Michelle Rhee Launches National ‘Students’ First Advocacy Group. Wonderful! She exclaims, “I am going to start a revolution,” Rhee declared. “I am going to start a movement in this country on behalf of the nation’s children.” Absolutely!
Now anyone interested in starting a revolution to advocate for students’ teachers as well?
It is with great disappointment that I read the “manifesto” by public school chancellors and educators for our nation’s schools in the Washington Post Outlook section today on “How to fix our schools.”
I do acknowledge that the educators who signed off on this manifesto believe that “the task of reforming the country’s public schools begins with us.” And that’s the problem. Real change doesn’t happen because we threaten professionals who are dismissed if their students don’t score high enough on tests. The educators note, “There isn’t a business in America that would survive if it couldn’t make personal decision based on performance.” And that’s another problem. Education is not a business. It’s an experience. The “clients” are students, their families, and society and the intricate web of interconnections and demands among them. As a teacher, I am insulted by the current reform movement. There is no easy “fix” or one set of tools to measure children’s learning. We are professionals, not technocrats. We are problem-solvers and innovators.
To complicate matters, how do we “fix” anything by getting rid of teachers who are willing to teach in the most challenging schools where raising students’ test scores is complicated and complex? How do we attract the “top students” to be “top teachers” by simply increasing the pay as noted in another Post article? How do we support teachers’ ongoing professional development in “quality” programs that do make a difference in their professional development?
And how do we make all charter schools attractive for families or how do families make charter school attractive? Simply saying “charter school” does not mean a charter school is better. As Gail Collins with the NY Times reports...only about a fifth of American charter schools “produce amazing results.” In fact, a study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that only 17 percent did a better job than the comparable local public school, while more than a third did “significantly worse.”
It’s the village.
It’s families, it’s community, and yes, it’s teachers – but teachers who feel they are respected – not because they make lots of money – but because they are motivated to change the one thing they can change, themselves and for their students’ learning.
Yes, even those who have given up and deserve to be booted are candidates for change. To “fix” the nation’s broader economic problems as augured by the educators, begins by not punishing or rewarding teachers like they are animals who earn the treat of continuing bashing and disrespect. But by bringing teachers into the conversation to discuss solutions by studying their practice with colleagues because they choose to “fix” their own classrooms. Chancellors cannot “fix” anything without teachers. Complex structures are built with a firm foundation from the bottom up. We better get started.
Sometimes it may seem that everyone is talking about what to do to teachers but that teachers have not been part of that conversation. Teachers may feel the doors are shut with others inside deciding what to do to improve the quality of teachers.
Take charge of your teaching by studying your own classroom.
Daniel Pink argues that humans are not motivated by carrots and sticks and yet that is the direction of motivating teachers towards improving their students’ test scores. What are the implications of his very interesting argument for teachers?
Watch this video and post your comment:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
and speaking of motivation, being motivated also and especially applies to students.
Read:
Robert Samuelson’s OpEd in the Washington Post on September 6, 2010, “The failure of school reform.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/05/AR2010090502817.html
Well here’s a quagmire for you. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan was quoted in the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/28/AR2010082803319.html
“We want to hold you accountable for high standards” he said, “but give you the room to get there”…” Our job is support you” Duncan said. “Our job is give you a chance to make a huge difference in children’s lives.”
Can teachers feel SUPPORTED when they are penalized directly for students’ test scores? Where is the personal accountability in that? Where is the “CHANCE” for teachers in that? Do test scores = high standards?
The Secretary is giving it everything he has to “take reform show on the road” but it’s not a road show and there is no magic bullet to educational reform.
Teaching reform begins with teachers feeling they are not pawns in a political game. Making a difference in children’s lives is what matters. How do we get there without demanding that teachers as well as administrators fix it all and then penalize them if they don’t?
What might happen if we encouraged teachers to be accountable by examining their teaching with the support of colleagues?
Things that are most worthwhile do take time.
They especially necessitate that we are honoring and supporting the work that teachers are/ and CAN DO through reforming in the first person through a self-study of their practice.
Consider the people you know in different professions. What would they tell you about how their professional training taught them to think? What is their habit of mind for their daily practice?
For example, a lawyer may tell you she was taught to think about arguments, claims and warrants; an engineer may indicate that he understands logic and problem-solving, and a scientist may say she follows the scientific process and examines evidence.
Next, I ask you to blog about what you think it means “to think like a teacher”.
What is essential to “thinking like a teacher”? Is there one key factor? Is there a common set of thinking?
