Hey John,

First, I’m glad that you had a chance to try out a TED talk. Even if you didn’t do as well as we had hoped, you probably said your piece with conviction, calm, and an honesty that suits a man who works with kids no taller than his knees. While we wait for video evidence of this, just know it’s probably not your last shot at this, and, if anything, you’ll get lots of practice with your kids.

See, something you said here triggered a few thoughts of my own:

I love TED Talks because I believe there is a spark that happens when human beings enter a learning relationship with each other.

I am here to talk about how we can create the education students deserve by the year 2030. The first thing we need to do is acknowledge that education already changed.

You just can’t tell from our standardized tests.

We can critique TED Talks as another way for people to just listen to someone talk at them for 8-15 minutes at a time, something truly progressive education rejects. You get, however, to the heart of the matter in that TED Talks often provide opportunity to people who have a great idea a platform where they can just speak from their true nature.

When I did mine, I found myself getting super-creative, looking at some of the successful ones from years prior, then blowing those examples apart. I wanted my voice to come through. No silly interruptions from people who need to alpha-dog everyone else in the room. No smarter-than-thou-art people who’ve barely been in a classroom. No sidebars from people without a general vision of what they actually want schools to look like.

Instead, what the audience got that night was me speaking from the heart. Sure, I prepared, but I hoped to convey the passion and love I have for teaching as I do in conversations with you, or in my own writing. Sometimes, while striving for perfection, we forget the delicate balance between divinity and humanity. What makes any “talk” we give isn’t knocking out the “umms” and “errs” from our speech, standing up straight, or speaking in a slow ans steady tone.

It’s the connection we make with people who listen to us. We have an opportunity every day to speak to people and make an impact one way or the other about them. These young people will have an idea they’d like heard, and you might be their first audience member.

Hey John,

In the last post, you wrote:

Recently empowered professionals, like NBCTs, need a true community with hearth-like sustenance, easy access to support a network, and a space that is safe to trust each other and to share vulnerabilities. I would like to think I might have found that on NBCTlink if it had that ability. I am afraid though, the passionate network of caring professionals I’ve found may have never happened in a community comprised entirely of NBCTs, focused on being NBCTs, not on being great teachers … Since that time TLN has grown to become a powerful group for teacher voice, without the identification of a particular ideology or understanding of what it means to be accomplished teacher. The strength of the community is in the diverse experiences and perspectives on excellent teaching.

Since you posted that, my colleague Genevieve DeBose responded in kind with a vision for the new NBCT platform. I noticed this:

We are also working to strengthen the voice of NBCTs in their schools and districts and among state and federal policymakers. By working with other professional organizations (like CTQ), unions, local districts, state education departments, our network affiliates, and other stakeholders we’ll ensure that NBCTs and other accomplished teachers are valued for their expertise and are routinely part of the teams making decisions that affect teaching and learning in their schools, districts, states, and nationally.

What often happens in communities of educators is that we do need a bit of re-purposing and yes, culture-building. Any time adults convene, we too need some sort of direction when we come together. Building community does, in fact, take the right people. Having credentials is not often enough, as the creators of the Teacher Leaders Network can attest to. Any group of educators, no matter how well credentialed, needs to understand the rules of the game, whether written or otherwise.

Secondly, teachers also need a community where they can tell the truth unfiltered about their professional situations. Teachers constantly find themselves playing politics about what happens inside and outside their classroom. When I hear things are going “just fine” with the teacher, it tells me nothing except that they know how to dissuade people from coming into their classrooms. I’ve learned that having a community of confidantes can help teachers parse their situations out without feeling like it might get back to their administrators, the end goal being that we turn the so-called “moaning and complaining” to cogent, actionable, and research-based responses when we get back out there.

Until then, even those of us who tell truths all the time need a place to be less “professional.”

Parsing out our ideas matters a whole lot. I’m no NBCT, but I’d wager that the TLN serves as a model for how other teacher leader type groups want to think about their own communities.

Hey John,

You said:

… you should know that when my chair came out of teaching to pursue his Ph.D. he fully planned on going back to the classroom when he finished his degree. He told me recently of a conversation with a lauded researcher he studied with in the field of early childhood education that influenced his thinking about his career direction. He said that his mentor asked him, “What are you going to do when you finish?” My chair answered, “I am going to go back to the classroom to teach.” His mentor said, “People don’t get Ph.D.s to go back to the classroom to teach. You have an entirely different set of skills with which to contribute to the field now.” That statement struck a chord with me. You ask, “Will I keep teaching?” The answer is yes, until I am not meant to but, I do have a new set of tools.

