**Archived Information**

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE TEACHING

FOR THE 21^ST^ CENTURY

DR. JAMES STIGLER

SEPTEMBER 23, 1999

TRANSCRIPT BY: FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE

620 NATIONAL PRESS BUILDING

WASHINGTON, DC 20045

**\[Accompanying PowerPoint slides are referenced in brackets throughout
the transcript.\]**

DR. STIGLER: **\[See Slide 1\]** Teaching is important, what happens in
classrooms is fundamentally important. Everyone here knows that, yet,
still it\'s kind of important to be told it again from time to time. In
fact, if you look at the reforms that have been conducted in classrooms
or in schools over the past 20 years in this country, most of them have
not focused on improving teaching in the classroom. For example,
there\'s been a lot of effort on changing the political structure of
schools, site based management, who has power, who has control. There\'s
been a lot of effort on putting computers in schools, and even the
standards movement, setting clear learning goals and assessments for
what students need to learn has not fundamentally been targeted at
changing what happens in classrooms, teaching and learning in
classrooms.

Now, you may think that because you\'re the commission on improving the
quality of math and science teaching, that you\'re going to be
different, you are going to change what happens in classrooms. And what
I want to start with today is going to be the main point I want to make,
which is that I\'m afraid you won\'t be different. I\'m afraid you
won\'t be different, and I want to urge you to maintain your focus on
improving the quality of teaching and learning that goes on in
classrooms. If you shift your focus to questions of teacher licensure,
teacher certification, how to recruit better people into the profession
of teaching, then I think you\'ll be wasting an opportunity. That\'s one
of the main points I want to make today.

If you look at medicine, as an example, I think everyone would agree
that healthcare has made remarkable gains in quality over the past 100
years. But, I want to submit to you that that\'s not because better
people are going into medicine. It\'s because there is a professional
knowledge base of medicine that has grown, that\'s alive, that has grown
over the years and that new practitioners can participate in. It\'s not
the exceptional doctors that determine the healthcare most of us
receive, but it\'s actually the average doctor, it\'s what the standard
practice is. And in education it\'s the same way. What we need to do is,
yes, we want the most qualified people we can in the classroom. But,
that alone is not going to make the difference. What we need to do is
find ways to shift the focus from the teachers to the teaching methods,
and figuring out how to improve those methods, how to build a knowledge
base for the improvement of teaching.

The premise of everything I\'m going to say today is that teaching is
not some magical, elusive quality that is only able to be carried out by
certain gifted individuals. But, teaching is something that can be
studied and improved. And that\'s really the challenge that we face
today. Now, **\[See Slide 2\]** what I\'m going to do in my presentation
is I\'m going to talk about ‑‑ I was a little embarrassed that so many
people came up and said they read the book, because that makes me feel a
little bit redundant and superfluous. But, you probably didn\'t read it
as carefully as we wrote it.

[TIMSS Video Study and a U.S. Lesson]{.underline} \[in middle of
paragraph\]

**\[See Slide 3\]** So what I want to do today is talk about the TIMSS
video study a little bit. I want to show some video, because I want this
commission to take a look inside classrooms, and see what\'s going on
there, and talk a little about what we learned from that. Then I want to
shift gears and talk about the implications of the work that we\'ve been
doing for the improvement of teaching, a lot of which is just our own
opinion developed over time.

I really want to stress that anyone is free to interrupt me, if that\'s
not against the law, I don\'t know. Linda, can people interrupt and ask
questions? So anybody who wants to interrupt and ask a question, I would
really appreciate that, because there\'s no way we can get through all
the material that I have. But, I do want to make sure that I save enough
time at the end to talk about my vision of how it is that we can improve
teaching in the classroom.

All right, so first, what I want to do is I want to talk about this
unique study that I was privileged to conduct, and I also want to point
out that Lois Peak is here, and came up to me. Lois Peak was the person
who made this whole study possible, by securing the funding from the
National Center for Education Statistics. And she just reminded me that
we cooked up this whole idea 10 years ago on a beach walk in California.
And it\'s amazing how long it takes to get anything done.

This study was actually a very simple study. A simple idea it was to
take national samples of classrooms, eighth-grade teachers, and to
videotape them teaching one lesson in a classroom. We basically had a
videographer in each country. We did this in three countries, by the
way, Germany, Japan, United States, and simply gave him a schedule and
had him go around for the whole school year and tape what was going on.
We took the tapes that we received, and we sent them back to our lab at
UCLA, and we spent a long time with teams of researchers from all these
different countries arguing about what we saw happening on the tapes.
And it was a very exciting summer, I\'ll never forget, when the first of
these tapes came in.

**\[See Slide 4\]** This is an overview of the design of our study,
which is very simple. I think most of you probably recognize this
picture, I hope Senator Glenn recognizes this picture. It was sent back
from Mars a couple of summers ago. This really summarizes the design of
our study. It was sitting in Los Angeles, waiting for these images to
come back from all over the world, and then analyzing them. And I have
to say we were really just as excited about seeing these things as the
people were at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where they were waiting
for the results of all the work they had done to get these images back
from Mars.

**\[See Slide 5\]** We had three major goals in the study. First of all
was to just see what was happening in U.S. classrooms, and this may,
most people who aren\'t in education probably figure we already knew
this. In fact, almost everybody thinks they know what\'s going on in
classrooms, but no one really had the opportunity to actually look
inside a national sample of classrooms. Another goal was to discover
alternative teaching methods. We were very interested in what they were
doing in other countries, particularly countries that had very high
achievement, like Japan. And we were interested in studying the effects
of policy on classroom practice. There are a lot of people who believe
they are influencing what happens in classrooms, and we wanted to take a
look and see if that was true.

Okay. What I\'d like to do now is shift gears, and go and actually show
you some video from the study. And at the same time I\'m going to be
able to show you a little about how it was possible for us to handle
this incredible quantity of video information that\'s coming in. In our
current study we\'re collecting more than 2000 hours of video. And the
way we\'ve done this is with multimedia software that we actually
designed and developed to help us in this project. So, for example you
can see we\'ve got a software screen with the video, we\'ve got a
transcript on the right, and it gives us the ability to quickly run back
and forth through the videotape, and it also gives us an index over here
of the video.

What this means is that we have in our database all of the videotape
that we collect, all of it transcribed, all of it translated into
English, so that we can search and find different pieces of classroom
practice that we\'re looking for in our analysis. This is a huge
advance, because this was not possible even five years ago, to really do
this, and now it is. People who used video previously to study teaching
only did it on a small scale, and I know why, because it\'s really hard
work to get on top of this.

What I want to do is just show you a few minutes of this teacher, an
American teacher, and let you watch it, and see what you think. And then
I\'m going to show you a few minutes of a Japanese teacher, and try to
give you just some sense of what\'s going on in these classrooms. And,
by the way, I want to preface this by saying this is a typical American
teacher, and we can really say that with some confidence, because we\'ve
looked at a national sample.

\[Video\]

Teacher: What is the angle that is vertical to the seventy-degree angle?
Vertical angles are formed by what, Juan?

Student: Umm...I don't know. I was just stretching.

Students: Ha, ha, ha.

Teacher: Don't get nervous, you do stretching. When I intersect lines I
get vertical

> angles. Right? Look at your definitions. I gave them to you. You have
> them. You don't? You can look them up.

#  Here we have vertical angles and supplementary angles....Angle A is vertical 

to which angle?

Students: Seventy.

Teacher: Therefore angle A must be...

Students: Seventy degrees.

Teacher: Seventy degrees. Go from there. Now you have supplementary
angles.

Don't you?

#  What angles is supplementary to angle B?

Student: A.

Teacher: I mean...I am sorry. Angle A.

Student: B.

Teacher: B is and so is?

Students: C.

Teacher: C. Supplementary angles add up to what number?

Student: One eighty.

Teacher: One hundred eighty degrees. So if you know one is seventy the
other one has

to be?

Student: Hundred ten.

Teacher: A hundred ten. Go from there...Okay. You have all you
information. So we

we already figured these out.

\[Video ends\]

DR. STIGLER: How many people find this pretty familiar? Most people I
show this to say, that\'s my math teacher. This is very familiar.

Did you have a question or did you just point at this question.

QUESTION: It wasn\'t my math teacher, because I was educated in the
\'50s when they taught, you put in geometry by deductive proofs, which
has largely disappeared from the curriculum.

DR. STIGLER: Right, right, but this is many people\'s math teacher. And
two things I want to point out about this, first of all, this is a very
typical pattern of teaching in the United States. And one of the points
I\'m going to make later is that we were really shocked at how little
variability there is in teaching methods across the country. This is
especially surprising in a country like ours, where we all believe
we\'re very individual, autonomous, that we decide how we want to teach
in our classroom, we have a very hands-off approach, but what\'s
interesting is, when given the choice we all pretty much teach the same
way. It\'s almost like those studies of identical twins separated at
birth, and then they reunite them 40 years later and find out they have
all these uncanny similarities. That\'s the way we feel when we\'re
looking at these videotapes of American teachers, who are all
independently deciding to teach the same way.

## Classroom Differences by Country -- A Japanese Lesson

The other point I want to make is that a lot of the most important
characteristics of teaching in your own culture, and that\'s the United
States for most of us here, are very difficult to see unless you do some
comparison. And this is becoming clear to us, over and over, all the
time, because one of the things we\'ve done in our new study is we\'ve
gotten people from the seven different countries in the study to come
and bring us examples of videotapes from their countries, and to tell
us, you know, what they see that\'s important.

