My
friend and fellow Michigan teacher, Cossondra George, recently asked:

Do teachers have a responsibility to
be the gatekeepers of their profession? Can we settle for allowing our
colleagues to give students less than they deserve?

Teachers
ought to serve as gatekeepers for admission into the profession--and until that
happens, we can't lay claim to being fully professional. I'm all for raising
the bar for entrance to teaching (using better tools than SAT or Praxis scores),
and investing more time, resources and research on effective teacher development.

In
the meantime, however, we have teachers who are not doing the job well enough. Some
of them should be gone--tomorrow; others have plenty of untapped potential but
are floundering. No point in repairing the rusty gate granting access to teach
unless we pay attention to supporting teachers once they're in the field.

Struggling
teachers come in two basic flavors: #1) teachers who haven't had sufficient
experience or training to do the job well and #2) teachers who once had the
disposition and tools to be good teachers, but have checked out due to cynicism,
fatigue, bitterness and unforgiving working conditions.

The
first group is not necessarily easier to deal with. In some environments, "professional
development" is seen as an administrative duty, and early-career teachers
are threatened by the idea that their performance might be evaluated and found
wanting. Their daily practice is marked by the overriding desire to keep a low
profile. All teachers--from rank newbies to award-winning veterans--must
consider themselves collaborative learners and practitioners.  All of us are responsible for lending plans,
tips, materials and support to new teachers.

One
thing that can be done by accomplished veterans: asking newer teachers for their ideas, and approaching them as
full colleagues, rather than those who need help. I work with many first- and
second-year teachers who are pretty vocal about observed shortcomings in their
assigned mentors. Most faculties adopt a kind of pecking order. Flattening that
hierarchy--opening doors and sharing uncertainties--can help. Novice teachers
ought to be considered for leadership roles, such as curriculum writing or the
school improvement team, rather than dumping unwanted, time-sucking class
advisories or club sponsor roles on them.

The
second group of ineffective teachers is a different problem. I worked for
decades in a strongly veteran culture, which equated years of service with accrued
power and influence. I eventually discovered that many of the teachers
I saw as jaded burn-outs were once enthusiastic and creative, but had had
their mojo squashed by a culture of anger and perceived betrayal.

For a
teacher trained in the 70s, teaching to a mandated and scripted  reading program feels like being told that the
best lessons in their tool bags are useless, and their judgment flawed. For a
teacher who's spent 20 years in Detroit, bringing in used clothing and peanut
butter sandwiches for neglected students, blaming teachers for the system's
failures now is callous.

Some
of those favorite lessons and teaching methods are useless junk. But--a significant group of teachers who retain
the potential to be very effective in the classroom have found the only
"leadership" role open to them is fighting back against systemic
change through their unions. They need to have their professional experience
validated and acknowledged; they're not going accept either praise or criticism
from someone they don't respect, but they have not stopped caring about their
students' learning.

So there
is an opportunity to salvage good teaching--and valuable contextual
experience-- by acknowledging that veteran teachers have something to
contribute: been there, tried that, learned from it.  We might start by asking dried-up veteran
teachers "Why did you choose to be a teacher?" The ones who say
"June, July and August" can be dismissed. But the ones who say
"I wanted to make a difference in kids' lives" deserve to have their
ideas heard, at least.

An
old friend inadvertently gave me the title for this blog when he let me know
that a true Michigan conservationist and sportsman-Rusty Gates--passed over to
the great fly fishing stream in the sky last week.  Rusty Gates understood that in order to learn
to fish, you had to stand in the river for a time. And so it is with teaching.

Image: Neil Whiteside@Flickr Creative Commons