Tag Archives: causing learning

Teach Up to Cause Children to Meet Higher Expectations

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One of the most common phrases in school mission statements is “we have high expectations.” These words are used to describe school goals for academic learning, athletic and artistic performances, student behaviors, and rankings in state report cards. School boards and school leaders use the phrases “we have high expectations” and “we expect great things” as if just saying the words makes it so. They do not. What usually is not explained is what the school or teachers, coaches, and directors will do to move student achievements from “usual expectations” to “higher expectations.” The action necessary is teaching up, coaching up, directing up, and reinforcing up so that “ups” are achieved. The conversation about the actions needed to move achievement upward and the commitment to those actions is what bridges the distance between having high expectations and achieving high expectations.

Teaching up is a choice.

Carol Ann Tomlinson writes, “Teachers who make the choice to teach up believe, or are at least willing to believe, that all students are capable of much more than they currently show the world. Teachers who make the choice to teach up know that brains are malleable and thrive in rich environments. They also know, perhaps from research, perhaps from their own experiences are learners or as classroom observers, that students who have teachers that set high expectations are more likely to flourish than students who set lower expectations.”

https://ascd.org/el/articles/making-the-choice-to-teach-up

Tomlinson nails it. Teaching up to elevate student achievement is a choice when meeting minimal or usual expectations is a universal expectation or goal. The words “minimal expectations” are not used casually. Too many children and schools struggle to make minimal academic, athletic, and artistic progress. There are a multitude of environmental reasons, including poverty at home and in school financing, lack of home and familial support, lack of food security, challenges in a child’s socio-emotional and mental health, and post-pandemic student apathy that make achieving minimal achievement goals an uphill struggle. Just making minimal achievement goals can take tremendous teaching efforts.

The choice to teach up is to buck the norms in statewide assessments that say “minimal” is good enough or local expectations to be just a little better than a neighboring school and cause children to overachieve.

How much “up” and what does “up” look like?

Once a decision to teach, coach, and/or direct up is made, the real work is identifying how much upward improvement will be the target of higher expectations and the meaningful instructional, coaching, and directing actions needed to elevate student achievements to those expectations. Increasing the desired levels of achievement too much can overwhelm children, but increasing levels too little may seem meaningless. The level “up” should have transferable benefits, like climbing to the next plateau provides a base for climbing to a yet higher plateau on the way to a pinnacle. Increasing knowledge, skills, and dispositions is the scaffolding for future increases in achievement.

Generically, regular teaching is characterized by a teacher making more challenging yet supported assignments for children ready for the challenge. Students are assigned to read texts and materials that are above their current reading level preceded by the teacher pointing out new and significant vocabulary, providing necessary background information and context, and chunking the reading into smaller readings.

Generically, regular teaching is assigning more multiple step math problems, performing more complex music preceded by technical voice and fingering instruction, or diminishing the tolerances in milling a piece of metal preceded by technical instruction in settings, timing, and rate of milling.

Generically, regular coaching and directing is scheduling more successful teams to play and pieces to perform and expecting athletic and performance skills to rise to the level of new competition and expectation.

These kinds of “up” are usual in most teacher’s instruction of children in all subjects and grades, and in athletics and the arts. They are incremental and baked into school curricula.

To be significant, teaching “up” is condensing or leapfrogging usual increments and expectations with the belief that, as Tomlinson wrote, “… children’s brains are malleable and thrive in rich environments…”

“Up” looks like a demonstrably higher sophistication in the quality of student outcomes. To accomplish much higher outcomes requires explicit instruction, coaching, and directing of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for significantly higher achievement. Usual or regular teaching will not result in unusual or irregular achievements; it takes stronger instructional knowledge and skill.

Teaching “up” requires “upped” teaching.

Teaching, coaching, and directing “up” requires the teacher, coach and director to study, learn, and master skill sets that cause children to learn and master higher order knowledge, skills, and dispositions. These are not in initial educator preparation programs. We must learn to teach up before children can up their learning. For example, there are specific skill sets required to

  • improve children’s close reading and technical writing abilities to elevate and expand their levels of comprehension, understanding, and analysis/evaluation so that they can create more precise or expressive writings, or
  • improve players’ ability to hit a baseball and putting it in play with more frequency and power, or
  • increase children’s ability to understand the uses of perspective and interest in real life drawing, painting, and photographic creations.

Teachers must commit themselves to mastering improvements and changes in how they teach if they want children to master new learning and achieve higher order outcomes.

