The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom

For years our schools and children have lagged behind international standards in reading, arithmetic, and most other areas of academic achievement. It is no secret that American schools are in dire need of improvement, and that education has become our nation's number-one priority. But even though almost every state in the country is working to develop higher standards for what students should be learning, along with the means for assessing their progress, the quick-fix solutions implemented so far haven't had a noticeable impact.

The problem, as James Stigler and James Hiebert explain, is that most efforts to improve education fail because they simply don't have any impact on the quality of teaching inside classrooms. Teaching, they argue, is cultural. American teachers aren't incompetent, but the methods they use are severely limited, and American teaching has no system in place for getting better. It is teaching, not teachers, that must be changed.

In The Teaching Gap, the authors draw on the conclusions of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) -- an innovative new study of teaching in several cultures -- to refocus educational reform efforts. Using videotaped lessons from dozens of randomly selected eighth-grade classrooms in the United States, Japan, and Germany, the authors reveal the rich, yet unfulfilled promise of American teaching and document exactly how other countries have consistently stayed ahead of us in the rate their children learn. Our schools can be restructured as places where teachers can engage in career-long learning and classrooms can become laboratories for developing new, teaching-centered ideas. If provided the time they need during the school day for collaborative lesson study and plan building, teachers will change the way our students learn.

James Stigler and James Hiebert have given us nothing less than a "best practices" for teachers -- one that offers proof that how teachers teach is far more important than increased spending, state-of-the-art facilities, mandatory homework, or special education -- and a plan for change that educators, teachers, and parents can implement together.

Amazon.com Review
In a time when educators and politicians in the United States are fumbling for a fix--from vouchers to smaller class sizes--for ailing public schools, it's refreshing to read the more sophisticated take on what can be done to improve American education found in The Teaching Gap, a straightforward analysis of approaches towards teaching around the world. James W. Stigler, a UCLA psychology professor, and James Hiebert, an education professor at the University of Delaware, argue that America's culture of teaching needs to be changed before we see any real change in student achievement--and they're not simply talking about higher pay and more respect.

The bulk of The Teaching Gap examines the cultural differences among teaching methods, with detailed accounts of video observations of eighth-grade math teachers that were part of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS (which Stigler directed). American teachers in the videos tend to emphasize terms and procedures, thinking of math as a set of tedious skills. They try to interest students with praise and real-life problems. In contrast, Japanese teachers are more likely to emphasize ideas, expecting the concepts alone to stir students' natural curiosity. They weave together lessons that have a distinct beginning, middle, and end. Teachers in the other countries are more likely to share lessons on what works in the classroom and receive more sophisticated training, the authors found. Only seven out of 41 nations scored lower than the U.S. in TIMSS, placing American eighth-graders with those from Cyprus, Portugal, South Africa, Kuwait, Iran, and Colombia. Without falling into teacher-bashing mode, Stigler and Hiebert insist that reform efforts need to originate with teachers, not university researchers. They call for overhauling the teaching profession with stricter requirements, better peer review, and more demanding academic standards, as well as improved interaction between teachers. Their detailed examination of the study's video observations gets to the heart of the matter and should be worthwhile reading for educators, policymakers, and anyone interested in the condition of today's education system. --Jodi Mailander Farrell

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Japanese vs. US in the classroom, 2008-07-16
I picked up this book at a friend's house and gave it a quick read. It was interesting enough I thought I should review it. It is a little dry for my tastes, as it spends a lot of time talking about the experiment, what they looked at, etc., but the crux is this: They videotaped 8th grade math classes in Japan, Germany and the US to try to figure out how they taught math differently. The differences were intriguing.

There were two main points, and I will tell you because I am pretty sure you will never read this book. The first is that Japan, and Germany, to some extent, challenged their math students by giving them difficult problems to solve using the tools they had been taught. They often focus all of one class on the problem, or a series of problems leading up to that problem. In this way, they really got the kids thinking. This contrasts with the US style of demonstration of a rule and lots of practice with that rule. The Japanese method gets students thinking harder, and they are able to handle more difficult math problems sooner. I thought this was a great approach to math, and should be emulated. Japanese kids also rarely had homework.

