Re: [Phys-L] teaching credentials +- qualifications+- administration

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

But MDs and JDs are all subject to recertification.  In addition MDs are now
being watched by hospitals as to their outcomes.  This watching is generally
on certain statistics.  MDs are ticked off when a nurse is empowered to tell
them they can not do an operation until they have been observed to properly
wash their hands.  That is now happening and it reduces the rate of
infection to almost zero.  Of course this is being done within the medical
community, but it was sparked by information on infection rates in
hospitals.  Medicine still has the same problem as education.  Neather are
really driven to improve by market forces.  You can not really find out what
MD, hospital, or medical plan is the best one.  The consumer is totally in
the dark.  Education has the same problem.

Sure if you go to Harvard or MIT you have a gold plated degree, which may
open doors.  In the end this degree does not guarantee success.  There is
also no way of knowing whether the teaching is better.  Good students go in,
and good students go out, but was that a result of the school, or just the
reputation?  Shayer & Adey showed that all secondary schools in England were
doing the same things and achieving the same overall results.  The output
differences were purely a function of input.  Of course people don't want to
believe that!

University departments need to face up to the challenge of teaching, and the
professors need to apply some of the same high level research skills to
figuring out what works in their classrooms.  They are formal operational in
research, but much lower in what to do in class.  Actually community college
teachers are subject to observations, but they are often very perfunctory,
and governed by the colleagues stick together rule.  The idea that anyone
can teach without training in how to  do it is certainly rampant among
university professors.  If they don't try to improve as a group,
observations and evaluations my be forced on them!

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> You know what would REALLY tick them off?  Evaluations on the 
> basis of monthly observations of their teaching and the 
> progress their students make on university mandated testing 
> (tests constructed by peers and administrators).  
>
> On Oct 21, 2013, at 10:26 AM, brian whatcott wrote:
>
> > On 10/20/2013 6:36 PM, Marc "Zeke" Kossover wrote [in small part]:
> > > .... many people think that they know what would make a 
> person a great high school teacher though they have never 
> taught and never hired someone to teach. They would probably 
> be ticked off if I were to suggest how their universities 
> should hire professors.
> > > Zeke Kossover
> > Would they be as ticked off if you suggested that 
> university professors  be hired on the basis of a statistic 
> like the quotient of  number of papers published in refereed 
> journals and number of cites in refereed journals  with a 
> suitable multiplier for the count accumulated in journals of 
> the first water - Science, Nature, NEJM and the like, and a 
> hugely bigger multiplier for Nobel awards in any field?
> >