Schools for Tomorrow Blog

In my introductory blog, I wrote that I wanted to investigate/examine/interrogate the notion of teacher as professional. I wrote that teachers need to view themselves as professionals and that society needs to treat teachers as professionals, as opposed to treating teachers as well-intentioned “Mother Teresas,” fighting the good fight.

One way to judge whether or not teachers are treated and act like professionals is to compare teachers to other “professionals.” In 2005, the Finance Project, an organization that looks to “support decision-making that produces good results for children, families, and communities,” published a report that compared education to six other fields. The report, titled Preparing and Training Professionals: Comparing Education to Six Other Fields compares professional development in education to six other professions: law, accounting, architecture, nursing, firefighting and law enforcement.

Since we know that teacher quality is the most critical factor in improving student achievement, professional development of teachers is crucial. So how does education stack up as far as professional development?

In comparing preparation programs, all of the other professions had “greater consistency than education in standards across states.” Education, as opposed to the other professions, has no national standards, which, the report says, would “enable preparation programs to better compare their work to that of their peers and to measure progress towards established goals.”

Most of the other professions require practitioners to pass national exams before practicing. The report goes on to compare education to those other professions in six categories. But let’s stop at the issue of national standards.

Accountants, architects, and nurses must pass a single national exam. Lawyers must pass state bar exams, which employ a national or multi-state component.

Why no national exam for teachers? The major stumbling block to a national standard exam for teachers is disagreement around what the standards would entail. Why is it so difficult to come to consensus around the issue of teacher standards? Other professions do it. Does the resistance come from within the ranks of teachers and teacher unions (although the AFT is way ahead of the NEA on proposing teacher standards)? Do states get in the way here? Are they concerned with losing their autonomy? What about society in general? Is there reluctance by society in viewing their children’s teachers as professionals? What do you think?

I was attending one of the seemingly hundreds of educational fact finding committee meetings (if someone did a meta-analysis of the reports put out by these well-intentioned powerless groups—think P-16 Council, P-20 Council, Great Education Colorado — I predict they would all say the same thing: something needs to change!), and a business owner asked why teachers wanted more money.

“Don’t teachers work for only 10 months out of the year? If you look at the pay for 10 months and not 12 months, it’s not that bad.”

To a certain extent, this  is a valid argument. But  looking at pay by the hour versus the year tells a different story. Let’s ay the average worker puts in 50 weeks a year, with two weeks off for vacation.  At 40 hours a week times 50 weeks, that’s 2,000 hours. Now let’s look at a teacher’s hourly work week. This is not empirically based. I am sure there is data out there that tracks the time teachers work (if you know of any, let me know), but this is based only on my observations of 14 years of teaching experience.

A typical teacher puts in 10 hours a day with, let’s say, a minimum of another 4 hours at home per week. That’s 54 hours a week, times 38 weeks (the typical contractual timeframe), which equals 2,052 hours a year. In other words, teachers work just as many hours in 38 weeks (or more) as a your typical 40-hour per week worker.

Yes, I am sure that some teachers do not put in that many hours, just as I am sure that not all workers are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing at their jobs every hour. The missing factor here is what teachers do over the summer and the fact that most are not compensated for work that SHOULD be done over the summer.  

Teachers should be responding to the needs of the students during the school year–remediating with students, changing lesson plans to adapt to the changing needs in the classroom, tutoring students, conferencing with parents and, finally, implementing lesson plans. Teachers should not be working on the “Three Cs” (as Rick DuFour names them): Consequences, Calendar and Choices.

Before I start teaching every year, I should have looked at any and all data that was produced the year before, i.e.  CSAP, ACT, district assessments, common course assessments or individual teacher assessment data. This allows me to focus on any shortcomings from the previous year. The problems might stem from misaligned courses, wrong essential outcomes for courses, invalid assessments or poor teaching strategies, just to name a few.

Researching best practices and locating resources to assist me is key as well. I am not suggesting that all this be done in isolation. It needs to be done collaboratively to ensure consistent application and implementation. Some teachers do this without pay.  Most  do not do it because it is outside of their contractual obligations.

Currently, the first day back for teachers may be spending  a brief time glancing at the previous year’s data, if you are lucky enough to get that data when you return in the late summer. In my district, we have three teacher duty days, in which you are supposed to get ready for the upcoming year. This also includes copying, preparing rooms, attending meetings about new policies, and meeting with administrators to set up individual teacher objectives for the year, among other requirements.