For example, we had someone from the Czech Republic come, show us
videos, and tell us what is the key characteristics of teaching in the
Czech Republic, and what was amazing was she showed the videos, she did
some description, but she missed what to us were some of the most
amazingly interesting, strange things that we\'d never seen before. For
example, almost every Czech lesson starts by the teacher grading the
students. And what this means is, the teacher takes a student and calls
on them, say, Paul, why don\'t you come to the front, solve this
problem. And Paul comes up and spends maybe five minutes, maybe even
more, struggling with the problem, and the teacher asking questions back
and forth, and the whole class watches. And then the teacher says, okay,
that\'s a B. All right, why don\'t you sit down, we\'ll grade one more
person today.

Now, this Czech representative didn\'t even mention that, but we said,
wow, what are they doing, that\'s amazing, we\'ve never seen that. She
said, well, how else would you grade students, I mean, that\'s obvious.
So what\'s important here is that you don\'t really see clearly what\'s
happening in your own classrooms unless you begin to take a
cross-cultural view, and that\'s because teaching is a highly cultural
activity, which is something I want to come back to.

All right. Let\'s go to Japan and spend a little more time looking at
the Japanese lesson, and the reason I want to do that is because many of
you have probably never seen a Japanese lesson. I\'m going to turn on a
subtitling feature, and what I\'m going to do is show you a little bit
of the lesson from the beginning, and then I\'m going to sort of talk
over it a little bit to help introduce you to what\'s going on as we go.
So this is the beginning of a Japanese lesson, and this is a geometry
lesson and I\'ll just let the teacher take it from there.

\[Video shown of Japanese classroom\]

DR. STIGLER: Now, this is very typical, he starts by talking about the
concepts they studied in the last lesson. And last time they studied
this idea that if you have a triangle constructed between two parallel
lines and you move the vertex along one line, but keep the base stable,
the area of the triangle doesn\'t change. And the reason for that, of
course, is because the base doesn\'t change, and the height doesn\'t
change, only the shape of the triangle. So now what he\'s going to do is
present the first main problem he wants the students to work on today.
And what he\'s done is he\'s taken two plots of land, divided by a
crooked line, he says this is Eda\'s land, that\'s Asuza\'s land, and
the problem is can we figure out a way to straighten the boundary
between their plots of land, without changing the area, without changing
how much land each person has. Eda and Asuza are two students in the
class, by the way.

\[Video ends\]

DR. STIGLER: So he puts a sign up that says, I want you to think up a
method of changing the boundary without changing the area of the land.
And then what he does is he just lets the kid loose to work on this
problem. And this is the way most Japanese lessons start, giving
students a problem that they don\'t know how to solve, and having them
work on it.

Now, what\'s interesting about this is, this is almost never done in the
U.S. In fact, most American teachers think that\'s unfair to give
someone a problem to solve that you didn\'t teach them how to solve. So
in American lessons we see teachers teach you how to solve the problems,
then they give you practice problems to work on. In Japan, commonly they
give them a problem that they don\'t know how to solve. First they have
them work on the problem individually, and then later in the lesson the
teacher says, okay, now that you\'ve struggled individually with this
problem, I want you to do whatever you want, you can work with your
friends, you can work with the assistant teacher, you can do whatever
you want. And then this is what the class looks like for about the next
15 minutes or so, as the students are trying to work on this problem.
The teacher walks around, usually making little suggestions and hints,
but the real focus is on students struggling, trying to figure out
methods for solving a problem that they\'ve never solved before.

Now, after they\'re done with this, almost invariably, in a Japanese
classroom, the teacher will call the class back together and ask
students to report on the different solution methods that they\'ve come
up with in the class. And usually there are at least two different
solution methods presented. We can watch a little bit of this first
student. One of the things you\'ll notice is they\'re not exceptionally
articulate or anything, because they\'re talking about things that they
don\'t fully understand, but that\'s the nature of learning something
hard, like mathematics, is that you spent a lot of time struggling with
things that you don\'t quite understand. It\'s the nature of my job,
too, actually.

By the way, does everybody understand the solution to this problem is to
construct a triangle, draw a line that parallels to the base of the
triangle, and then if you move the vertex up or down you\'re able to
split the two areas in half without changing how much land either
student has.

All right. Often what happens in a Japanese lesson is after the students
have given their presentation the teacher summarizes the different
solution methods the students came up with. And then the teacher goes on
and presents another problem. And this next problem is related to the
first problem, but it\'s actually a little bit harder. And the problem
here is, here\'s an irregular quadrilateral, how can we change this
quadrilateral into a triangle that has the same area as the
quadrilateral.

And he\'s going to follow pretty much the same procedure, he poses the
problem, students are going to work on their own, then students are
going to work in groups, and as they\'re working the teacher has
them ‑‑ every time he sees a unique solution to the problem, the teacher
has them put their solution up on the board. So that by the time we\'re
at the end of the lesson you can see that there are all these solutions
up on the board, all having been placed there by different students. And
now the teacher is going to go up and summarize the different solution
methods the students came up with.

Yes?

QUESTION: Are their instruction periods approximately the same length in
time as in the U.S.?

DR. STIGLER: They\'re very regular, they\'re usually 40 to 50 minutes.
It\'s a highly organized thing. You know, always the same period every
day and so on. By the way, the solution to this problem is to divide the
quadrilateral into two triangles, and then construct a line parallel to
that one, and then you can move this up and back and make a triangle
that you know is going to be the same area as the quadrilateral. In
fact, I think if we zip through this a little bit, we can see the
teacher doing a demonstration using technology to demonstrate the
different solutions that you can come up with for this problem.

Okay. I want to stop, but yes?

QUESTION: I don\'t know if it\'s just my experience, or just reflection
on my own past, but both as a parent helping kids with homework, and
also as a substitute math teacher, I find that American students, or at
least the students that I reflect on by comparison are ‑‑ break out in a
cold sweat if you ask them an open ended question in class, and
particularly are frustrated if you don\'t follow exactly what the
teacher said as to the method of solving the problem.

DR. STIGLER: Right.

QUESTION: Yet, what the Japanese instructor is presenting is there are
many approaches to solving the problem. And the American students are, I
guess, preconditioned to think that there is, I can only do it the way
the teacher explained it, which means the teachers solve it in advance,
the student is not engaged in any kind of assimilative thinking.

DR. STIGLER: It\'s a very limited view of mathematics that we have in
our American classrooms. I mean, if you look at what mathematicians do
it\'s not go through the steps that someone showed them how to do, it\'s
work on problems that no one knows how to solve, exchange ideas about
the different solutions, try to justify their solutions and persuade
other mathematicians that they didn\'t make a mistake. This is what
mathematicians do, but it\'s not at all what goes on in school. This is
tough, my own kids also look at me like I\'m crazy if I try to get them
to work on a problem they don\'t know how to solve. Their answer is, we
haven\'t had that, period, case closed.

But, I will tell a story from a study that we did a long time ago. We
had this idea, we were studying elementary school children in Japan and
the United States. And we had this idea that we would give them an
impossible math problem, and then we would measure how long they worked
on it, because I\'m a psychologist, we love those kind of measures, you
can get the mean and the standard deviation. So we gave the first
graders and the mean time for the first graders, we did about 12. We
actually couldn\'t continue this. The mean time for the first graders in
the U.S. was about 15 seconds. They looked at the problem and they said,
I don\'t know how to do that.

All of the 12 Japanese kids who got the problem worked an hour, and
didn\'t give up. And finally they had to go back to class, because they
had been pulled out to do this study, and the Japanese collaborator
said, we really can\'t use this problem, because it would take too much
time, and besides, you know, they\'re not really getting anywhere, it\'s
an impossible problem. But, the key was these kids worked on it for an
hour, and this was in first grade. So how do you socialize students to
believe that mathematics is such a different kind of discipline that
it\'s something you could struggle with for that long, it\'s a really
important problem.

Yes?

QUESTION: Is this method also used across disciplines?

DR. STIGLER: Actually, we\'re studying science now, and it is used in
science. But, I don\'t know about literacy or social studies. I would
guess not. I would guess it would have to be a little bit different. Any
other questions?

## Cultural Patterns of Teaching

**\[See Slide 6\]** Okay. Well, what we\'ve been able to do is produce a
couple of different kinds of analyses. One is we\'re able to begin
identifying these cultural patterns of teaching. If you look at the two
patterns I have up here, you can see the one on the left is the one that
characterizes American classrooms, and actually it\'s a pretty good
characterization of German classrooms also. Most of the math lessons in
the United States that we looked at have two main parts. The first part
is where the teacher tells you how to do the problem. They give you
instruction. If they\'re a very good teacher, they also give you some
explanation about why the solution works the way it does. And then they
let students practice on their own. And what teachers do is they go
around and help the kids who are having trouble.

In Japan they just have a very different script or pattern that emerges
in most of the lessons. They\'re kind of backwards from the American
pattern. First, the teacher poses a rich problem, that the students
typically have not solved before. The students struggle with that
problem, they\'re confused, they don\'t know what to do. You see a lot
of evidence of that. The students present their ideas, and their
solutions, and they have a class discussion about the methods and the
teacher concludes the discussion. Often, they\'ll go through this twice.

One other interesting thing I can point out, I think we put this in the
book, but American teachers have a real intolerance for confusion. So
any kid ‑‑ not only do we not pose problems for students to struggle
with, but if we see students struggling most American teachers rush over
to intervene and provide help, because they don\'t think there should be
strugglers. Somebody struggling in math class it must mean we didn\'t
teach them very well, or we didn\'t explain clearly enough what they
were trying to do. Then, of course, the Japanese teachers think you
should look confused, and in fact, if you ask a Japanese teacher, do you
think your students really understood that at the end of this lesson,
they\'ll say, of course not, that\'s going to take weeks for them to
understand that. So different views of understanding. We have a very
instantaneous view, you explain it. If the kids get it, a light bulb
goes off and you move on. Whereas, in Japan they have a very different
view of what understanding is.

