On Thursday night I saw the premiere of "The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System." This is the latest film by Robert Compton, who perhaps best known for "Two Million Minutes."
Let me simply list the key takeaways from the film:
1. Finland does not have high stakes tests
2. Finland worked to develop a national consensus about its public schools
3. Having made a commitment to its public schools, Finland has few private schools.
4. When asked about accountability, Finns point out that they not only do not have tests, they do not have an inspectorate. They find that trusting people leads to them being accountable for themselves.
5. Finland does not have incredibly thick collections of national standards. They have small collections of broadly defined standards, and allow local implementation.
6. Qualifying to become a teacher is difficult.
7. Teachers are well trained, well supported, and given time to reflect about what they are doing, including during the school day.
8. Finns start school later in life than we do
9. Finnish students do little homework.
10. There is meaningful technical education in Finnish Schools
The premiere was introduced by the Ambassador of Finland to the US, and followed by a panel discussion. I will provide some comments about the panel discussion, but I want to focus mainly on the takeaways.
The premiere was by invitation only, held in the auditorium of the National Press Club in Washington DC. After he was introduced by Bob Compton, the Ambassador offered a few remarks about the importance of education in Finland. We then saw the film, which was followed by a panel discussion led by Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard U, who is the narrator of and featured in the film. Then came the panel discussion, about which more anon.
Some commentary on the takeaways with which I began.
No high stakes tests - Finland does have one test for college admissions. It does not have high stakes tests for high school graduation. Teachers and schools are not evaluated on the basis of student scores on such tests. And yet when nations are compared on the basis of scores on international tests such as PISA and TIMSS, Finland has been consistently at the top. Keep that in mind. Also understand that absent such tests with high stakes, Finland is not taking instructional time way from meaningful learning in order to prepare students for such tests. That leads to a more efficient use of instructional time for real student learning. There are entrance exams for tertiary education, which are used for student selection. There are no exit exams from high school, and no use of student performance on external exams as part of the evaluation of teachers or schools.
National Consensus - The film points out that Finland is not rich in natural resou��rces, other than timber. They understood the need to develop creativity, to develop the minds of students to be creative people for the economy and the society. Much of what occurs in Finland is derived from this national commitment, which was developed over a number of years, and was very much the process of a bottom-up study rather than imposed from above legislatively or administratively. Here I might not that we do NOT have such a consensus. Insofar as there is a conventional wisdom right now in the US, it is that everyone is supposed to be college/career ready upon graduation from high school, which an increasing emphasis on STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I would also note that the Finns seem to understand the importance of educating the whole child, something that our current focus on STEM seems to ignore
Having made a commitment to its public schools, Finland has few private schools. This of course is not possible in the United States - we have private schools with a history older than the US as an independent nation. That Finland went this route indicates how different our cultures are. Still, it is worth noting because of the emphasis on a common educational approach across the entire nation. It is also worth noting that the Council of State must approve the opening of a new private school, and that school is provided funding on the same basis as the local public schools, cannot charge tuition, and must admit students non-selectively. This makes private schools far less attractive than many in our country, which are deliberately established as elite institutions.
When asked about accountability, Finns point out that they not only do not have tests, they do not have an inspectorate. They find that trusting people leads to them being accountable for themselves. - our emphasis on "accountability" for schools and those that work in them (although for some reason we do not seem willing to apply the same metric to those who almost destroyed our economic system) is often destructive real learning. When those of us who are professional educators try to point this out we have thrown back at us an accusation that we don't want to be accountable. We are accountable, first and foremost to the students before us, in ways that often cannot be measured by the poor quality tests upon which we have been relying. We are accountable to one another, since most of us recognize that we do not teach our students in isolation from the other adults responsible for their education, starting with their families, but including every adult within the school system.
Finland does not have incredibly thick collections of national standards. They have small collections of broadly defined standards, and allow local implementation. - By contrast, our direction in the US has been to cram more and more in, even though it is not possible to meaningfully test all of the mandated content. As a result, in many subjects our approach to education is coverage of material but with superficial understanding. Assessments such as PISA which require a deeper understanding and application of material demonstrate that the emphasis we have been making is not improving real learning, even if the scores on our various state tests may have been going up. Local implementation allows for greater flexibility in meeting the students where they are, rather than being forced to move at an artificial speed to ensure coverage of material that will be assessed by external tests. We use tests to drive instruction to the detriment of real learning, no matter how good the performance on those tests might be.
Qualifying to become a teacher is difficult. We have institutions in the US that take all comers. In Finland, as those paying attention already know, one has to have demonstrated superior academic performance at a post-secondary level in order to be eligible for teacher training. That is the greatest barrier. Then the training is far more extensive, with all teachers expected to earn the equivalent of a masters degree.
