Supporting Teachers

How do we help teachers be better?

Robert Pondiscio is fond of pointing out that A) you go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had and B) with around 4 million teachers in the country, many are likely to be just regular human beings and not super-teachers.

He's not wrong. On the national, state, local, and building level, the teacher corps includes some very excellent teachers, some pretty good ones, some average ones, and a small but non-zero number of not very good ones. (My argument remains that it's not a simple bell curve because the majority of people who would be bad at it either never try or give up fairly quickly.)

Policy and reformy folks have tried to deal with this distribution in a number of unproductive manners.

Firing our way to excellence.

A favorite with the technocrat crowd. this was the plan whereby test scores soaked in VAM sauce was going to create hard data that could be used to make hiring and firing decisions (or, in some cases, merit pay decisions). But sure-- if we just fire all the terrible teachers, we'd be left with nothing but the good ones.

There are numerous problems with this, starting with the lack of a valid or reliable way to evaluate teachers. The Big Standardized Test is its own kind of sham, but Value-Added Measures can only dream of someday working their way up to junk science status.

Sardine Superteacher

The flip side of firing to excellence. This idea was to find the super-duper teachers and plunk them in classrooms with a couple hundred students. (There was a time when they also liked the idea of hooking the super-teachers up to computers, but COVID took some of the bloom off the distance learning rose.)

Rendering

Another idea was to take the Highly Effective Teachers and move them to the low-achieving schools. This idea lost traction on the slippery idea that teachers had to be convinced, somehow, to take the different job. More money? Sort of. Send a team to grab them, drop a hood over their head, and throw them in a van? Probably illegal.

All of these have the same problem

It's not just that it's really difficult to quantify how good a particular teacher is. It's that teacher effectiveness is dependent on context and environment. A teacher who's effective with 20 students is not necessarily equally effective with 200. A teacher might be very effective with one type of student and not with another. And despite being the best work at being "professional," sometimes teachers bring their own lives into the classroom. Plus, what are we asking them to teach? I found that I was actually better with multiple preps in a day than just teaching the same thing, but some of my colleagues struggled with that kind of grind. And there's just the influence of time and experience; I taught for 39 years, and I was not the same teacher every one of those years.

On top of that, teaching involves a teacher and a student, and that connection is also variable. Pick any teacher in your local school, one that you are certain is terrible, and I guarantee you that we can find students who will praise that teacher to high heaven. Likewise, pick someone known widely as a wonderful teachers; we can find students who will tell you how awful they are.

I'm not going to argue that judging teacher quality is impossible. I am going to say that it is heavily influenced by context and environment and factors that shift regularly, making it hugely difficult to quantify teacher quality in such a way that the measures can safely and accurately be used to make major decisions about teaching careers.

And even if you could...

What are you going to do? Fire a bunch of teachers and replace them with...? How much more practical is it to take the folks you have and help them be the best they can be. Will there be a non-zero number of non-salvageable teachers who have to be shown the door? Certainly. But can you direct (or re-direct) staff to be better? I think that's not only possible, but necessary.

So how?

We've seen bad ideas about this, as well.

Carrots and sticks and sticks and sticks

There's a whole family of reformy ideas that starts from the premise that teachers know how to get the high-achieving results that policy makers want, but those teachers have been keeping the secrets of Teaching Well locked in their filing cabinets, waiting to be either bribed or threatened into finally unleashing all the awesome.

It's a premise that is both insulting and myopic. The vast majority of teachers are doing the best they can with the tools they have. But some reformsters (looking at you, Arne Duncan) treat teachers like the main obstacle to educating children instead of the people who are actually in classrooms trying to get the work done.

Teachers and their students face a variety of obstacles, but reformsters got into the nasty habit of dismissing these explanations of real hurdles by calling them "excuses" rather than, say, "challenges that maybe we could try helping teachers meet."

De-professionalizing the Profession

For some reformsters, the dream has been the teacher-proof classroom. Set out a curriculum so specific and pre-programed that whoever your teacher is, you just hand them the program, tell them to implement it With Fidelity, and voila!-- an educational program that a trained monkey could implement effectively. Maybe it's scripted. Maybe it's just a day by day, minute by minute guide. Maybe it's a computer program, or a series of videos.

Some reformsters see this as an opportunity to cut personnel costs. Turn teaching into a job that anybody can do, as long as they follow instructions, means that the labor pool is huge and the meat widgets hired for the classroom can be easily (and inexpensively) replaced. These are the folks who are so excited about AI "teachers" that they barely bother to pretend that such a move would foster better teaching.

De-professionalizing teaching is the fast food model of education. But the promise of standardization in a McDonalds is not that you can always get excellent food there, but just the promise that you probably won't get terrible food. People who want excellent food go somewhere else, where the chefs are chefs and not assembly-line food prep meat widgets.

Maybe forcing your less-gifted teachers into a program to implement With Fidelity will improve schools on the bottom end (though I'm not convinced that someone with limited teaching ability can really implement one of these scripted programs effectively). But by stripping teachers of autonomy, you will inevitably hamstring your best teachers. You can argue that their superior teaching skills will allow them to find ways to put their personal spin on the mandatory teacher-proof program, but I'd say you're just arguing that they can still be great to extent that they work around, ignore, and otherwise find ways to escape the mandatory program.

Removing teacher authority may or may not help your mediocre teachers, will hamstring your better teachers, and will make the profession less attractive to people who would be a real asset.

