The Teaching Life

I've been dying to attend the WNET Teaching & Learning gala since I first heard about it and checked out the rich agendas offered at this "Not Your Mother's Ed Acronym Conference." I still haven't made it, but the next best thing this year has been the live blog coverage by Anthony Rebora, managing editor of Teacher Magazine. There was lots of content, lots of kids, lots of Notable Persons. Bobby McFerrin, Arne Duncan, and Queen Latifah. Now there's a sandwich.

There was also much-needed celebration of teaching at a time when some leaders seem ready to throw up guillotines
in schoolyards. Anthony backgrounds the annual conference and this year's highlights in this post.

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!

Finland
has an education system with its priorities in the right places and the results
to match. It’s time for our leadership to take a look over there and say, “Yes!
I’ll have what they’re having.”

Linda Darling-Hammond’s indispensable new book The
Flat World and Education
profiles three
countries-Finland, Korea, and Singapore— that had struggling education systems in the 1970s
but have aggressively revamped them into superior national systems. I plan to blog more on
Darling-Hammond’s opus, but for now, I want to focus on Finland.

 

Finland has much to teach us, if only we pay
attention. They didn’t arrive at an equitable, world-class system through our
current measures of privatization or accountability via high-stakes testing.
The Education
System of Finland’s website
spells out its mission in a way that starkly
differs from ours. (In fact, I couldn’t find any corresponding mission
statement on the U.S. Department of Education site
only endless links and a blog.)

Here are a few highlights from Finland:

Competent teachers On all school levels, teachers are highly
qualified and committed. Master’s degree is a requirement, and teacher
education includes teaching practice. Teaching profession is very popular in
Finland, and hence universities can select the most motivated and talented
applicants. Teachers work independently and enjoy full autonomy in the
classroom. 

This is the ace. What isn’t even mentioned is that
all teacher training and degrees are fully paid for by the government, making
teaching a competitive and attractive profession. Endless research points to
quality teachers in every classroom as the most crucial helper for students;
Finland actually invests in making that happen. In the U.S.’s fragmented
system, so many teachers enter the classroom with minimal training, heavy
student load debt, and a sink-or-swim attitude from their school leaders.
Naturally, many would-be competent teachers decide not to even bother. Finland
doesn’t have a teacher turnover crisis; quite the contrary, they have a
well-trained, highly talented corps of teachers. This is excellence— although I
can already anticipate loud, insipid criticism from the American right about
government-supported teacher training as a recipe for socialist indoctrination.
We need to get over ourselves and realize that investing in teacher training is
not optional for developing a sustainable, robust school system. We don’t have
that now and it’s killing us.

Encouraging assessment and evaluation The student assessment and evaluation of
education and learning outcomes are encouraging and supportive by nature. The
aim is to produce information that supports both schools and students to
develop. National testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not
exist.

The last line is clearly a knock at the U.S.’s
ideological march toward high-stakes testing as the sole relevant indicator of
student and school achievement. We need to shake off the addiction to
corporate-assembled tests for our students, and pay attention to implementing
rigorous assessments that support, not deaden, kids’ interest in education.

Significance of education in society Finnish society strongly favours education and
the population is highly educated by international standards. Education is
appreciated and there is a broad political consensus on education policy. 

Darling-Hammond mentions an American tradition of
under-investing in preparation. President Obama has committed unprecedented
billions to education in his Race to the Top program, but the money is tied to
the reforms du jour of tying teacher
evaluations to test scores and green-lighting more charter schools. In effect,
we’ll get more testing (and practice testing) and more privatization. So much
high-stakes testing sucks the soul out of education and charter schools are interesting
innovations at the fringes of the system. We cannot privatize our way to a
world-class education system that serves all American students. We need a
dramatic, bipartisan re-commitment to education. Finland did this, and we can
see where it got them— number-one status.


 

My long-distance love affair with Finland continues: it is
ranked by Forbes as the second-happiest
country
in the world. (Side note: it has a single-payer public health care
system and 88% of
its citizens are satisfied
with it. The EU national average for health care
satisfaction is 41%.)

Perhaps the U.S./Finland contrast is best elucidated by
Finnish policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg, who is cited in depth by Darling-Hammond:

The [No Child Left Behind] legislation… has led to
fragmentation in instruction, further interventions uncoordinated with the
basic classroom teaching, and more poorly-trained tutors working with students
and teachers. As a consequence, schools have experienced too many instructional
directions for any student, with an increase in unethical behaviors and a loss
of continuity in instruction and systematic school improvement. The difference
between this and the Finnish approach is notable: The Finns have worked
systematically over 35 years to make sure that competent professionals who can
craft the best learning conditions for all students are in all schools, rather
than thinking that standardized instruction and related testing can be brought
in at the last minute to improve student learning and turn around failing
schools.

