Most Likely to Succeed

I thought this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about how to hire good teachers was really well-done. The article asks the question: "how do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?"

It's sort of a dry topic but Gladwell makes it interesting by leading in with an anecdote about a pro football scout who is trying to determine how well a promising college QB will fare in the NFL. He then uses that example throughout the piece to draw comparisons about predicting success for future teachers.

On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a football coach, and before that he played linebacker—although, he says, “that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago.” Every year, he evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his homework for the evening’s big game—an edited video of the Tigers’ previous contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.