2816: [Part 1] On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practice Case Study by Cal Newport

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This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 2816 on great teachers and the remarkable life of a deliberate practice case study. Part 1 by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com In the numerator, jostamolic reading you blogs every single day of the year. Now, today's article is a little longer than normal, so read the first half today and then finish up the rest tomorrow. So, that'll get right to Part 1 as we optimize your life.

On great teachers and the remarkable life, a deliberate practice case study, Part 1 by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com. Predicting greatness. The impact of teachers is profound. If you rank the world's countries by their students' academic performance, the US is somewhere in the middle.

In a 2009 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell knows that replacing the bottom 6% to 10% of public school teachers with teachers of average quality could be enough to close the gap between our current position and the top ranked countries. Quote, your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Gladwell concludes. But there's a problem, quote, no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like end quote, or at least according to Gladwell.

Teaching for America a nonprofit that recruits outstanding college graduates to teach in low income school districts disagrees. This organization is fanatical about data. For the past 20 years, they've gathered massive amounts of statistics on their teachers in an attempt to figure out why some succeed in the classroom and some fail. They then work backwards from these results to identify what traits best predict a potential recruit success as Amanda Ripley reports in a comprehensive look inside the Teach for America process published in the Atlantic monthly.

The results of this outcome based approach to hiring are humbling. I came into this with a bunch of theories, the former head of admissions at Teach for America told Ripley quote, I was proven wrong at least as many times as I was validated and to quote, when Teach for America first started 20 years ago, applicants were subjectively scored by interviewers on 12 general traits like communication ability, a sample interview question, what is wind? By contrast, if you're one of the 35,000 students who applied in 2009, a fool that included 11% of Ivy League seniors 30 data points gathered from a combination of questionnaires, demonstrations and interviews were fed into a detailed quantitative model that returned a hiring recommendation. This data-driven approach seems to work.

As Ripley reports in 2007, 24% of Teach for America teachers advanced their students at least one and a half grade levels or more. Two years later, as the organization's models continue to evolve, this number has almost doubled to 44%. I'm fascinated by Teach for America for a simple reason. The traits they discovered at the core of great teaching are unmistakably a variant of deliberate practice.

Not the pure coach-driven practice of professional athletes and chess grandmasters, but a hearty, adaptable strain that's applicable to almost any field. Put another way, these outstanding teachers may have unwittingly cracked the code for generating a remarkable life. Inside the classroom of an outstanding teacher. In her Atlantic piece, Ripley recounts an afternoon spent in the math classroom of William Taylor, a teacher in Southeast Washington, D.C., who ranks in the top 5% of all math teachers in the district.

When Taylor enters the classroom, his students fall into a strictly choreographed interaction. Good morning, he calls. Good morning, the students answer. The period begins with mental math.

Taylor calls out problems, which the students answer in their heads. They then write their solutions on orange index cards, which they all hold up at the same time. If some kids get it wrong, they have not embarrassed themselves, Ripley notes. But Taylor now knows who needs more attention.

After mental math, Taylor teaches the class a new method for a long division. The students try the strategy in groups of four, each led by a team leader that rotates on a regular basis. Taylor found that students were more receptive to help from their fellow students. After having the students try the method on their own, Taylor begins calling them up to the board, selecting names that ran and to ensure no one is overlooked.

I try, but I can't find a child who isn't talking about math, Ripley recalls about her afternoon in the classroom. The class continues with the spirited game of multiplication, Bingo. Before the students leave, they have to answer a final problem on a slip of paper that they hand to Taylor at the door, another method for him to assess who is still struggling with the day's material. What makes great teachers great?

Hear that in tomorrow's episode. You just listen to part one of the post titled, On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life, A Deliberate Practice Case Study by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com. Local news is in decline across Canada. And this is bad news for all of us.

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Take it a call. I don't know about you, but that math class sounds a lot more interesting, dare I say fun, than some classes I took. But in any case, I completely agree that the teacher is so important for the student. I went to a decent college, it's not a major university by any means.

Well, I actually started in the UC system, but I didn't like how most of the classes were massive. Or if they were small, it was a teacher's assistant teaching instead of the actual professor. It just wasn't for me personally, so I ended up transferring to a smaller private college. And that's where this idea really started hitting me and affecting my life.

I could have a class and a topic that I was really interested in and absolutely dislike the class and the topics, everything about it. And then yet, I could have a class on a topic like, I don't know, anthropology that I have virtually no interest in and find it incredibly enlightening and something I'll never forget all because of the teacher. It's amazing to me how much they shape our lives. It's so important.

So if you're doing that work as a teacher, that's appreciated. Hopefully this article brings up some things to consider. And if you're not in this field or a teacher like me, it's still worth thinking about since teachers play such a large role in our lives. And we're all kind of doing some kind of teaching somehow, even if not formally.

That's just the first half of this post, so stay tuned for tomorrow where we'll finish this up and where you're optimal life. Oh, wait.