Second major point was how teachers improved in Japan. I'm not sure what exactly the program is in the United States, but it was described in the book as researchers gather information and then pass it on to the teachers to have them implement in classrooms. In Japan, teachers and researchers work together to make lesson plans which are tested in student classrooms with real teachers. From what it sounds like, the faculty are very heavily involved in observing and formulating lesson plans.

This approach seems beneficial for two reasons: 1. Teachers observe other teachers in action and are able to learn from them (does this happen in the US? It doesn't seem like it), 2. melding the research and teaching together to form a whole unit involves the teachers more and makes it more likely successful changes in teaching will be implemented.

Some very decent thoughts about improving our schools.


1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This is how it should be done. , 2007-06-08
Why is American Schools being out performed by schools in other countries? It couldn't be the teaching methods taught in today's Teacher Prep colleges, could it? It is not a thick book. Read it and think. then read related materials.
Can it be done? It is being done, just not hear. This is a research book worth reading in an easy reading format.


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Do The Easy Things First!, 2006-09-11
American middle-school and high-school pupils continually lag their peers in other developed countries - especially in mathematics - despite years of decreasing class size, building ornate new structures, "new" math, etc. However, these efforts are bound to fail if what goes on inside the classrooms is poorly structured.

The "bad news" is that we are often blind to the most familiar aspects of our everyday environment; the "good news" is that looking across cultures is one of the best ways to sharpen our view of ourselves. In "The Teaching Gap" the German and Japanese 8th-grade classes studied were comparable to the American classes - yet, substantive differences were noted.

Content in the U.S. was less advanced and presented in a more piecemeal and prescriptive way - there were twice the number of definitions presented in the U.S., and more concepts were simply given/stated vs. developed/derived. There was also more topic switching in the U.S., more interruptions (0% in Japan, 13% in Germany, and 31% in the U.S.), less coherence of U.S. lessons, less student involvement in doing the work (9% in the U.S., 19% in Germany, 40% in Japan).

Another difference is that Japanese teachers do not use overhead projectors - instead, they work their way around the room on chalkboards, leaving a record of the entire lesson for the pupils. Still another is that Japanese teachers focus on joint efforts at continuous improvement - a concept probably taken from Toyota's much vaunted "Toyota Production System."

"The Teaching Gap" concludes that most popular U.S. reform efforts have avoided a direct focus on teaching. The evidence presented within the book indicates that it is time we did.


4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

It may not be correct, but..., 2005-12-28
After reading the book and the previous posters, even if the Japanese mathematics classes were not representative of the education system as a whole, the implications of this study and the ideas that the authors came up with are what we should be focusing on.

The question "why?" is asked far too little in all mathematics classes. If only we would take some time to teach the methods and reasons of mathematics, rather than just the process, I am sure that all students will benefit and be able to truly understand the concepts that are currently being taught with a "learn it for the test" attitude.

The book brings up these vital points, so that teachers may question their styles, regardless of the authenticity of some of their claims.


12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Interesting for a Education Student, 2004-02-16
I am in a program to become a High School math teacher. Our professor recommended this book. I found it to be pretty interesting. The authors do a detailed analysis of a video study from the TIMSS study. Their analysis compares how math is taught in the US, Germany and Japan. Their conclusion is that the US approach focuses on teaching terms and procedures where as the other countries emphasize understanding concepts. They go onto to propose a system of "lesson planning" to improve teaching in the US. Lesson planning calls for teachers to work in teams and develop a single lesson plan (maybe one per semester). The process of developing the lesson plan and refining it imparts to the teachers involved a kind of "best practices" that they can then use in their everyday planning. I am not sure if this is practical, but it sure sounds reasonable to me.

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