Testocracy

We are already reaping the problems created by a new generation of teachers who have never known anything in school except test-centered prep work. Too many have learned that you check the standards, google for "exercises" aimed at those standards, hand them out, drill them down, and that's supposed to be teaching (Daniel Koretz writes about this in The Testing Charade).

Okay, have you got anything other than complaints?

The job of a school administrator (of any manager) is to create the conditions under which staff can do their best work. Most folks who work in schools already know that teachers are overworked, overstressed, and overburdened with a whole bunch of responsibilities. Many attempts to improve teaching and/or sell new education-flavored products are built around the idea that we could take X off teachers' plates.

The crazy thing about this is that these attempts are all marked by one feature--the people behind them have decided on teachers' behalf what it is that teachers need. Let me suggest a crazy new approach--

Ask the teachers.

I've talked about this before (see "The Seven Most Powerful Words in Education") but not enough since. Just ask staff, "What can I do to help you?"

Now, sometimes this will be tricky, because teachers, as different individual human beings, will want/need different things. And sometimes they will want things admins can't give them. But administrators have to be better. One former colleague of mine pissed off our administration by asking, after being given yet another new responsibility, "What do you want me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" It's a legitimate question, and one that every teacher in that room was thinking, but asking it was Forbidden Not A Team Player naughtiness.

Ask your staff what they need. Don't just jump to "I have decided that what you want is a program to manage grades" or "I have decided that you want PD about apps I'm sure you want to use." Ask.

Provide high quality materials and resources.

But do not mandate how they must be used. Involve staff in the collection or creation of these materials, and revisit the collection annually. There will be eternal debates about which materials are high quality, just like there are eternal debates about what belongs in the canon. These debates are eternal because the answer keeps changing because of the times, the context, the available materials. But the fact that these debates can't be settled conclusively is not a reason to abandon the work of getting the very best materials available to your staff.

Provide structure and scope and sequence, but don't set it in cement.

Your newer teachers should be able to find a useful answer to "What should I be working on next" and your experienced teacher should be comfortable adjusting the scope and sequence to fit the class, and all staff should feel safe adding their own special educational touches.

Flexibility is a local thing

Note that every mandate that comes down from the state or federal government tends to reduce flexibility, particularly since so many of them are wrongheaded variations on "If we make all teachers do X, all students will learn Y," a statement which is always wrong, no matter what you plug in. Policy makers need to ask one simple question-- does the proposed policy provide support or a straightjacket?

Teacher training and peer support

Too many undergraduate teaching programs waste too much time. For secondary teachers, there should be far more emphasis on the content of the subject area they plan to teach. For all teachers, there should be far more support through the student teaching experience, and hefty support should also be present through the first couple of years in the classroom.

Some folks like the mode school model, with professionals working their way up as interns etc etc. Schools don't have to look exactly like that, but supports need to be in place. In most schools, whether a teacher has good support in their first few years depends on random factors like which other teachers have lunch the same shift. That early mentoring needs to be deliberate, intentional, and carefully considered.

Peer support should continue. It should be easy for teachers who work in the same department or who work with the same cohort of students to collaborate and consult. If policy makers want to encourage this, there is one thing they can offer--money. Schools don't build more deliberate mentoring programs because such programs depend on time during the work day which equals money (sometimes there's also a lingering attitude that teachers are only really working when they have students in front of them).

Nothing else-- not PD, not merit pay, not threats, not scripted instruction-- will work to turn a new teacher into a good teacher better than regular support and mentoring by capable colleagues.

Hold teachers accountable

The myth that teachers are all about defending low-achieving teachers is bunk. Second only to parents, nobody is more bothered by a low-quality teacher than the teacher who has to teach those kids the following year. What teachers fear is not accountability, but random irrational bad-faith harassment and mistreatment trying to pass itself off as accountability.

So when a teacher wanders into the weeds, go help them get back. Yes, maybe they won't be helped, but you need to try first because firing just means starting over from scratch (if you can even find somebody). Give them extra-intense mentoring, coaching, daily assistance--whatever you think will get them back on track. But don't just leave them out in the field flailing.

The non-answer answer

There is no one single simple answer to finding and developing good teachers, but we have more than enough experience to know that "Hire some people and hope for the best" is not the winning approach. Provide and surround them with access to top quality materials. Provide them with personal support. Treat them like grownups. Provide a supporting structure that holds them up without choking them off.

If you want a metaphor, here's one I'm sure I've used before.

Let's call teaching the classroom version of playing jazz. To pay jazz, you need a couple of things. For one, you need a solid rhythm section; a solid rhythm section makes everyone else sound better, plus it gives you a foundation on which to play. On that foundation, you have plenty of freedom, but you exercise that freedom within a framework--a best, chord changes, maybe even the basic tune of the song. Ignore the beat and the chords at your peril; you can't just do whatever the hell you want. Find good people to play with, and you will play better. And when you are really good, you can actually bend and defy the framework of beat and chords--but you have to really know what you're doing. It's part inspiration and gut, but it also requires technical skill and control and a good piece of equipment on which to play. Also, some songs are way better to play on than others (depending on who's on the stand tonight), so have a big book to select from. And especially also, you have to pay attention to your audience and where your own playing is in that moment, and adjust accordingly.

I have no idea how many jazz trombone players there are in the US, but if there were 4 million, only a small number would be a Jack Teagarden or a George Brunis or a Gunhild Carling. But given the right tools and the right support, the rest could do a good job. That's teaching.