Jose-

One of the reasons I enjoy working with you on this blog is that you are always pushing my thinking in novel directions. Your last post left a taste in mouth I was having trouble enjoying. It seemed like an acquired taste. When you said,

The term “celebrity teacher” is such a difficult one too, because it presumes that the spotlight should focus strictly on the teacher and not on the ways in which that teacher helps students. The profession doesn’t lend itself to alpha dogs and sunbathers of the egoistic type. Yet, I have a hard time with the idea that, in a landscape with people so replete with opinions about our profession, that we shouldn’t have the same viability when we speak about it ourselves.

It seems like your question is, “Why can’t our voices be heard like that of a celebrity chef when it comes to what we do in our classrooms?” I started thinking about the celebrity chef idea and I realized that, even though, as Maureen Devlin pointed out in her comments, the dispositions of a successful teacher and a celebrity teacher might seem contrary the idea of the influence of celebrity does not. Then I started thinking about the effect that the celebrity chef phenom has had on our culture and I thought, maybe it is time for the root of the word to be heard. It is time to celebrate great teaching.

Here is a brief list of pros and cons that seem to have been the result of the Celebrity Chef phenomena.

Pros

Cons

People you might not think would be into food are excited about great cooking
If you are a celebrity chef cooking can become secondary

More people are interested in becoming chefs and enrolling in culinary schools
Everyone thinks they are a celebrity chef because they have an app for that.

Increased attention has led to increased innovation
Celebrity chefs begin to move outside of what they know, cooking

Local, sustainable, and organic foods have become more common
Sometimes celebrity chefs create recipes that are less healthy than pre-packaged foods

The pros seem to mostly describe the overall good affects of the celebrity chef phenom while the cons have more to do with the foibles and fallibility that losing focus can have on any profession. Most importantly though, the pros column has a lot of the same changes I want to see in education.

I want people to be interested in great teaching.

I want people to want to become a great teacher.

I want there to be more innovation in teaching.

And possibly most importantly, I want great teachers to be able to create the local, sustainable, and organically evolved education that students deserve.

From this analysis, it would seem some celebration of teaching would be a good thing, as long as the focus remains on the food and not the chef. Bon ape’teach.

Mario Batali

Hey John,

I have another confession to make: I’m a bit of a K-12 snob.

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Hey John,

Thank you for your latest post, and starting us on the conversation about The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for Student Leadership. One of the other major findings we see in this survey is the set of critical points made about teacher leaders:

1. Half (51%) of teachers are at least somewhat interested in teaching in the classroom part-time combined with other roles or responsibilities in their school or district, including 23% who are extremely or very interested in this option.
2. Most teachers (69%) say they are not at all interested in becoming a principal.
3. Teachers are most likely to say it is very important for a principal to have been a classroom teacher (79%) and give less importance to leading the development of strong teaching capacity across the school (69%) and using data about student performance to improve instruction (53%).

These three pieces can either lend themselves to an improved school culture where we innovate on teacher leadership … or perpetuate the idea that teacher leaders are just assistant principals with less pay.

Currently, the term “teacher leadership” varies from giving a few teachers a bunch of titles to a full-blown teacher-run schools, and everywhere in between. For instance, New York City recently implemented a pilot teacher leadership program where they would work in the classroom for around half the time and, for the other half, do leadership-type activities, all negotiated between central offices, principals, and the teacher leaders.

This sounds amazing, and familiar to the ideas we had a few years back.

Yet, in programs like these, I wonder if they’re trained as teacher leaders or as assistant principals, learning how to speak to teachers from on high instead of as a liaison between parties. I wonder if some principals actually let those leaders attend to their teaching load, however “light” the program seems.

I wonder if teachers who are deemed teacher leaders understand why so many of us put the word teacher in front of the word leader when talking about teacher leadership.

This falls on some of our colleagues too, who jump right into the teacher leadership role and misunderstand what comes with the title of “teacher leader.” The perception is that, yes, they will lead as teachers. No teacher should have to feel reserved or voiceless when it comes to their professional opinion, but fellow teachers do value expertise and approach when it comes to leadership, no matter who it comes from.

If school systems don’t do a better job of defining teacher leadership, then we should recognize that no one will want to take on teacher leadership, similar to what’s happened with leadership period.

*** Photo courtesy of Carolyn Dickson ***

Hey John,

Your post on responsive writing as a teacher leader reminds me of a quote from Nelson Mandela:

“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”

We need to listen to this every so often because it helps. The idea that we always need to lead from the front, charge forward without the people we lead in mind, or work individually doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes, leading from behind means you’re in on all the conversations, get a better feel for the people’s wants and needs, and probably makes us better teachers, too.

This might sound ironic considering my current presence on the Internet, but the truth is that we don’t truly exist independently, but interdependently, testing our voices out for pitch and tenor.

How do we adapt to the needs of our students, our peers, and our “superiors?” What makes our voices remarkable compared to our colleagues? How do we create our own language that pushes back against those who seek to move us away from talking about children? How do we motivate our children to get better at the things they do?

Lots of questions, and we can answer many of these in due time. In the interim, we have a charge here, John: to listen more than we speak, to push people to think harder about the decisions they’re making, and to speak to the experience of the classroom teacher. While we’re not a monolith by any means, you and I do have enough cache to represent a good chunk of the teaching population.

Sometimes, it means we don’t necessarily put ourselves in front when it behooves us, but instead, watching and waiting until the right moment. It lets us lead more effectively, so when the tough times come, we’ll be ready to walk with instead of walking against.

Hey John,

In the last week, I’ve given lots of thought about your responsibility versus accountability post, and wondered how vocal we are about the ins and outs of our profession.

Frankly, there’s a whole list of things I’ve rather not be held accountable for, including but not limited to student attendance, adult comportment around students, and an education system that cares much more about its bottom line than its students most in need. Yet, I feel responsible for all those things because a) I came in with the ideal that I would help move the needle towards progress and b) I still believe it.

The optimist in me wants to believe everyone involved understands this dichotomy; the realist in me knows too many people in positions of power who ignore this purposely.

That’s why, at every chance I get, I remind people that one of the ways we’re going to push the profession forward is to take responsibility for their own advocacy as well. I do believe in a collective voice, so naturally, I love having a union (or in my case, unions), and their work matters now more than ever for us having a say in how teacher evaluation and contracts are formed.

However, in other spaces, I’ve found that, in the midst of trying to advocate “for teachers” or speaking on behalf of us, people completely neglect us and / or play to a similar power structure that their detractors do. They might think they’re speaking as part of a collective, but not quite. While people don’t always intend for this to happen, it’s hard for me as an advocate to sit there and wonder why teachers still  get the fewest amount of seats (if at all) even in spaces that proffer us, physically or virtually.

Mike Klonsky said once that we might need to destroy the whole flippin’ table, and I tend to agree with him.

For, whenever only a couple of us feel responsible for the children we teach (and these tend to also get held accountable), those moments become part of our experience, moments no one can take away from us. We can speak collectively about our concerns, but we root it in the experiences we have as teachers on a daily basis.

Now that I mention it, I also don’t want to be held accountable for our honesty, but I’m well aware of my responsibility towards it.