Teaching for higher order close reading.

Close reading is more than holding the book closer. It is a set of reading practices that require commitment. Most children give a text assignment a single read. They may take notes or create a brief outline. Better students create flash cards to self-quiz their accuracy and memory retention.

Upping reading has children do the following:

  • Read the text multiple times. First to gain a basic understanding and key ideas included in the text. Second, focus on structure, language, and the author’s writing style. They focus on text-specific questions not just questions assigned to any and every text. And in a third reading, children read and reflect on both the text and relate it to their knowledge and understanding of other texts. Children consistently write notes, annotate, and reflect on key literary and text analysis questions.
  • To focus on reading comprehension, the teacher chunks the text and engages children with reading aloud and thinking aloud. Thinking aloud is reacting and responding immediately to what has been read. Doing things aloud takes time and consideration and these two elements push the reading and thinking upward.
  • Teachers teach children a Socratic discussion model and children use this model to up their comprehension, interpretations, and insights. Children are expected/required to engage in discussions. As children listen to other children, they reflect on, consider, and edit and amend their own thoughts and conclusions. Socratic processing benefits the speaker and the listener.
  • Parallel to multi-step reading and Socratic discussion, children use graphic organizing techniques the teacher has taught them to break down the text into logical parts that aid in their memory and recall. They use and then file these organizers for future references.
  • Children act out a part of the literary text, rewrite a part to create a different outcome, or creatively illustrate the setting of part(s) of the text. For non-literary text, children create chronologies of actions leading up to and after the information in the text or create parallels of what else is happening simultaneously with the text.

These, or all of these, are not usual in classroom instruction focused on knowledge and understanding of the general curriculum. In the aggregate, these teaching/learning episodes move a child’s cognitive, social-emotional, and performance-based achievements to higher order levels. They are demonstrable for the teacher’s peers, administrators and the child’s parents to observe and acknowledge.

Coaching up for improved hitting technique.

I played on several state championship baseball teams in my high school years and never was instructed in hitting. To improve hitting, we took more batting practice and rotated in pitchers with different deliveries and throwing velocities. The only critique when we struck out was “you need more practice.”

Coaching up for hitting involves the following:

  • Having the hitter not just assume a batting stance but analyze the set up and stance. Is the stance balanced on the width of the feet with flexed knees, bend or no bend at the waist, and good weight distribution. The hitter needs to talk aloud with the coach about the stance set up in order to understand how a stance and set up work. The hitter needs to do this in the batters box and in front of a mirror or camera. Too many hitters think they are balanced and flexed when they are not. The coach needs to press hands on the batter to check for balance, flex, and weight distribution.
  • In the stance and set up, are the hands in natural position near the back shoulder, does the head position allow for a clear vision of the pitcher and ball in flight, and are the toes, knees, hips, and shoulders aligned. Hitters don’t do this solo, but under the supervision and critique of the coach. Many hitters think their stance and set up are solid when they are not.
  • Swinging the bat is not just swinging the bat. In preparing to swing, the hitter’s weight should be slightly loaded on the back foot while maintaining a balanced posture. The stride forward initiates the swing and rotation of the shoulders. A hitter’s stride is highly individualized, but if it is too long or too short it disrupts the plane, power, and release of the swing. During the stride, the hitter starts with a hip then shoulder rotation to create torque and power. There is a natural release and forward press of the upper body. Coaches can detect better than hitters when the release and press are not natural.
  • Swinging on a plane is essential to striking a thrown pitch. On plane gets the bat into the hitting zone leading with the hands (bat pointing slightly behind the hands). Hitters need to be consistent with their plane – is it down with bat control for hitting hard ground balls, is it parallel to the plate for hitting line drives with power or is it upward for long fly balls. Gifted hitters can change swing planes depending on game situations. Most hitters need consistency and coach supervision, critiquing, and correction to create and consistently be on lane.
  • Getting the bat to the ball is just the start. Hitters need to extend their arms through contact with the ball to drive the ball. Pitch speed, bat speed, and extended driving through the ball create power. Extension plus rotation to a high finish with the bat behind the lead shoulder almost to the hitter’s back makes a complete swing.
  • Hitting coaches study the art and science of swinging a bat and hitting a ball. They know that each hitter has a different physique and baseball personality. Hence, coaching hitters is a highly individualized and personalized endeavor. Coaches use soft toss and front toss drills, live batting practice, video analysis, and consistent work on identifying a pitch as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Hitters have fractions of a second to make the decision to swing or not swing at a pitch and if they swing their mechanics need to be designed and practiced for hitting success.