This has to change! I believe we need to pay teachers to work over the summer on the Three Cs. A recent article in the Washington Post describes a district that is doing this. Contracts have been extended nine, 14 or 21 days. Not all teachers can participate. There is a “competitive” process to select teachers. Teacher’s duties are very specific, and they are expected to monitor their summer work throughout the year.

Yes, it takes money. And my district is struggling, as are most, with maintaining current services and would be hard-pressed to find additional money to compensate teachers for this vital work. Can we find funds to accomplish this? Here’s a thought: What about Denver altering  Denver’s ProComp to make this one of the options for teachers?

As always, constructive feedback is appreciated.         

This is my first blog for this site. A bit about myself: I am 50 years old, and I have been a teacher for 14 years.  When I first got out of high school, in a suburb of Chicago, I had every intention of going to college. But instead I took a job as an apprentice truck mechanic for Ford (this is where I learned about the need for organized labor).
After finding myself reeking of diesel fuel and yearning for a more cerebral experience, I went to professional photography school and become a commercial photographer. I moved to Denver (where I was born) and took a job with May D&F, a retail store, which was later consumed by Foleys and now Macys, as their director of advertising photography (this is where I learned about the “free market”).

Disillusioned with trying to coax customers into changing their wardrobes every six weeks through advertisements, I finally went to college and got my teaching certificate. It was inevitable for me to enter the profession. My dad was a high school teacher for 30-odd years; my sister is a medical doctor teaching in the State University of New York system; and my youngest sister is an assistant principal at a West Slope high school. As you can see, I’ve dabbled in a few different areas of work. I think this gives me an excellent vantage point from which to pontificate.  

    
Fifteen years ago, as I was making my way through the teacher certification process in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Colorado at Denver, I was struck by one of the portfolio requirements. The portfolio was to represent my body of work in the school, and I needed to show evidence for the five or so topics in the portfolio. One of the topics was “Teacher as Professional.”

I was struck by this, because I thought teaching was all about being a professional. Doesn’t it go without saying? Or is it a bit like when Nixon said, “I am not a crook” when he was under fire for Watergate? Didn’t that go without saying? One of my hopes in this blog is to call attention to the lack of professionalism given to and expected by teachers.
This came to mind when I was reading a blog about a teacher who had a conversation with a friend of hers who was going into the nursing profession. She was attracted to nursing in New York City because, in an attempt to attract more people to the profession, the starting pay had been increased to around $55,000. “How do we attract new teachers to our profession?” the teacher asked. One of the ways the government currently tries to attract teachers is through the Teacher Corps–where we place anyone, as long as they are not pedophiles, into the classroom, and then train them as they go!

Huh? I am not aware of any other profession that would allow this. Would you want a nurse, with zero experience, taking your vitals, administering life-saving drugs? Or how about a person with no experience or training—or, for that matter, education–designing a highway bridge? Why do we do this with wannabe teachers (especially in inner city schools)?
It is because we as a society do not view or treat teachers as professionals. If only I had a nickel for every time someone confessed to me that they too wanted to be a teacher, but it just wasn’t worth their time salary-wise–as if the only thing keeping me from being a doctor was all of that school stuff. Not everyone can be a doctor, nurse or architect.

Most of society sees teachers as passionate souls fighting the good fight. This is a bit analogous to a nun or priest, who’s certainly not doing it for the money. But higher salaries are not going to make professionals out of teachers. My contention is that until teachers are treated–and here’s the big one—and act like professionals, it will be difficult to improve student achievement.  What will it take for teachers to be treated and to behave like professionals? What does it mean to be a professional?  And where does accountability fit into the discussion?  Give me your thoughts.  

As delegates and all things Democratic prepare to flood Denver, I’ve been wondering how my students can get involved in the process.  I’d like us to spend the first week or two of school building trust and laying the foundation for a thoughtful, safe learning environment, and then head into a lively election unit.  

How can the unit be designed to bring the election to life?  How can the boundaries of my classroom become permeable so that student voices are interacted with outside of the walls of my classroom; becoming a genuine part of our country’s dialogue?

Since the 1980s, students have been reporting, in increasing numbers, that school is not preparing them for living in the world.  I spent much of this week at a conference put on by When History Happens, absorbing ideas for how to create permeable classrooms where learning incorporates interactive technology and directly relates with the world.  