Does the thinking necessitate:
Join the conversation!
Imagine schools without teachers. Are we headed there? There sure are a lot of efforts to get rid of teachers. DC is just one example- and even with the support of teacher unions.
As in any profession, there are those who are ineffective and in “teacherland” that translates lately to students’ test scores. But what would happen if we reversed the psychology and actually said to teachers:
WE CARE ABOUT YOU BECAUSE YOU MATTER TO OUR WORLD.
WE APPRECIATE WHAT YOU DO FOR STUDENTS EVERYDAY.
WE WANT TO SUPPORT YOUR PERSONAL EFFORTS TO IMPROVE YOUR PRACTICE SO YOU IN TURN CAN IMPACT STUDENTS’ LEARNING.
Why should students invest 50K to become a teacher, with few teaching positions available, and then be scrutinized and subjected to a narrow scope of outside assessment? Standards do matter and so do teachers.
There has little conversation about how teachers are motivated to improve their own practice. They are after all the direct players; the ones we all want to be “highly qualified”; the ones who are held responsible for improving students’ learning and enacting a flood of standards. How are teachers encouraged to improve the quality of their teaching?
Is it by the use of incentives like merit pay, a tier professional pay scale, or a “race to the top” by school? Is it by punishments with hordes of teachers being dismissed from their school? The current approach for motivating teachers does not appear to working and some might even just suggest we break the mold.
Despite teachers’ frustrations with the educational system and perhaps the system with them, the one thing teachers know they can change is themselves.
What might happen if we ask teachers to choose to study their own reform effort with school colleagues in order to improve students’ learning?
Revolutionary? You betcha! Students and teachers deserve better than our current approach.
The time has come. . . . I am pleased to announce that my new book, Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry, Sage Publishers, has gone to press!
I begin this blog by inviting you to join me in jumping inside your teaching and sharing your explorations and research about your teaching inquiries.
Are you frustrated with high-stakes standards that are impacting your teaching?! Let me say that that your teaching begins with you. The power of your personal narrative to define the parameters of your own classroom inquiry is at the forefront of your academic thinking and professional development.
This does not mean that there should be no outside accountability. It does, however, bring to mind that change that is demanded by others is less powerful, less meaningful, and less sustainable than change that is self-initiated and self-motivated. You are a generator of knowledge who can learn about your teaching and about your students’ learning by studying your own classroom. Despite any frustrations you might have in trying to change the educational system, the one thing you know you can try to improve and change is yourself.
Ann Lieberman and Desiree Pointer Mace in their article, Making Practice Public: Teaching Learning in the 21st Century, [2010, Journal of Teacher Education, 61 (1-2), 77-88], call for a “local teaching” movement where “Growing your own professional development” means giving value to your efforts to shape teaching and learning in your classroom; “Just as a local-foods gardener is invested in the daily care to grow food that will grace the tables of his or her community, teachers can assess a greater investment in their own knowledge and expertise by sharing their fruits of their labors with each other” (p. 86). The key is to belong to a learning community in practice. And so the support of critical friends is essential to our professional practice as teachers.
Many years ago I taught preschoolers and observed how much they learned by getting their hands dirty by jumping into new projects and sharing their work. My advanced studies involved learning about early childhood education, human development, curriculum and instruction, and teacher education. You can read a bit about me on my personal webpage.
I find myself smiling when I reminisce on teaching young children. I watched 3-year olds energetically and enthusiastically dig their hands into finger paint, shaving cream, clay, and mud as they played with and shared their ideas with classmates. With busy hands, they traced and painted, designed and cut, and placed and glued fabric, yarn, and buttons on their self-portraits, which were posted in hallways and on home refrigerators where they were made public. “Look at what I made at school” they shouted.
As we get older, we often forget how much we learned by playing and sharing our ideas with colleagues–by muddying up our hands, making mistakes, and sharing our ongoing understandings of practice. We sometimes lose faith and our sense of agency as teaching professionals. For the last decade, I have been learning and practicing what is called self-study teacher research.
Self-study is a methodology to critically examine one’s own teaching as a way of developing a more consciously driven mode of professional activity (Samaras, 2002); that is you are examining your own teaching from the inside and sharing it with others outside of your classroom so as to add to the knowledge base of teaching and learning. Self-study research involves a self-reflective stance in concert with self-responsibility as well as a responsibility to others. As teachers conduct self-study research projects, they are reminded about the important role they play, and can play, in addressing performance measures and improving the educational system.