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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“Is the grass really greener elsewhere?”. Many teachers consider this question at several times in their careers. Actually, the question is not worded correctly. “Is the grass where I stand green enough for me now and for my future” is a better question. The resounding answer for too many teachers is “There is little grass where I stand, and it is not green enough!”
Teachers have choices and they are making the decision to leave their first profession. “According to the WI DPI’s analysis, about 4 out of every 10 first-year teachers either leave the state or the profession altogether after just six years (39.4% of new teachers), and only 68 percent of aspiring educators who complete an education preparation program were ultimately employed in a Wisconsin public school”.
State the conclusion first and then develop its reasoning.
Educational leaders and politicians have bemoaned the realities of teacher shortages for decades; however, moaning has not changed its reality. In Wisconsin, legislators continue to modify the requirements for obtaining and keeping a teaching license believing that this will attract and keep teachers. Their heads are in the proverbial sand. It is the conditions of the profession not the entry requirements that are the problem.
Instead, make changes in two of the most critical elements of the profession: compensation and supervision. First, make and fund a $70,000 starting salary for teachers in every district in Wisconsin irrespective of their current state funding or property values. After a probationary period of five years, make the continuing salary point $85,000 and let CPI dictate annual increase thereafter.
Second, guarantee every teacher has adequate principal support and supervision. Adequacy means that a principal has a face-to-face conversation with the teacher every week and is in the teacher’s classroom at least once every two weeks. Overkill? Hardly. Instructionally proficient teachers will welcome the increased principal presence because the principal will see and know how good they are. Students will understand there is no distance between teachers and principals relative to student behaviors and discipline. Instructionally underperforming teachers will profit from the principal’s guidance for improvement.
Why these two remedies? Because they address two of a teacher’s most pressing concerns. Is my compensation enough for me and my family to satisfy our needs and some of our wants? And does my boss know and care about my teaching and the children I teach? When we answer these two concerns positively, all the rest of the minor career irritants can take care of themselves.
It is easy to dismiss these two steps will because they will cost more money than currently is spent on education. On the other hand, the constant loss of teacher talent and the constant expenditure of school time and expense in recruiting and on-boarding new teachers every year has equivalent costs. We should stop paying the cost of teachers leaving begin paying the costs for teachers staying.
As a school superintendent, our district practice was to begin each new teacher to our district with a salary amount large enough that salary was never an issue with the teacher’s ongoing job satisfaction. Money issues aside, we then could constructively work on teaching and learning. A second practice was for administrators to purposefully connect with every teacher and staff member weekly. We were a small school with a superintendent and a principal, but our priorities were clear. A purposeful connection was non-negotiable and not a discussion of the weather but a conversation about instruction, curriculum, assessment, and student performances.
Interestingly, some teachers still will leave their profession and they probably should. But it will not be for lack of compensation or administrative support and supervision. The truth is some teachers should not be teaching and they need to find that out for themselves.
The conclusion is reached because green differs among professions.
People are comparative shoppers by nature. As we compare cars in the parking lot, houses by neighborhoods, or vacations by the amount of beach time, people also compare professions by salaries. A first-year teacher in Wisconsin observes these two facts about her profession.
The average first-year salary for teachers in Wisconsin is $48,520 and in the nation is $46,590. These are averages with 50% of teachers, first year and veteran, earning less.
The grass really is greener somewhere else at the start of a professional teaching career. Teachers do not approach the starting salaries of other professions that require a baccalaureate degree and training. Further, the difference is magnified over time. By the time teachers and other professionals are in the 35 to 45 age brackets, the difference in salaries between these same professions will be $60,000 or more per year. This status has been fact for decades.
The shortage also is driven by a lack of collegians enrolling in colleges of education. Enrollments dwindle every year as more and more employed teachers bail out on teaching. Comparatively speaking, neither beginning nor continuing a career in teaching pays the bills as well as salaries in another profession.
The significant change to a $70,000 starting salary and an $85,000 post-probation salary point irrespective of district will cause collegians and veteran teachers to reconsider their professional decisions.
The conclusion is reached because there is more than dollars that causes teachers to leave the profession.
Money matters, but there are other factors we need to acknowledge and address in order to stem the tide of teachers leaving the profession. A study by the Learning Policy Institute cites these five factors for teachers leaving the profession.
Inadequate Preparation – Beginning teachers with little or no preparation are 2 1⁄2 times more likely to leave the classroom after one year compared to their well-prepared peers.
