[thaumasiotes]

> high-quality teaching has incredibly high leverage.

This is not a claim supported by the literature. (Though it is a very popular one.) The results of teaching are overwhelmingly determined by the student getting taught. Variation in the teaching itself has a minor effect.

[medvezhenok]

Yes and no.

When you look at populations, it averages out, but there are definitely 10x teachers out there. It’s more of a function of teacher+student combination. The problem is actually more about the structure of schools that limits what great teachers can do.

I’m sure there are studies out there - I’m also extremely skeptical that studies can adequately measure variation in teaching performance (I come from a background in sports / circus, where scientists are always 10-20 years behind the state of the art understanding of the actual practitioners)

(I think it’s kind of like with coding - anyone can write a CRUD app, and anyone can teach basic arithmetic. But certain teaching tasks require very skilled teachers to work)

[darkwater]

Care to point to some of those studies? How do they define what a "very good teacher" is versus a "mediocre teacher"? Interviews with students? Interviews with teachers? Average results of their students?

[jacobolus]

The studies in question are stuff like: if you look at standardized test scores before/after each particular teacher's class, and then run statistical regressions throwing in a bunch of other variables, you will find that most of the variance in the improvements in student performance can be attributed to factors other than which teacher they drew.

But this is a weak way to study the most important influences teachers can have which are about inspiring and exciting students and might not be particularly observable until years or even decades later, when e.g. a student with an inspirational middle school teacher chooses their college major or career path, which might be a different choice from the counterfactual student whose teachers were just phoning it in.

[ramblenode]

That's not what high leverage means. If you teach 150 students a day then even a small effect of teaching will translate into a big difference in cumulative learning.

[thaumasiotes]

That's even less impactful. Cumulative learning is determined by the student much more strongly than per-class learning is. Years after a student took your class, the contribution to their knowledge, positive or negative, from you is negligible.