Teachers are well trained, well supported, and given time to reflect about what they are doing, including during the school day. - The training and support are part of the preparation and qualification. New teachers do not simply walk into a classroom with responsibility for a full load of teaching. They are inducted gradually, with greater support, more opportunity to learn from experienced teachers. Of equal importance, even after they are experienced, they are expected to cooperate, collaborate, and most of all reflect, and they are given time within the school day. I know as a teacher how valuable it is to have to think about what just happened in a class. That is rare. There are times when I have had 4 classes back to back, covering 3 different preparations. I have 5 minutes between classes, some of which time I have to use for administrative tasks in order to maximize the amount of time available for instruction and learning.
Finns start school later in life than we do. - in Finland schools start at age 7. In the US, 1st grade is normally age 6, but we have near universal Kindergarten at 5, and an increasing emphasis upon preschool even earlier. In someways what we are doing in these earlier programs is contrary to our best understanding of human growth and development, especially as we push elements of academic learning to ever earlier ages. We now obsess on having children reading "on grade level" in third grade, even though many of our young people are not developmentally ready for what we throw at them, and as a result get turned off to reading, a skill that is essential for much of what we later demand of them. I wonder if our approach is not more to provide mass child care to allow parents to earn greater incomes at the same time as providing business and industry with a larger work force that enables them to depress wages. But then, that is my cynical side showing. On this I think we keep children in school for too long - in terms of number of years, even in terms of number of hours. And then we ask even more of them. Which leads to the next immediate takeaway:
Finnish students do little homework. - at the high school level, it might be an average of 30 minutes a night. We insist on so much more, to the point where some of our students are in theory supposedly doing 4-6 hours of homework. Of course they don't do it all, and what they do they often rush through. I want to come back to this point, and not just because I pay attention to what Alfie Kohn offers, and he has been critical of our insistence upon homework for many years.
Finally, There is meaningful technical education in Finnish Schools - that is, it involves real world task with real world people. The Finns do not have our obsession with trying to prepare everyone to be college ready - or as we now phrase it, college or career ready - upon graduation from high school. Too much of our technical education is becoming focused on STEM, and does not recognize the real world skills that can enable one to earn a good living with other skills. I have written about this in the past, which is perhaps why this part of the film caught my attention.
What also caught my attention was seeing students work in groups to solve real world problems. It was finding out that they have much more freedom in choosing the projects they do to demonstrate competence. I will also return to this point.
Homework - Let me focus on my Advanced Placement class. It is supposed to be a college level class in American Government and politics. It meets 45 minutes a day for the entire year. While we have in theory 180 instructional days, the AP test is in early May, which cuts the time for instruction before that to around 150, although it is less with mandated testing, assemblies, shortened periods due to weather or administrative functions. If it met for 45 minutes for 5 periods a week, that would be 225 minutes. A college class that meets 3 times a week does so for 150 minutes. We are already devoting more instructional time than students would have in college. Of course, in college I would expect students to do 2 hours of work for each hour of class. That would be a total of 450 minutes between instruction and independent work. To equal that, students would be doing 45 minutes a night for my class outside of school, right? Except consider this: in college a full load of classes is usually 4, occasionally only 3. In our school students take 7 courses, occasionally 8. A similar commitment of outside time is simply not possible.
Of course, related to this is our increasing emphasis on AP courses. We have students who as high school juniors are taking 6 such courses. That is 1.5 times the class load of a college student, when they are not yet in college. That concerns me. It concerns me that they do not have time to reflect about what they are learning.
In the film we discover that older high school students in Finland often take only 3 or 4 courses at a time. That seems so much more sensible. We could do that with course that met for two periods for half a year, except what we do with AP makes that impossible - if you do it in 1st semester, the students are not in the course at the time of the AP exam, and if you do it in 2nd semester, the amount of time before the AP exam - or for non-AP courses any external state exams - means you have less instructional time than you would in first semester.
Let me turn briefly to the panel discussion. It was led by led by Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard U, who is the narrator of and featured in the film. It included Annmarie Neal, Chief Talent Officer from Cisco Systems; Gene Wilhoit, Executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers; John Wilson, Executive Director of the National Education Association; and Tom Friedman, author and columnist for the New York Times. I am going to ignore most of what Friedman said, other than to note that he seemed to want to prove that he was cleverer than anyone else and that he could coin the most memorable phrases. I got little of value from his remarks. Wilhoit and Wilson spoke at times bluntly, both representing the point of view of the organizations they direct. There was actually a fair amount of agreement.
It was the remarks of MS Neal that caught my attention. She was very impressed by what she saw of students staying 26 hours in a school working together on a common project within broad outlines to come up with a real world solution. She related that to how Cisco puts groups of people together to brainstorm future business endeavors. And she related it to one of her real passions, which is Montessori education - she is a mom as well as a high-ranking business executive. In the Montessori approach one key emphasis is on the interest of the student. The role of the teacher is far less "sage on the stage" than it is of facilitator and to some degree of co-learner with the students. The kinds of people she is seeking for Cisco are far better prepared by that kind of approach that by the kinds of instruction far too common in our schools.
