Ineffective Teacher Quotes

I was only pretending to be the underpaid, duplicitous, ineffective, struggling teacher of immigrant French. The real Suzanne was the lover and muse of a brilliant artist.

Often these approaches reflect the inverse of the habits of effective people. In fact, my brother, John Covey, who is a master teacher, sometimes refers to them as the seven habits of ineffective people: Be reactive: doubt yourself and blame others. Work without any clear end in mind. Do the urgent thing first. Think win/lose. Seek first to be understood. If you can’t win, compromise. Fear change and put off improvement. Just as personal victories precede public victories when effective people progress along the maturity continuum, so also do private failures portend embarrassing public failures when ineffective people regress along an

A group of teachers may use a new strategy and express concerns that the approach is ineffective because after initial attempts, students didn't learn as well as when the previous strategy was used. However, when developing proficiency in a new skill or strategy, even experts are prone to errors (Ericsson et al., 1993).

Any teaching that in any way detracts from Christ’s exclusive role is by definition both wrong and ineffective. The teachers themselves are probably not denying that Christ was central to God’s saving purposes. They seem rather to be arguing that certain practices must be added on in order to achieve true spiritual fulfillment. But, for Paul, in this case, addition means subtraction: one cannot “add” to Christ without, in effect, subtracting from his exclusive place in creation and in salvation history.

If she [English literature teacher Mrs. Ratliff] had been evaluated by the grades she gave, she would have been in deep trouble., because she did not award many A grades. An observer might have concluded that she was a very ineffective teacher who had no measurable gains to show for her work.

So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do. Jack Kornfield: A similar diagnostic process is needed both in meditation teaching and in insight therapy. When people come in to see a teacher, they present specific and unique difficulties, traumas, problems with circumstances in their life, or struggles with their mind and personality. Skillful teaching requires a subtle evaluative process to sense what particular intervention out of the many practices will be most helpful to a given individual. For example, for people with powerful self-critical and judgmental thoughts, a necessary part of meditation instruction will be teaching them how to work with these thoughts. If we don’t attend to this problem, they can do all kinds of other practices, but those self-critical patterns will keep repeating, “You’re not doing it right,” and as a consequence, the other practices they are engaging in may be quite ineffective. Jan Chozen Bays: I want to suggest that we study an intervention that I call media fasting. As I said, we’re not designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world.

Another central finding of this study is that boys tend to elicit the pedagogy they need. This point was brought into high relief in the accounts of many teachers who reported that their best lesson was conceived as a result of prior failures to engage boys productively. Boys’ responses to ineffective teaching—disengagement, inattention, disruption, unsatisfactory performance—are intolerable to a conscientious teacher. Such teachers adjust course content, pedagogy, and relational style until student responses improve. Improved responses over time tend to reinforce the adjustments the teacher has made. Or to put it even more simply, resistant student behavior elicits changes in teacher behavior, and when students respond positively to those changes, the teacher retains them as standard practice. From this observation, it follows that when boys succeed in revealing their learning preferences, responsive teachers adjust in a dynamic of continuous improvement.

Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of the grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience. Based on a massive study, Dr. Chetty testified that a single year in a classroom with a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings per classroom. Based on a 4 year study, Dr. Kane testified that students in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] who are taught by a teacher in the bottom 5% of competence lose 9.54 months of learning in a single year compared to students with average teachers.20

When value-added is calculated for a teacher using just a single year’s worth of test score data, the error rate is 35 percent—meaning more than one in three teachers who are average will be misclassified as excellent or ineffective, and one in three teachers who excel or are terrible will be called average.

We don’t want to tell great teachers they’re great and ineffective teachers that they’re not, so we essentially tell all of them that they’re doing well. In rating teachers nationwide, fewer than 1 percent are given an unsatisfactory rating on their performance evaluation. The unfortunate result is that we don’t celebrate greatness, because we’re not differentiating at all.