The public pays doctors. They should tell doctors how to treat themselves.

Dan, I’m glad you saw the push/pull of “non-teachers need to hear more about how Education works” and “let’s not cheapen our field to make it bite-sized enough for SXSW.” There’s no simple solution there, and Lisa’s concern hits closest to home for me.

The relationships with students are my favorite part of teaching, and they are also the part that I’d most like to showcase, promote, and show to an audience of 1,000+ non-teachers. Any success I’ve had in costumes, silliness, or tweetable stories have their roots sunk deep in a culture where students and teacher respect each other.

I’m curious to see how a competition could showcase that.

Thanks, Elizabeth. I’ve updated the post with your comment.

Thanks for the discussion, all. This is probably obvious, but I agree w/ Michael Pershan: the success of the Teach-Off depends on execution, and we and our teacher design team have put a lot of thought into those details, so our hopes are high.

Regardless, the first thing I thought of when I heard about this was the Key and Peele skit from a couple years ago called “Teaching Center.” It was a spoof on SportsCenter and it envisioned a world where teachers were treated like professional athletes. And while some things were cool (i.e. being paid millions of dollars), there was a scene where they did a play-by-play of a history class and it was cringeworthy.

I can’t speak to the specifics of *this* event but I do know that at the NCTM regional in Chicago last year, Takahashi did a lesson study workshop and brought in 30 kids (and their teacher) from a Chicago public school. The teacher did a demo lesson and then the audience discussed it. So it can be done, and has been done. That doesn’t mean this will (or won’t) work that way. But I did hear very good things about that session from people who attended.

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The public “lesson” part is the appetizer to the main meal which is the lesson deconstruction, debrief, and future edits and iterations.

Cmon, you’re the guy who got famous for a TEDx talk about the essential nature of engagement. You said you sell a product to an audience that doesn’t want to buy. What is engagement if not holding attention and suspending audience disbelief? And how is selling not fundamentally about the delivery mechanism? Think about ed school and books on teaching. They all present teaching in terms of performance. We always tell teachers they need a classroom presence, a teaching voice.

Math teachers have to take kids who think they can’t do math and convince them otherwise, and for many of us, a critical first step is to engage their interest through our persona and our presentation. Now, it’s certainly true that some teachers confuse engagement with teaching: all persona, all entertainment, no content. But that’s why we feel such a great spark when we watch good teaching in action–because we can see how the teacher uses the engagement to communicate content.

The public pays the bills for our teaching. I think their opinion about what constitutes great teaching matters.

education realist:

… but ultimately, classroom delivery is a pretty essential part of what the public thinks of as great teaching.

No other profession accommodates the public like you think teachers should. The public thinks that being an attorney means making speeches and objections in front of a judge. Why accommodate that image?

We’re educators. We should educate.