The fact is that most coaches coach a team to play baseball or softball. They have a basic understanding of throwing, catching, hitting, running the bases and sliding, and fielding ground balls and pop flies. They do not have the skill sets to up player performance with explicit instruction in any of the game’s skills. It is the difference between a coach saying, “just do this” and another coach saying “this is the physiology and physics of doing this.” Upping requires knowing what up is.

The Big Duh!

Tomlinson told us that “…all students are capable of much more than they currently show the world.” It is a teacher who causes them either to achieve only the minimum expectations that our world holds for our students, athletes, and artists or to show their much higher levels of achievement and performance. It is both a teacher’s decision to teach up and a teacher’s ability to teach up that moves child achievements upward.

Rigor and Productive Struggle – “Kind of Hard” Causes Leaning

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Teaching for learning often resembles the Goldilocks story. If things are not just right, Goldilocks is not happy. Her sampling of chairs, porridge, and beds showed some chairs and beds to be too soft or too hard and some bowls of porridge to be too cold or too hot. By experimenting, she found her “just right” spot.

When children find lessons that are too easy to too hard, and I add, not interesting or of no perceived value to them, they also are not happy. They express their unhappiness by wandering off into boredom, distractive behaviors, and absenteeism. The “just right” lesson can catch each child’s attention and positively challenge their emerging skills sets. Such is a teacher’s constant dilemma – designing lessons with enough rigor and interest, not too little nor too much, to cause learning.

The sweet spot.

In “Productive Struggle Is a Learner’s Sweet Spot” (ASCD, Vol 14, No. 11), Barbara Blackburn describes the tension in instructional design teachers face in creating lessons that are “just right” on the scales of interest and rigor. “Student success occurs when you create an instructional environment that sets high expectations for each student and provides scaffolding without offering excessive help. The key is to incorporate productive struggle.

Productive struggle is what I call the “sweet spot” in between scaffolding and support. Rather than immediately helping students at the first sign of trouble, we should allow them to work through struggles independently before we offer assistance. That may sound counterintuitive, since many of us assume that helping students learn means protecting them from negative feelings of frustration. But for students to become independent learners, they must learn to persist in the face of challenge.”

https://ascd.org/el/articles/productive-struggle-is-a-learners-sweet-spot

Blackburn speaks of two essential elements for teaching in the sweet spot. One is using the tension between the Goldilocks’ just right and too hard to provoke children to learn. Instruction that is too easy will not cause learning. It is the tension between what a student knows and can do now and what they need to know and do next that is the cutting edge for their learning. Teachers use the tension to motivate, instruct, and reinforce new learning.

Blackburn’s second element is scaffolding new learning so that all children incrementally secure their learning and developmentally grow their knowledge and skills through productive struggle. Blackburn does not allow Goldilocks to settle back into comfort but keeps pushing Goldilocks to learn to know and do what initially is too hard for her. For Goldilocks-like students, what is just right today will become too soft in the future

Blackburn locates that sweet spot by finding the critical attributes of the new or next learning in her curriculum. Madeline Hunter taught us to assess critical attributes by sorting the ideas, concepts, and generalizations of knowledge and the rigor of skill sets to identify what children need to learn “right now.” This creates the sequence and the rate and degree of what will be taught to cause learning. The scaffold ensures that children are prepared and ready to climb from one step of the learning sequence to the next. Children learn the facts and skills in the order required to create concepts and generalizations needed for new progressions of their curricular learning.

When an appropriately considered scaffold is absent, children easily drift into boredom and disinterest. “Over time, students who are continually and insufficiently challenged tend to become disengaged and complacent, exerting lower effort and gaining only superficial learning. As a result, some fail to develop resilience and perseverance with difficult tasks.”

https://ascd.org/el/articles/thriving-in-the-zone-of-productive-struggle

Lev Vygotsky added to our understanding of how children learn with “the Zone of Proximal Learning. “According to Vygotsky’s theory, the ZPD describes the area between a child’s current and future ability. The ZPD is a hypothesized construct that describes the range of children’s abilities from what they are capable of doing to what they are unable to do on their own. When teaching, teachers should encourage child learning by using activities and supporting strategies that enable a child to accomplish a task with the assistance of another peer or teacher. It is important while scaffolding that teachers ask questions and give tasks that target a child’s current developmental level. As children begin to master skills on their own, teachers adjust their teaching strategies accordingly so that children continue to advance.”