Off hand, I know at least five people in my wider circle who have education careers that yearn for that classroom again. You’ve developed a set of skills that no one can take away from you anymore, and that you couldn’t have picked up by staying in the middle of the action. Lots of people, from union activists to administrators, have yearned for the chance at getting back to the daily grind of the classroom. The connection with the kids matters so much, and brings a certain passion that you can’t get from the humdrum of correlation studies and number-crunching.

That’s why, when we have these discussions on the future of teaching, we have to keep in mind that some of our “allies” were once teachers as well, those who have kept an eye on what happens in the classroom because they’ve had some experience in it. In no way does it mean that everyone who’s ever been in the classroom has a similar mindset to us, but for those who intentionally taught the way we do, with the fire under our hearts and the air under our feet, we can go anywhere and still work under the mindset that, yes, this stuff is hard and it matters.

Those who intentionally or unintentionally left the classroom and still work in education often tell me how they couldn’t match the classroom experience anywhere they went. Until we can truly raise the status of teachers to the rest of the country (financially and otherwise), many of those feelings may still linger. Teachers will keep leaving the classroom in favor of jobs and titles that expand their opportunity without risk of jealousy or, much worse, removal.

It’s the art of looking back to look forward.

Hey John,

First, let me congratulate you on your getting your PhD. You’ve obviously earned it, and you continue to be an invaluable asset to all your different communities, especially in the early childhood arena so in need of advocacy in a major way.

While the title “PhD” has often been reserved for those in the field of medicine, a friend told me that it originally meant that, no matter what the field, the person was a master teacher. Sure enough, I look on Wikipedia and see:

In the universities of Medieval Europe, study was organized in four faculties: the basic faculty of arts, and the three higher faculties of theology, medicine and law (canonical and civil). All of these faculties awarded intermediate degrees (bachelor of arts, of theology, of laws, of medicine) and final degrees. Initially, the titles of master and doctor were used interchangeably for the final degrees, but by the late Middle Ages the terms Master of Arts and Doctor of Theology/Divinity, Doctor of Laws and Doctor of Medicine had become standard in most places (though in the German and Italian universities the term Doctor was used for all faculties). The doctorates in the higher faculties were quite different from the current Ph.D. degree in that they were awarded for advanced scholarship, not original research.

Understanding this history made me think that, as teachers, our practice constantly pushes us to do better, understand more, and broaden our scope as the children in front of us change. In a way, this is our “advanced scholarship.”

In New York State, teachers are generally required to get a masters in education to continue teaching. Many of the complaints coming from teachers who go through the program have to do with the heavy dependency on philosophy and not enough on practice. What does real classroom management look like? How do I explain why we have negative exponents? What’s the most effective way to show kids the scientific method?

We would do well to discuss the future of education schools in the vein of necessity.

For instance, a masters’ in education can lean more towards practice, and, in certain situations, localize the message so teachers can start using the best practices they’ve learned immediately. They can get some of the philosophy, but let that philosophy stay embedded in practice. As we become veterans, some of us stay curious about the “why,” meaning we want to either pursue positions that let us teach other teachers or broaden our scope. For those of us who are extra-curious, we can have PhD programs (as we do now) that address this population.

I also believe that, because we already engage in advanced scholarship, we would already have built-in tracks for following up with a PhD while teaching. That is, without breaking the bank or getting a fellowship, thus pulling us out of the classroom.

What do you think, good doctor?

I have a confession: before this kind of thing was cool, I’ve met over 300 of the people I knew online in person.

The first person I did that with went alright, but then they did something which made me reconsider meeting anyone that way ever again. The second person, thankfully, didn’t exhibit such anti-social tendencies, and we’ve been cool ever since. Meeting him let me meet other friends of mine, and my network kept growing, both online and in-person.

Nowadays, people have little qualms about making friends online and meeting them in person. To wit, the Teaching 2030 team still has strong ties, even though we rarely get to see each other collectively. Part of that came from having a common goal and vision, but another part of it is building the right conditions to assure that everyone can come together for this common goal.

Whether we meet virtually or face-to-face, knowing the personnel matters.

In the best ones I’ve seen, all the rules were understood and grew organically from the conversations that happened. These norms helped develop it (for the better), and people who didn’t conform learned how to … or left. In an understated way, teachers held each other accountable for a high sense of professionalism and courtesy. It’s never perfect, but once the group understands the relationships, they don’t necessarily need to say anything.

Yet, it’s also important to restate the norms once a group reaches a certain point. At first, I couldn’t understand that common sense / courtesy is not common, but, probably more appropriate, not everyone understands how a professional environment develops. Some of us still need to learn that voice, whereas others have it but don’t always get to share it in other arenas.

First and foremost, though, the relationship between that person and the others in the group needs to grow, needs trust, and respect. The most effective environments have people who know this, whether they meet face-to-face or not.