forgetting to remember

thanks to sarah for posting the article about bill gates, and thanks to jessica for pointing out the comments in response to the article. i always enjoy reading the comments after articles that seem polarizing or somewhat controversial and trying to figure out what kind of people are reading and responding.

this sentence in the middle of one of the longer comments jumped out at me:

there is no linear correlation between quality of teaching and student performance, and for one very good reason: nobody has the slightest idea, beyond common sense, of what constitutes quality teaching.

i agree with the gist of this statement, although i would argue that nobody has the slightest idea of what constitutes quality teaching because no one is using common sense. when i think about the teachers i had in grade school/middle school/high school, most of the ones that come to mind didn't teach subjects that i loved or even did spectacularly in -- instead, the ones i remember as being great teachers are the ones who worked hard to find ways to facilitate understanding in those students who didn't "get it" the first try, and the ones who didn't balk at getting slightly off-track or incorporating digressions and slightly unorthodox activities into their lessons if it was going to help people learn.

it's hard for me to believe that the people who think standardized testing is a good way to measure teacher quality, let alone student achievement, have ever taken the time to reflect upon their own experience with teachers in schools. what can we do to make them remember?