1. Describe the TFA program and how it got started.
2. What was the percent of TFA teachers who finished the first year of teaching? How would we evaluate this information, as it relates to the success of TFA?
3. Which of the TFA teachers portrayed in this video did you most admire and why?
4. Have you ever, whether in college or in your earlier years of schooling, considered teaching as a profession? If not, why not? If so, what made you decide not to pursue that option? Or is teaching your goal, and if so, why?
5. If we don't finish with this movie on the first day, go to the Teach for America website and see how the organization is doing? What are some of its successes? What is its current size? What have some of its alumni been doing? Finally, make this more specific to a particular region; if you choose Minneapolis, which has only been operating for a year, do another region as well.
1. A role is the set of expectations governing the behavior of a person holding a particular position in society, and a role set is the circle of people whose expectations help to define that position. Using these concepts in our analysis of this video will help us shift from the more individualistic mode of explanation which comes naturally to most Americans into a more sociological mode of explanation, emphasizing the power of social forces.
1. How would you describe the role set of the new TFA teacher, and how do you think that affects job performance and persistence in the job?
2. Do you see any likely conflicts or inconsistencies in the expectations of those who make up the role set?
3. How can we use the concepts of role and role set to explain the relatively high degree of success of the new TFA teachers? In other words, explain their success in terms not of their abilities or their habit of success but in terms of the pressures and expectations coming to bear on them as a result of their position as new TFA teachers.
4. How can we use functional analysis to explain the success of TFA in its first year and its dramatic expansion, both as an organization and in terms of the influence of many of its veterans in educational reform movements more generally? Clue: Why was this entirely unproven young woman, Wendy Cobb, able to get the money for start-up and expansion from corporate donors?
5. There are several aspects of American society that would seem to be dysfunctional. I think immediately of the fact that we lead the industrial world in imprisonment and its costs(by a lot), that we lead the world in military expenditures (again, by a lot, which gives us a kind of strength but soaks up a large amount of the federal budget), that we lead the world in medical expenditures (again, by a lot) but not in health or longevity, and that we trail quite a few of the affluent democracies in the quality and success of our educational system. How would you put these things together, thinking first as a functionalist theorist (part A) and then second as a conflict theorist?