Further, even though she works for a technology company, and needs engineers, she values the learning how to think that is a product of a liberal arts education. She expressed some concern that our focus on STEM is too narrow.
I had a chance to chat with MS Neal briefly afterward, and she repeated those points. Remember her title - "Chief Talent Officer." She goes all over the world seeking out the best people for one of the more productive high tech companies in the US. I told her that her approach reminded me of something I had encountered when I worked in a data processing placement company many years ago. The old Philadelphia Railroad did not want mathematicians to train as computer programmers, it wanted musicians. I also noted that the 2nd best orchestra in the Boston area has traditionally not been found at Harvard or the New England Conservatory, but at MIT.
There are things we can learn from Finland, as the film makes clear. It is not that we can simply transfer their approach to the US. If nothing else, we by now should have learned that taking a model out of its context and imposing it in a different situation often leads to failure, as many of our attempts at whole school reform demonstrated in the past couple of decades.
What we can learn is that the direction we are going with our national policy on education is diametrically opposed to what Finland did to totally reform their educational system over a period of several decades. The Finns began in the 1970s. Our current round of reforms can arguably be dated to A Nation at Risk in 1983. While the Finns have made major improvements in their public education, we have perhaps not even tread water for too many of our students.
We do have some superb public schools. We also have inequitable distribution of resources, and not just within schools. We lack a consistency of approach on how we are going to address our problems. We attempt to do much of what we do from the top down, whereas much of what happened successfully in Finland was because of a deliberate decision to do as much as possible from the bottom up.
There are other things I could note. All students in primary and secondary schools get free meals. Students grow up learning Swedish and English as well as Finnish. There is health care in the schools. Oh yes, Finland's teaching force is 100% unionized. Administrators function in support of teachers, not in opposition.
Some of this I knew before seeing the film. Not all of it is addressed in the film, nor was it addressed in the panel discussion.
Can we learn from Finland? I believe we can. Too often Americans seem to want to ignore what we can take from other nations. Yet there is much we have already taken from other nations in education. After all, the original concept of kindergarten was German, as the name itself demonstrates (too bad that it is decreasingly a garden and much more of a regimen). We have in some places learned what Maria Montessori developed. It might be helpful for those wanting to understand what is possible in educating young children to also examine Reggio Emelia - I note that when I have asked some major politicians who are often considered committed to education what they know about the last, I have yet to find anyone who has any knowledge beyond perhaps having heard the name. Of course, the same is unfortunately true of most in the media who write about education and schools. Few politicians or education journalists are familiar either with Simpson's paradox or Campbell's Law, both of which are basic to truly understand much of the data upon which we are now basing major policy decisions.
If I could offer one overall sense of what I derived from seeing the film, it was this - education in Finland is much more conducive to producing the citizenry necessary for the sustaining of a democratic government than what we are currently doing in the United States.
That does not mean we should copy the Finns. In many ways we cannot. it is not merely that they have less than 6 million people, have far less poverty or economic disparity than we do. There are major cultural differences that can require differences in approach.
But surely we can learn from them.
Surely we can learn the importance of giving students the opportunity to explore their own interests.
Perhaps we can learn from them that excellence in education can be achieved without mandating sameness from the top down, with no need for a punitive approach based on a test-based accountability system.
We should learn from them the importance of properly selecting and preparing teachers. Yet for all our verbiage on the importance of teachers, somehow the policies we implement seem to work contrary to that stated goal.
Is what Finland has accomplished really all that surprising? It shouldn't be. That the word "surprising" is part of the title of the film speaks more to what is wrong in our approach to education than it does to what is outstanding in Finland.
Thursday night I saw the film, I talked with some people from the panel both before and after seeing it. I talked with the producer both before and after viewing it.
I pondered until Saturday morning, when i began drafting this piece, to which i returned several times, finally finishing it in mid-evening.
Were I to see the film again, I might have different takeaways.
I offer this as a starting point, to let you know about it, and about my experience on Thursday.
If you are interested in education and have a chance to see the film, I suggest you do. I found it worth the time spent viewing it.
Peace.
Showing posts with label schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label schools. Show all posts
I am a proud union member
I stand with my unionized sisters and brothers, especially in Wisconsin, but everywhere where teachers and unions are under attack.
I am the lead union representative for more than 100 teachers in my school.
Today, all across the country, teachers are blogging their support for our unionized sisters and brothers in Wisconsin, and you can follow some of the results of that at EDUSolidarity
Today I want to tell you why I am proud to be a union member as well as a teacher.
I teach my students one period a day. We have 9, since some students take a zero period at 7:15 in the morning to squeeze in an extra course. Most of my students are sophomores, with at least 6 courses besides mine. I am only one of those responsible for helping them learn.
For me teaching is a collaborative effort. It includes not only those of us formally designated as educators, but all of the support staff as well.
Why are teachers unionized? Why do we insist on seniority being a major part of decision making about who stays and who goes?