Yes?

QUESTION: Did you say their class sizes are proportionate to the U.S.?

DR. STIGLER: Approximately 40 students in Japan.

QUESTION: And the German classes and the American classes?

DR. STIGLER: Much smaller, of course, much smaller, of course.
California class sizes are pretty high, although that\'s something else
I want to point out, is that there\'s an interesting paradox looking at
these teaching methods around the world. We deal with individual
differences in a very different way than they do in Japan. In Japan
there is absolutely no tracking, and no ability grouping until 10th
grade, at the earliest. So all students, whoever they are, however fast
they learn, are all put in the same classroom. In the United States we
divide students up at from the very earliest ages. Even in kindergarten,
we often will have a different class for the students who need a little
more help with their English, and a different class for the students who
are native English speakers, and so on. We\'re always dividing people up
to deal with their individual differences.

One of the results of this is that in Japan there is actually more
variability in terms of preparation in a classroom than we see in the
United States. This is one of the findings from previous research we\'ve
done. And paradoxically, in Japan they\'ve developed a lot of teaching
methods that are especially suited to highly diverse classrooms.
Paradoxically, in the United States, where we have a very high priority
and a lot of diversity, priority placed on addressing diversity, our
teaching techniques really don\'t work that well in diverse classrooms.

QUESTION: Most math classes ‑‑ most math teachers in America use the
textbook as the curriculum, and they use the teachers guide that is
often script for them. In Japan, do they have textbooks, or is the
curriculum pretty much designed by the teachers?

DR. STIGLER: No, they do have textbooks. And this is one of the things I
want to talk about later. They do have textbooks. But, a lot of ‑‑ and
they do have teachers\' manuals, and they do follow them pretty closely.
However, those textbooks and those teachers manuals change over time,
because in Japan they have a system for collecting feedback, back up
from classrooms, to improve the kind of techniques they\'re using in
classrooms. So we tend to have a negative connotation toward a script,
we say only a bad teacher would use a script. But, I want you to think
again about what professionalism means in other professions, like
medicine. Medicine, you\'re supposed to use the standard practice,
unless there is an unusual situation that develops and you need to be
able to do something different. In teaching, we devalue teachers who use
the standard practice. So one of the points I want to make is that what
we need to do is figure out how to shift the standard practice, not act
like there's something wrong with using standard practices.

Yes?

QUESTION:  Two quick comments. Currently in high schools there's two
academic tracks for math instruction, called high and low. The current
high level track teaches one-third less math than the standard academic
track in the 1950s when I went to school. So while we do have this
diversity here, it\'s considerably less than what was the single
standard track in the \'50s. The second is, you mentioned that in the
Japanese classroom the teacher says, we'll struggle over this concept
for several weeks and then they\'ll get it, and in the American teacher
says it once and then everybody supposed to get it immediately. Then
when we look at the textbooks, the fourth grade book, and fifth grade
book, and the sixth grade book are sort of 90 percent the same. So we
basically don\'t expect them to get anything, because everything is
going to be repeated the next year, and the next year.

DR. STIGLER: The problem is we expect them to get it all in one day or
one week, but they don\'t really get it. So we have to repeat it the
next year, and the next year. It\'s a little bit of a tortoise and a
hare phenomenon here. In Japan, somebody described Japanese teaching as
slow and sticky, and American teaching as quick and snappy. And I think
that\'s a pretty good description that can go with this.

**\[See Slide 7\]** Now, in addition to identifying these patterns we
also did a lot of quantitative analyses, because one of the things
that\'s very important when you\'re looking at videos is videos can be
very informative, but they can also be very misleading. You can see a
powerful example on video and assume that it means more than it does. So
one of the things that we\'re also trying to do is check ourselves by
figuring out how to code quantitatively what\'s happening in the videos.

And I brought one example which is, you know, when the teacher gives
students stuff to work on, on their own at their desk or in groups, we
call that seat work. And one of the things we looked at was, what was
the kind of task that students were posed during seat work. And we
divided it into the three levels, the first was to practice routine
procedures. The second one was to apply concepts in novel situations.
And then the highest level was invent or think, and this included things
like can you think of another way to solve that problem, or how many
solutions can you come up with, or can you prove that that would always
be true, not just in this case. This is the higher level thinking.

And what you can see is that in Germany and the U.S. they have a very
similar pattern. About 90 or more than 90 percent of the time students
are given work to do on their own, they\'re asked to practice routine
procedures. In other words, to do things they\'ve been taught how to do
already by the teacher. But, if you look in Japan you\'ll see that the
tape I showed you is very representative of what\'s going on in
classrooms. The majority of time Japanese students are given work to do
at their seats they\'ve given this highest level, they\'re asked to
invent, they\'re asked to think, they\'re asked to reason, prove, engage
in the kind of activities that mathematicians engage in.

Yes?

QUESTION: Just sitting here thinking, as an employer how I would react
to something like that. It\'s one of those things that you talked
earlier, you go, well, yes, I do that. Why not let the students do as
they do in Japan, because in the workplace that\'s what\'s expected of
you, where they discover the means to a solution. Yet, the culture of
the American classroom is, follow this prescriptive approach and you\'ll
have the answer to the test. Yet, you put them in the workplace and it
doesn\'t ‑‑ problems don\'t get solved that way.

DR. STIGLER: Right. A lot of this is about goals, it\'s about being
clear about what you really want students to learn, not only in the
short term, but in the long term. And that\'s something that is great
that\'s going on right now, with the whole standards movement, is people
have finally focused on what they want students to learn. But, then that
is a political debate, what do you want students to learn. Do you want
them to be able to, as fast as possible, execute the same solution to
the problem that everyone knows, or do you want them to be able to come
up with three different ways to solve a problem that they\'ve never seen
before, or maybe you want both and there\'s nothing wrong with that.
But, you have to realize that the kind of instruction we see is highly
related to the kind of learning outcomes we\'re going to see.

Yes?

QUESTION: Could you comment on how these two different methods
will change in terms of teachers' preparation, because it seems like
it\'s easier to follow the straight, you know, just tell how to solve
the problem and you work on that, instead of challenging the student,
what kind of new methods, and whatever you try. It takes very
experienced teachers, I actually learned all my math and science, you
know, in Asia, in Taiwan, and before, and I see the teachers'
preparation, dedication perhaps makes a lot of difference.

DR. STIGLER: Absolutely, it takes a lot of preparation. But, you know,
it takes a lot of work and preparation to teach the way we teach, also.
In fact, if you look at a lot of these videos, American teachers work
very, very hard. If you think about it, they\'re trying to make sure
they teach every single step. In some ways the Japanese teacher\'s job
is easier, because they pose the problem. But, the other thing I want to
point out is, they don\'t do it by themselves. They have a knowledge
base, they have resources they can go to. Every Japanese teacher can
look up this problem in a book, because this problem would be used all
over Japan. And they can go read up on it and find out, here\'s the five
most common solutions. And so they have the resources available that
they need.

Let me move on. And, but keep interrupting, that\'s great. I\'m happy to
be interrupted. **\[See Slide 8\]** Let me move on, and I wanted to talk
about three important lessons that I think we\'ve learned from this
study, beyond the particular findings, lessons that I think are
important for your work.

Yes?

QUESTION: You mentioned diversity, but just touched on it in your
comments. Do you have any recommendations of how teachers could do more
to deal with diversity in the classroom?

DR. STIGLER: Well, one of the things I want to stress, and I was going
to bring this up a little later, but let me bring it up right now. I\'m
not recommending that we teach like Japanese teachers, and there\'s a
lot of reasons why I\'m not recommending that. The main one is that we
won\'t be able to. Teaching is a complex system. In fact, I\'ll just put
this point out of order. Teaching is a complex system, you go into an
American classroom and act like a Japanese teacher, and within a day or
two you\'ll be back to acting like an American teacher. Why? Because the
pressure is so great from all the other different components in the
system, not the least of which are the students. So students ‑‑ in fact,
I do this in my college teaching. I\'m always trying to improve my own
teaching at the university. And I go in and it\'s amazing how much
backlash you get if you try to change anything.

For example, I remember last year I said to my students, they asked for
a review sheet of everything that was going to be on the midterm. And I
said, well, what I\'d like you to do is go back through everything
we\'ve read, and all your notes, and you make up what you think are the
most important concepts and those will probably be the ones on the
midterm. They said, that\'s not fair, you have to tell us what\'s on the
test. And I said, well, that\'s the way we\'re going to do it. They
complained, and complained, and complained, and they never stopped
complaining until the end a number of them wrote in and said they
learned a lot by trying to make their own review sheet. But, the fact
is, you get hit a lot.

So I\'m not recommending that we adopt Japanese techniques, but one of
the things I do want to say is that because teaching varies so little
within a culture, and varies so greatly across cultures, one of the
things that\'s very hard for us to do is to envision alternatives. If
you\'re a teacher in a classroom, what you tend to do is teach the way
you were taught. I mean, teaching is one of the only professions where
you have a 13 year apprenticeship before you ever go out and get in the
classroom, because everyone is a student. And all those years that
you\'re a student, you\'re learning what it is that a teacher does. And
if you even ask a kid, you know, pretend you\'re a teacher, they\'ll do
these same sorts of things. So what\'s hard for us is to envision
alternatives. This is something we can get by looking at Japanese
instruction.

