Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Performance related pay for teachers: a dialectic
Thesis: Teachers go mad mental crazy when you ever suggest putting them on performance related pay.
Antithesis: On the other hand, education is actually the performance-measuringest business you ever did see. At least a quarter of the workload of the average teacher is performance measurement. I would guess that your average teacher carries out more assessments of someone else's performance than any other category of worker, supervisory or non-supervisory, anywhere in the world.
Synthesis: It is surely nonsense, therefore, that teachers' performance can't be measured, or that the flaws in student performance evaluations can't be corrected for. If it's not possible to measure how well a class of students have been taught, then this undermines the whole logical basis of the system.
Hypothesis: Teachers object to performance-related pay so strenuously precisely because they know how arbitrary, biased and unfair their own assessments of their students are. Apparently it's possible to like totally game the student evaluation system by blatant pandering, easy grading and a bit of showbiz. I wonder how many undeserved A-grades have been handed out to good-looking students who sit near the front, ask one sycophantic question per class in a loud voice, and feign interest in the professor's fuck-dull book?
Prosthesis: It might be right that:
"If the administration at A&M were serious about improving classroom performance, they'd invest quite a bit more money in pedagogical training for their graduate students; hiring more professors and reducing class sizes; offering release-time for professors to design new courses; and so on and so forth"
Sounds good to me (although the word "pedagogy" always makes me think of dodgy priests somehow). On the other hand, if the administration at A&M did make such a big investment in good-teacher-talking-stuff, then you'd certainly hope that they might follow it up with a bit of a look to see if it worked or not.
Photosynthesis: And if they were doing that, it wouldn't seem like the daftest idea to bung a couple of quid to the bloke whose teaching turned out to be the best, just to encourage the rest.Labels: posts which are not necessarily consistent with views previously expressed (dialectically)
this item posted by the management 1/14/2009 02:29:00 PM
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