Let's go back. Why are any workers unionized? Because without cooperation, without the support of a union, an individual worker is at a huge disadvantage in negotiating with an employer - that applies to working conditions, to compensation, to benefits. As an individual, one is negotiating from a position of weakness. As part of a larger group, there is more leverage, and thus less capriciousness and even maliciousness in how those in positions of authority can deal with one who lacks the protection of a union.
Nowadays we hear all kinds of statements about how seniority is keeping bad teachers and forcing good teachers out. Baloney. As a union rep I have helped move out bad teachers, teachers who were not good for the students. I ensured it was done fairly, that they had due process. That protects me and all the other teachers.
How do we determine an "effective" teacher anyhow? If we make it all about test scores we will cheat the students of a real education.
That's not the real issue. That is the rhetorical cover to replace more experienced teachers with noobies, largely over money. That's right. Over money.
Put all the pieces together.
We have Bill Gates saying that teachers don't really improve after their 3rd year. He says that additional degrees don't benefit the students by improving the teaching. Oh, and he wants to stop paying for years of service.
My base pay is twice that of a beginning teacher. Absent protections of seniority, how hard would it be for an administrator pushed financially to find an occasion to find me, and other more experienced teachers, less than effective so that s/he could replace me with two bodies, thereby saving money on the budget.
The workman of any kind is worthy of his hire. Some apparently don't believe that. They opposed raising the minimum wage, which is still far below what one needs to live. They want to pay less than minimum for teen-aged part-time workers.
If the mentality is only about saving upfront costs, then we may be penny wise and very pound foolish. In engineering, whether a nuclear reactor near Sendai or levees near New Orleans, failure to put enough resources in up front can lead to catastrophic failure.
The unwillingness to pay for the experience and quality of senior teachers leads to a constant turnover of younger, inexperienced teachers who are still trying to learn how to teach. While there may not be a catastrophe of the magnitude of Katrina, the loss of learning opportunities for our students is often irrecoverable.
I want to quote a dear friend, with her permission. Renee Moore is one of the most distinguished educators in the US. She is a former Mississippi State Teacher of the Year. She has sat on the boards of a number of key organizations, including the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She is a superb writer and speaker about education. She recently included the following words in an email a number of us received:
The seniority system was put in place in an attempt to end capricious, retaliatory firings and various shades of nepotism. Given the current status of our evaluation system, if administrators are going to use "keeping the most effective teachers" as justification for who goes and who stays, teachers and parents should unite to demand they be very transparent.
capricious - what did the principal have for lunch, or who from the Central office yelled at him today
retaliatory - Speak up, point out that this latest educational emperor is naked, and one might well be dismissed. Or if not dismissed, experience a retaliatory transfer, as happened to an outspoken teacher in DC who criticized the wrong-doings of one of Michelle Rhee's hand-picked principals. Even Jay Mathews, in general a supporter of Rhee, criticized her on this.
nepotism - too many people forget when school boards would hire people who were related to them by blood or political affiliation even if they were unqualified. Absent protections, qualified people would be forced out for the nephews and the political contributors.
Due Process - and transparency - things that unions can demand on behalf of their members, that individual teachers cannot.
On Thursday I have been invited to the premier of a film. It is titled “The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System” and the viewing will be introduced by the Ambassador of Finland. 25 Years ago Finland did not do well on international comparisons. Now their schools are acknowledged as among the very best in the world. They take time to train their teachers, insisting on the equivalent of a masters degree. Oh, and their teaching corps is 100% unionized.
The current highest scoring state is Massachusetts. As my friend Diane Ravitch points out, it also has a unionized teaching corps.
Some want to take away collective bargaining rights completely. Others want to limit the rights severely, excluding working conditions and issue of assignments. These steps would deprofessionalize teaching, and then allow opponents to further demean those who teach, and justify further slashing their compensation and benefits.
My periods are 45 minutes each. For some of my students, that 3/4 of an hour is more time than they spend with their parents each day. Do you want that 45 minutes to be with a trained, caring adult, who is not constantly fretting over how to pay basic bills? Do you want the teacher able to concentrate on the task of teaching our young people, or do you want to force her to take a second job in order to make ends meet?
Teaching should be an honorable profession. For all the rhetoric that some offer about great teachers and the importance of teachers, their actions with respect to policy provide those paying attention a very different picture. They claim it is important to hold teachers "accountable" in many cases for things they do not fully control, but scream bloody murder at accountability for the criminal offenses of the financial sector that have helped create the financial crises that are being used as justification for attacking the unions and the benefits and the compensation of public employees, including teachers. They rant about bad teachers having tenure but say nothing about promoting generals who violate international and US law in their treatment of those detained under their custody. They want to examine everything about teachers to try to find an excuse to bash them further, to delegitimize them, but God forbid there be an honest investigation of the wrongdoings and dishonesties that involved us in conflicts abroad that by the time they are done will, according to Nobel winning economist Joe Stiglitz, cost this nation at least 2 TRILLION - maybe even 3 TRILLION - dollars.
