Teaching is a team sport. Although individual educators may teach individual classes, the relationships and collaboration among adults in a school will heavily affect the experiences of everybody’s students. Ignoring this need for facilitating cooperation comes at a steep cost.

The just-released first section of the “MetLife Survey of the American Teacher” provides striking data to illustrate the urgency of building substantial time for collaboration into all teachers’ schedules. The average time allotted per week for collaborative activities is only 2.7 hours. In schools that make the effort to do more than that, the rewards are tremendous. Here are a few eye-catching survey stats examining differences between teachers who work in higher- vesus lower-collaboration schools:

Beginning teachers have the opportunity to work with more experienced teachers.

Higher collaboration teachers: 95%

Lower collaboration teachers: 59%

My principal’s decisions on school improvement strategies are influenced by faculty input.

Higher collaboration teachers: 92%

Lower collaboration teachers: 48%

At my school, I strongly agree that the teachers, principals and other school professionals trust each other.

Higher collaboration teachers: 69%

Lower collaboration teachers: 42%

Satisfaction with teaching as a career

Higher collaboration teachers: 68%

Lower collaboration teachers: 54%

I am very confident that I have the knowledge and skills necessary to enable all of my students to succeed academically.

Higher collaboration teachers: 89%

Lower collaboration teachers: 81%

All or most of my students who have a sense of responsibility for their own education.

Higher collaboration teachers: 56%

Lower collaboration teachers: 35%

Wow. And the last two are really the kickers.

It’s incontrovertible: students benefit when their teachers are participants in a supportive, active learning community. MetLife also reports, “Sixty-seven percent of teachers and 78% of principals think that greater collaboration among teachers and school leaders would have a major impact on student achievement.”

It’s no secret that this works. Infuriatingly, 69% of teachers “do not believe that their voices have been adequately heard in the current debate on education.”

The cue to wring hands is… now. Or we as individual educators and citizens can work alongside MetLife to raise the profile of this urgent need. We must be heard!

Roland
Barth incisively observed, “[T]he relationships among the educators in a
school define all relationships within that school's culture. Teachers and
administrators demonstrate all too well a capacity to either enrich or diminish
one another's lives and thereby enrich or diminish their schools.”

Amen.
But for schools with room to improve (i.e. every single one), what does a
culture shift toward better relationships look like? Tinkering
or wholesale reform? Human knots? Happy hours? Clique-busting in the lounge? Collaborative
planning periods? All of the above and more?

This weekend I
tore through a compelling new book, The
Checklist Manifesto by
Atul Gawande, which gave me another idea. Gawande is a Harvard-based surgeon,
writer of two previous award-winning bestsellers, MacArthur Genius Grant
Recipient, leader of the World Health Organization Save Surgery Saves Lives
program, and all-around world-beater. The subtitle of the book “How to Get
Things Right” caught my attention. If Dr. Gawande wanted to tell a teacher
perpetually seeking to get things right how to do it, I was in.

Of course, the
book claims up front that checklists are useful. But why? What makes a good
checklist? Can teachers use this? (I think so.)

Gawande offers a
handful of well-chosen case studies in operating rooms, construction sites,
airplane cockpits, venture capitalist brains, and high-end restaurant kitchens
illustrating the consistency and collaboration that using a checklist can
provide. When an operating team huddles before a surgery to run through a safe
surgery checklist, the risk of complications decreased sharply. For starters,
each team member introduces himself by name (a nonstandard practice in a great
many operating rooms), a practice that removes much of the reticence of many
nurses to call out doctors when they observe mistakes in progress. Running
through the standard procedure for running lines into a patient drops the line
infection rate from occasional to zero. 
The nurses may have prepared lines many times, but in the heat of the
moment, important little things can be forgotten— unless there is a check in
place.

The Checklist
Manifesto moves like a
Malcolm Gladwell book. (Bestseller-machine Gladwell even appears on the back
cover for an enthusiastic blurb.) It’s a good read. Gawande suggests
convincingly that it’s too much for a surgeon, or a builder, or a pilot (or, we
can extrapolate, a teacher) to hold in one’s mind every little thing that needs
taking care of in all contingencies. We forget things, we re-shuffle our
priorities, we respond to emergencies. Without a check— coming from a checklist
or a colleague— things can get unnecessarily fouled up. As we pursue excellence
in our craft, this cost-free (if initially annoying) option warrants
consideration.

Good checklists
are crafted on the ground and are constantly evolving. They should not take
more than a minute to run through. Five to nine essential items. Clear and
concise.

Perhaps most
importantly, checklists require collaborators to talk to each other. This is
where they can be of real use in schools, where too often each classroom
becomes its own island. A functioning classroom has so many moving parts that
the opportunities to use checklists with students and colleagues are vast.

I can see the adoption in schools of non-threatening, teamwork-oriented, locally-created checklists
leading to better relationships among educators and better outputs for
students. Roland Barth would like it. 

In the midst of a difficult teaching year, TLN member Mary Tedrow has found solace in Thomas Newkirk's Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, which she describes as "a manifesto on behalf of quality instruction."

