Hey John,

I had a recent conversation with a few friends about teacher advocacy / activist work and wondered if anyone made any clear distinctions about this sort of thing. One of the highlights of our professional careers has been the Center for Teaching Quality’s involvement with the Teacher Leader Standards piece (full disclosure: they’ve featured our blog).

In the midst of all this, I got to thinking what it means to advocate for teachers as a teacher. The order of the title here matters: the title of “teacher” ought to take precedent over the “advocate.” For that matter, it also should come before “leader,” “trainer,” and “activist.” Anytime we as teachers take on an extracurricular task that has to do with what we do as teachers day-to-day, we must keep in mind the “teacher” title.

In other words, teachers emphasize teaching. The other stuff presumes we are teachers first.

For instance, many people would have a hard time with someone who advocates well, has a popular name, and speaks well to what teachers need to professionalize, but couldn’t teach their way out of a wet paper bag … or whatever the metaphor is. Yet, no one would frown upon someone whose kids actually felt like they learned something from the class and yet the teacher didn’t necessarily take on other tasks besides the ones assigned to him or her.

Teaching trumps all the other titles.

That’s certainly ironic considering I too advocate for everyone to work on their teacher voice. Indeed we must. Yet, in order for us to speak from a point of knowledge and expertise, we must gain these things and then enact it with the students we currently have. Our job is two-fold and simultaneous: to serve students’ needs and to work for better teaching conditions. They go hand in hand, but if we lose out on the first, we won’t make any headway personally or collectively.

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.

Hey John,

Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to give your friend a writing prompt.

Seriously, the first few days have been buzzing with excitement. I’m particularly impressed with my students’ ability to use the proofs we’ve developed for some laws of exponents and apply them to problems we haven’t yet discussed.

But, along with a new school year comes new initiatives. Every teacher goes through this. Arthur Goldstein writes in Schoolbook:

“Thank you all for coming. It’s great to see you all energized and ready for another school year. Personally, I just can’t wait to get started,” the person will say.

“We have this Thing. You must do this Thing. This is the only Thing that works. We will observe you and pay very close attention to whether or not you do it, because you can’t possibly teach unless you do it every single day without exception. But don’t worry, because it’s the best. After we tell you about it, you’ll break into groups, try it, and report back to us.”

Experienced teachers often disappoint presenters by failing to get sufficiently excited. They ask disrespectful questions, like what happened to last year’s Thing? They are invariably told it’s out. It’s not the Thing anymore.”

It might be the best description of the first week of faculty meetings for schools nationwide. The Common Core State Standards (and multiple intelligences, the workshop model, and the host of other initiatives I’ve seen) have brought along their own set of pseudo-experts coming in to tell teachers what to teach, how to teach, and, inevitably why.

The last one is particularly insulting because I’d wager most educators know why they’re in their profession, but one of the first rallying speeches always alludes to a talking point used by another expert out there. “We have failed our kids …” and “We keep doing kids a disservice for as long as we have …” doesn’t inspire, much to the dismay of people from the outside. If anything, it discourages because it assumes that those of us who, under the guidance of the former supervisors did these things, didn’t have the best intention when we tried to teach.

That’s another reason why I keep advocating (as Center for Teaching Quality does) for teacher-based solutions.

What I mean is simple (but not easy): having teachers actually research and test out best practices for the classroom, continuously reflecting and retooling their methods, and teaching accordingly. One of the best math teachers I ever worked with always used to say that, no matter how great a year went, she would toss out all the lesson plans because, if she’s using the same ones, she can easily fall into the trap of not thinking about the lessons she’s teaching.

While I’m sure most of that was hyperbole, the message remains the same. Effective teachers think and rethink their days, sometimes right on the spot. We plan and adjust, move with the winds, bob and weave. But if the reforms are teacher-based, they often feel more like a natural process than another forced-upon task to complete. That’s why, for instance, I’ve given some props to my district’s professional development with some of its schools around pedagogy and task creation: the pieces don’t come from on high, but from teachers’ own prompts, vetted by students.

Good administrators secretly believe this. On any level.

The new thing for the year will constantly come in, no matter what that thing is, but now it’s time to solidify, strengthen, and lay permanent the idea of teacher expertise. We can do it. And keep it for years on end.