We shift wealth to the already wealthy, who then balk at paying for public services, perhaps because they have become so wealthy and powerful they have the ability to purchase whatever they need - including the occasional judges, senators, congressmen and governors. And more. But teachers are greedy because we want to keep the pensions to which we agreed as a form of deferred compensation, for our willingness to be paid less than people with comparable educational background.
I am a teacher. I am by choice. I came to it late, but it is what I should do.
I am willing to make some sacrifices. We do not have children of our own, in part because I could not commit myself to teaching as I do with the attention I give my students, were I to have the responsibilities of a caring parent. I make less than I did when I worked with computers, and my hours are far longer.
Yet now some would want you to believe that my experience is not worth more compensation, that I should not be paid for the additional professional education I obtained AT MY OWN EXPENSE, and would be happy to see me replaced by two brand new teachers, in some cases with only 5 weeks of training and who are not committed to stay beyond two years, a period at the end of which they MIGHT be becoming good teachers.
I have worked in Maryland, which is unionized in its schools, and in Virginia, which as a right to work state BANS collective bargaining by public employees, although Arlington, where I live and for one year taught, sort of gets around that. Which might be why they maintain a strong teaching force, without that much turnover. Which increases my real estate taxes because the good schools are something that draws families, along with our closeness to DC and the superb access to public transportation. My taxes go up because the value of my home goes up. The schools are a large part of that.
What is happening in Wisconsin and other states, if it goes unchecked, will destroy much of value in this country. It will start with schools, already a target. It will affect other public service employees. It will bleed into the private sector as well, depressing wages for everyone, and exacerbating the increasing economic inequity in this nation.
I am a union rep because I understand this, because I can speak - and write - to it.
I am a union rep because my fellow teachers trust me to keep them informed, to make sure their interests are represented fairly, both within the building and within the very large (over 130,000 students) school district.
I stand with my sisters and brothers in Wisconsin, in Indiana, in Florida, in Michigan, in all the places they are under attack.
Today many of us are speaking out. We are writing. We are wearing red.
Today we express our solidarity.
It is not YET too late to take back our country, to save our public institutions, and thereby save the middle class.
Not YET. But time is running out.
Stand with us.
Make a difference.
And remember, if you could read this, thank a teacher.
Solidarity! The only true form of Peace.
PS to read more posts on this theme, please go to EDUSolidarity
What's Worth Teaching
this is a cross-posting of a review of this book. The review original appeared at Education Review
Marion Brady is a retired educator. He has taught in K-12 and at the university level. He has written columns for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and guest-blogs for the Washington Post. He has authored textbooks. He wants to change American education far more radically than do those normally identified as “reformers.”
This new book is the culmination of many years of thought and work. In it, Brady focuses on what he believes is key to reforming our educational institutions, and that is the construction of our curricula. As he has done for many years, he reminds us that the current framework of school curricula into four main domains of Language, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies is a product of the Committee of Ten in 1892, of which he notes
In the opening chapter, from which those words are taken, Brady identifies six specific problems and then offers what he considers the biggest problem of all. The six are, in order of appearance, criticisms of the “traditional curriculum because it
1. has no Agreed-upon overarching aim
2. disregards the brain’s need for order and organization
3. fails to exploit the teaching potential of the real, everyday world
4. lacks criteria for determining what new knowledge to teach, and what old knowledge
to discard to make room for the new
5. ignores important fields of knowledge
6. fails to capitalize on human variability
For each of these Brady provides illustrations, before coming to what he considers the most serious issue he can identify:
By now you should have a clear sense of Brady’s intention. He wants to present an entirely different way of thinking about and organizing instruction, by rethinking and redesigning how we do curriculum, for it is the curriculum that should determine what is taught and how we teach it.
Perhaps a key to understanding Brady’s approach to how we should organized curriculum can be found in one sentence at the beginning of Part Two, which is titled “A Solution.” On Page 15 we encounter the following:
It is not that we do not have a system of organization currently. Brady acknowledges that we do, but argues that it is dysfunctional, based on the outline of learning established in the 1890s by the Committee of Ten that approaches knowledge in a fragmented fashion, and which does not match how we naturally organize material in our brains. One can best grasp Brady’s thrust from two paragraphs (separated by one omitted sentence represented by the ellipsis) found on page 19:
Brady argues that the most important systems to study and learn are those that involve people as the main components. He suggest phrasing the elements of this systems architecture as being based on Something and defined by Time, Where in Space, Actor(s), Action, and Cause and the to Integrate. If one examines those five key elements, it should be reminiscent of basic journalism, albeit in a different order than the traditional presentation. Brady clear acknowledges this:
Only ultimately Brady’s model is a bit more complex, containing six elements. He chooses to phrase it as Time, Environment, Actors, Action, Shared Ideas, and Relationships, the last being part of how we apply what we learn from using the model to expand and deepen our understanding. Part II consists of an elaboration of this model, illustrated using several different examples from material students might learn in school, and amply supported by graphic representation. In a sense this is the heart of the book, as Brady tries to demonstrate how broadly applicable his model is. He explores how humans tends to explain, noting reliance upon either physical causes or human action, and our tendency to ignore the impact of anything we cannot fit into those two causes. He uses this as an illustration of shared ideas, a topic heavily explored in the section, which of course shapes our understanding of the world in which we live.
