Assessing the unmeasurable

Great article by Malcolm Gladwell in this week's New Yorker drawing an unlikely (but apt!) comparison between evaluating who will make a good NFL quarterback and who will make a good teacher: briefly, both are skills that are nearly impossible to evaluate any way other than to see the person actually doing it. 

I was a bit shocked, when I started teaching, at how few assessments were done of new teachers. Somehow from seeing me, what? Three or four times over the course of the year, they felt they had some idea of how I was doing. Being in there, though, is the only way to find out!

Give it a read.