I think a few districts are trying to figure out what makes a teacher good/excellent and figure out how to get all their teachers up to that point. Shortly before my mother had to retire due to early-onset Alzheimer's, she spent 3 years as a mentor to new teachers and helped them cope with the stress, taught them how to plan lessons properly, and made sure that they could maintain order in a classroom. The result was better teachers and lower turnover.
you mean they didn't get taught that when they got their masters in education.
I have to wonder too how many times lessons need to be planned. Do math and English go through radical changes every year? Do good teachers each need to teach multiplication in their own special way?
Did your degree teach you exactly how to work in your profession? Do you know any that does? Degrees teach you mostly theory, but applying theory to the real world takes experience, and that doesn't come overnight.
Obviously the concepts in math, English, or other subjects may not change much over the years, but the environment certainly does. Teachers have to learn how to tailor their methods to meet the needs of the whole class. That means being able to understand where children are in their development cycle, recognizing what learning methods work best for each student, and striking a balance so that the needs of all students are met. The good teachers are the ones that learn how to do this, and have developed the confidence to maintain order and discipline. --Providing support and mentoring can make a huge difference between having a new teacher succeed or fail.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, you've never taught a class before, have you? Good teaching is not something you can package up, and lesson plans are very idiosyncratic creative works. They are not readily transferable between teachers.
No matter how good the teaching materials you get, from the school/textbook/other teachers, that's just the start of a good lesson. You have to review the material yourself, and tailor it to your own style and preferences, and then revise it based on how well it actually worked. I can still spend hours revising lessons I've delivered several times before.
It is possible to deliver a pre-packaged lesson from another teacher or the textbook company. But if you haven't put your own effort into customizing it, the students will recognize it as a sub-standard effort. And they'll treat you accordingly.
Good teaching is not something you can package up, and lesson plans are very idiosyncratic creative works. They are not readily transferable between teachers.
This simply isn't true. Direct Instruction (pre-scripted lesson plans given to all teachers) is well known to produce excellent results.
It's just fought against tooth and nail by teachers unions because a) it's boring to the teacher and b) it makes teachers easily replacable. But it works.
(Incidentally, I taught math for 5 years at the university level. I was flying blind - I probably would have done better if I had a script to follow.)
Direct instruction works great for mechanical skills, because there is a 1:1 correspondence between that which is tested and that which is assessed, and because the goals are clear and discrete. If we're talking something like multiplication by two-digit numbers, or properly using semi-colons, those skills are mechanical enough that direct-instruction will work, and will probably work at least somewhat well, assuming that it does not become a slog for the students.
Personally, I'm willing to put up with scripted lessons, so long as the script works the way it should most of the time and so long as I've got the ability to modify if it needs modification. There is a distinct difference between a strong script and an incredibly constrictive script.
I'll still argue that teaching is as much an art as it is a science, but you're right that lesson plans can be transferred between teachers. I have no compunctions about stealing good ideas and good methodology, and have had success doing so.
Here are some broader concepts we can appropriate, which should be palatable to most good teachers:
1) Have a concrete goal, and reinforce it consistently until students are able to meet it.
2) Group students by ability (within a class, if necessary), so that everyone is constantly moving forward.
3) Make sure that there is a deliberate progression, or at least as close to one as possible. Not everything has a deliberate progression (writing, for example, is a pretty non-linear process once you get past a certain ability level).
4) Judge classroom progress by student achievement, rather than by the calendar.
The one reservation I have about Direct Instruction is that it removes some the ability of a lesson to go useful places. If I am teaching a lesson on metaphors while my class reads "The Great Gatsby" (which has impeccable metaphors), and a student says "Hey, when it describes Gatsby as 'dispensing starlight to casual moths', that's a metaphor, and it's parallel in theme to this poem we read two weeks ago"; this is exactly the type of thinking I want my students to be able to do, because it is the type of thinking that will be important later.
That said, if they do not know how to write grammatically complete sentences or how to multiply without a calculator, then I guess all the metaphors in the world can't save them.