This extensive section, pp. 15-70, is followed by a briefer third part in which Brady explores The Model and the Traditional Curriculum. He begins by noting limitations of the traditional approach, and then offers a few comments about possible uses of the Model within the current structure of curriculum. Thus we will see its application in History, The Social Sciences, The Humanities, Language, The Natural Sciences, and Mathematics. He also addresses what he calls Special Classes, such as teaching non-native students.
After this exploration of the application of the Model within the various disciplines encountered in school, Brady devotes some time to discussing its limitations. Two often we are presented ways of thinking and organizing - and teaching - that are too rigid. Brady offers this caution:
For Brady, these words not only serve as recognition that if applied his model may need to be adjusted over time as it is applied. It is also implicitly a criticism of our continuing to rely upon a model of thinking more than a century old he thinks serves us poorly. He does not want to make the same mistake in his approach, even as he strongly argues that his model is much more usable, relates to how we tend to organize naturally, and thus can improve our learning far beyond what is too often the learning of facts and concepts too much isolated and unconnected to the real world.
The third section covers 18 pages. The fourth and final section, Notes on Teaching, is only 16, from 89 to 104. In it Brady offers some broader thoughts about schools in general. He tells us that he began playing with these ideas more than four decades ago. He offers some anecdotes from his own experience. He strongly criticizes common aspects of what students encounter in schools. For example, under Roles he begins
Similarly, under TEXTBOOKS we read
Brady criticizes much of what we see in education as Theory T - that the purpose of instruction is the transfer of information from those designated as knowledgeable - teachers, creators of textbooks, curriculum and standards writers - to the captive audience of students. This implies a particular understanding of the purpose of school and how and what is to be learned. While Brady does not reference it, readers might see this as parallel to the banking model so heavily criticized by Paolo Freire.
Against this Brady offers what he calls Theory R, one of relationship. He argues that much of what we learned and remember
I think it fair to say that what Brady is attempting to do with his model is to formalize how students learn naturally. He wants us to understand that the paradigm for how our schools and our learning is currently organized is outmoded - that is, if in fact it ever served a useful purpose. He believes strongly, as one involved with education for more than 6 decades, that we ill-serve our students and our society by remaining tied to a paradigm that does not support - and may hinder - real learning and understanding, that is contrary to how our minds work naturally.
Brady is explicitly critical of the current approaches to ‘reform’ that dominate our educational policy discussions. He things we need a radically different approach.
Like Brady was, I am a social studies teacher. Much of what he offers makes sense, based on my far shorter (16 years) tenure as a professional educator. I have seen bits and pieces of what he suggests in approaches such as History Alive! I have seen teachers do part of what he suggests. Where possible, I have implemented some similar approaches in my own pedagogy, which may be why when I first got to know Brady and his work almost a decade ago I found myself drawn to his approach.
Drawn to it, but not completely convinced. Given my druthers, I would completely redesign our entire public education system. I simply do not see that happening. Like Brady, I am highly critical of much of the thrust of our current efforts at “reform.” Yet absent a broader reform of our society on many levels, the best we seem able to do is to try to ameliorate the worst effects of that ‘reform.”
Nevertheless, I think this book is quite useful. It may not be possible to totally restructure our schools and our curriculum, but even within the current structure it is possible for schools, individual departments, individual teachers, to take what Brady offers and make major modifications to how they organize learning, to how they teach. In fact, many of our best teachers already do this. It is one of the stressors of being an educator that we are bound by rules and structures imposed from above and outside by people who do not fully understand either learning or teaching, we must seem to be abiding by them, yet our real fealty is to our students and to our discipline. I think it is possible for individual teachers to implement much of what Brady offers.
Would it be possible to totally redesign public education along the lines of his model? In theory, yes, although I do not see it happening. Perhaps we will see some private schools, or some charter schools, as well as the occasionally very brave individual school attempt to follow what Brady suggests. The problem is this - so long as those in public schools are going to be measured by the kinds of tests and measure we currently use - something that will not be changed that much by the efforts of the two multi-state consortia now underway - the validity of Brady’s approach will not be fairly assessed. Those who try it run the risk of being found “wanting” by how we currently assess learning, even if in the long run students participating in such an approach will be far better educated in the best sense of that word.
I said I was not convinced. I am not convinced it is possible to do as it needs to be done.
I am convinced that there is much wisdom and insight in what Brady has presented.