And now to answer your question, which is do I have any recommendations
about diversity, I wouldn\'t recommend any particular teaching
techniques, because I don\'t think that should be what anyone does.
However, I would say that we can learn a lot from cultures who worked,
who have perfected techniques that tend to be especially useful in
diverse situations. I don\'t think our teaching techniques are, so I
think we have a lot to learn.

QUESTION: Can I ask question? What is the level of parental involvement,
and so on, on this? It seems to me under the Japanese system you\'re
talking about it would a whole different thing to try and help a kid
doing homework, like the governor is talking about at home, whatever
than it would be under the American system. Did you tie in any study of
that, also?

DR. STIGLER: Well, I\'ve done that in other research. And it\'s
interesting the kind of parental involvement is very different in the
U.S. than in Japan. U.S., there\'s more direct teaching, parents try to
actually help their kids do the homework, get the right answer. In Japan
it\'s a much more indirect kind of help. So provide a desk for the
student, or provide time, or give them snacks, but not actually get in
there and help them do the homework.

I\'ll tell you one other interesting thing, and that is we\'re always
talking about parental involvement. Every school you go into now that\'s
a good school there\'s parents all over the place. And one of the things
we learned in showing our videotapes to our colleagues from Japan is
they said, who are those people in the classroom? And we said, that\'s
the parents. They said, you\'ve got to be kidding. And they said, you
let parents teach? They couldn\'t believe it. And you know, when you
think about it, it\'s a very interesting point. Would you let parent
volunteers go in and do surgery in the operating room, just to show that
you have a hospital with a lot of involvement? No. It\'s just another
example of the very, the very subtle ways that we undermine teaching as
a profession. Yes, it looks like a great thing to have parents in the
classroom. But, think about it, what you\'re saying is, anyone can
teach, and I think we do believe that.

## Three Truths About Teaching

Let me just talk about three truths about teaching, and this is things
that \-- some of which I\'ve touched on already, but I think are
important. First of all, teaching in this country is a very private
activity. I said it before at the beginning, that most of our efforts to
improve education have not focused on what happens in classrooms. One of
the reasons for this is that policymakers believe it\'s none of their
business what happens in classrooms, because everyone in our society has
told them that over and over again. A teacher goes in their classroom,
they shut the door, that\'s it, it\'s their classroom, they\'re the ones
who get to decide what happens. One of the consequences of this
organization of teaching is that we have no shared language for talking
about teaching.

I was at a meeting two days ago, this is my third Washington meeting,
and I\'ve got to get out of here. But, someone was saying that he takes
in his graduate class at Harvard University, and these are mostly
experienced practitioners coming back for a masters degree, and he shows
them videotapes from classrooms and has them talk about it. And he says,
it\'s the most painful thing he does every year, because they don\'t
have anything to say, they don\'t know how to talk about the practice
that\'s going on in their classrooms. We saw this with our videotapes.
We got all the videotapes back, and we were trying to agree just on what
we could point to was happening on tape.

One of the things we thought we\'d do is, this was math, we thought ‑‑ I
said, why don\'t we mark all the problems they work on in a math lesson.
And do you know that we struggled for months to try to define what a
problem is, and we could never agree on it. We were never able to talk
about how many problems they do in a math class. Now, in our new study
actually we went back and we are going to talk about how many problems
they do in a math class. But, the point is, we have no shared language
for talking about teaching, which is a huge problem if you\'re trying to
improve professional knowledge, because knowledge requires that you be
able to communicate about that knowledge.

QUESTION: Dr. Stigler, should this be three truths about American
teaching, and America and this is really what you\'re saying ‑‑ 

DR. STIGLER: Well, most of these are true about all teaching. But,
nowhere have I found teaching to be such a private activity as it is in
the United States. I mean, somebody said, even sex, you know more about
what people do in their bedrooms than you know about what teachers do in
their classrooms. And it\'s true. For the most part we don\'t think we
have a right to know. But, you know, if we don\'t get into classrooms we
will not improve education. That is the bottom line. Whether you think
teachers are under-qualified, not capable, whatever, you cannot improve
education if you don\'t work with teachers, because they are the
gatekeepers, they\'re the ones there, they are the ones who have access
to the information that\'s required, and you have to get to them.

Second is that teaching is a complex system, and I already sort of made
this point, but I want to make sure you understand that you can\'t just
copy a teaching technique that you see on a videotape. It\'s actually a
fun thing to try, and you learn a lot about yourself as a teacher when
you do that. But you immediately learn that it won\'t work because of
all the things that aren\'t there. You know, you may change your
behavior, but your students don\'t change their behavior, or they have
all these materials and we don\'t have those materials, or in the last
lesson the students studied how to find the area of parallelograms and
our students didn\'t study that, so they don\'t know what they need to
know to do this lesson. And this come up over and over again. So
there\'s no feature of teaching that\'s always good or always bad.

So all these wars that are going on between we should do basic skills,
we should do direct teaching, or we should do discovery learning, the
fact is all of those things are good sometimes, it just depends on the
situation. There is nothing wrong with discovering something in the
right situation. There is nothing wrong with giving a lecture. In fact,
one of the ways Japanese ‑‑ Japanese teachers engage their students in
more discovery than any country that we\'ve studied so far. They also
lecture more than teachers in any other country that we\'ve studied so
far. But for them the key is, the best preparation for a lecture is
yourself struggling with a problem, then they\'re prepared to hear a
lecture. So the whole thing about teaching is that it\'s a complicated
system and you can\'t take a simplistic view.

And then finally, I\'ve pointed to this already, but this is an
extremely important point, teaching is a cultural activity. It varies a
lot more across cultures than it does within cultures. And there are
some important implications of this. First of all, teaching is learned
implicitly, not explicitly. So it\'s not the same as learning to be an
engineer where most of what people learn they learn in college and
graduate school. With teaching, it\'s learned implicitly, and that makes
it very hard to change. It\'s also hard to see, as I talked to you
before. But, teaching is hard to change. Everyone who has ever tried to
change teaching will tell you that it\'s really hard to change teaching.

Yes?

QUESTION: If all of this is true, how do you explain the fact that
American students in the fourth grade sample of the TIMSS did quite
well, compared to the other nations. So where does it fit in? Is it part
of the culture that\'s working and other parts that are not?

DR. STIGLER: Well, they didn\'t really do that well. And actually if you
look at the TIMSS results what you find is the further you go through
school the more behind American students are. So at fourth grade
they\'re not as far behind because they\'re only in fourth grade. But,
these are like linear functions, and I think it\'s important to not act
like there\'s something different going on in fourth grade that makes us
superior. We\'re just not as far behind. And also, we\'re a very rich
and privileged country. A lot of kids know all the stuff they\'re
learning in school before they ever go to school. And that really takes
you a long ways in school. You can get through first grade, second
grade, fourth grade, and still do pretty well if you go home at night
and you\'re engaged intellectually by your parents. But, it can\'t take
you the rest of the way. That\'s the problem. So that\'s the way I look
at it.

Yes?

QUESTION: Now that technology is being introduced in the classroom,
another element, are the Japanese ahead of us in terms of that? I saw
that the Japanese teacher seemed to use a video, especially with math,
for the teacher\'s acceleration. You can talk about it a long time, but
if you see a graph or you see something moving you can understand it,
the concept is better.

DR. STIGLER: No, the Japanese are not ahead of us in terms of technology
in the schools. We have more computers in the classrooms than we ever
see in any other country in the world. However, the Japanese understand
that putting the tool in the classroom will have no effect on what\'s
happening in the classroom unless you study it and figure out how to
integrate it into your classroom practice. So what\'s going to happen in
Japan is they\'re going to be very slow to integrate technology into the
classrooms, but they\'re going to do it in a very thoughtful way.
They\'ll have teacher study groups, and they already have them all over
Japan, studying how to use technology. The way we saw it in this tape is
one of the most common ways it is used in Japan, which is as a focus for
class discussion. The most common way computers are used in American
classrooms is to give extra drill and practice to some students, so that
the teacher can work with another group of students. That\'s the most
common thing we see.

Yes?

QUESTION: So could we say that we are only number two to in science in
relation to other countries in the world on TIMSS and something happens
along the way that our students don't do as well in the upper grades \--
that is not exactly true? You know, you mention that we're falling
behind \-- the reason that we are doing so well on the fourth grade...

DR. STIGLER: Well, you know, we don\'t hardly teach science at the
fourth grade level. That\'s one of the things that was also in the TIMSS
report that most people didn\'t notice, is we scored very well in
science, but we don\'t really teach it in school. So again, it gets back
to the point I was making before, which was there are a lot of different
ways to learn things. Math is interesting, because most of the math kids
learn they do learn in school, that actually makes it a pretty
interesting topic for study.

Yes, I\'ll take a couple more questions. Then I\'m going to move on,
because I don't know, do I have an ending time? I bet I do. Because I
want to make sure I talk about how to improve teaching Diane?

QUESTION: Yes, you collected these data when?

DR. STIGLER: These data were collected in 1994 and 95.

QUESTION: Okay. Since 1994-95, one of the things you mentioned was that,
in fact, this teaching is situated within a complex system, instruction
materials are part of it, preparation is part of it. And even the kids
and what they expect is part of this system. Since then, some new
instruction materials have come out that have a different structure, and
call for a different kind of teaching. And actually now there\'s been an
opportunity for some school districts to actually implement those
materials and start kids from kindergarten through a different kind of
instructional sequence, where there is, in fact, at least the beginnings
of a different system starting. In your new study are you going to be
looking ‑‑ have you looked at any of those classrooms, are any of those
included in your new study?