(TL;DR: I generally agree in principle, but have reservations regarding practice)
I don't think there is any problem with a highly constrictive script if it works. Again, the teacher might be bored, but the purpose of school is educating the students, not entertaining teachers [1].
As for students advanced enough to make connections between metaphors in various literary works, go ahead and get off script. In fact, the few examples of DI scripts that I've seen do allow this - they tend to be flow charts, not screenplays. They instruct the teacher to skip/redo sections based on student performance on standardized diagnostic quizzes (i.e., go ahead and teach metaphors if they understand the use of commas.)
[1] Side note. I believe that "entertaining teachers" is why we tend to have so many literature classes, and a dearth of classes on factual writing. Teaching students to distill a spreadsheet+employee status reports into a department status report using only simple language is boring, but incredibly useful. I developed a lots of bad writing habits while an undergrad, which increased page count and obscured the vacuousness of my literary opinions. It took my PhD advisers about 2 years to beat those habits out of me.
I went to school to become an English teacher, but English courses at the collegiate level were intensely frustrating for the reasons you describe: vacuousness, self-aggrandizement, and a deliberate shift away from clarity and understandability.
Were it in my power, I'd have all students take courses in applied rhetoric. It's amazing how quickly all the bull goes away when everyone is able to see through it.
Again, I mostly agree with you, and would be okay with DI, by and large, if it were largely in flow-chart format.
The scripts I've seen (non-DI) are screenplays, and the schools that use these assess the teachers on their ability to memorize them. These scripts are blocked out down to 30-second intervals, which is ridiculous.
I work in a tutoring center which uses DI (in practice, if not in name), and I've seen great gains come from it. But every so often, it's necessary to break the script due to a larger issue at hand, one that the standardized diagnostic quizzes don't catch.
As an example, I had a student break down and start crying because she didn't understand how to multiply polynomials (and was in danger of failing her math course). After consoling her, we went all the way back to multiplying multi-digit numbers together, at which point I showed her how the multiplication algorithm works in expanded form (e.g. 123 * 256 = (100 + 20 + 3) * (200 + 50 + 6)), at which point she was able to see the parallel, and very quickly figured out multiplication of polynomials.
All the diagnostic quiz tested, though, was whether or not she could multiply, not whether or not she understood the algorithm. You could point to this and say "That's a failure of the diagnostic quiz", but I think it's probably more indicative of the impossibility of standards (whatever they may be) being completely and totally comprehensive and complete.
I can see the advantage of that approach to 'hard skills' like reading, phonetics, computation. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can envision it being applied to complex issues in biology, english or social studies.
I'm starting my fourth semester teaching undergraduate biology, hopefully a little less blind each semester. So far I've never seen a lesson plan from any source that I could just read over and then deliver to a class, but maybe they do in fact exist? Wouldn't that be nice!
the class is always filled with people that learn at different rates. does the teacher present the information at many different rates to deal with that? Wouldn't they need to do that every year?
The non BS answer is while math might not change, the standardized tests do. Every year the state will change what teachers are required to cover for each subject. Add in some new textbooks and shifting holidays and a good teacher will reorder their schedule each year, and then fine tune things around snow days etc.
PS: And let's not forget a little experimentation, keep what works and try out new ideas to replace what failed.
There's so much to be done in the presentation of material, and so much of that needs to be at least somewhat tailored to classes.
Even though I only substitute teach now (and teach writing workshops), I still do the same lesson a few times per day, and so will re-work lesson plans based on what is working with this particular group of students.
I've had classes where I can be pretty relaxed, and we can have useful discussions, and I've had classes where I had to keep them busy lest they get into fistfights (no joke).
Additionally, lesson plans need to be differentiated based on ability. The way I present participles to a class full of kids who stink at grammar is different from how I present participles to a group of honors kids who mostly get it.
One could try to argue that "If the teachers before you had done their jobs, all of these students would be at the same level", but even that isn't true, as students are at different levels by dint of different innate ability levels.