Lack of Support for New Teachers – New teachers who do not receive mentoring and other supports leave at more than two times the rate of those who do.
Challenging Working Conditions – Teachers often cite working conditions, such as the support of their principals and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues, as the top reason for leaving.
Better Career Opportunities – More than 1 in 4 teachers who leave say they do so to pursue other career opportunities.
Personal Reasons – More than 1 in 3 teachers who leave cite personal reasons, including pregnancy and childcare, as extremely or very important in their decision.
An improved and greener professional career derives when teachers are supported and recognized for their good teaching and their causing children to learn. The caveat to this step in supporting teachers is that principals need to time and resources to be educational leaders for teachers. A principal trained in curriculum and instruction is wasted sitting in an office writing out discipline reports. Most student discipline is routine and can be administered by a dean of students or admin-assistant. Most campus supervision can be successfully provided by paraprofessionals.
The Big Duh!
We have a teacher shortage for two reasons. Our educational system and cultural mindset do not place a high enough monetary and appreciative value on teaching. Because the system does not value teachers, teachers do not value the profession. Change the valuing by paying teachers a professionally comparative salary and ensuring adequate administrative support and supervision. What we value highly receives more of our continuing attention.
The second reason for teacher shortage is that we keep doing the same inane things in the hope that more people will want to teach and then remain classroom teachers. Stop mucking around with licensing. Instead hold high and higher standards for a teaching license. We don’t value what has been devalued. Make the profession one of higher standards and more people will value it more.
What the heck!
If we cannot do these two things to enhance the profession, then turn all schools into PK-12-day care centers. The average annual salary for full-time daycare workers in Wisconsin is $27,640. There is a new goal for politicians who do not value public education.
When you don’t plan for your next generation, you are assured you will evolve into obscurity if not extinction. Aspects of our culture go missing over time. Then existed then, over time, their need dissolved and poof! They are no more. Consider these areas of employment – telephone operators, elevator operators, gandy dancers, phrenologists, redsmiths, scissor grinders, telegraphists, lamplighters, soda jerks, lectors, town criers, film projectionists, log drivers, and milkmen. The need for these employments once was and is no longer. They drifted to obscurity then elimination. Evolution in the world of work and the elimination of fields of work is real. Our teaching crisis is that we are short of teachers who want to teach.
Extinction takes many forms. For the dodo bird, extinction meant elimination – there are no dodo birds today. Through a combination of hunting, deforestation, and purposeful destruction of dodo nests, these birds that were first identified by explorers in the early 1500s were gone by 1681. Poof! While the existence of the dodo was in human hands, not the bird’s, they continue to be a landmark in the reality of extinction.
Obscurity then extinction – will public education teachers be next? Obscurity is when the primary function of school is day care for children; extinction is when any adult can be a day care provider.
What do we know.
We know these two facts:
More people are leaving the educational profession than are entering. The profession has a current gap of almost 70% in the number of teachers quitting, retiring, and moving on compared to the number of new teachers beginning work in the field.
There are more persons in Wisconsin with valid teaching and other educational licenses than the number of educators currently employed PLUS current and anticipated job openings. We have an abundance of licensed educators. However, licensed educators do not choose educational employment.
Hence these questions. If we have an abundance of dodo birds, why are we experiencing a shortage of dodo birds? Why do we have an abundance of licensed teachers and a shortage of teachers in classrooms? Why do people spend the time and resources necessary to gain an educational license and then choose not to be employed as educators?
Why is this thus?
Teaching in public education is on the drifting list. There is a shortage of teachers in most states leading to either larger and larger classes for an employed teacher or increased numbers of students taught by an unprepared teacher. There is a clear shortage of teachers with specific licenses, special education being the teacher hardest to find. Math and science and computer technology are close followers in the shortage market.
Why? Compensation has been and continues to be a real downside to teaching. The source of teacher pay in most states is through legislative funding and state funding is always political. Legislators balance state budgets by controlling educational spending, one of a state’s largest annual expenditures. Clearly, teacher pay was not keeping up with the cost of living prior to our current national economic inflation woes and suffers greater discrepancy now. Teachers chronically lose spending power. Teachers are choosing to leave classrooms for employment that pays more.
Second, education is being beaten up politically. Politicians are making education a partisan campaign battle topic. Conservative legislation dictates what teachers can teach and cannot teach, how they may address children, and threaten teachers with prosecution and loss of license for teaching unapproved subjects. Some teachers are being bullied out of their profession.