DR. STIGLER: Well, I would like to look at those classrooms, and many
people will look at those classrooms. What\'s important about our study
is that it is a national sample. So what I can tell you is, and this was
a surprise to me, and I think would be a surprise to everyone, is that
if we\'re working with these new curricula and new teaching methods, we
tend to think they\'re really catching on. The fact is, they\'re not
really catching on. They\'re so miniscule that they hardly show up at
all in the national sample. Now, I believe we should be studying those,
because I think that we can learn a lot from that kind of research. But,
it just doesn\'t happen to come out when you study the national sample.
Now, in our new study, I can\'t say for sure, we\'re still collecting
the data. So we may find more evidence of that.

But, another thing I want to say, and I was going to say this later, but
since later may not come I\'ll say it now, is the third goal of our
study was to look at reform, to see what effect it has in classrooms.
And you do see evidence, in our last study we asked teachers have you
read the NCTM standards, and all these new documents that are out there
to tell teachers, these are recommended things, changes you should make
in your classroom. And 75 percent of the teachers had read them, and 75
percent of the teachers said they implement them in their classrooms.
And so we have the videotape, so we said, what about the lesson we
videotaped, can we see it there? And yes, they said, it\'s right there,
you\'ll see I\'m implementing the NCTM standards in my classroom. And
then we went back and looked at the videotape, and what you see is just
like what\'s on every other videotape, what\'s going on here?

In the book we told that story that Al Shankar told, which I\'ll tell
again for the people who didn\'t hear it, because I think it\'s exactly
what happens. He was telling a story about when he visited Israel back
in the \'60s, I think it was, and he was looking at housing projects
that had been set up to house immigrants from other Arab countries. And
they were telling him that one of the big problems they had in these
housing projects was health because the Arabs were coming in, and they
were eating off the floor, and it was causing a lot of health problems
and disease and everything. So they started a campaign to get Arabs to
eat off tables. And Shankar said, well, that\'s interesting, could we go
in and look and see how a family is living. He said they walked into a
household of a family who had recently immigrated from Yemen and he
said, there they were, the family, eating dinner off a table. The only
thing is, the table was upside down, and the legs were sticking up in
the air, and the food was on the underside, and they were all sitting on
the floor around it. What they did is they used the table to fit into
their cultural system.

This happens all the time with teaching. The reason it\'s important to
know that is not to discourage you, that you can\'t improve teaching,
but to realize that you can\'t improve teaching by writing a document
and printing a whole bunch of copies and sending it out to everybody.
And, sure, the same is going to be true for the report this commission
puts out. There\'s going to be a report, it\'s going to get printed, but
that alone is not going to change what teachers do in classrooms. It may
lead to things, hopefully, that do change what teachers do in
classrooms.

## Improving Teaching by Improving Teaching Methods

**\[See Slide 9\]** Let me move on now to the final part of my
presentation and talk about improving teaching. I want to go back to the
point I made at the beginning. I said, it would be a tragedy if you make
your work into solving the problem of how to get different kinds of
people into the classroom. That is important, improving the quality of
the teachers is important. But, it\'s not going to be enough, and in
fact, it\'s not going to solve the problem of improving the methods that
happen.

Right now we can go back and we can say, actually, there are two other
kinds of improvement, or ways that you can improve teaching. The second
way is to improve the competence of the teachers in the classrooms. Now,
I want to make the point here that of course you want teachers in the
classrooms to be as competent as possible. But, in the TIMSS video study
you saw many examples of competent teachers, competently implementing
limited teaching methods. And I think that\'s how I would characterize
the teacher I showed you today. This is a competent teacher. He\'s warm,
he\'s well liked by his students, it\'s got a good climate. But, he has
a very limited view of what mathematics is, and limited teaching
techniques. So the point I want to make is that improving the competence
of teachers also is only going to be another little bit of the way. What
we need to do is figure out how to shift the methods that teachers are
using.

Yes?

QUESTION: Have you compiled any evidence that shows that when teachers
are brought in, let\'s say from industry, and outside of the educational
realm that it\'s actually improved in teaching, or doesn\'t improve the
teaching competence by showing that they have more, as this fellow here
said, they have more of a business orientation and you have them work as
more in discovery rather than the typical standard?

DR. STIGLER: I haven\'t done a formal study, but I can tell you from
personal experience, they teach just like everyone else teaches, because
you put them back and say, now you\'re a teacher. And they go, I\'m a
teacher, so they start acting like a teacher. It doesn\'t matter how
they acted in business, they\'re going to act like a teacher when they
get in the classroom. So I don\'t think you\'re going to see any big
difference in the kind of teaching methods that they use.

So really the key, and most Americans I think would rank order these in
the order that I\'ve listed them. They think the first thing is to get
really good teachers in the classroom. Now, beyond that it would be nice
to give them a little in-service and let them improve their competence.
And most Americans don\'t even know what you mean when you say, well,
let\'s improve the methods. What I want to urge you to consider is
totally changing the order of these. The most important gains are going
to be made by figuring out a way to improve the teaching methods that
are used in classrooms. Beyond that, improvements in competence will
definitely follow. And beyond that, we\'re going to be dealing with the
teachers that are in the classrooms right now. Any policy we try to
implement to recruit different kinds of people in teaching, I don\'t
think they\'re going to work, necessarily. And also, it\'s going to be a
very hard thing to do, it\'s going to take a long time. The best way to
recruit better people into teaching, by the way, is to give them a
professional life, is to let them become members in a profession with a
professional knowledge base, and that\'s what you get when you improve
teaching methods.

So the point, the main point I want you to understand today, which I
highlighted is that the key to long-term improvement is to
generate -- figure out how to generate, accumulate, and share
professional knowledge. What we desperately need is a knowledge base to
underlie the teaching profession. And we do not have this today. One of
the things I want to say that\'s a great tragedy is we have 3 million
teachers out there, some of them are outstanding, they didn\'t get to be
outstanding because we trained them well. They didn\'t get to be
outstanding because they participated in professional knowledge base,
they got to be outstanding because they\'re just outstanding people who
went into their classrooms and learned from their own experience. The
biggest tragedy that I think we face is that we have no way to learn
even from those teachers.

There is no way for an excellent teacher to share what they know with
other teachers and so we can\'t possibly improve. Yes, individual
teachers can improve, but unless we can figure out a way for them to
share what they know with other teachers, then each new teacher will
start new. And yes, the ones who work extra hard, the ones who are extra
smart, some of them are going to be excellent teachers, and they\'re
going to figure out what to do. But again, we have to keep starting over
each time.

Deborah, did you have your hand up?

QUESTION: I just want to respectfully also say that improving teaching
methods I think is extremely critical, but also helping teachers and
educators find a way to internalize those methods is critical. Because I
know we\'ve done training in the summer, and somebody may implement a
program and use teaching methods that are very effective, and then not
really internalize them and carry them over to the classroom throughout
the year.

DR. STIGLER: Good. That\'s a very good point. And I\'m going to come
back to that as soon as I move on.

Yes?

QUESTION: When you talk about improving methods, the implication is that
maybe we know what good methods are. And, so ‑‑

DR. STIGLER: I\'m going to address that in just a second, too.

QUESTION: And something else I hope you\'ll address is, what advice
would you have to those of us in universities in terms of preparing the
next ‑‑ I mean, what do we need to do in order to put teachers in the
classroom who are adept at these new methods?

DR. STIGLER: Okay. I will answer that in a second because I have an
answer. Let\'s take one more question, Diane, and then move on, because
I\'m afraid they\'re going to kick me out here.

ANSWER: You\'re fine.

DR. STIGLER: Really. I\'m used to being kicked off.

ANSWER: You\'ve negotiated a good deal, Jim.

DR. STIGLER: Yes, go ahead, Diane.

QUESTION: You talk about the key to long-term improvement is the
generating, accumulating and sharing of professional knowledge. You
already mentioned that in Japan one of the mechanisms for sharing this
accumulated professional knowledge is through the textbooks that, in
fact, reflect this, and there\'s other resources available that teachers
can go in. And you\'ve alluded to their time for collegial discussion.
Would you elaborate other kinds of mechanisms they have for doing that?

DR. STIGLER: Yes. I am going to do that. In fact, these are all the
things I was just about to say, so maybe I should just go on and say it,
and then ask questions.

**\[See Slide 10\]** Okay. So, how do you do this, how do you improve
the teaching methods? That\'s really the key. And I want to talk about
two different approaches. One is the old approach, and one is what I
would call a better approach. So the old approach is, as the questioner
there pointed out, assumes that somebody knows the best way to teach,
and in particular it assumes that it is researchers who know the best
way to teach, people like me, for example.

And, most people think that the biggest bottleneck in improving teaching
is not that we don\'t know how to teach, but it\'s how to get that
message across to the teachers and everybody will tell you that. You
know, if we could only find a way to get them to understand what we\'re
saying. But see, they\'re not smart enough. And that\'s one of the
reasons why people say, you know, we need better people in the classroom
because people who are researchers go out and say, I need somebody who
understands what I\'m saying. Well, part of the problem is, most
researchers don\'t really know that much about what\'s going on in
classrooms. And a lot of the ideas that come up with actually aren\'t
useful to particular classroom teachers. And that\'s one of the
problems.

But there are some other problems also. Another problem is that ‑‑ well,
same problem, researchers really aren\'t the ones in a position usually
to know what\'s the best way to improve teaching in the classroom. And
finally, there just aren\'t very many researchers. There might be a few
thousand researchers out there trying to figure out how to improve
teaching techniques, but there\'s three million teachers out there. The
work of coming up with enough good ideas to improve teaching methods
isn\'t going to come from teachers.