Hey John,

A couple of weeks back, a few of us on Twitter had a conversation about the comparison between teachers and athletes (everyone does it, including me). The always poignant John Spencer (@johntspencer) echoes sentiments I’ve heard friends like Stephen Lazar make before: “I’d rather pay teachers a living age and ‘reward’ them with creative control and autonomy.” In baseball terms, that’s a fastball right down the middle, with the batter striking out looking. As a corollary, I would also add that I might be influenced to take on merit pay if I knew that every teacher got paid the way professional athletes do, and the way they’re represented in their unions, the media, and our society as a whole.

I have nothing against athletes getting their six to eight figure salaries because that’s their slice of the multi-million (often billion) dollar pie of their sport. So what does that say about the way our society pays teachers (and many other public servants) for the value they add to our civilization as a whole?

Barnett Berry made me think of this conversation after his piece on some economists’ flawed studies on education. He writes:

Would it be outrageous for economists to have to pay back part of their salaries if their theories don’t improve the economy? What if education economists had to return consulting fees to the think tanks that paid them if their methods were flawed? Or if their conclusions ignored other research findings and the realities of teaching?

If you think this would be a good idea, then Harvard professor and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Roland Fryer and Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago professor Steven Levitt (and colleagues John List and Sally Sadoff) might just have to cancel their vacations this fall. They would have to return the pay they received for their recent paper and recommendation that teachers must return salary bonuses (paid up front) when their students’ test scores do not improve sufficiently from one year to the next.

This dude abides.

Not sure why economists would suggest taking away monies from teachers here when we barely make a living wage, even with a masters’. To further complicate their argument, they use Chinese factory workers as a a model, implying that teachers here are the equivalent of factory workers there. Are teachers just assembly workers or real professionals? If people view us in the former, that would explain the erroneous policies levied on teachers now, but if we’re the latter, then we have a huge challenge ahead of us.

Let’s face it: even those of us in the middle of the line-up have to do extra hours of outside of classroom time getting ready for the school year. The harder we work at our craft, the better we become as teachers, and the easier we make it look. Good teaching isn’t easy, though. It’s hours upon hours of arduous, focused practice for a few hours of showtime. Even in the off-season, we have to stay abreast of the latest happenings before we lose ground in our performance. Study after study shows that merit-based systems based on what economists think (even the Broad- and Gates-funded studies) don’t work. I try hard enough as is, as I’m sure those teachers did.

But I don’t expect to get paid the way our athletes do right now; I just hope we can get paid enough so we can keep doing our jobs properly, as the experts we are.

Hey John,

I’ve been around the world and I, I, I, I … OK, maybe just to Washington State and Florida, but it feels like I’ve spent more time at the airport than at my own house. The tons of hours I’ve spent learning about the future of education policy (especially as it relates to the Common Core) only emphasize the points we’ve been making for years about the need for teacher input.

Recently, I wrote a few tips for teachers at Education Week about improving their teacher voice, mostly met with promotion of their own efforts (OK), but various degrees of trepidation (fair). I’d like to address the second because it matters so much to the progress of this discussion. The truth for so many of our teachers in all sectors of education is that, no matter what their years of experience say about their status in their communities, very few teachers feel protected in their jobs. They’re reluctant to use their teacher voice because they either feel alone in their efforts or they simply fear retribution. I have to respect that; as a new father, getting a reasonable income matters in these odd times.

However, I can’t help but feel some sort of way about the risk / reward dynamic that’s played itself out when it comes to advocacy. As professionals, how long can teachers wait until our profession gets completely stripped away from us? How much will we tolerate policy committees and education panels without so much as a former teacher, much less a current one? How often do we value the opinions of self-proclaimed experts and leaders and don’t look towards ourselves as such?

How many houses have we been asked to build that didn’t ask for our input on the design, no matter what the perils?

I envision the future of the teaching profession as one centered on the expertise of teachers, especially around student needs. As the old cliche goes, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” Teachers who feel isolated will have to find spaces where they feel their voices mean something, usually in their unions, or professional organizations (hint: Center for Teaching Quality). They’ll have to sign up for Twitter, Google+, or EdModo. They may even have to create their own blog, even under the guise of a pseudonym, until someone pays attention. Their voices might creek, clank, and crash at first, but eventually, they become attuned to the needs and wants of their colleagues.

Just like ours did, right? Right.