Third, the deficits of student learning loss in the pandemic put teachers on the hot seat for an impossible speedy recovery of lost learning. The financial cliff of federal pandemic dollars to schools will cause many recently added school positions to be discontinued due to no continuing local funding. Tutors and interventionists and additional teaching positions will be terminated. And the pressure for current teachers to make good on all mandates, all requirements, and all political entreaties within the historical structure of school is causing more teachers to seek other employment.
Finally, teachers suffer from the “pile on” effect. 75% of departing teachers cite their being overworked and under appreciated as their real reason for quitting teaching. Piling on happens in many ways.
Going back two decades, No Child Left Behind began a trend of government mandates with the expectations of “do this or be replaced”. State assessments in reading and math became a school’s annual report card. Art, music, PE, shop, marketing, technology, computer science, agriculture, and world language teachers all were told to incorporate ELA, reading, and math in their daily instruction in order to raise school test scores.
Across time family and school relationships have drastically changed. The number of homes with two working parents struggling economically has significantly increased parallel to a decrease in parental supervision of children doing schoolwork at home. This is not a complaint about parents but a statement about new realities. Classroom teachers spend more daily time with a child than the child’s parents. Teachers have become frontline care takers and surrogates for parents.
Teacher shortages mean teachers in school needed to assume additional assignments and responsibilities. The most egregious of these are non-instructional duties, such as recess, lunch, and bus duties, but also more before and after school tutoring for students who need extra time. These are things that absent teachers used to do. Every extra duty subtracts from teachers’ workday time for planning, correcting and grading student work, professional meetings, and communication with parents. Planning, correcting and grading, and communicating are essential work so teachers do these from home.
A teacher’s time for home and family life has been greatly eroded by piling on. What is billed and contracted as an 8:00 am to 4:00 pm job, now is a 7:00 am to 9:00 pm job. There is the 8:00 to 4:00 school day with seven or more hours of assigned duties and there is the before and after schoolwork at home necessary to be a complete teacher. Work life reduces home life for teachers.
Teachers’ resignations are not equally distributed. Resignations are greater among:
Young teachers. They are lowest on the compensation scale, carry undergraduate debt, face housing scarcity, and are not seasoned to the realities of teaching today. They also have the least to lose in a career change early in life.
Teachers in low-income districts. Resources matter. When the common response to an inquiry is, “We don’t have that in our district” or “We cannot afford to do that”, it does not take long for teachers to seek employment in districts with needed resources.
Teachers in districts with high diversity. Diversity equals educational challenges. There are more non-English languages spoken, more cultural nuances, more special needs students, and more non-educational struggles. Teaching in high diversity districts requires more than teaching from teachers.
Resignations create the greatest havoc in districts that have the greatest difficulty in recruiting new teachers.
Where schools and classrooms are empty due to diminishing enrollment, there also will be schools and classrooms empty due to diminishing numbers of prepared teachers.
What can we do about this thusness?
Compensation is the easy yet wrong answer. Teacher compensation needs to keep pace with costs of living. No more and no less. Why would those in charge argue differently? Well, there are reasons but that is for another day.
Beyond compensation, restructure the work so that the right work, causing all children to learn, can be accomplished. Do these:
Maintain class sizes of 20-25 children. Although the STAR studies indicated class sizes around 15, there was no compelling research to support such small class sizes. A class of 20-25 gives school leaders enough flexibility to manage enrollment. More importantly, a teacher can effectively instruct 20 to 25 children, create positive daily interaction with each, understand the individual learning needs of each, and still utilize whole group instruction as appropriate. The “paper” load for 20 – 25 is manageable. The parent contact requirements are manageable. In many urban schools, 20 – 25 reduces their current daily student assignment by 40% or more.
Invest in classroom teachers for initial instruction and level two interventions. Assign current interventionists to classroom teaching. Too many dollars are spent in correcting and filling in after-initial teaching. The hiring of interventionists assumes failed initial instruction. With proper class sizing and planning time regular teaching can resolve student lapses in learning.
Make planning and prep time real and inviolate. Assign each classroom teacher a minimum of 90 minutes of daily prep time. This does not include before and after school time as that is when professional meetings occur. Before and after school time also must be reserved for student and parent access. 90 minutes of uninterrupted prep time allows a teacher to ensure clear and targeted lesson plans, quality feedback on student work, and planning that accommodates all student needs.
