How to Find the Best Teachers

There was a very interesting article in the 12/15/08 issue of The New Yorker. The title is:
Most Likely to Succeed:
How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

It's by Malcolm Gladwell, who is a talented reporter and good at taking a fresh look at things. He compares hiring teachers to NFL scouts predicting which draft picks will end up performing well in the NFL. He writes, "There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching." He goes on to describe some interesting studies of quality teaching being conducted by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Really fascinating.

Click here to read the full article.