I’m fascinated by this potential.  As I’m constructing the structure of my classroom (that will be put into motion in a couple of weeks!) I’m thinking of ways students can create video clips and podcasts that they make from interviewing one another and members of the community, and then upload them onto the When History Happens learning community; I’m wondering how to teach writing and editing through publication to places such as TeenInk  or YourHub  (TeenInk is a national magazine written by teens and Yourhub.com/nextgen is a space for 4-8th graders to write news stories.  YourHub is run by the Rocky Mountain News and over 200 4-8th graders across the Denver metro area are currently members); I’m wondering how our class can compare and contrast the Convention of 1908 with the Convention today using primary resources.

If I plan well, these activities will connect with understanding inference, author’s purpose, prediction, poetry, civics, grammar… all must-haves for CSAP as well as for a fully literate life.  I’m trying to figure out how to build structures for this kind of permeable learning.  Perhaps classroom-community connections could be a literacy apprenticeship of sorts.  Students can apprentice with, and be mentored by, our burgeoning 21st century newspapers, businesses, non-profits… by society.  Imagine if part of a 21st century teacher’s job is to facilitate this interaction.  Wow!

Could classroom permeability ever exist as a component of educational policy?  If such a classroom proves effective and meaningful for student learning, and if the overarching goal of policy is to build an innovative, thoughtful society, perhaps the “world as teacher” for our schools can become part of policy.  

Have you ever seen any classrooms where this type of learning was active and working?

This coming August Mapleton is adopting the reading program “Every Child A Reader” put out by the National Literacy Coalition (who has also designed a writing program called “Every Child A Writer,” but we’re not implementing that one this year). Since I’m a humanities teacher, I took the required training last week.

I’m not the friendliest person to cookie-cutter educational programs making their way into our classrooms, but I must say… I like this one so far and am curious to see how students will engage with it.

The program model creates a differentiated classroom. Students are grouped by their reading level (a grouping that is not set in stone – groups can change throughout the year), and spend most of their time in class working at (rotating) stations. I’ll be at one station, working with one group of students at a time.

It’s a program based in structure, not in content: instead of telling me (and students) what articles or stories we need to study in our classroom, I’m learning how to group students according to their reading abilities, and I’m learning text comprehension strategies to use with students in small groups. Since it’s not a content-based program, I choose texts and create the stations. Thornton Middle School implemented this program last year, and my comrades there tell me it’s quite the success.

In my training as a Boettcher teacher, we talk a lot about differentiating instruction. Last year was my fellowship year, and the 15 of us fellows spent hours and hours (and papers and papers!) discussing what it means to build relationships with our kids. The program challenges us to deeply know each student as a learner, and a person. I think relationships are emphasized so strongly in Boettcher because the better I know my kids, the better I can help them learn. I’m more astute at differentiating for them.

Are differentiated classrooms the classrooms of the future? Students can meet standards and benchmarks in many different ways… maybe offering them multiple ways to learn just makes sense. Kids are different. As I know that Xavier is interested in the election, and that he likes learning independently, I can create opportunities for him. To meet the 8th grade civics standard of understanding the importance of citizenship maybe he would keep an ‘election’ scrapbook of articles from newspapers and magazines that he has responded to. Sheila, on the other hand, might help organize a school-wide mock election on Super Tuesday. She’s meeting the same standard, yet doing it in ways that engage with her interests.

Differentiated classrooms may need to be the wave of the (urban?) future. We have classrooms with students coming from the U.S., Asia, Africa, and South America (and from all the different countries in these regions). Students’ literacy levels range from advanced to unsatisfactory. Culture and language differences abound. Our classrooms are overflowing in richness and diversity, yet how do we tap into it?

Our conversations about ProComp and school structure (K-8 schools, or 6-12 schools) need to include conversations about what goes on inside our very diverse classrooms. The effectiveness of our classrooms will influence the effectiveness of our structures (and v.v.) Do you think differentiated learning will help all of our kids meet standards, and become vibrant members of society? Will effectively differentiated classrooms help ensure that ProComp and our larger school structures are effective?

Our discussions on education need to be wide open because the future is wide open in our rapidly changing world. What are your thoughts and ideas about differentiated classrooms, and differentiated literacy programs that districts like Mapleton are beginning to adopt?

I don’t always agree with the D-Ed Reckoning blog, but I love reading it. For an example of why anyone interested in school reform should visit this blog regularly, read this merciless dissection of  a progressive education school project’s shortcomings. Terrible truth-telling. It will make you wince. (And I’m someone who was "progressively educated" and who appreciates much about progressive education).

Over at Slate, business professor Ray Fisman tries to tackle the question of teacher tenure with a slightly different twist, asking “Why are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?” (H/T Joanne Jacobs) To dig deeper is to find it truly a perplexing question—and an increasingly frustrating one for education reformers the more we learn just how crucial teacher quality is to student outcomes.

