Wow, this is a great article. This is the first time I'm reading an article about teaching that actually makes the profession more attractive. I read a good amount about teaching but have never come across this. First time that I'm reading about proper teaching techniques in general, let alone Lemov's taxonomy.

> As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t.

The idea that only a select group of individuals possessing a certain voodoo are capable of performing a certain task effectively is very pervasive. It also kills the desire to work on one's approaches, learn new things, and otherwise develop skill. I would say it should be considered harmful, whether we're talking about teachers or programmers...

> They decided that rather than buy talent, they would try to build it.

It's fairly rare to see anyone actually bother building talent. The expectation generally is that the person is either ready or useless.

> Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year.

This seems is not congruent with what I've been reading about teaching in the past few years: that student outcomes have mostly to do with the student's aptitude, and that teachers have a limited effect[1].

Intuitively, I feel that teachers (and other environmental factors) /should/ be able to have a large effect, and anecdotes about highly influential educators abound, yet other studies seem to make teachers look close to irrelevant compared to IQ.

Of course, these things are kind of related. The belief in the idea that you can train teachers implies that you should be able to train students.

> Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year.

Haven't heard about this, either. Both myself and people I talk to continue to perceive teaching as a low paying profession. Given that the article is from 2010, perhaps those programs have died out by now.

Awarding high salaries only to amazing teachers may not be terribly productive, though, especially if the measure is not reliable and people don't feel confident about it. Measuring teachers too much or too strictly causes all sorts of problems[2]. But I could scarcely imagine if teaching was overall perceived as a respected profession with a high salary ceiling and decent autonomy that it wouldn't have a large community of people to work out something similar to Uncommon Schools. Correct incentives absolutely align people to solve problems.

A lot of the techniques seem like they could have more general application as communication skills. Communication and social skills are still one of those things that are perceived as "voodoo" and haven't been documented terribly well.

> Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it.

This point is one of the reasons I could never agree with the idea that if a person understands something, they can teach it. Those are just not the same thing and being able to teach is its own skill.

[1]: https://rogertitcombelearningmatters.wordpress.com/2015/01/0...

[2]: https://disidealist.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/im-not-an-outst...