Much of Darling-Hammond’s examination of Finland can be found
here
in a 2009 article for Voices in Urban Education, but I recommend getting the book. We’d be fools to ignore what
really works on a national level.

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. 

The Teacher Leaders Network recently celebrated the third anniversary of our partnership with Teacher Magazine and Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, to bring more expert teacher voice to the national conversation about our public schools. Nearly 160 individual essays and excerpts from our daily TLN Forum conversations have appeared in the online magazine and been spread throughout the Web by the power of social media and through large-scale e-newsletters like ASCD SmartBrief.

Here's a sample of our weekly postings from the last several months:

Giving Classrooms a Purpose
California author-educator Larry Ferlazzo explains why having a clear understanding of mission is the secret to classroom management and student success.

Teaching Secrets: Creating Positive Classroom Management
Rhode Island teacher-coach Marti Schwartz explains how helping students take pride in positive behaviors—and reflect on negative ones—can help change the classroom environment.

Does Grading Bias Apply to Education Reports?
A damning new report card on innovation in education relies on a selective view of the teaching profession, says math teacher Bob Williams, Alaska's 2009 teacher of the year.

Lessons in Democracy
A new book prompts Maryland's Ken Bernstein, a high school government teacher, to question how well schools teach—or even reflect upon—the art of democratic participation.

Should Teachers Sell Their Class Materials?
Members of the Teacher Leaders Network argue that teachers have a right to profit from their own intellectual work. (November 18, 2009)

The Experience Factor
Who said anything about retiring? Some Baby Boomer teachers find they're only now reaping the benefits of their hard-won knowledge and skills.

Making Professional Development an Inside Job
Anthony Cody, a science coach in Oakland CA, questions why districts insist on hiring outsiders to conduct PD when local classroom teachers have so much to offer.

All material at the Teacher Magazine website is free to visitors who establish a guest membership.

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.


Read on your own,
and you are in a strong position. If you do not do this, you’re in deep
trouble. 

This is my constant
thought about my students. Recent data from my classroom and an eye-opening new
book, African
Americans and Standardized Tests: The Real Reason for Low Test Scores
, have borne it out. 

 
 

The data from my
classroom has been consistent. At my school, we administer math and English
“interim assessments” three times a year. The teachers create the exams, often
drawing upon practice SAT, AP exam, and state tests. Within 48 hours of the
testing, teachers have run the students’ scores through the in-house Scantron machine
and printed out data reports. Then the Friday of interim assessment week is set
aside as a student-free professional development “data day” in which the entire
cohort of teachers serving a grade-level scours each kid’s test and open-ended
responses. We discuss patterns, draw up action plans, and identify students of
concern. It’s a model of using data to drive instruction.

Every single one of
these data days is an occasion for hand-wringing. The lower-achieving students
rarely display meaningful progress. Their essays are often cringe-worthy. For
some 11th- and 12th-graders on the cusp of heading to college, their lack of
mastery of the English language can be downright scary.

I have a clutch of
students who read for pleasure, yet bizarrely hand in assignments only
sporadically. Let’s call them “Readers.” These are the kids who take home The
Kite Runner
and read the
whole thing in two days—then never write any of their journal responses. Their
grades do not reflect their abilities. However, these students always score at
or near the very top of the class on these standardized tests.

I have many more
students who hand in almost all of their assignments, yet they— according to
their own pronouncements— dislike reading and never do it except when forced.
They are the moaners and groaners when new books are distributed in class. They
are always at or near the bottom of the statistical heap. Let’s call them
“Worker Bees.”

The most recent
data day sent me into a tizzy of bafflement about how to boost my Worker Bees.
An hour of Amazon.com book browsing (my new addiction) led me to order Clark
Atlanta University professor Veda Jairrels’s scarily titled African
Americans and Standardized Tests: The Real Reason for Low Test Scores
. I devoured the 140 pages in one sitting.

Jairrels, a lawyer
and an education professor, gave me little hope for the upward mobility
(academically and professionally) for most of my non-reading Worker Bees. She
lowers the boom in her introduction:

I believe
African Americans score the lowest… because of a lack of long-term voluntary
reading. Voluntary reading is also referred to as reading for pleasure… This
emphasis on reading should begin at birth (i.e. parents reading to their
infants). The amount of reading that children do in connection with school
assignments is often not enough…

When I tell
African American parents about the importance of taking their children to the
library, they sometimes reply, “My child has plenty of books at home.” My
unspoken response is, “No, you don’t. You just think you do.”

