increasing the standards or credentials of those entering the teaching profession, but rather finding a way to seek out those people that are truly great teachers.

Teaching is not what it used to be. It is much more complex now and requires teachers to not only be smart, but to have six or seven different roles in the classroom, and the only way to determine if a teacher is a good teacher, is to allow them to teach.

I think it’s a pretty amazing concept. I know that my ‘best’ teachers brought me to where I am now. They were the ones that guided me and brought out my strongest skills. Gladwell suggests the following idea for new teachers:

Get rid of teachers college
Hire new teachers on a 2 year probationary period and OBSERVE them
Make the decision. If they are a good teacher, keep them. If they are not, send them on their way. “This job is too important to have bad teachers”

Gladwell continues speaking about the complex world that we live in where problems are caused by a surplus of information. It is too difficult to analyze everything and find one solution. We need to experiment and determine what works best. The above plan is one of those experimentations.

You want to teach? Let’s see if you can first!

Keynote Address Part 2 – Malcolm Gladwell 5/14/10 from Collingwood Conference on Vimeo. The part where he speaks about education and class sizes begins at about 22:25, however I suggest you watch the entire address.