Those thinking about how to make what happens in our schools connect more effectively with our students will find this book useful for expanding their thinking, even if they decide they cannot fully implement all Brady suggests.
Marion Brady is a retired educator. He has taught in K-12 and at the university level. He has written columns for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and guest-blogs for the Washington Post. He has authored textbooks. He wants to change American education far more radically than do those normally identified as “reformers.”
This new book is the culmination of many years of thought and work. In it, Brady focuses on what he believes is key to reforming our educational institutions, and that is the construction of our curricula. As he has done for many years, he reminds us that the current framework of school curricula into four main domains of Language, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies is a product of the Committee of Ten in 1892, of which he notes
The curriculum now in near-universal use in America’s classrooms was poor when it was adopted, and has become more dysfunctional with each passing year. About the only thing it has going for it is familiarity and the comforts of ritual. It’s accepted not because it’s good, but because, like most rituals, it’s unexamined. Its problems are myriad and serious. (p. 5)
In the opening chapter, from which those words are taken, Brady identifies six specific problems and then offers what he considers the biggest problem of all. The six are, in order of appearance, criticisms of the “traditional curriculum because it
1. has no Agreed-upon overarching aim
2. disregards the brain’s need for order and organization
3. fails to exploit the teaching potential of the real, everyday world
4. lacks criteria for determining what new knowledge to teach, and what old knowledge
to discard to make room for the new
5. ignores important fields of knowledge
6. fails to capitalize on human variability
For each of these Brady provides illustrations, before coming to what he considers the most serious issue he can identify:
One problem, however, stands above all the rest in seriousness - the familiar curriculum’s failure to model the fundamental nature of knowledge. In the real world, the world an education is supposed to help learners understand, everything relates to everything. It’s a systematically-integrated whole, the parts of which are mutually supportive. The curriculum should model that whole, should help learners discover or create a corresponding conceptual framework or structure of knowledge, and it doesn’t. Instead, it breaks reality into myriad small pieces and studies each piece in isolation, with hardly a hint either of how the individual pieces related to each other or how they fit together. (p. 11)
By now you should have a clear sense of Brady’s intention. He wants to present an entirely different way of thinking about and organizing instruction, by rethinking and redesigning how we do curriculum, for it is the curriculum that should determine what is taught and how we teach it.
Perhaps a key to understanding Brady’s approach to how we should organized curriculum can be found in one sentence at the beginning of Part Two, which is titled “A Solution.” On Page 15 we encounter the following:
We take our systems of organizing for granted, but it’s no exaggeration to say that systems of organization make civilization possible.
It is not that we do not have a system of organization currently. Brady acknowledges that we do, but argues that it is dysfunctional, based on the outline of learning established in the 1890s by the Committee of Ten that approaches knowledge in a fragmented fashion, and which does not match how we naturally organize material in our brains. One can best grasp Brady’s thrust from two paragraphs (separated by one omitted sentence represented by the ellipsis) found on page 19:
Systems are what learners must understand, and that understanding comes from learners themselves investigating many different systems, looking for general principles. This requires (1) noting significant parts of the system being studied, (2) identifying important relationships among those parts, (3) deciding what forces are making the systems operate, (4) noting the interactions between the system and its environment, and (5) tracking changes to the system over time. . . .
If learners apply these five general analytical categories, over and over, to systems of all sorts, the categories will give them a mental framework - a way of organizing what is learned. That framework will, of course, be enhanced by the addition of appropriate analytical sub-categories expanding the learner’s mental “filing system.”
Brady argues that the most important systems to study and learn are those that involve people as the main components. He suggest phrasing the elements of this systems architecture as being based on Something and defined by Time, Where in Space, Actor(s), Action, and Cause and the to Integrate. If one examines those five key elements, it should be reminiscent of basic journalism, albeit in a different order than the traditional presentation. Brady clear acknowledges this:
As most readers will already have noted, the Model is just an elaborated version of what middle school newspaper staffs are told by their supervisors in their first meeting, that a proper news story include the relevant information about who, what, when, where, and why. (p. 27)
Only ultimately Brady’s model is a bit more complex, containing six elements. He chooses to phrase it as Time, Environment, Actors, Action, Shared Ideas, and Relationships, the last being part of how we apply what we learn from using the model to expand and deepen our understanding. Part II consists of an elaboration of this model, illustrated using several different examples from material students might learn in school, and amply supported by graphic representation. In a sense this is the heart of the book, as Brady tries to demonstrate how broadly applicable his model is. He explores how humans tends to explain, noting reliance upon either physical causes or human action, and our tendency to ignore the impact of anything we cannot fit into those two causes. He uses this as an illustration of shared ideas, a topic heavily explored in the section, which of course shapes our understanding of the world in which we live.