Ugh. She goes on to
lay out extensive, sobering data reflecting African Amercans’ poor performance
relative to other groups on tests. For example, the mean score for African
American college-bound seniors whose parents earn more than $100,000 on the
2007 SAT Writing test was 469; The mean score for white students whose parents
earned less than $10,000 was higher, at 474. At the household income of
$100,000 or higher, the mean score for white students was 540. And so on.

Jairrels claims the
core reason for this disparity is an accumulated deficit of skills and
knowledge from not African American children not reading enough for pleasure.
Reading teaches you words; it shows other places and perspectives. It broadens
one’s world. She wants parents to be getting kids pumped about reading from
birth, and for schools to immerse students in reading opportunities from the
moment they first enroll.

After finishing a
recent unit using the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, James, one of my Worker Bee 11th-graders
told me, with a real sense of accomplishment, “Mr. Brown, this is the first
book that I ever really
read.”

I was proud of him.
James’s effort in class this semester has been strong. He still remains
woefully behind his Reader peers. If he somehow caught up, he’d be a
statistical anomaly.

Reading is everything. When kids don’t read at an early age, they fall
behind.  I believe that all
children can learn, but when, for many, valuable years of reading and learning
have been squandered, those students awaken in the upper grades at a tremendous
deficit. Veda Jairrels sees it, and I see it in my classroom every day. 

No meaningful
education reform can ignore this.

 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 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-GradingAlfie 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/]

In my first year in
the classroom, I felt like a failure almost all the time. I didn’t understand
that this was normal, and as the months passed, I sank into ever-deepening
whirlpools of despondence. 

Now, six years
later, I have more experience, more perspective, and a supportive new school
and principal. My craft still needs lots of work, but I know I’m making a
positive impact and I feel successful pretty often.

How do we help
those rookies who don’t even know how to ask for help yet? (They may think it’s
a sign of weakness.) There are all of the conventional means of gentle intervention, like initiating
reflective conversations, sharing good practices, etc. But I have a new
recommendation:

Hand him or her a
copy of See Me
After Class
by Roxanna
Elden. (Or put a couple copies in the teachers’ lounge to let them find it on
their own.) 

 

Elden’s book,
subtitled Advice For Teachers By Teachers, is a useful, empathetic guide to weathering the first-year
lumps. The author jokes that this book is not chicken soup, but rather “Hard
Liquor for the Teacher’s Soul.” I’d peg it somewhere in between— perhaps a
frothy, satisfying Guinness for the teacher’s soul.

My favorite
chapter, “Classroom Management: Easier Said Than Done,” offers a host of
non-intuitive strategies for controlling a class. Bits of insight (Ex. “When
possible, don’t threaten or promise to call home— just do it.”) are expounded upon
with readable anecdotes and explanations. In my first months, I didn’t
understand the impact of a well-placed call home; Elden’s book may have given
me the push I didn’t know I needed. A few other favorite nuggets:

“Plan some
silent time into your day. Have a quiet activity that keeps students busy and
happy if they finish early. This can include art, crossword puzzles, review
activities, or reading. Also be prepared to shut down fun activities…”

Absolutely yes. And
I’d add choice time.
Everyone wants to feel ownership over his time, and (structured) free choice
time can be a powerful and constructive carrot to dangle in 1st or 12th grade. 

Tone it down a
little. If you find students rolling their eyes when you praise them, your
compliments may sound forced… Staying low-key also makes it more meaningful
when you do pull out the pom-poms.

Tell it, Roxanna.
I’m an effusive dispenser of praise in the classroom and I realized midway
through my first year that the desired impact of my compliments was being
diluted by my frequent gushing. I worked on continuing to stay positive, but
tying each compliment to a specific, replicable action the kid did. For
example, I did away with “Yes! You’re brilliant!” and brought in more specific
compliments like, “It was brilliant how you used what we talked about yesterday
to solve this problem! Remembering what we’ve done and applying it to the next
thing is the key to everything!”

Elden peppers her
book with original teacher-themed poetry which I could do without,  but I can see plenty of teachers vibing
right along with her on the stream-of-consciousness lyrics of poems like “Make
Me or Break Me,” and that’s fine. 
I like this See Me
After Class
a lot; at
$13.57 on Amazon it does no harm and lots of good for on-the-ground educators.

Note: Apologies
for the radio silence over the past few weeks. On December 18, my wife Colleen
gave birth to our first daughter, Sadie Eva Brown! Things have been hectic and
wonderful, and I’ll be back to regular blogging in January. Happy New Year!

 
  

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

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