Extend the annual teaching contract to include 20 days of summer curriculum and teaching development time. Inserting PD as stand-alone days in the school year is absurd; it is lip service to the school board’s obligation to provide PD. We wouldn’t expect children to profit from a stand-alone day of essential teaching and learning. Summer PD provides accountable educational in-service as administrators and teachers have adequate time for professional training, collegial interaction, and practice/reinforcement of new training. Everything we know about teaching children should be applied to teacher in-service.
Assure that teaching is politically agnostic. There is no place for partisan politics in the education of children. Our goal is to cause all children to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for each to be an informed and problem-solving adult. In the now, we need to stand against partisanship that would tell us what to teach and what not to teach based upon political positions and political retribution.
The Big Duh!
These are seven bullet points that make a difference between a teacher being in the classroom and being in another profession. Much like the dodo bird that what made extinct by how people and the culture of the time treated it, classroom teachers are responding to how people and the culture of today treat them. We can leave things in the current status quo and watch the number of qualified teachers dwindle until public education is truly just day care or we can change the culture to ensure public education continues to be our nation’s most important continuing institution.
The importance of teaching and teachers will be one of the lessons we learn from the Time of COVID. The need to educate children is a constant and daily issue in every community. This has focused attention on the essence of teaching. As educators work to improve and refine strategies for in-person and at-home teaching and learning, we can use every community’s attention on educating children to refine and enhance teaching as an essential and newly-preferred professional career.
Take Away
Lesson 1 learned is that public education is essential to the economic and family structures of every community. Across all states, local business interests want schools to be open for in-person learning to provide daycare for employee children. Parallel to their employers, parents need to work to support their families. They prefer in-person learning. State, county, and local governments want children to be educated. An under educated generation is a lost generation. This makes teaching a profession of essential employees. Fundamentally, this status is true with or without a pandemic.
Lesson 2 learned is that teachers teach and others do not. I apply to this to the teaching of school-age children. Certainly, parents who choose to homeschool their children make a commitment to become teachers for their own children. However, a vast majority of parents who are forced by school campus closures to be teachers-at-home want out of that role immediately. A good day for a parent-teacher is buried by a score of bad days. Parents are not prepared to be their children’s teacher. They know it and so do their children.
Professional educators are essential to the education of a community’s children. The pandemic has proven that there is no substitute for professional educators.
What do we know?
The pandemic will change teaching; the direction of the change is not yet known. The need for remote, virtual, distanced, synchronous and asynchronous teaching have been so great and widespread that their effects will be part of the ongoing features of school for years to come. The profession can passively go with the flow of the pandemic and do what it can, when and where it can, and provide continuous, responsive education for children. Or, the profession can understand the moment and use the reality of educating children in a pandemic to inform and reform educating children after the pandemic.
As a people, we focus on a problem if it personally affects our well-being in the immediacy. This is the reality of our national attention span. When these two conditions – personal well-being and now – are present, we can address large-scale problems. As soon as the problem no longer is personal or immediate, we lose our focus on the issue. Sadly, this is us. Even large and enduring problems fade once the emergency subsides. If there is to be a positive change in the profession of teaching, it must be addressed now.
This is the problem. We are not in an era of teacher shortage, but an era when teaching is an undesirable career choice.
Before and during the pandemic, schools have had difficulty attracting and retaining teachers. However, the problem is not the scarcity of persons entering the profession. It is the scarcity of people wanting to be teachers. These may sound like contradictory statements, but they are not. Our problem is that teaching is perceived as an undesirable career pathway by college students considering their future and young teachers in their first five years in a classroom. Too few people are being trained as teachers and too few trained teachers are teaching. These are the issues this moment in time requires us to change.
Why is this thus?
Employing and retaining teachers is an historic problem that has plagued public education for more than a decade. “The share of schools that were trying to fill a vacancy but couldn’t tripled from the 2011-12 to 2015-16 school years (increasing from 3.1 to 9.4 percent), and in the same period the share of schools that found it very difficult to fill a vacancy nearly doubled (from 19.7 to 36.2 percent). These difficulties are also shaped by the dwindling pool of applicants to fill vacancies. From the 2008-09 to the 2015-16 school years, there was a 15.4 percent drop in the number of education degrees awarded and a 27.4 percent drop in the number of people who completed a teacher preparation program.”
We can point to many contributing agents leading to this problem. Low starting salaries. Slow and inadequate financial advancement. Attacks on teacher unions and teacher organizations. Blaming education when all other social institutions are failing. Constant cuts in state financing. Draconian federal accountability legislation.
