If a faculty of teachers is the heart of any school, then high quality instruction by caring teachers is the end game of faculty-building.
Faculty building is the recruitment, hiring, sustenance and bonding of an array of expert teachers into a synergistic group whose total professional work is a harmonious teaching environment that causes all children to learn.
Today we are in faculty crisis. Our school districts are bottoming out in their ability to attract and retain end game teachers. A generally recognized low compensation and low appreciation for teachers and increasing governmental abandonment of traditional public schools are taking a toll. As the career teachers of the Baby Boom generation retire, how will we fill their roles with new end game teachers? And, as nearly fifty percent of seated teachers leave the profession before the end of their fifth year, the capacity of school districts to build new faculties is more and more important.
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-do-teachers-quit/280699/
Certainly, we cannot anticipate a national or even state-led strategy to build our next school faculties. While the US Department of Ed champions the improvement of teaching across the nation, there is little political appetite for a new federally-led initiative. The banner of conservative politics safeguards public education to state and local control. Yet, states are poorly able today to lead a resurgence in faculty-building. Too many governors balance annual budgets by squeezing their allocations for education and too many state politicians have embraced school choice as a strategy for building their political base. Reinvesting by the statehouse in faculty building in public schools would contradict their current alliances. Hence, if a new faculty is to be generated, it will be up to local school districts one school at a time.
The recipe for building a new faculty begins with a school governance commitment to do what it takes to recruit, hire, sustain and bind a diverse set of teachers into a faculty. “What it takes” requires the dedication of money for salaries up front, money for salaries and benefits going forward, and money for professional support. It is ludicrous to believe that a new faculty can be generated without new investment. This is why. When undergraduates in colleges and universities consider their potential careers and do a side-by-side analysis of what life in each career would be like, in growing numbers they reject education. They look at the low entry level compensation and the low rate of salary growth. “A night manager’s starting salary at a fast food restaurant was 20% higher than mine.”
http://blog.octanner.com/appreciation-2/why-teachers-and-nurses-are-among-the-least-appreciated-jobs
Low starting salaries are followed by pay schedules of miniscule annual increases and, depending upon the state’s revenue collections, frequent years of frozen wages. As teachers consider the totality of a career, they check the status of teacher retirement funds and find too many state pension plans going bankrupt. Compensation is a problem for young teachers who have a chance to change career pathways before they lock in with a family and mortgage; especially talented teachers who will be successful in almost any other career they choose.
This is why there must be a new investment in faculty building. Entry level salaries must be raised and the progression from entry level to the district’s highest salary level compacted from 15+ years to six or seven. After six years, all teachers should have reached a comparative level of instructional quality, student-centered expertise and professional integrity. If they haven’t, they don’t belong in the new faculty.
Parallel to compensation, starting teachers consider the public perception of teaching and, as a national generalization, find teachers to be held in modest to low esteem. “Teachers are female, familiar, ubiquitous, and it is difficult to quantify their value.” What a terrible generalization, but generalizations are the bane of teachers.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-teachers-not-respected-in-American-culture
The list of indistinguishing characteristics goes on. Seasonal work. Short-term relationships with students and most families. Too many reports in the press about the bad acts of teachers. A “do gooder’s” profession. Bad experiences with a teacher are all you hear from peers. And, teachers are too rule orienting and conforming. At the end of the day, these generalizations are fully inaccurate of the vast majority of teachers, but in our society singular stories get generalized and spread broadly. Consider the daily news and the ratio of good stories about teachers to bad stories. Bad stories make the news. And such generalizations beget a lack of appreciation for teachers.
Gladly, even with low compensation and low appreciation, there are bright and talented individuals who still want to be teachers. However, they are counted as individuals when the majority of their bright and talented classmates choose other career paths.
The second ingredient in faculty building is creating an environment of professional integrity. In a 2014 Gallup Poll, teachers ranked last among 12 professional groups in agreeing that their opinion at work matters.
A teacher’s being told what to do did not start with No Child Left Behind and the standards movement, but these two phenomenon left all other reasons in the dust. NCLB ushered in a flood tide of “to do” mandates that have not yet left the house. Every teacher needed to submit their credentials to prove they were “high quality” and began to attend staff meeting after staff meeting to understand the meaning of Adequate Yearly Progress and AMOs .
http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/definitions.cfm
Schools everywhere charted the percentage of students attaining proficiency or better on statewide reading and math assessments and schools that did not make the mark quickly implemented new curricula and teaching models in order to make the mark on the subsequent year. Teachers were manipulatives just like paper and pencils. Data overwhelmed opinion.
Fast behind AYP came the need for more rigorous state academic standards and once again teacher input was not sought. State legislatures adopted appropriately rigorous academic standards in order to comply with federal fund-ladened mandates. And, once again teachers met in large rooms to be told what they would teach, how they would teach it, and how their job stability hinged on their students’ achievement.
http://www.corestandards.org/assets/WI_Adoption_CCS_2_June_2010_dpinr2010_75.pdf
The remedy will begin with a new era of professional integrity between school district leadership and the teaching faculty. A high level of professional integrity understands, accepts and benefits from a degree of tension. Every day is not one of sunshine and roses. Good arguments are healthy when they are undertaken by people who respect and trust each other. And, good arguments will improve organizational health and vitality. Arguments turn bad when they are not undertaken with respect and trust, but with animosity.
These are synonyms for making an argument: advance, allege, argue, assert, challenge, claim, confute, contend, contest, debate, disagree, dispute, elucidate, emphasize, enunciate, establish, explain, expostulate, express, oppose. They all are verbs that apply to an environment in which everyone cares about what their colleagues think and believe is best. These could be symptomatic of the professionalism that teachers want and deserve – the expectation that their well-argued opinions matter.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/make+an+argument
The third ingredient for building a new faculty is sustenance. Sustaining a new faculty is the expectation/requirement that every teacher will engage in professional learning. This is not the district’s usual presentation of professional development necessary for organizational fidelity. The district has the need and obligation to inculcate its personnel with procedural matters. Certainly, school safety and security today require every teacher’s attention. This is organizational development not professional learning. Professional learning feeds a teacher’s personal need for advanced education. It is teacher-centric in that a teacher decides and engages in studies that advance their professional talent. “Idiocentricity” is what makes professional learning an essential part of life in a new faculty.
Some states have implemented personalized professional development strategies for teachers. Wisconsin’s PDP is an example, although it was implemented as a substitution for a faulted PD system of credits and units required for licensure renewal. Take away the relationship to license renewal and a PDP assumes the purpose of professional sustenance
The last component of a new faculty is inspired principal leadership. An inspired principal is an effective instructional leader, a superb role model for children, an efficient administrative manager plus one. That “one” is the ability to bring out the “best and brightest” qualities of each and every member of the new faculty. Sometimes leading a large group of talented people is best served by underleading. Throw in examples of collegiality, participatory leadership, community, and “fun” and a principal begins to look inspired. When a faculty has an inspirational leader for a principal, often they find that appreciation, integrity, and sustenance become “just the way the new faculty is at our school.”