The teaching gap
by James W. Stigler · first published 2007
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"American schools have famously lagged behind foreign schools in all areas of academic achievement. When James W. Stigler and James Hiebert made their assessment of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) ten years ago, they discovered that the problem with American education is neither one of testing nor curricula, but teaching. A clarion call for treating teaching like the craft it is, The Teaching Gap lays out a clear program for change that administrators, teachers, and parents can implement together. Newly updated with fresh teaching solutions drawn from new research
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…good-quality dead-tree literature on the subject, http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Elementary-Mathematics-W-Sawyer... http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio... http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... you could learn something new that could help you better understand the other countries in the world and…
on “Man with multiple degrees fails standardized test for children” ↗…policy-makers learn from the United States?) I like the books by Liping Ma http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... and James Stigler and James Hiebert http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... as examples of what the United States could learn from the practices of other countries, but perhaps you have other suggestions for readers here.
on “The Broken U.S. Jobs Factory: Too Many Athletes, Too Few Scientists?” ↗…blogger ignorant of the large body of research on textbook content and classroom practice in different countries for elementary mathematics in different countries of the world http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education/d... http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... took the lazy way out and said that if "race" is taken into account, then the United States is second to none…
on “Knowledge of fractions and long division predicts long-term math success” ↗…Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... for a detailed discussion of elementary math teaching, or The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... for a broader perspective on other ways to organize schools.
on “Female teachers transmit math anxiety to female students” ↗…boredom in (high) school: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html This essay was the second essay (after "Why Nerds Are Unpopular) that made me aware of pg's interest in education policy. See also the book The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom for ways that school could be done better. http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...
on “School: It's way more boring than when you were there” ↗…United States could do a lot better and reach the level of Finland by staffing reforms http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads... and by using best practices http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... in provision of elementary education.
on “Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).” ↗…differences in school staffing practices and teacher training to make that possible are described in book-length works http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... but boil down to letting classes be extra large, so that teachers can be scheduled to have joint prep time together each day in which new teachers learn from master teachers…
on “A warning to college profs from a high school teacher” ↗…of educational interventions over the years, http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Learning-Synthesis-Meta-Analys... and many thoughtful international comparisons of teaching practice, http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://www.amazon.com/Making-Learning-Whole-Principles-Trans... but none of those conclude that simply raising…
on “Paying teachers more results in higher pupil performance” ↗…content of mathematics textbooks in different countries, and specialized studies on differences in teaching practices http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... in different countries have helped me understand the differences I frequently observe between people of the same ethnicity who received their primary and secondary education…
on “Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms” ↗…the curriculum issue comes from. As part of the 1998 TIMSS, a couple hundred videos were made of math teaching in the US, Germany, and Japan. James W. Stigler and James Hiebert then wrote a book, "The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom", on the content of these videos. They observed: "When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something…
on “I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests” ↗…United States. There are whole books on the subject. http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio... http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740... http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
on “The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries” ↗…that the United States, by OBSERVATION OF ACTUAL PRACTICE, is underperforming in providing lessons to young people in school, http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education/d... http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ especially from the point of view of how much the United States spends on schools. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf
on “You'll never be Chinese” ↗…the average American student will lag 1-2 years behind many other developed countries. Note that this problem extends even to the first years of college. [1] Not really a secret, see (for example) "The Teaching GAP" by Stigler and Hiebert, which analyzed video recordings that were taken as part of the TIMSS 1998. [2] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-cor...
on “The Bright Students Left Behind” ↗Tokenadult, I always enjoy your well-informed comments on topics such as this. I think you may have misinterpreted Stigler's 1999 "The Teaching Gap", though, as many of us did. In that book, he reports on a study of math teaching in the US, Japan, and Germany, and finds Japan's results to be far superior to the others and their teaching methods very…
on “How Japanese Kids Learn To Multiply” ↗…important a subject to be single-sourced from any source. Especially, mathematics is much too important to be left to the United States public school system in its current condition. I was just rereading The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (1999) the other day. It reminded me of facts I had already learned from other sources, including living overseas for two…
on “How well does Khan Academy teach?” ↗