In a new essay for Teacher Magazine (free registration), Tedrow welcomes Newkirk’s recounting of classroom-proven literacy teaching principles, but she’s most taken with Newkirk’s message about teacher failure: It’s built into the work.

Newkirk acknowledges that all teachers live with a deep insecurity that
we either learn to accept or ultimately ignore for self-preservation.
He argues that the profession needs to embrace an awareness that all
teachers struggle with regular failures: students they can't reach,
lessons that fall flat, explanations that are met by blank stares. He
eloquently describes the inevitable class where—because of the time of
day, or the season, or the odd mix of personalities—no one appears to
have the energy for learning, and the teacher feels mired in lethargy
as well. He reminds us that no one is a super-teacher 24/7. Some
failure is a natural consequence of the tremendous challenges we take
on.

One commenter at the Teacher website wrote: “This reflective piece should be emailed to every struggling or anxious teacher in America.” We agree.

 On TLN, we have a tradition of posting our New Year's resolutions. Usually I am pouring with ideas and professional goals, but this year I found it difficult.  Then, as I was reading other people's goals, I remembered...I am in the midst of carrying out a big goal I set for myself in August before the school year started.  What I need to do now is check in on them and regroup for 2010.   

The most tangible goal I set for myself this school year was to improve my assessments.  I wanted to make sure I could clearly track the learning of my students.  Why? Partly, for my own piece of mind--in this age of "accountability," I wanted to be sure of what my students were learning and be able to say say clearly what each student knew how to do and what each student needed to work on.  I wanted to be able to answer to people who say, "How can you prove what your students are learning, if not using standardized tests?"  

Obviously, I've always had to grade students, and I've used a combination of rubrics, simply assigning grades, just giving comments, etc.  This year, I have put many more hours than ever before into grading everything stringently using rubrics I created and keeping track of the trends and where individual students need help.  At first it was interesting and somewhat motivating for me, but soon I felt myself b-u-r-n-i-n-g  o..u...t........ I kept going, though. 

My conclusion at the close of 2009 is that I have not learned anything ground-breaking from this extremely time-consuming (left-brain heavy) process of "accounting" of my students' learning.  I realize that I was always using student data (though not always in numerical form) to inform my instructional decisions.  I always had a pretty good grasp of what my students understood and didn't understand because I looked at their work.  

In fact, this assessment process has made my vision of my classroom somewhat more myopic than usual.   For example, if you ask me what a particular student knows or doesn't know about, say, point of view in literature, I have to consult the numbers in my grade book, whereas before I could probably tell you off the top of my head.  This is because I've forced myself to focus on the empirical side of assessment (the numbers) and less on the actual student! I am less tuned in to the "soft" aspects of teaching, such as how I am motivating my students, and how much joy and creativity there is or isn't in my classroom.  I *count* that as a loss for both my students and me.  

I did discover a few good things about this practice.  The rubrics were often helpful as a tool to communicate clearly to students what they needed to work on. When I've given students opportunities to revise or redo the work, many of them have done voluntarily, which is a big success. I notice this form of feedback is most helpful with students who are already at least somewhat achievement-oriented. Students who generally struggle with academic skills and engagement, however, seemed to disengage more than usual when they found everything was graded strictly based on the 8th grade standards.  This raises some questions for me that I will share below.

2010: As a result of my learning this fall, I will use rubrics when I want to communicate to students about their progress on a specific objective, especially when I will be giving them new opportunities to achieve greater mastery the concept or skill.  Ideally, though, I want to structure my class so that my students get to a point where they can assess their own work, where I do not always have the final word about what's best.  

In 2010, I will not continue to keep track of student learning using rubrics to create numerical data just for the sake of it, or to answer to some higher power.  If I am the single most important factor in the learning of my students, then I need to do what enables me to be the best teacher I can be, which means NOT getting burnt out in the process. Moreover, I need to approach teaching in a way that feeds my spirit. I need to use my intuition to stay in tune with the pulse of the class as a whole and build relationships with all my students.  I resolve to welcome formal and informal occasions for joy, humor, and creativity in my classroom. I am fairly certain that these are no less important than mastery of standards.  

Questions: I'm still torn about whether actual grades and rankings are ultimately helpful.  In From Degrading to De-Grading, Alfie Kohn explains the well-researched fact that grades take the child's attention away from the learning itself, which is detrimental to all learners, from struggling to gifted. Written or verbal feedback, he says, is very helpful, but grades--which rank the work, whether we use letters or points, or percentages--make students focus on the grades, not the work. What would happen if I stopped giving grades and only gave written feedback?  What if I gave and scored quizzes, but at the end of the term asked kids to look at their work and feedback and assign themselves a grade and explain their rationale for it.  How would they fare? 

In the use of rubrics, I question the practice of deciding beforehand what every student should learn from each assignment.  For certain objectives and certain assignments, yes.  But everything? For every student? Isn't that an attempt to standardize the learning that takes place in our classrooms?  What about play? Innovation?  What's the right balance between accountability for student mastery of pre-determined standards and the need for students to explore, discover, and learn in a way that is authentic and honors their individuality?

[image credits: www.readingpl.org/, eduspaces.net, www.flickr.com/photos/ bingramos/126661740/]

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