To address these issues, politicians, colleges and universities, and state departments of instruction continue to look for peripheral solutions. Legislators massaged statutory requirements for teacher preparation and created alternative pathways to a teaching license to make it easier for college graduates and second-career adults to become teachers. State departments allow teaching with permits not licenses. A teaching permit is like a learner’s permit for a student in driver education. A school board can employ a permitted teacher for several years without the teacher completing the full certification process. School boards work within limited finances – an increase to salary is a decrease to classroom supplies. Robbing Peter to pay Paul means that an increase in teacher pay is paid out by the teacher to purchase class room supplies.
Teacher shortage, however, is the symptom and not the problem. People who invested money and time to graduate from college with teacher certificates choose not to teach.
“The last time we checked we have about 120,000 people who hold a valid teacher license, and about 60,000 are teaching in public schools,” said David DeGuire, director of teachers, education, professional development and licensing at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.”
Further evidence that teaching is not a preferred career comes to us anecdotally. High school counselors, a traditional recruiter for would-be teachers, report that in their conferences with high school seniors and their parents many parents say to their son or daughter “… you don’t want to be a teacher…” and redirect college planning toward a different and more preferred career.
Further evidence derives from the choices made by the talent pool of students in college. Prior to 2000, teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities attracted many students from the top quarter of their graduating class based upon grades and testing. Many of these were young women who perceived teaching as an accepted profession for their gender. Since 2000, teacher prep programs have drawn fewer, if any, college students from the upper half of their class. The more talented collegians are choosing other professions, not teaching.
Unless we change these perceptions of teaching and the trend lines of people choosing teaching as a career, the outcomes of teacher shortage, understaffed schools, crowded classrooms, and discontinued school programs will continue unabated. We cannot look to our politicians or state departments to change the attitudes about teaching. We need to change the realities of schoolhouse teaching so that a new professionalism can attract and retain new professional educators.
To do
The list is long and varied.
Focus a teacher’s work on professional teaching. To do this, we remove all non-instructional duties for the usual teacher job descriptions. A characteristic of a profession is its well-defined and accepted area of expertise. Think about professionals in law, medicine, engineering, and architecture. Each of these professions has an explicit educational and training requirement, as do teachers. However, other professionals are not generalists and do not abide a constant addition of “…duties to be assigned”. Teachers have this line in every contract. A teaching contract is a potpourri of assignments, classroom teaching being just one. In a school board’s employment, we can disaggregate the professional duties of teachers, counselors, administrators, school health specialists, and non-certified personnel. Each of these has a specific purpose in the school and a matching training and span of duties. Teaching is an expertise in pedagogy, subject area content, dispositions necessary for teaching and learning, and assessment of learning. Professional teachers teach professionally.
Employ non-certified staff to do all supervisory work. Segregating teachers from other schoolhouse duties will require “someone” to supervise playgrounds, bus zones, cafeterias, and hallways. The trade-off of improved teaching is the cost of non-certified staff to execute these duties. Children need adult supervision when they are “at” school. Assigning teachers to these duties is at the expense of time, effort and focus on instruction and exacerbates the professional standing of teaching.
Hold teachers accountable for student learning of district-approved curricula. Teachers are not independent contractors in a school. There is a legal and linear relationship from the School Board’s responsibility to provide a free and appropriate education to every child, to ensure compliance with state statutes, and to align instruction and student learning outcomes with standards-based and performance-based curricula through school administration to classroom teachers. A Board employs teachers to teach the district-approved curricula. This is the “what” and “when” and “how much” of teaching. The teacher supplies the “how” based upon assessment of child readiness, need and capacity. Adherence to this simplified linearity greatly increases and improves the professional standing of teachers as pedagogical experts accountable under administrative supervision for causing all children to successfully learn their annual curricula.
Concomitant with accountability is the understanding that high quality teaching and achieving district expectations for student learning are a requirement of continued employment. Professionals deliver profession work to achieve professional outcomes. A teacher who cannot deliver will be counseled out of the profession.
Teaching is perceived by too many in the public as part-time work with nine months of school and three months of vacation. Our school year organization has roots in an agrarian calendar when children were not available to attend classes year-round. Farming communities required children as farm labor in the summer months. In our state, children who are 13-years and older populate many of the summer jobs required for our tourist industry. For this reason alone, schools cannot begin classes until after September 1 and local business owners decry a school calendar that extends past the first week in June. Summers off creates the assumption that teaching is part-time annual work.
