Teachers need real feedback - Bill Gates

[Music] [Music] Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player. My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else’s in the world. Sorry, Sharon, here you go!

We all need people who will give us feedback; that's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98% of teachers just got one word of feedback: satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was satisfactory, I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who is the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them; it's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk.

So today, I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve. Let's start by asking, who's doing well? Well, unfortunately, there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems, so I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve.

Consider the rankings for reading proficiency; the US isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the US in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? 11 out of 14. The US is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So, there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills.

Let's look at the best academic performer, the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board in reading, math, and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They make sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups where teachers get together and talk about what’s working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues.

You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world.

So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best. What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea?

We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson? Do you learn to correct your mistakes? And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we’re asking the right questions. Second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools because they pointed to specific places where they can improve.

I'm going to show you what this video component of MET looks like in [Music] action.

"Good morning, everybody. Let’s talk about what’s going on today. To get started, uh, doing a peer review day. Okay, a peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to improve in your essays. My name is Sarah Brown Wesling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa. Turn to somebody next to you, tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove."

"I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it. Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers. I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can’t really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that. There are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in a tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It’s not a perfect shot; it doesn’t catch every little thing that’s going on, but I can hear the sound, I can see a lot, and I’m able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection."

"Alright, let’s take a look at the long one first. Okay, once I’m finished taping, then I put it in my computer and then I’ll scan it and, you know, take a peek at it. If I don’t write things down, I don’t remember them, so having the notes is part of my thinking process, and I discover what I’m seeing as I’m writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom."

"I’m glad that we’ve actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn’t. So, I think that video exposes so much of what’s intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about."

"I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy. Alrighty, everybody have a great weekend. I’ll see you [Music] later."

One day, we’d like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.

So, building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won’t be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren’t immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom; that’s understandable. But our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate.

Building a system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to $5 billion. Now that’s a big number, but to put it in perspective, it’s less than 2% of what we spend every year on teacher salaries. The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback as well as the means to act on it.

But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn’t just make us a more successful country; it would also make us a more fair and just one too.

I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too. Thank you! [Applause] [Music]