Isn't teaching for excellence better than teaching for competence?

Before execellance comes competance. The teachers' hands are tied by so many factors, rules, laws, restrictions. Teachers have become an easy target.

If you desire excellence, put it on the backs of the students.

The answer is that they should be teaching for excellence, but that the public education system does not reward it. Competence is defined as the ability to pass a paper and pencil test, which is not really a good assessment of employability. Employability should be the number one goal of public education (there are other goals as well).

Teachers spend most of their time coaching students to pass those tests. More and more they are becoming test technicians. Teachers with passion will have to find another way to express it.

There is little room for it in today's classrooms.

Teaching for fluency is the ultimate way to teach for competence and excellence. The best way to do this through a fully implemented direct instruction framework.

I fully agree with middlespecialist. Nowadays the teachers job is to pass a set bar. It has nothing to do with readying you for employment.

They don't care what the students strengths and weakness is. Everyone is treated as they are the same. So even to say that they are teached for competence is in most cases not really true.

Teachers should teach for excellence, but because of state testing and school requirements, they often just try to get by on competency. They hold back students who are already competent, and force students who aren't competent to keep up even if they aren't retaining anything.

Yes you are right. Fortunately all my teachers didn't drive me to focus on a target or try to compete. They always tried to teach me what I should know exactly in the subject as well as made me search what I could add for that.

I love them.

Teaching for excellence will result in competence. Excellence is a high level evaluation of an individual in our education system. You cannont have excellence without having competence.

These two terms are interrelated. You can have competence but excellence may not be reached dependent upon the level of competence attained. It is true that our educational system is being evaluated on the bases of test results students achieve in a given educational institution.

Test results do not reflect whether a student has competence or excellence only that tests have been passed. I believe teachers should strive for excellence from their students but pointing out the fact than not achieving it does not mean you are not competent. Students must be given the right perspective as this is important when they enter society looking for jobs.

They must feel competent that they can meet the criteria fo today's job market with the subjects they are now being taught. Great question.

Teachers who don't want to do the effort to reform education, who don't want to let go of their fat-cat unions, always start shifting targets from the concrete to the abstract. "Teaching excellence" is vague, but education is failing at the basics, like teaching how to read and write at a competent level. Ironically, getting kids to master their own language was a source of PRIDE, but now nationalism is a dirty word and we are leaving the unhealthy impression that they can text-message on their phones any way they want and that's communication.No way!

Teacher education has fallen under neglect, we NEED nuts and bolts targets and we need them fast before the Western World goes out of business.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.