Reflection about Qualified Teaching

    To be a qualified teacher, simply put, you need to know what you are teaching. A teacher can have a masters or doctorate in science and be the most engaging instructor but if they are assigned to teach an English class they will just not be effective. At the same time a qualified teacher must be interactive with the classroom, a teacher who knows more about a subject than anyone else on the planet, won't be able to share that knowledge if they just drone on and on about it with a power point. A college education is important, but experience in a field is more so to be a qualified teacher. I have had teachers who had no education in teaching who were much more effective than teachers with masters in education. Amrein-Beardsley summarizes this beautifully by writing “The only master’s degrees which made a difference in student achievement were master’s degrees in the content areas taught.” and “Acquiring master’s degrees, particularly if they were not related to the content area(s) teachers taught, did not raise student achievement levels.” Both of these statements exemplify exactly how I feel about our education system. The level of education is not as important as the teacher’s ability to connect with students. Another requirement of a qualified teacher most are actually in agreement on is that regardless of education level it is important that teacher’s are properly certified. There is a huge difference in the quality of teaching when certificates are temporary or emergency compared with those who are properly certified through a program. The article Teacher Research Informing Policy: An Analysis of Research on Highly Qualified Teaching and NCLB mentions salary as a significant factor in the quality of teaching. This just goes to show that as a society we need to put our teachers at the top of our priority lists. When teachers make enough to live on and not have to worry about monthly bills, they are freed up to focus entirely on their students and the results speak for themselves.
    How do you assess qualifications? Or are qualifications even the most important thing? Is a teacher who looks perfect on paper and meets every criteria guaranteed to be an effective teacher? No one can predict the future, as evident by our wonderful meteorologists. As such assessing qualifications seems less important to me as assessing actual interactions between a teacher and their students. Many professors with doctorates and years of experience can lose sight of how to communicate with young minds who don't know everything that their professors do. What the article focuses on for assessing teacher qualifications is whether or not their students are successful. If students scored well on standardized tests then teachers were effective, this seems to be a very limited way of assessing the qualifications of teachers.
    Many of these questions have no true definitive answer. There is a majority answer and a minority one. Teachers who have a college education and a few years experience who are interactive and students focused are better at teaching than those with the opposite qualifications. Qualified teachers will likely have the upper hand as far as psychology goes, but under qualified teachers are just like their students and on more equal ground which allows for a more comfortable setting in which learning can be enriched. College educated and experienced doesn't mean effective and teachers who just found there way into education are sometimes the best out there. I have had teachers that met both sets of criteria on either sides of the spectrum and sometimes the rule is correct, but other times the opposite is true. The best example I can give of either is two web design teachers I had at my previous school. One was college educated with a masters and was tenured with a decade plus of experience and he continuously produced inadequate results in his students, I had him for one class and he couldn’t answer a question about the content he was teaching, I had to figure it out myself and tell him what I did. While the other was educated at the local community college only, asked to come in and teach a couple classes because she had experienced the working world and was able to give insight into what to expect when we graduated. She took students of all ability levels and continuously produced students who were able to leave the college and start working. Both are examples of the extreme opposites on the spectrum of qualified teaching and have really inspired my own educational journey.
    In order for schools to meet the standards of having qualified teachers for all their students, they should take the under qualified yet supremely effectual teachers they already have and provide them the means to become qualified. They should offer incentives for their current teachers to return to school and meet out any qualifications they don't quite have yet. Just because your Algebra teacher doesn't have a masters doesn't mean they didn't want one. Many of the teachers in rural and suburban areas have the same issues as their students, low income and few opportunities to improve themselves. If our current teachers would be offered the chance to advance their studies, I can guarantee you most of them would jump at the chance. If they don't then you likely don't want them in your schools anyway.

References:
Amrein-Beardsley, Audrey. “Teacher Research Informing Policy: An Analysis of Research on Highly
    Qualified Teaching and NCLB.” Arizona State University.

Educational Research

Because research is conducted continuously, teachers are able to adjust their styles and programs on a regular basis to get the most out of their subjects for their students. At the same time research can say one thing but in practice certain techniques just don't work all the time. It is helpful to know the research that is being done and it is good to know alternatives for any kind of lesson plan.
As far as researchers and teachers collaborating in the classroom goes, it can work really well so long as there is flexibility for the teacher. If they are trying to test out a technique or lesson plan on a group of students that simply isn't working, it's imperative that the teacher be allowed to change it up to make sure the students are actually learning the material and not just being used as test subjects. So long as there is communication between researchers, teachers. administrators and parents I see no reason why most classrooms couldn't participate in some form of research. It might even be a good way to help supplement income for schools.
Teachers already are researchers. They test out a way of teaching, see if it works and then repeat or discard the process depending on the results. The only thing teachers might be leaving out is the sharing of information that researchers do. If teachers aren't paying attention to what works and what doesn't with their students then they are just failing themselves and their students. Teachers are researchers and they all need to share the wisdom they gain from both students and other teachers as well as the researchers doing major leg work.

Does good teaching make a difference?

Good teaching couldn't make more of a difference! It still astounds me how much of an impact the teaching style and just the teacher himself/herself has on my learning experience. Having an amazing teacher isn't just about having someone who is funny or takes you on field trips every other day. An amazing teacher is someone who is so passionate about what they have to say that you feel that passion and share it with them, even if you have never had a passion for that subject before. I took a history class last semester and let me tell you I have always dislike history, but that class nearly convinced me to change my major. The teacher I had was engaging and listened to the students and was obviously passionate about what he was talking about. I wanted to be in class every day and often walked with the teacher after class just talking about what we had discussed as a class that day. I crave that one on one connection with my teachers because I want to soak up as much knowledge as I can while in school. Especially at the college level, I am paying a lot of money to be here, I will get my monies worth! Haha. I have had many teachers from high school as well as at college who have inspired me to continue my journey towards becoming a teacher. I have also had many awful teachers who have inspired me so that I can be one of those amazing teachers in the future, because there will unfortunately always be less effective ones as well. The teachers who connected with me didn't always connect with other students and the same is true for the reverse so it is rather hard to assess just how effective any particular teacher is. We need a diverse array of teachers so that if one student doesn't connect with their current teacher, they can always try again with the next one and hopefully learn more than they had even intended.