Vygotsky

Just right is “kind of hard.”

There is an intersection where applications of productive struggle and proximal learning can be used to enhance student learning by finding the “just right” spot.

Does it make sense to make learning slightly harder?

Annie Murphy Paul wrote, “Yes, and the reason is twofold. The first reason to make learning harder is to make it interesting. Learning something new and complicated is hard in itself, as we saw above. Lightening the learner’s cognitive load will allow her to learn more effectively without becoming frustrated or confused.

But once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her “sweet spot” of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring. This is also the place where learners can practice encountering adversity and challenge and overcoming them, a key experience in the development of grit.

The second reason to make learning harder is that it makes learning work better. UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork has developed the idea of “desirable difficulties” — difficulties that we actually want to introduce into students’ learning to make it more effective. Bjork notes that many of the learning activities that make students feel competent and successful — like reading over a textbook passage several times so that it feels familiar — actually they do very little to help them learn. What they should do instead is something like this: close that textbook and ask themselves to recall from memory what they’ve just read.

It won’t feel as good. They’ll struggle to remember the words that were just in front of their eyes. But this activity, known as retrieval practice (or simply self-testing) is an example of a desirable difficulty that will dramatically increase students’ learning.”

https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/making-learning-easier-harder-for-kids

Paul suggests that cognitive load is a factor in what makes learning new content and skills easy or hard. “Cognitive load refers to the amount of information our working memory can process at any given time. For educational purposes, cognitive load theory helps us to avoid overloading learners with more than they can effectively process into schemas for long-term memory storage and future recall.”

https://www.mcw.edu/-/media/MCW/Education/Academic-Affairs/OEI/Faculty-Quick-Guides/Cognitive-Load-Theory.pdf

How much is “just right?”

As we design lessons for cognitive load, we consider the number of pieces or chunks of new information the brain can process at once. “In a famous paper humorously describing “the magical number seven plus or minus two, “Miller claimed to be persecuted by an integer. He demonstrated that one can repeat back a list of no more than about seven randomly ordered, meaningful items or chunks (which could be letters, digits, or words). Other research has yielded different results, though. Young adults can recall only 3 or 4 longer verbal chunks, such as idioms or short sentences (Gilchrist, Cowan, & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008). Some have shrugged their shoulders, concluding that the limit “just depends” on details of the memory task. Recent research, however, indicates when and how the limit is predictable.

The recall limit is important because it measures what is termed working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960), the few temporarily active thoughts. Working memory is used in mental tasks, such as language comprehension (for example, retaining ideas from early in a sentence to be combined with ideas later on), problem solving (in arithmetic, carrying a digit from the ones to the tens column while remembering the numbers), and planning (determining the best order in which to visit the bank, library, and grocery). Many studies indicate that working memory capacity varies among people, predicts individual differences in intellectual ability, and changes across the life span (Cowan, 2005).

It has been difficult to determine the capacity limit of working memory because multiple mechanisms retain information. Considerable research suggests, for example, that one can retain about 2 seconds’ worth of speech through silent rehearsal (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). Working memory cannot be limited this way alone, though; in running span procedures, only the last 3 to 5 digits can be recalled (less than 2 seconds’ worth). In these procedures, the participant does not know when a list will end and, when it does, must recall several items from the end of the list (Cowan, 2001).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2864034

Once “just right” is taught, teach children how to remember/study.

One may think that Goldilocks was just goofing around in the three bears home. But she wasn’t. She tasted porridge to find something to eat and she tested chairs and beds for something to sit and sleep on. So, it is with lesson design. Learning must be focused on the right outcomes.

Paul also referred to Bjork’s “desirable outcomes” or expectancy theory. In his example of a study habit – re-reading – he shows that when a child re-reads material several times, the expected outcome is familiarity not memorization what was read. To memorize, a child must set the expectation of recall not familiarity. Hence, instead of re-reading, close the book and try to recall what was read. If not successful, read again, close the book, and try to recall. This is practicing the expectation that the child really wants – to remember what was read not just be familiar with it.

As we teach children new information and skills, we want them to internalize what they learn not just parrot it back to us. Early on in their school careers, children must be taught how to create memory and not just expect memorization to happen. The ability to memorize is just as important as content and skills. To do this, teach a small chunk of new information, then ask children to repeat it back to you. Have children read a paragraph, set the reading aside, and tell you what they read. Extend their listening and reading to larger chunks of information. And correct them when their repeating or telling is not correct. Practice this in class and tell them they need to do this when they study at home. We teachers assume children know this intuitively and they do not.

