What method of teaching do Montessori schools use?

How should teaching be assessed?

• The lack of a clear way of assessing teaching is having a fundamental effect on education in pretty much every country and every education system. So what is the best way to assess teaching? Below I've discussed the standard four ways of assessing teaching, with the effects they have. I've used the word "learners" because "pupils" or "students" tend to imply particular age groups, and I am referring to learners of any age. 0: Don't. Just let teachers do what they want. This is pretty much unacceptable nowadays as people will believe that the teachers are just wasting time and not bothering. Most of the teachers I've met wouldn't do so - people who don't give a damn about learners tend not to become teachers in the first place - but people will insist. 1: Give the learners a test. This is the most standard way and probably the way that works best at actually testing if the learners have learned - which seems to be the basic thing which we should be assessing. Unfortunately, it's fraught with political problems and questions. Who sets the test? How much should the teacher know about the test? What if the teacher is just teaching people to pass that specific test? What if the learners are unwilling and all do badly - is that the teacher's fault? If all the learners pass, is that an objectionable thing in itself? Every year if a large number of pupils pass their exams, there will be news stories about how easy exams are becoming. A more subtle effect is that almost always the assessment used is the number of learners who reached a particular score on the test, which encourages the teacher to focus all their efforts on getting everyone to, or just over, that score. The learners with most difficulty will be abandoned as spending extra time on them is a huge risk when they may not pass, and the learners with most ability will also be abandoned because they have already passed. A similar variation on this is to see how well the learners do in life afterwards - many schools have an "employment rate" or similar. But this puts the teacher at the mercy of supply and demand and the job market. 2: Ask the learners. Most higher and adult education institutions have some form of judgment where the learners evaluate the teacher. Most schools have this in defacto terms because the pupils can skew any evaluation of the teacher by how well they behave in their lessons. At first this seems reasonable - who better to ask than the people learning? Unfortunately, there's way too many confounding variables. Will learners who fail submit "hate ratings"? Is there a subject skew? The Mathematics master will have a much harder time than the Music teacher. If a learner doesn't engage, should their rating count, or does the fact they didn't engage demonstrate a failing by the teacher? Again there is a nastier more subtle effect, too. "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." Learners, generally, take a given class only once, and therefore their evaluations do not learn from history. Since there is no teaching method that is absolutely ideal for every group, the effect of this is that the teacher is forced into a back-and-forth or round-and-round cycle of methods where every time they use one, the learners highlight its flaws and ask for a different one. That different one may have already been used years back and its failings discovered, but the current learners have no idea about that. If the teacher tries to use their knowledge of the class' history and don't yield to the learners' insistence that the new method is better, they will be lambasted for not responding to the learners' feedback and guaranteed even worse ratings by the next group of learners who do not know the history or tradeoffs involved. 3: Ask someone to observe them. This is the favorite for schools - ask someone to come in and watch the teacher and give them a rating. Of course, it has all the general problems of third-party assessment. Should the observer be another teacher? If so, is there the risk of a tit-for-tat effect? Will the observer assess against their own method of teacher, or what will they assess against? What should the observer be looking for? The subtle problem here is that learning is not something you can do twice. Open a page of a book. Learn something from it. Good. Now learn it again. You can't - not until years have passed and you've forgotten it. That means that when an observer is watching a lesson they're not participating in the most important part of the lesson - the learning. This also gives rise to the base rate effect - when the observer is watching lesson after lesson with no interest in learning anything, they can quickly become numb, meaning that the lessons that get high scores will be those that stand out and break the numbness - even if the way in which they stand out isn't a good idea. So what's the best approach? Can a balance be struck between these three, or is it a lost cause?

• Answer:

  I would go with "observe success of the learners". This would mean seeing how much students participate in projects, and how much above and beyond the scope of assignments do student go in order to learn on their own. This speaks to the point of the educator igniting students' passion for the subject (even if the students are kicking and screaming). Testing someone would only make the educator teach what is being tested - no more, no less. Asking the student is too biased - some of the best teachers are disliked by students and are only appreciated by those students years later. Asking someone to observe the educator is not too effective either - unless the observer is an educator deeply familiar with the challenges of teaching and with the subject matter itself. One of my favorite teachers - Medieval history - looked as if she did not do anything at all: we were mostly left to our own devices in terms of learning, and tests were just a non-eventful bureaucracy, while we were talking about historical events and significance of historical figures (once we even had a debate on the agricultural reform, from the viewpoint of historical significance and geopolitical importance). And then there were teachers who ruled with an iron fist, and we were not happy about that, yet we were constantly and consistently beating other schools during the Olympiad competitions on physics and chemistry. Who knew? :)