Fisman notes the successful turnaround of New York City’s PS 49 is in large part attributed by its leader to “getting rid of incompetent teachers.” But Fisman also highlights research that shows large school systems don’t improve their teaching hires based on selectivity. In other words, overall instructional quality is unchanged whether a school district hires 50, 100, or 200 teachers from a specified pool of applicants. Could it the wrong criteria are being used to decide who should be employed in our classrooms?

In a 2005 Progressive Policy Institute report, Andrew Leigh and Sara Mead observe that standard practice is out of line with what has been shown to matter more:

In other words, current research suggests that, absent any other information about the individuals involved, we would be wiser to bet on the teaching success of an individual with strong verbal and intellectual skills, or high test scores and no teacher training, than we would be to bet on the success of someone with mediocre skills and full teaching certification. Clearly, at the individual level, other personal factors are critical, but working with limited information,

research provides the strongest evidence for the importance of teachers’ intellectual and verbal

skills.

It appears that PS 49 has been a lot closer to making this correct wager than the New York City public schools at large has been. Meanwhile, Fisman suggests an even more reliable indicator for identifying a quality teacher:

What economists have found is that only one thing tells us how much a teacher will boost his students’ test scores next year: the amount he raised test scores in previous years. A good teacher this year will very likely be a good teacher next year. Unfortunately, when making hiring decisions, principals rarely have that information at their fingertips. Most hiring decisions are made before applicants have a teaching record.

Of course, the stakes are high when making a teacher hire with limited information. The investment of tenure makes it difficult and costly to remove a poor performer from the classroom. (Sure, Colorado’s tenure process isn’t as burdensome and overwhelming as New York City’s, but it is still a major obstacle to successful education reform.)

What about the 3-year probationary period that Colorado law allows before teachers automatically earn tenure? As an Independence Institute report highlighted, the state’s largest school district had a policy in place that effectively nullified the probationary period. (It since has started to be phased out of practice.)

How well other Colorado school districts make use of the probationary period to weed out ineffective instructors is an area ripe for closer study, one that cannot be ignored simply due to political sensitivities. Teacher tenure is an important piece of the important teacher quality puzzle, even as we also look for ways to reduce regulatory barriers that keep the brightest and best from teaching in our schools. There’s every reason to take a closer look at how Colorado appropriates teacher tenure.

Blogfather’s note: Rachel Pickett is a teacher with the Boettcher Teachers Program.

The ProComp debate is a good one: should teachers be paid, in part, based on our performance?  (And I must confess, my limited knowledge about ProComp is based on what I’ve read on this blog.)  Will this initiative work to increase our kids’ test scores?  Will those of us who are effective in our practice shine, and will our schools become bastions of effective, innovative teaching because effective teachers will guide each and every classroom?

I see ProComp as situated in the larger context of educational reform.  Paying teachers by our performance is one idea trying to tackle the larger question ‘how do we raise all students’ academic understanding and achievement?  How do we engage in the hard work of creating school environments that are mainstays of effective, innovative teaching and learning?’ 

If ProComp is going to be effective, it needs to be one of many diverse yet interconnected initiatives all working to create healthy and innovative instruction, school culture, and communication.  Perhaps paying teachers based on our performance is one brick in the larger process of building an engaged, creative, literate classroom.

Imagine what our schools would be like if all teachers were trained in ways to structure purposeful learning environments where students want to be engaged and literate.  Imagine if it was expected that we freely share our best practices and problem-solve our confusions/concerns, with one another (maybe district-wide).

Imagine if teachers were seen as inherently capable, and structures were created which both expected and supported us to capitalize on our strengths and capabilities.  Paying us more for our success might be one of thousands of initiatives that we need to scaffold truly effective reform.

There are other possibilities of ways to support students’ learning and increased test scores, too.  In Montgomery county Maryland, the entire school district (which is one of the largest and most diverse school districts in the country) is experimenting with study circles.  These circles, where students, teachers, and community members come together to problem solve about the issues facing their schools, have begun building trust and stronger avenues of communication school-wide. Test scores are beginning to increase, and achievement gaps are beginning to narrow.

Innovative residency-model teacher training programs (such as the Boettcher Teachers Program) might be another possibility.  Thoughtful and relevant professional development could help teachers become more effective.  Setting up clear accountability systems for teachers is another.  Maybe each of these steps is another brick.

ProComp makes sense to me if we look at it as a piece in our larger climb towards effective and equitable education for all students.