The Big Duh!

The design of good instructional lessons is not easy. Assess what children know now and what they need to know next. Assemble new information and skills that are at the hard edge of what would be relatively easy for them to learn. Set the motivational hooks of novelty, interest, and challenging material for children before they engage in new learning so they will choose to engage in learning. Don’t provide help too soon – productive struggle builds resiliency. Teach them to study and create short- then long-term memory of what they learned.

Then, do it again for their next lessons.

Good Classroom Management is Not Easy; It is a Learned and Practiced Skill and Art

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Teacher preparation in the United States is in crisis mode. There are not enough new teachers each year to replace teachers who leave the classroom. The cold fact is that four in every ten young teachers leave classroom teaching for other employment in their first five years of teaching. “Multiple reasons rise to the top of the list. Student behavior is a leading complaint Long hears from teachers who contemplate or leave teaching, and one he believes is among the hardest to address. ‘I don’t think anyone has the answer,’ said Long, referring to accounts of extreme student behavior targeting teachers that has resulted in physical or emotional harm.” Zachary Long quit teaching and with his wife co-founded Life After Teaching. He helps teachers who want to quit teaching to quit.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/behind-the-stats-3-former-teachers-talk-about-why-they-left/2023/04

Student behavior runs teachers out of teaching. It is a fact, but it need not be a continuing fact. When we know teachers quit teaching because of unsuccessful classroom management, we need to aggressively improve how we prepare teachers.

When your boat is taking on water, you can abandon the ship, or you can fix the hole in the hull. We tolerate and accommodate the abandonment of classrooms even though we know a huge “hole” in teacher preparation is classroom management.

A review of teacher preparation curriculum in local colleges of education tells the story. Our local university, for example, provides teacher candidates with 72 credits of college course work toward a major in K-9 education. But there is only one three-credit course that teaches classroom management, and it combines learning theories with student behavior. When we know that an inability to manage children in a classroom setting is one of the leading causes of teacher attrition, is this adequate?

EDUC 340. Supporting Learning and Behavior in the Classroom. 3 Credits.

Course provides pre-service teachers with an understanding of how students learn in educational contexts. Learning theories reviewed, & learning strategies to enhance learning and prevent/manage behaviors are introduced and applied in direct interaction with a learner. Course may be repeated 2 times for a total of 6 credits.
Fall and Spring.

No Longer Is It a Hit Them Hard and Often Response

How to organize and manage groups of students is an age-old problem. The first Normal Schools (state teacher prep schools) endorsed corporal punishment for misbehaving students. Students went to the proverbial woodshed where their teacher administered discipline with a paddle. Teachers taught children to behave by fearing physical punishment. Although some schools began banning corporal punishment as early as 1914 it continued as a disciplinary practice in many states in the late 1990s.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/corporal-punishment-schools-still-legal-many-states#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Department%20of%20Education,dropped%20over%20the%20past%20decade.

When a wooden paddle was considered too harsh, teachers used a gym shoe. I saw the well-known design of a Converse gym shoe on the backsides of my male classmates in the 60s.

On the first day of my first teaching assignment my principal gave me a well-worn wooden paddle and told me to use it. When I asked what a teacher should do if a child’s behavior did not improve, he implied I should hit them harder and more often. I put my paddle in a closet.

Student Discipline as Pedagogy

As often as we talked about paddling back in the day, we clearly understood most of our teachers would never raise a hand to a student. They created patterns of good student behavior through good teaching. It was not a matter of experience, however. We knew veteran teachers whose classrooms were unruly and undisciplined and novice teachers whose students focused on learning not misbehaving. Even before I began my teacher preparation, it was clear that good teaching and good student discipline are linked.

Our task in teacher preparation today is to create highly qualified teachers of both curriculum and student discipline. A teacher who will stay in the profession needs to learn both.

Toolbox Preparation for every Teacher

Classroom management is as important as teaching methods. If a teacher cannot focus children’s attention on the curriculum, how can a teacher teach the curriculum? It is a what to do first dilemma – teach teachers how to teach or teach teachers how to manage children as learners. Both are equally important, and each needs equally strong emphasis.

Field experience tells us that fitting a student management philosophy to a teacher is like fitting shoes. One will feel better, wear better, and be more satisfying than all others. Therefore, teacher prep programs must teach teachers a variety of philosophies and strategies so that a teacher can find a personal plan that refines student behavior and enhances student learning.

