Minnesota Teacher of the Year

Mike Geisen, the 2008 National Teacher of the Year, has started blogging about his adventures this school year. As National Teacher of the Year, Mike leaves the classroom for one school year to travel the world and speak about education. He will serve in this role through May of 2009. In addition to his sharp intelligence and thoughtful insights on education, Mike is a wonderful writer and an even better human being . We couldn’t ask for a finer teacher representative. Check out his blog here.

Have a great year, Mike!

Congratulations to Derek Olson for being named our new 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year! Derek received the award in the wake of Carleen Gulstad’s resignation for personal reasons in June of this year. Derek will make an excellent Teacher of the Year, and is incredibly deserving of the honor. He is a highly respected member of his community, an outstanding educator, and an engaging and energetic human being. I’m excited that such a tremendous representative for teachers and education will serve as this year’s Teacher of the Year. Congratulations, Derek! Have a great year!

In speaking with Derek, we decided to continue with the plan formulated in May of opening up the blog all Minnesota Teachers of the Year. This will relieve the pressure of one person trying to maintain a blog during what is often a busy year of serving as Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year, and will provide a forum for any former Minnesota Teachers of the Year to post their educational views and experiences. If you’re a former Minnesota Teacher of the Year and would like to be part of the fun, please contact me.

I will stay on as blog administrator, and will post as time permits. I have begun tweaking the format and making changes to reflect the changing nature of the blog. I hope to complete the changes this week. Derek and I will be meeting tomorrow to get Derek set up as a blog editor. He’s mentioned that he has a post all ready to go, and we should be able to put that up tomorrow evening.

I wanted to make a quick post first and foremost to congratulate our new Minnesota Teacher of the Year, Carleen Gulstad. She is both articulate and enthusiastic, and will be a wonderful representative for Minnesota educators! Congratulations, Carleen! I’m very happy for you!

In speaking with Carleen about the future of this blog, we decided that rather than limit it to exclusively the current Minnesota Teacher of the Year, that we could extend an invitation to all former Minnesota Teachers of the Year to participate in posting on the blog. Things get fairly hectic during the year you are the Teacher of the Year, and in this way we think we could expand both the reach and content of the blog. I’ve got piles of notes from this past year, and I’m looking forward to finally having time turn some of them into posts. But more to the point: if you are a past Minnesota Teacher of the Year and would like to write a few pieces on the blog, feel free to contact me at any time and we’ll get you set up with an authoring account. I will stay on as the person behind the scenes managing the blog.

I’ve got a few commitments that are keeping me tied up until the end of June, but at that time I’ll go through this blog and redo the format and focus of the blog. Carleen, of course, will have center stage, but I’ll add a page for past Minnesota Teachers of the Year who would like to post. So check back in early July for more information and a slightly different setup.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, talks about the snap decisions human beings make and their accuracy. The book is a fascinating read that touches on a wide range of subject matter. One chapter of the book, interestingly enough, talks about an experiment on evaluating teachers done by Tufts psychologist Nalini Ambady.

In her series of experiments, random people were shown short video clips of teachers in class. They were then asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the teachers. Although these subjects had never met the teachers they watched, their evaluations showed an amazingly high correlation with the real conclusions drawn by the students who actually took the course.

What gets even more interesting is what the subjects actually saw in later runs of the experiment: random six-second silent video clips. The conclusion, from page thirteen of the book: A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the class for an entire semester.

To be fair, the book seems a bit inaccurate. The abstract for the study mentions six-second clips, but not two-second clips. But in either case, the point is made.

Now, Ambady realized that one could argue that a student’s impression of teacher effectiveness may not represent an accurate assessment of actual teacher effectiveness, so she performed a subsequent experiment (not covered in the book Blink). In this experiment, she measured the evaluations of teacher effectiveness against an actual measure of their effectiveness. Her conclusion: “Students learned more from teachers who were seen in the thin (video) slices as having the qualities of a better teacher.” In other words, subjects were able to accurately measure teacher effectiveness after watching only six silent seconds of that teacher teaching. (More details on both her experiments can be found here, about two-thirds of the way down the page.)

Now this perhaps gets somewhat humorous if you think about all the time, money, and effort that goes into evaluating teachers—whether that be for hiring purposes or for the current discussions regarding Q-Comp and teacher performance pay—but I’ll leave that discussion for others. I’m more interested in this question: What did they see?

What could the subjects have seen in six seconds that could possibly lead them to so successfully measure teacher effectiveness? What do effective teachers consistently do that ineffective teachers consistently don’t do, and how can it be so telling? The article mentions that the video clips included “molar nonverbal behavior”, which refers to movements such as walking, writing, and gesturing. Interesting.

