http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n42/

•Institute is called boot-camp for a reason. (I haven’t been to boot camp, but one of the people who attended with me was in one of the first women to attend one of the Academies. She compared the two.)

•I found a blog entry written by someone at MY institute. The TFA intensity shifts after institute, enough that it’s hard to remember how crazy that period is.

•I didn’t learn as much theory/ed history from TFA as I did in my college ed classes.

•The college experiences I draw on most in my classroom are from observing at the local high school. TFA pushes observations more than my college’s ed dept did. (I was lucky in taking the course I did.)

•TFA’s support, the feedback cycle, uses observations to give specific suggestions for improvement. (Always focused on student achievement.) Based on a few online conversations, I think this is more concrete feedback than other first and second year teachers receive. The TAL rubric was designed to provide a common language and it does.

I would agree with your assessments of both Gladwell’s considerable gifts and the articles, vis a vis doing their jobs via summary versus new thinking. However, I’ll stick to my guns about the Gladwell article. In particular he cites at length the extremely problematic work of economist Eric Hanushek as the yardstick for “teacher quality”; and while he gives lip service to the idea that such measures are “crude” (never mind incorrect), he does little to offset such crudeness in the article. I do indeed find this “ill-informed,” to the point that it taints his argument irrevocably.

Neither article breaks new ground – they are both absolutely correct.

The I was teacher-trained (and the way I suppose most of us were teacher-trained) is akin to putting a non-swimmer in front of a blackboard for ten weeks to learn the finer points of swimming and then after the ten weeks are up, telling the student, “Okay, you should be able to swim now!” and tossing that student into the water. That is basically what we have done with teacher-training up to now: throw them into the water without a life ring and hope they figure it out based on what was taught to them. An effective teacher-training program should coincide with university studies, but should have the teacher involved in the classroom from day one. Maybe get the feel of it the first semester and then really get into the whole shebang the second semester.

The article cites studies that show that the pairing model used by Chicago schools does not significantly affect student achievement, but I can tell you this: Studies done here in New Orleans on the effectiveness of our Teach for America teachers show that student achievement (as measured by test scores of course) increased more for those students taught by the Teach for America teachers than they did for the veteran teachers.