The CESA 7 (WI) Teacher Development Center treats Instructional Methods and Classroom Management as toolbox courses that every teacher candidate, regardless of the license sought, must master. In Classroom Management, candidates study several behavioral management philosophies and strategies that allow the candidate to develop a personal and philosophical “fit” to their classroom management plans.

Candidates study and are assessed for their knowledge and understanding of five philosophies and strategies. They know the basis and background of each, their authors, and field studies of their applications. Candidates must know the following:

  • Choice/Logical Consequences
  • Discipline with Dignity
  • Assertive Discipline
  • Social Justice
  • PBIS

As an “apprentice” teacher development program, teacher candidates are employed by a school district and enrolled in the TDC. From day one they are classroom teachers under the supervision of school principals, mentors, and CESA 7 supervisors. CESA 7 enrolls candidates from districts throughout Wisconsin; districts that know CESA 7’s reputation for quality instruction and personal support given to of its apprentice teachers. The TDC licensing program requires four semesters of teacher prep coursework, daily teaching, and synthesis of TDC instruction into classroom applications.

Classroom Management and Instructional Methods are the first courses candidates must complete in their licensing program. The CESA 7 candidate supervisor emphasizes and guides apprentices to engage their students in the teacher’s learned classroom management design. This “guided” implementation sets up the relationship between learning and behavior and expectations for both the teacher’s and all students’ commitment to both.

Support of Novice Teachers is Critical

A second most common reason for teachers to leave teaching is their perceived lack of professional support. It starts with a principal and administrative structure that is hard pressed to meet daily crisis demands and leaves new teacher support as a low priority.

The Learning Policy Institute says, “New teachers who do not receive mentoring and other supports leave at more than two times the rate of those who do.”

https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Teacher_Exodus_Infographic.pdf

The CESA 7 TDC answers this dilemma with constant support from its classroom-visiting supervisors, a 24-7 online project specialist, and a curriculum and instruction consultant. TDC experience shows that its staff often understands and responds to candidate classroom problems before the school principal is aware of a problem.

Unlike IHEs that supervise student teachers during a clinical semester only, the TDC conducts supervisory observations and counseling throughout the candidate’s enrollment. Through this process, principals and TDC supervisors see, critique, and guide the development of each candidate’s classroom management practices. TDC teachers do not guess at student behavioral management. Candidates apply the methods they studied, use informed supervision, and refine strategies that work. And, they have ongoing professional feedback on the effectiveness of their classroom management.

The Big Duh!

We know that good teaching and good classroom management go together. We know that positive professional and administrative support is essential for novice teachers. We know that too many teachers leave their chosen profession too early because of problems with student discipline and a perceived lack of professional support. We know that novice teachers who learn and implement good teaching and good student discipline programs are more likely to continue their careers as classroom teachers.

When we know these things as true, teacher preparation programs must fix the hole in our teacher development programs that lead to teacher resignations. We can fix these problems and children can have the prepared teachers they deserve.

Disaggregated, There Is a Vast Difference in Teachers

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Teachers are a vast hodgepodge of people.  They come in all colors, shapes and sizes, and from the wide spectrum of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.  At one point, each decided to be a teacher.  Some early in life, the majority during their education, and others after experiencing other vocations.  Each is the product of an educator preparation program.  Each has earned a baccalaureate or more degrees and each carry one or more teaching licenses.  As practitioners today, they range from first year teachers to four decade-long veterans.  Teachers also range across the spectrum of effectiveness.  That describes the hodgepodge of our profession.

Question?

If a teacher teaches a lesson and no one learns, did the teacher really teach?  Though a play on Cartesian logic, it is a question that is asked everyday about teachers.  We teach to cause children to learn. 

Every day there are millions of lessons taught in our schools.  A lesson is a complicated dance requiring teaching skills, teacher empathy, child readiness to learn, and child engagement with the teaching.  Teachers know the dance steps but too often their teaching does not lead to learning.  Some point to the other person(s) in the room – children.  “Only if the children …” is their lament.  Others point to the current morass of distractions confronting teaching and learning.  Technology, social media, unstable home life, poverty, harassment from their peers – take your pick, they each bear guilt.  On the Cartesian other hand, if a teacher teaches a lesson and every child learns, the teacher really did teach.

Not all teachers are created equal.

The following may be generalizations about teachers, but when you close your office or classroom door and consider your faculty peers, their names and faces fall into these.