The other thing I want to point out though, is that we have to get
beyond this idea that anybody knows the best way to teach. We should be
agnostic on the best way to teach. A great opportunity exists now
because we have so many states adopting standards for learning. What
this should do is focus us not on what\'s the best method, but the best
method of teaching is the method that helps students learn the most.
That is how we should define good teaching. And we should not seek an
end to that. We should stop, you know, back and forth from old math to
new math to this and that, and start implementing a system where we\'re
not going to argue in favor of any particular method. What we\'re going
to do is develop a system where any idea is worthy of being tested. And
if it helps students learn more, it\'s an idea we\'re going to work more
with, and we\'re going to perfect. And if it doesn\'t help students
learn more, we\'re not going to do it, even if our ideology tells us
it\'s the right thing to do.

Yes?

QUESTION: One of the things that I thought of in a meeting we were in
last week that really relates to what Jim says, and there is hope. Jim
has worked with some of our teachers and after having an opportunity to
reflect on watching different strategies, they have gone back and worked
together and looked at what they want to do in the classroom. But in all
of our meetings in the last week and this week, we continue to hear
about the medical model. And it finally dawned on me where Jim is
talking about refining better techniques. In the 1950s when my father
had cataract surgery, we lived in Ohio, and they had to take him to
Michigan to have the surgery and they put his head between two cement
blocks on a bed for two weeks so that he had this recovery time. And,
unfortunately, I inherited that trait from him, and I\'ve had to have a
number of cataract surgeries, and I\'ve gone into the hospital at 9 a.m.
and I\'m out by noon.

The medical model has said we have taken strategies or techniques, and
we\'ve built upon them for a number of years and continuously refined
them so that the practitioners can use them. And it seems that on
numerous occasions we\'re prepared to throw everything out and start
over again as opposed to refining these concepts and using them, as Jim
has said, in an eclectic way, to use a variety of strategies that have
continuously been refined, and I thought that one medical model really
spoke volumes about what it is that we\'re charged with doing.

DR. STIGLER: Thank you, Paul.

Now, a better approach, the one that I want to argue needs to be
considered, is more like what we see in Japan, the lesson study movement
in Japan. What it does is, it says teachers have to play a central role
in the development of professional knowledge. We need to figure out a
way to capture the knowledge that teachers are developing, capture their
experience, and let them generate, accumulate, and share knowledge among
their colleagues.

Now, some people would say, you know, this is never going to work
because teachers are the whole reason we\'re discussing it in the first
place. And to them I would simply say, first of all, I disagree. But,
second of all, whether you think teachers can do this or not, there\'s
really no one else who can do it. Because teaching is such a cultural
activity, and so highly contextualized, there\'s no one ‑‑ you cannot go
around the teacher. There is no one else who is going to be able to
observe what teachers observe and come up with the ideas that teachers
come up with.

Now, yes, people can ‑‑ teachers don\'t only learn from their
experience, they can get ideas from a lot of different sources. And even
from researchers. But ultimately, whether some idea is going to work to
help students learn more in classrooms is going to have to be something
that teachers are part of discovering. There\'s no way we\'re going to
be able to get around that.

Now, I want to talk just a little bit about lessons studied. But I\'ll
take Deborah\'s question first.

QUESTION: I guess I don\'t see the dichotomy between those two. The
teachers will play a central role in helping to identify practices that
are making a difference with kids, play a role in identifying parts of
the work that people can\'t see, all these things you\'ve been talking
about, language, the fact that it\'s complex, strikes me that you\'re
right that teachers have to play a central role. But that doesn\'t seem
at odds with the notion that we need disciplined study of teaching,
which is what research can contribute. Without that, we\'re very likely,
especially given your argument about the cultural embeddedness of the
practice, to simply give a high status to some practices that don\'t
work because it won\'t be necessarily situated in a disciplined approach
to figuring out whether certain techniques actually do work for kids. It
seems to me you\'d want to argue for something that combines these two.

DR. STIGLER: Well, I do. And I always argue for something that combines
these two. But the problem is, I think this dichotomy is important
because the first approach is so ingrained. Most teachers don\'t believe
they should have any role in improving teaching. They think when they go
to an in-service they\'re supposed to have somebody tell them what\'s
the latest, and what\'s the greatest. They don\'t take responsibility
for that. And I think that that we have to really counteract because
we\'re wasting so much information that we need.

Yes, we do need disciplined study of teaching, and that is going to play
a part of it. **\[See Slide 11\]** And one of the things that I want to
talk about for just a few minutes is lesson study in Japan because it\'s
an example of the kind of system that I\'m talking about that\'s
actually concrete.

In the book we talk about it, and I don\'t need to go into great detail,
but the key of lesson study in Japan, and this is something that 99
percent of all elementary school teachers in Japan participate in, about
50 percent of all middle school teachers, is that teachers participate
in lesson study groups. And what lesson study groups do is, they meet
together two to five hours a week. And their focus is on improving
teaching in their classrooms, that\'s what they do in a very concrete
way. And the way this work goes is, first of all, they get together and
they plan a lesson. And usually they\'ll only do one or two lessons a
year, so it\'s a very intense process, and I brought some pictures that
one of my graduate students gave me who spent a year with a lesson study
group, and just here\'s a picture of teachers in a Japanese school. And
this is a very typical activity.

Now, in front of them they have detailed lesson plans because they use
lesson plans not to write in their books so a substitute will know what
to do, not to write in their book because the principal is going to
inspect it later, but they use it as a planning tool to actually think
through how instruction can be improved. And these lesson plans are
about 10 or 15 pages thick. And they go through the lesson in such
detail that you can\'t imagine.

For example, this group spent three hours talking about whether, this
was in first grade, they were going to learn subtraction with borrowing
for the first time, and they spent three hours talking about whether
they should do the problem 12 minus 7, or 13 minus 7, as the first
problem. And they had an amazing discussion where they thought through,
well, these are the 12 different things a student might say. And, oh,
some students may misunderstand it. And they actually went through. And
that\'s the level of planning they go through.

**\[See Slide 12\]** When they\'re done planning the lesson, they go
into the classroom and teach it. One of the teachers teaches it, and all
the other teachers watch. And you can see they\'re all fanned out here
observing what the students are doing during the lesson. They collect
the students\' work, they look over the students shoulders, and 90
percent of their discussions about these lessons have to do with how did
students understand the instruction that we planned? How is it helping
them learn what we wanted them to learn?

So, what\'s unique about this is that they\'re trying to improve
teaching by directly studying teaching, not by going and taking a course
on child development or technology or cognitive science in a college,
but by going into the classroom and saying, let\'s take this lesson, and
see if we can make it better. They teach the lesson, **\[See Slide
13\]** and then they meet to go over what happened. And here\'s some
pictures from a meeting, and this is a meeting in a school where this is
the second time they\'ve taught this lesson.

They invited all the teachers in the school to come, and there were
about 70 teachers in this school. We don\'t have a shot that shows all
of them. But what\'s interesting here is, first of all, that\'s the
principal of the school on the top. Every teacher in this school is
there to hear about this first grade math lesson, the principal, the
vice principal, the music teacher, the art teacher, this was the key
most important thing going on in this school was the focus on how to
improve teaching. And the guy on the bottom, by the way, is a
researcher. He\'s a consultant who was called in to watch the lesson and
to provide his feedback, and so on. So, Deborah, there is a role in
their system for university-based researchers.

Now, at the end of this whole lesson study process, these teachers write
the report. And these reports are the story of what they did. Here is
the lesson plan we first planned. Here\'s what happened when we taught
it. Here\'s the problems that occurred, some of the students didn\'t get
this, some got the wrong idea, they developed a misconception. Here\'s
our hypothesis about why this didn\'t work. And here\'s a solution
we\'re going to propose. Then we redid it with the solution, the revised
lesson plan is there. Then we tried it, and here\'s what happened the
next time we taught it. Did it solve the problem? Hey, maybe we\'re
right about what we thought was the root of the problem.

Now, if you go to any bookstore in Japan, you can see shelves and
shelves of books written by teachers, products of lesson study. So that
if you\'re a teacher in Japan, you can buy books on how to teach all the
different parts of the Japanese curriculum. Whatever part you\'re
struggling with that year, whether it\'s fractions, subtraction,
geometry, proofs, you can find books written by teachers that explain
the results of their lesson study. And this is the way they accumulate
and share the professional knowledge base.

Now, in Japan, it\'s a lot easier because they have a national
curriculum, so any particular lesson that the teachers choose to work on
is immediately shareable and it\'s shareable because that lesson is
going to be taught by other teachers throughout the country. So, they
really have an interest in finding out what your lesson study group
learned about how to teach that lesson.

Now, what can policymakers ‑‑ and the other thing I wanted to say, by
the way, is I was just in a meeting two days ago and heard a whole bunch
of presentations by the superintendent, the principal, and a teacher
from District 2 in New York City, which has something very similar to
this going on in their school. They decided, their whole focus was going
to be professional development. And the focus of all their professional
development is how to help students learn more.

They started this 10 years ago, they went in, they took every student,
they looked at where they were, and they said, what can we do to help
them? We\'re going to organize ourselves around figuring out how to do
that. That\'s what the teachers do. The principal\'s job is to help
teachers do that, help the teachers get together and figure out how to
help these kids learn. The superintendent, their job is to help the
principals help the teachers. And they\'ve made remarkable gains.

Often people say, we can\'t do that here because it\'s Japanese, and
we\'re not Japanese, which is obviously true. But what\'s interesting to
me is that the Japanese never take no for an answer, they never say, we
can\'t do that here because it\'s American. They say, that\'s an
interesting idea, let\'s study it and see if that would help us. I think
we need to have an attitude more like that.