In any case, if you accept the conclusions of these studies, here’s something for us teachers to ponder next September as we start school: In the first six seconds of class on the first day of school your students can accurately judge your effectiveness as a teacher, even if they can’t hear a word you say.

Congratulations to the newly announced 28 semifinalists for the 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year honor!

Personally, it was a treat to be able to get a chance to learn about so many wonderful teachers in Minnesota during the first stage of the process. I’ve mentioned this in speeches, but seeing so many fine candidates for the award makes me wish there were a way to cut the distinction up and share it over all the deserving teachers in the state.

A full list of the semifinalists for the 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year honor and more details on the award are available on the Education Minnesota website.

A few weeks ago I was invited to give a speech on Myths, Assumptions, and Attitudes in education. It wasn’t a viewpoint I was accustomed to examining. Initially I found myself struggling with the topic, but after a bit I realized that our educational climate is packed with stubborn misconceptions that are incorrect yet refuse to die. Once such misconception is that America’s Ivy League schools are too expensive for the average student to afford.

Every year, I’ll have a conversation with a talented high school senior who will mention that they didn’t consider applying to a college such as Harvard or Yale because their family couldn’t afford the tuition. For whatever reason, the myth persists that Ivy League schools are solely for the rich. After all, Harvard College’s tuition is over $30,000, and the total cost after room, board, and miscellaneous fees is close to $46,000. How could a middle-class family afford that?

The truth of Ivy League affordability, however, is quite different, and the news keeps getting better. In December of 2007, Harvard revealed a new plan to increase financial assistance to undergraduates by 43%. Students from families who earn less than $60,000 will pay nothing. Even at a family-income level of $180,000, families will only be asked to contribute 10% of their income. The end result is that the cost of Harvard is comparable to in-state tuition at a public university. Yale announced a similar plan this month. Other Ivy League schools have similar plans in place.

The reality is that—conversely—an Ivy League school is a fantastic place to apply if you come from a family of limited means. In many cases, you’re going to get a better financial support package than you would from a public institution.

You’re also likely to graduate with less debt, as Ivy League schools are moving to eliminate student loan calculations in financial aid packages. Even now, Ivy League students graduate with significantly less debt than their counterparts who have attended other institutions. The average debt for a senior graduating from Harvard has dropped from $16,000 to $6,400, roughly one-third of the national average. With this new policy in place, that number will fall closer to zero.

As an aside, the ramifications of this reduced student debt can only help shatter another Ivy League myth that incorrectly assumes Ivy League graduates are focused solely on personal economic gain, and pursue career paths of the rich and glamorous. With much less debt, graduates from America’s prestigious institutions will be much freer to pursue altruistic careers instead of feeling pressure to earn money to pay off their alma mater.

Bottom line: It’s worth a shot to apply to an Ivy League school if you’ve got the marks and the achievements to possibly get accepted. Not applying is the same as getting refused, so go for it. Change your life.

Related reading: Recent Economist Article

Image Credit: blisspix

Being the Minnesota Teacher of the Year has been both the most challenging and the most rewarding year I have spent in education. The three months since my last post in this blog have rocketed by, and it’s hard to think that in only three and a half more months there will be a new Minnesota Teacher of the Year.

The only disappointment I have had so far is that I had hoped to be more proactive with the award in reaching out into the educational community to get involved in issues and groups of my choosing. However, with a full teaching workload and an average of two Teacher of the Year engagements, presentations, or speeches each week, I’ve found my plate full in simply reacting to the various invitations and requests that have come my way over the past three months.

This past summer, when I met Neil Witikko, 1997 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, I asked him what surprised him the most during his year as Minnesota Teacher of the Year. He replied that he had been caught off guard by the amount of time it took to prepare his speeches and presentations. I would readily agree with this. I had assumed that I would develop a set of three or four speeches to give during the year, but what I’ve found is that I’ve had such a wide range of audiences that I have only had a couple of occasions where I felt comfortable using a speech from a previous event. I’ve also learned a lot over these past eight months, and my beliefs about education have constantly evolved during this time. This has led to what seems a perpetual tweaking and revising of my messages.

This is not to complain. The experiences I’ve had have been marvelous, varied, and incredibly enriching. I have learned more about myself and education in this past year than I have in the previous sixteen combined.

The good news is that I finally feel like things have settled to the point where I’ve got a library of messages that I can build from to be more efficient in my speech preparations. Over the past two weeks, I’ve started to feel like I’ve got my life under control again, and I look forward to being a bit more proactive with the award over these next three and a half months. I also look forward to chronicling more of the year’s experiences in this blog as the year winds down.