We know teachers who have learned instruction as a form of mechanical teaching.  They can construct lessons.  They also know their curriculum.  They can attach content knowledge and skill development to their instruction.  They teach and some children learn some things sometimes.  If these teachers were inspired and excited about learning and if they were “connected” to the children they taught, the results would be different.  But they are not

We know teachers who innately care about children and in return children respond to them.  Their classrooms are happy and exciting places.  They teach and children engage because the teacher cares about them, their school life and their home life.  Children hear and see and do and learn something sometimes. However, being happy and excited overpowers their constructive instruction.  Class time is full of talk and activity and excitement, but their instruction is not focused and scaffolded to build learning outcomes.  These teachers are liked by children, but these students will need reteaching next year of what they did not learn this year.

We know teachers who can deliver high quality instruction and innately care about children.  They connect their caring of the child as a unique person to their instruction of the child as a student.  Because the teacher cares about children, children care about their learning what the teacher teaches.  These classrooms combine a caring and inspired teacher with honed and effective teaching skills with children who are wanting and ready to learn.  Children learn.

The crux.

We can teach teachers pedagogy.  We can teach teachers the content and skills of their curricular disciplines.  We can purchase and provide all the curricular print and media, install and train teachers in the appropriate technologies, employ simulations and games in a rich educational environment.  But we cannot teach teachers innate caring.  The amorphous “teacher’s heart” is a variable we cannot grow.

On the positive side, we can train teachers to be responders to child needs.  As trained teachers, they do wonders in assuring that children have the support and programs they need in school.  Training is what moves children from hunger to being fed, unclothed to being clothed.  Training helps them respond to students who are victims of bullying and harassment and low socio-emotional self-esteem.  As trained teachers, they can implement their training, but training is not caring.  There is a difference between caring that is from the heart and caring that is a trained response to need.

Our reality.

There is not a shortage of people who completed teacher preparation programs and are licensed to teach.  There is a shortage of licensed teachers who want to be in classrooms.  We need to acknowledge the latter.

As another generalization, the low arc of teacher compensation over the first decade of employment and the low esteem the public has for public school teachers means that undergraduates in the top half of their graduating class do not choose education as a degree program.  Engineering, medicine, law, and business draw the top half of each graduating class. 

The same reasons have diminished the annual numbers of graduates with a teaching license.  In yesteryear, a district posting a teaching vacancy could expect dozens to a hundred applications.  Today districts are lucky to receive five applications, and some postings result in zero applicants.

The shortage issue has caused state government to open apprenticeship pathways to a teaching license.  People without teaching licenses are hired by school districts on the condition that this person enrolls in a teacher preparation program.  Concurrently, these unlicensed teachers teach and learn how to teach.  Understand clearly that school boards are happy to have a teacher of any dimension in the classroom even as they acknowledge apprentice teachers are not yet trained teachers. 

This introduces a new category to our generalizations about teachers.

  • The inspired, caring, highly effective teacher who causes successful student learning and growth.
  • The caring teacher who engages children socially and emotionally and causes some children to learn some things sometimes.
  • The technically-efficiently but emotionally vague teacher who constructs lessons and causes some children to learn something sometimes.
  • The apprentice teacher who is learning how to teach on the job.

The Big Duh!

We need to know our teachers and their widely differentiated qualities and understand what we settle for when we place every teacher in a classroom.  Children know the difference, so should we.

Gifted Teachers Cause Indelible Effects

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Every adult who attended public school knows the truth of this statement:  there are teachers and there are gifted teachers.  We are taught by the former, but we are inspired and grow at the feet of the latter.  Gifted teachers are extraordinary human beings.  It is the nature of their extraordinary being that makes them gifted teachers.

What do we know?

A school faculty is much like a professional baseball team.  While all pro ballplayers met a high standard of screening to make the team, there still are significant differences between players who hit .250 year after year, the league average, and those who hit .300, a threshold for Hall of Fame candidates.  An MLB roster has 28 players.  A successful team lists an all-star or three, several players with all-star like statistics, and twenty or so who are steady and dependable players.  The combination of steady and dependable players and a few all-stars content for league pennants.

Most teachers in a school faculty are .250 players.  Day in and day out they are present and prepared to teach their assigned curriculum to children in their classrooms.  Day in and day out they don’t make significant teaching errors.  In the same days, they also don’t teach many supernal lessons that light up student learners or cause children to have “Aha” moments.