Well, what can policymakers do to help all this happen? I think there
are three things that I want to leave you with. First of all, the
emphasis on standards and assessments is really, really important. And I
think that you\'ve got to affirm that in the recommendations that come
out of this commission because if you don\'t have clear standards for
what you want students to learn, this kind of professional
knowledge-based development can\'t occur. The only criterion by which we
know something is an improvement in teaching is if it helps students
learn more. So that\'s very important.

Second of all, there need to be incentives provided to make work by
teachers on improving teaching a significant part of their work week.
This is something that more and more people know. There are a lot of
schools now that have teachers getting together, collaborating, trying
to improve the instructions going on in their school, and everyone who
does some of this sees the value instantly, and the teachers see the
value instantly.

The problem is, most school districts say, it\'s impossible to find any
time for our teachers to get together and work. They\'re too busy
teaching. That\'s what we pay them for is to teach. Incentives have to
be put into place so that professional development is seen as not
something extra that teachers do in the summer, or go back to a
university and do, it\'s something that\'s part of their work week, and
has to be built in. And this somehow needs to be supported.

Finally, using the kind of technology that I\'ve demonstrated here
today, I think that there could be a national role in developing an
archive of professional knowledge about teaching that includes not only
written reports, but also videos, and teachers' explanations of what\'s
going on. We need a way to capture this knowledge, and it seems to me
that something that a nation could do is begin to put together such an
archive.

**\[See Slide 14\]** So, in conclusion, and then I will take as many
questions as you want to ask, but I do want to stop, teaching quality
can only be improved inside the classroom. Teachers have to be part of
this process any way you slice it. And we shouldn\'t continue to waste
the experience that they have. Currently, we have a lot of experience
and no way to profit from it.

We need to move beyond these ideological wars about what people think
they want to happen inside classrooms and, instead, ask ourselves this
question, 50 years from now, will we be able to look back and say, you
know, teaching has gotten gradually better over the past 50 years.
Unfortunately, today, we really can\'t do that. We can\'t look back and
say, you know, teaching has gotten gradually better, there have been
some real advances. Fifty years from now, we ought to be able to do
that, and that ought to be a major goal of a commission like this is to
figure out how we can ensure that that will happen.

And, finally, developing this professional knowledge base I think needs
to be a national priority.

So, that\'s all I prepared to say and I\'ll take as many questions as
you have.

QUESTION: How much of this is a national policy in Japan that this is
the way they will teach, and it\'s put out, and that\'s they way they do
it, standardized all over Japan, and how much of it is left up to
individual teaching schools, and so on?

And the other, you haven\'t really brought in Germany. You mentioned in
the book Germany, and I wonder if there were serious, if there were
major differences there also?

DR. STIGLER: Yes. Well, you know, one of the things interesting about
Germany, we didn\'t know this when we first started the study is, they
don\'t actually do that well in mathematics. Their achievement is not
that high. And in many ways, they\'re teaching looks a lot like our
teaching. There are some differences, but that\'s the reason we haven\'t
focused on it as much.

But your other question is really interesting, which is how policy works
in Japan, and it\'s a very interesting situation in Japan, where there
is top down policy, there\'s no question about it. But there also is a
great deal of feedback up from teachers that influences national policy.
And one of the ways this happens is through the network of national
schools in Japan. There\'s 100 national schools in Japan and they\'re
kind of like laboratory schools. But the way the government uses them is
like this, the government in Japan, the ministry of education puts out
new curricula and new teacher guidelines, and so on, every ten years.
And they\'re always thinking about five years ahead.

So if they have an idea, like right now a good example is technology.
They\'re very interested in how to, in figuring out how to use
technology in their classrooms. Now, what they do is, they put out a
directive to their national schools, and it\'s always very vague. It
says, we need to find ways to use technology in classrooms to help our
students understand mathematics more deeply.

In these national schools all over Japan, teacher groups get together
and they read this stuff, and they go, what does that mean
\"technology,\" and they don\'t know, and they talk about it. They\'re
usually vague. They say, deep understanding, what\'s deep understanding?
They talk about it. And then, they develop a lesson study group to focus
on the issues that the national government has asked them to focus on.
The results of what they learned five years later ends up getting built
into the national education policy.

So, yes, it\'s a national policy and centralized, but it\'s highly
influenced by feedback up from teachers. It\'s a very interesting
system.

Yes?

QUESTION: What\'s your assessment of the teacher preparation programs in
our colleges and university, and is what we\'re doing in these programs
compatible with what you think needs to happen in the classroom?

DR. STIGLER: Well, I\'m not an expert on teacher education programs, but
most teachers don\'t think teacher education programs help prepare them
very well for teaching. I went through a teacher education program, and
I don\'t believe it prepared me very well for teaching. I think that
teacher education programs also largely take place outside the
classroom. Now, part of that is because they must. They take place in
universities. Yes, I think we could improve the focus on practice in
teacher training programs, we could use more video and have one of the
things that teachers-in-training could learn is how to analyze classroom
practice and talk about it. They could learn a shared language from
talking about what happens in the classrooms and analyzing it, and
trying to envision ways to improve it.

But the key is probably in-service training. In Japan, they don\'t do
any better at pre-service training than we do. And most Japanese
teachers don\'t think they learn very much from pre-service training.
The difference is, that\'s most of the training American teachers ever
get is what they got in their pre-service training. The rest is sink or
swim. The difference is, in Japan, they jump in and they have a lifelong
path of learning, a place that they can continually be working to
improve their knowledge, improve their skills, and so on.

By the way, I want to say something, Japan, the teachers in these groups
believe that the main thing they\'re doing there is trying to improve
teaching methods for the nation. They don\'t believe what they\'re doing
is trying to improve their own skills. But of course, they do improve
their own skills in these groups. The group that my students studied,
one of the teachers was a first year teacher. He said, she didn\'t
really say a word the whole year. Maybe she said a little bit. But what
she\'s doing is, she\'s getting socialized into a profession that values
reflective inquiry on what\'s happening in classrooms, and studying how
to improve it, and that\'s what that teacher is learning.

QUESTION: Jim, could I have, I think we will limit questions to the
commission members here for a little while. We have about ten minutes
left here, and I appreciate the interest of other people here, and
that\'s great. Your questions have been good. But let\'s limit this to
commission members here for the remaining 10 minutes of the questions.

QUESTION: In your book, you made reference to the fact that the Japanese
in their classrooms have all of the students from high to low range.
What about gifted and talented programs, and special ed kinds of
programs that we have here in America, do they have those in Japan, and
how does it affect the instruction?

DR. STIGLER: For the most part, they don\'t have those kinds of
programs, although they think they need those kind of programs more and
more. They have people constantly studying our educational system
because they worry they\'re not doing enough for their gifted students,
for example. But, for the most part, they don\'t have those kind of
programs.

And that saves a lot of money. I mean, in a Japanese school, all the
money goes to classroom teachers. They don\'t have special teachers
particularly. They don\'t have janitors. The kids clean the school
themselves. They get together every day and scrub the school. There are
no janitors in schools. They don\'t have cafeteria workers to serve
lunch, the kids go get the lunch and serve the lunch every day. The kids
clean up after the lunch.

So, Linda Darling-Hammond, who I understand is going to talk to you this
afternoon, has some statistics on percentage of staff in school that are
actually in the classroom, and we\'re one of the lowest. We\'re like 43
percent of school staff are in the classroom teaching students. In
Japan, it\'s closer to 70 or 80 percent.

QUESTION: One of the things I think we need to understand about the
Japanese study groups, and the Japanese teachers is that they actually
go into the universities before they can ever enter teacher training
with a lot more knowledge of math than our teachers have. And I think
having that knowledge enables them to do more in study groups from this
knowledge base, but especially at elementary and middle school. What
most of our elementary teachers lack and many of the middle school ones.
And I think that issue is one that actually has to bring the commission
to talk about issues of certification, and although the focus on the
teaching and the instruction is prime, I don\'t think we can neglect
those other things that impinge upon teaching and what teachers know and
why they are able to do the kinds of teaching that they do.

DR. STIGLER: Yes. That\'s true. And now you\'re going to get us all
depressed about how we don\'t know enough math. And part of this is a
chicken and egg problem. I mean, the only way our students are ever
really going to learn more math is if we do a better job teaching math
to them. And this is going to take a very long time.

However, I just want to say that I don\'t think it\'s true that if
teachers just take more math courses, they\'re going to be better math
teachers because the knowledge it takes to teach mathematics is not the
same as knowledge of mathematics. But, yes, you have a very good point,
because our students knowledge of mathematics is very, very poor.

QUESTION: I agree with that. And I think there\'s a very good exposition
of the kinds of knowledge that the teachers need about math in Liping
Ma's book.

DR. STIGLER: Right.

QUESTION: I would like to make a comment on this teachers lesson groups.
It appears very similar to the QC circle. In fact, this has been proving
so successful in the manufacturing industry, was invented in the United
States in the 1960s, but nobody followed that in American industry. But
the Japanese perfected it in their industry, and in the 1980s, and they
became so successful. U.S. immediately going back to implement the QC
circle, exactly a quality control circle, found the people on the front
line, and now you ask industry, it increases the productivity and
efficiency tremendously. I think this is very similar.

DR. STIGLER: I think it\'s a very important point, and the idea is so
simple. It is the people in a position to know how to improve the
qualities are the ones right there doing it. So, give them that as part
of their job is to study what\'s happening and figure out how to improve
it.

Yes?