A more informed reality is that a school district’s professional development programs already are creating a fuller work year. Many districts employ teachers in June, July and/or August to review student achievement from the prior school year, review and improve curriculum, learn new curriculum and delivery strategies, and learn and practice new technologies. The list of summer work activities grows every year. However, this work is understood as supplemental to a teacher’s contract. And, it is not uniform for all teachers.
At the same time, there is a body of teachers who prefer nine-month employment. One of the things that attracted them to teaching was summers off. Additionally, other teachers enjoy a different employment during summer months, often outdoor and work with adults not children. Finally, summer has traditionally been a time when teachers engaged in post-graduate studies and continuing education. Although much of this work is now on-line and year-round, we still abstractly connect a teacher’s summer with their going back to school.
A professional work year should be 221 days of paid employment, including 180 days of student instruction and 41 days of PD, district and school work. A teacher would have a standardized four weeks of summer vacation plus Christmas/New Year’s and spring vacations and usual holidays that match their community’s annual calendar.
Professionals have dedicated time for planning and assessment. Teacher contracts include language regarding planning time or prep time. In elementary grades this often is the time when children move from academic instruction with a grade level teacher to special instruction – art, music, physical education, foreign language, library, and technology instruction. In secondary grades, a class periods) is designated as a teacher’s prep period. In addition, teachers are expected to use time between their arrival at school and a first class and time after a last class and their departure from school for preparation.
However, as soon as children arrive at school, all teachers share in the responsibility of student supervision. Children are not let loose throughout the campus. Also, teachers are to be available to assist children with their assignments before and after school. And, administrators schedule school meetings, meetings with parents, and professional development activities before and after school. Planning and review time are forfeit to each of these.
The result is that preparation, planning and a review of daily work seldom takes place at school. Teachers do their reviews, planning and preparation at home. Other professionals may also take their work home, but in other professions the norm is not preparing for every next day’s work at home. Office time is carved out of the workday and officially reserved for review, planning and preparation. This is not the case for teachers and it must change.
Teaching is a commitment to each child everyday. This is a commitment of quality instructional and personal interactions between a teacher and each child the teacher teaches every school day. It contrasts with assumptions that instruction presented to a whole class or group of students reaches to each individual child. The commitment eliminates class periods or days of instruction in which a teacher and child have no direct, person-to-person interactions. No children should be allowed to hide in class or to be invisible – never called on to speak or participate. Instead, a teacher commits to personal interactions with each child and these interactions emphasize an “I care about you and your learning – personally”.
For decades, critics of public education have written about the school as a factory. Children are the widgets of our industry, they say. When schools are interested in outcomes only and are not people-first, this is a valid complaint.
The list goes on with lesser detail.
“Japanese lesson studies” for all teachers. This type of study parallels the ways in which other professions conduct a formalized, internal review of their ongoing work. Lesson studies are a peer review not an employer evaluation.
Effective Educator assessments based upon student outcomes and attributes only. Evaluate the effects of teaching not the characteristics of teaching.
Teacher discretion over how they use all school time but class time. Professionals have control of personal professional time.
Use of science-based strategies. As an example, the Science of Reading presents data- and performance-based pedagogy that is proven to cause all children to become readers. Other subjects also have data- and performance-based pedagogies. Using these, rather than anecdotally supported pedagogy, strengthen a teacher’s claim to professional preparation.
Employ more school counselors for social-emotional student care. As caring as classroom teachers are for every child, a teacher is not a counselor and not prepared for SE counseling. SE is another unprofessional piling on of the classroom teacher list of expectations.
Pa a bonus to teachers who are fluent in non-English languages. Language-diverse school communities require linguistic- and culture-diverse faculty. We need more teachers with the capacity to communicate effectively with non-English speaking children and families.
Annually enter student work in every state competition as a showcase of teaching and learning. Successful work begets more successful work. Professionals publicize their successes.
Annually nominate teachers for Teacher of the Year competitions as a recognition local teaching talent. A local nomination is a local recognition and has meaning in the community.
The big duh!
COVID is the most significant change agent of this young century. Its effects will last for decades to come. As with all prior pandemics, mankind will survive but be changed by its experience. We will be changed in ways not yet understood. The extent and the after-effects of those changes lie within us not with the disease. I prefer not to mourn the ways in which the pandemic changed schools and teaching but to celebrate what we learned and can use from the experience to enhance the future of teaching. COVID reinforces the values of high quality teachers as essential at all times.
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