Some may read this a putdown of many teachers, but it is not.  The strength of public education is the steady and solid work of regular classroom teachers.  They are how we know and understand reading and writing, history and geography, math, art, music, PE, and speak at little Spanish.

Most teachers on a school faculty may be good at several skills sets for quality teaching; a gifted teacher elevates the performance of skills sets because of innate qualities of insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, and friendship.  These qualities certainly lie within regular teachers, but they remain fallow compared to the same qualities that burn brightly in a gifted teacher.

Game changers.

Children know.  They know their teachers who light them up on a frequent or daily basis versus their teachers who turn on the classroom lights and say, “Take out your books”.   A teacher who lights up children is a pathfinder to deeper learning.  Their insights into curriculum and pedagogy are 3D.  They know the sequence of facts and ideas and skills children need to learn to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, but they don’t stop at Remembering and Understanding.  They push harder with “Tell me more, explain that in your own words, how is it similar to and different than”.  Their students are used to the “so what and now what can you do with this” questions.

I marvel at the fact that gifted teachers, real game changers, don’t know who they are.  They just are.  They are unconscious of the ways they teach and relate to children. 

I am told that mathematics is the creation and use of elegant solutions to explain our world.  Simplicity and insightful are words that few strugglers with trigonometry, like me, understand.  Yet, I watch gifted math teachers help children to patiently unravel a math problem into understandable questions in their native language.  Gifted math teachers teach students to see the math question within the forest of words and digits on the page.  Insight is understanding what one is being asked to learn and the ability to state it in simple terms.  These teachers see problems, not just mathematical problems, differently and they teach children to see and think differently.  It is a gift.

My favorite band teacher is just a boy in man’s clothing playing his horn.  When he wears a tuxedo and waves his baton, his bands make wonderful music.  He is best, however, when he sits beside a child and together, they model and practice, model and practice, model and practice.  He slowly builds musical skills and the ability to read and interpret musical scores until children fit into an ensemble of players and then he gives them more difficult pieces to play.  He personalizes and perseveres and never quits on the individuals who are his band.  He grows musicians through patient and skillful instruction.  It is a gift.

“So what?” and “what do you mean by that” are the kinds of questions that cause many children to hunker down behind the child sitting in front of them hoping not to be called on.  Lots of hands go up when a teacher asks questions about facts; not so many when the questions require deeper inquiry.  A love of intellectual inquiry tolerates children who are reluctant to share and whose sharing contains inaccuracies.  Gifted inquirers know that these can be teased out and corrected.  It is the chase for understanding and reasoning they pursue.  Gifted teachers also know that children can learn in the periphery and listening to how one child sews together a reasoned response helps others with their own.  A gifted inquirer will smile and applaud louder for the unexpected yet slowly developed thinking of a reluctant sharer more than for the quick and always on point response of another child.  Chasing a well-reasoned and thoughtful response is a gift.

Some children come to school to learn to read, others to play an instrument, and others for the joys of recess and athletics.  Every child should have their own “go to” place in school.  I smile now thinking of an art teacher whose empathy for children caused him to seek out all children who had not found their school place.  He caused them to be artists and then to be proud of their artistry.  I remember him in his layers of baggy clothing and Birkenstocks helping a student with charcoal find depth through shading and a student at a potter’s wheel find the feel for drawing a vase out of a lump of clay.  It is easier to teach children who have a sense of who they are; it is more difficult to teach children who are lost in themselves.  His gift was in turning on the lights within wandering children.

Every child is different with a combination of admirable qualities and some things that cause us to shake our heads.  I watched a gifted science teacher who never shook his head because he focused on admirable qualities.  His teacher’s affect was as inviting as new snow and his expectations for student learning were as elevated as snow capped mountains.  It did not take students long into a new school year to know that his reputation was real.  He accepted who they were, found their strengths, and every day helped each child to build their understanding of Biology and AP Biology and computer science.  He was never in a hurry but, with his patience, caused all students to engage and learn.  Like Mr. Rogers of TV fame, he built students up and, in that building, taught them.  It is a gift.

Indelible effects that last a lifetime.

At their 50th reunions, alums invariably share stories about their school experiences and the teachers who taught them.  The passage of time has a way of rounding corners and evening out the particulars alums remember.  It is difficult to assign causation between a student’s schooling and their life at the age of 70.  However, the language and the tones change when alums talk of an exceptional teacher whose insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, or friendship made such an indelible imprint that it lasted 50 or more years.  The ability to cause such lifelong effects is a gift.