QUESTION: There are two things that really resonated to me as I listened
to you. One was when you talked about how in all of our years we\'ve
learned this culture of what a teacher is, and that we immediately
become that, and I thought how true that was when people want to teach
me new methods that I should be using in my classroom, they always use
the old methods. So, the lesson I got on how to individualize
instruction was done by lecture, that when I was done listening to the
lecture, I was supposed to go back in my classroom and implement an
individualized approach to students. So, it hit that all of a sudden I
understand why, because as soon as they got in front of this group of
teachers, they immediately got into the mode of teacher, and into that
culture that says, this is how you present it.

The second thing that really hit me is, when you were talking about and
showing the slide or pictures of the teachers working in groups, it goes
to how we define what is the work of a teacher. As I listened to you,
and your emphasis about the key to long-term improvement of generating
and accumulating this professional knowledge, and the teachers have to
play a key role, that has to be their work. But in our systems, that\'s
now how they define my work as a teacher. My sister, before she was a
judge, was a practicing lawyer, I used to tease her that lawyers bill
you for more time than when they\'re in front of the judge or jury. They
have work that they are, it\'s their work to prepare for that. But as a
classroom teacher, they often see my work is the only time I\'m working
is when I\'m in front of the students. And so I only work six hours a
day, because I\'m only in front of the classroom for six hours a day.
But if we only paid lawyers when they were in the courtroom, they would
be a lot less expensive.

DR. STIGLER: They\'d raise their hourly rates then.

QUESTION: But what you demonstrated by those pictures in Japan, it is
the work of the teacher not only to present lessons to students, but to
cultivate and develop that professional knowledge. They weren\'t doing
that on Saturdays and evenings after teaching six hours. That was part
of their work. And that is a cultural change that has to occur in order
for us to implement what you call the key to really changing the quality
of the instructional methods that occur.

DR. STIGLER: Very good point, very well taken.

Yes?

QUESTION: Playing off of that same idea, could you tell me just a little
bit, I think it\'s a remarkable, remarkable process in Japan, other than
the instructional emphasis on the research roles that the teachers do
play, what sort of non-instructional responsibilities do those Japanese
teachers have?

DR. STIGLER: Well, it depends on the grade level, and the school. But, a
lot of them do have a lot of non-instructional responsibilities.
Japanese teachers spend a lot of time on things like sports day,
children\'s day, special days and celebrations and so on that they\'re
on the committee to work on. It takes a lot of time. But, in Japanese
elementary schools, well, there's two big differences. One is they only
teach about four hours a day on average, in front of a classroom.
American teachers teach about six. But, the other big difference is,
Japanese teachers are at school nine hours a day, that\'s a big
difference from American teachers who are at school six-and-a-half to
seven hours a day.

So both of these things are part of the problem. I mean, yes, we need to
build more time into the work week of American teachers, but if teachers
are really professionals there is no other profession where people only
go to work and stay there six-and-a-half hours a day. Now, yes, what
teachers do is they go home and they work till 11:00 at night, getting
ready for school the next day. But, that is a different kind of work,
that\'s private work. And what\'s key in Japan is the value placed on
collaborative, public work. It\'s a very public process.

GLENN: We\'re going to have to end this pretty soon. Two more questions
then we\'re going to have to call a break here.

QUESTION: I had the great pleasure of visiting several schools
throughout Japan as a math teacher, and observing the same things you
were doing. I found that the pressure was on exit exams, so even though
students were not tracked, they were tracked by the results of their
exams. So I\'d like to hear your thoughts on their exams. The issue that
we have with social promotion with our kids' attitudes, thinking, well,
I\'m going to pass anyway, and not having the national or the state
exams.

DR. STIGLER: Well, that's very interesting. Obviously these exit exams
in Japan have a huge influence on everything that happens before. But,
one of the things we found in our study is that the focus on testing is,
it\'s there in America. That\'s what we see in our classrooms. I\'d say
90 percent of the lessons we looked at, at some point the teacher talked
about a test, a test on Friday, you don\'t have to take the test if you
got your quiz problems right. We\'re moving the test up next week
because of the vacation. We never saw Japanese teachers talking about
tests. Tests are part of Japanese life, but they\'re not part of
classroom life. That\'s all part of what makes you go to school with the
right attitude and work hard and study hard.

And they do have social promotion in Japan, because they have the test
at the end of ninth grade to get into high school, you always go to the
next grade in Japan. Now, at the end of ninth grade, you may get tracked
off into a vocational track, and you know that can happen. But, before
that nobody gets held back in Japan. I\'m not saying it\'s good or bad,
that\'s just the way they do it, although there\'s a lot of problems
with ‑‑ it\'s easy to say end social promotion, it\'s much harder to
actually make a policy that makes sense, and actually helps students
learn more and succeed. That\'s hard.

One more, yes?

QUESTION: There\'s much written about the pressure that young Japanese
girls and boys experience in their school years. And I wonder what\'s
known, or what can be known about how that connects with the way in
which teaching is done, or are there so many different kinds of cultural
influences that you can\'t really sort that out? In other words ‑‑ 

DR. STIGLER: Are you saying that maybe they feel more pressure because
of the way they\'re taught?

QUESTION: I\'m asking whether we know anything about that.

DR. STIGLER: Well, actually, there\'s a lot of pressure that American
students feel also. In fact, if you look at indicators of mental health,
you know, school phobia, and psychosomatic illnesses, and all kinds of
stuff like that, psychological problems, American students are probably
under more stress than the Japanese students. But, they\'re under stress
about completely different things, you know, girlfriends, boyfriends,
drugs, sex, violence, safety and so on. So it\'s very important to put
this whole stress thing in context. But, you don\'t see evidence of
Japanese kids under stress.

I mean, one thing I\'ve learned from doing research in Japan for almost
20 years is that you can\'t ask the Japanese to tell you how serious
their problem is, because they have ‑‑ everything is terrible, they are
a very self-critical society, you know. They go, our schools are
terrible, they\'re awful. I remember a few years ago somebody was
talking about the dropout problem in Japan, and how terrible it was. So
somebody ‑‑ and they had newspaper articles, the front page, and kids
were dropping out of even elementary school in Japan, it was so bad, the
pressure. And somebody went and did a study of the percentage of
students who actually drop out of school in Japan by the end of 10th
grade, it's like one-quarter of 1 percent, or something, compared to,
say, 20 percent almost in the United States by that time. So you\'ve got
to be really, really careful in listening to the Japanese tell you what
their problems are because we have much bigger problems, we have huge
problems, and most of them have nothing to do with teaching.

Shall we take one more?

GLENN: One more, that\'s it, that's it, one more.

QUESTION: In the U.S. there has been a lot of emphasis on girls dropping
out ‑‑ 

DR. STIGLER: Let\'s take two questions.

QUESTION: There\'s been a lot of emphasis on girls dropping out of math
classes, particularly in the middle years because U.S. kids are
interested in boys and as they\'re developing, is that true in Japan? I
think we've addressed a lot of that problem. Are there are lot of girls
going into math, and how do they do in math?

DR. STIGLER: One thing you ought to realize is Japanese kids hate math,
they don\'t like math. They think it\'s the hardest subject in school.
American kids like math, all the way up until they get to the end of
elementary school, and they think it\'s a lot of fun and it\'s very
easy. Japanese teachers think math is the hardest thing to teach.
American teachers think math is the easiest thing to teach. But, they
don\'t allow the girls to drop out of math as early in Japan as we do
here. So they get through more curriculum. But, you have to understand
that they don\'t love math. They really don\'t like math. And that\'s a
problem. They don\'t like math more than we don\'t like math.

QUESTION: I think one of the issues is that for policymakers is that
many times I don't think there is an understanding of assessment and I
think oftentimes policymakers may take that issue and stop.

DR. STIGLER: Yes.

QUESTION: And tie it to that\'s how they will grade teacher performance
and teacher pay. And then when you do that, I think what happens,
teaching methods and creativity go out the window, because you begin to
teach to the test and teach so that students perform, so that your
school doesn\'t end up graded as a low performing school, if you will,
in a certain area. What would you say, or how do you address the issue
of keeping the assessment and standards, what makes them important, but
not to the point that you are really tying them into teachers in the
classroom?

DR. STIGLER: Well, two things, one is make them better. This is our
first draft at standards that states are adopting now. A lot of them
aren\'t very good. And a lot of the assessments don\'t match the
standards, and a lot of the assessments don\'t really measure things
that most people think are important. So let\'s make those better. I
don\'t think we should say, because teachers in Texas are teaching to
the test, therefore we shouldn\'t have tests. I think that would be a
big mistake. But, the other thing is, people have to realize that
teachers right now are doing the best that they can.

So it doesn\'t make sense to go, in my view, and say, we\'re going to
pay you less because your students didn\'t learn as much, or we\'re
going to pay you more because your students learned more, because the
teachers have no idea of what they\'re doing that made their students
learn more or learn less. So it seems to me that we\'ve got to just
drive home the fact that although standards and assessments are
important, they don\'t tell you how to improve, all they do is tell you
whether you are improving or not. And you\'ve got to look somewhere else
to find out how to improve. And we just have to keep saying it, I guess.

QUESTION: Part of the point that you made in terms of improving the
model was sharing knowledge, people can\'t share things that they don\'t
have, just like you can\'t teach what you don\'t know. And if this is
going to work there\'s got to be a very, very significant increase,
across the board, particularly in the elementary schools in the math or
science courses before they even start majoring in education as a lot of
people do. Can it work any other way?

DR. STIGLER: People always need to get smarter. I mean, that\'s true.
The smarter we are, the better we\'re going to do.

Thank you very much.

(Applause and end of video.)