This extensive section, pp. 15-70, is followed by a briefer third part in which Brady explores The Model and the Traditional Curriculum. He begins by noting limitations of the traditional approach, and then offers a few comments about possible uses of the Model within the current structure of curriculum. Thus we will see its application in History, The Social Sciences, The Humanities, Language, The Natural Sciences, and Mathematics. He also addresses what he calls Special Classes, such as teaching non-native students.
After this exploration of the application of the Model within the various disciplines encountered in school, Brady devotes some time to discussing its limitations. Two often we are presented ways of thinking and organizing - and teaching - that are too rigid. Brady offers this caution:
Although new models of the real world liberate and expand thinking, they also eventually begin to have negative effects. What begins as a way of modeling reality in order to make it intellectually manageable tends to increasingly become the way of doing so. Instead of checking our models against reality to see how they should be changed to make them more accurate, we tend to accept only information that fits with or reinforces the one we’ve come to find comfortable and useful. The longer we use a particular model, the harder it becomes to change or discard it. (pp 87-88)
For Brady, these words not only serve as recognition that if applied his model may need to be adjusted over time as it is applied. It is also implicitly a criticism of our continuing to rely upon a model of thinking more than a century old he thinks serves us poorly. He does not want to make the same mistake in his approach, even as he strongly argues that his model is much more usable, relates to how we tend to organize naturally, and thus can improve our learning far beyond what is too often the learning of facts and concepts too much isolated and unconnected to the real world.
The third section covers 18 pages. The fourth and final section, Notes on Teaching, is only 16, from 89 to 104. In it Brady offers some broader thoughts about schools in general. He tells us that he began playing with these ideas more than four decades ago. He offers some anecdotes from his own experience. He strongly criticizes common aspects of what students encounter in schools. For example, under Roles he begins
One of the messages transmitted by the arrangement of the typical classroom is that the teacher is an expert on the subject at hand and her or his role is to distribute information. (p. 92)
Similarly, under TEXTBOOKS we read
To suggest that traditional textbooks are a major, perhaps the major obstacle to the achievement of educational excellence will seem to many to be nothing less than heresy. (p. 97)
Brady criticizes much of what we see in education as Theory T - that the purpose of instruction is the transfer of information from those designated as knowledgeable - teachers, creators of textbooks, curriculum and standards writers - to the captive audience of students. This implies a particular understanding of the purpose of school and how and what is to be learned. While Brady does not reference it, readers might see this as parallel to the banking model so heavily criticized by Paolo Freire.
Against this Brady offers what he calls Theory R, one of relationship. He argues that much of what we learned and remember
... we learned on our own as we discovered real-world patterns and relationships - new knowledge that caused us to constantly rethink, reorganized, reconstruct, and replace earlier knowledge. (p. 104)
I think it fair to say that what Brady is attempting to do with his model is to formalize how students learn naturally. He wants us to understand that the paradigm for how our schools and our learning is currently organized is outmoded - that is, if in fact it ever served a useful purpose. He believes strongly, as one involved with education for more than 6 decades, that we ill-serve our students and our society by remaining tied to a paradigm that does not support - and may hinder - real learning and understanding, that is contrary to how our minds work naturally.
Brady is explicitly critical of the current approaches to ‘reform’ that dominate our educational policy discussions. He things we need a radically different approach.
Like Brady was, I am a social studies teacher. Much of what he offers makes sense, based on my far shorter (16 years) tenure as a professional educator. I have seen bits and pieces of what he suggests in approaches such as History Alive! I have seen teachers do part of what he suggests. Where possible, I have implemented some similar approaches in my own pedagogy, which may be why when I first got to know Brady and his work almost a decade ago I found myself drawn to his approach.
Drawn to it, but not completely convinced. Given my druthers, I would completely redesign our entire public education system. I simply do not see that happening. Like Brady, I am highly critical of much of the thrust of our current efforts at “reform.” Yet absent a broader reform of our society on many levels, the best we seem able to do is to try to ameliorate the worst effects of that ‘reform.”
Nevertheless, I think this book is quite useful. It may not be possible to totally restructure our schools and our curriculum, but even within the current structure it is possible for schools, individual departments, individual teachers, to take what Brady offers and make major modifications to how they organize learning, to how they teach. In fact, many of our best teachers already do this. It is one of the stressors of being an educator that we are bound by rules and structures imposed from above and outside by people who do not fully understand either learning or teaching, we must seem to be abiding by them, yet our real fealty is to our students and to our discipline. I think it is possible for individual teachers to implement much of what Brady offers.
Would it be possible to totally redesign public education along the lines of his model? In theory, yes, although I do not see it happening. Perhaps we will see some private schools, or some charter schools, as well as the occasionally very brave individual school attempt to follow what Brady suggests. The problem is this - so long as those in public schools are going to be measured by the kinds of tests and measure we currently use - something that will not be changed that much by the efforts of the two multi-state consortia now underway - the validity of Brady’s approach will not be fairly assessed. Those who try it run the risk of being found “wanting” by how we currently assess learning, even if in the long run students participating in such an approach will be far better educated in the best sense of that word.
I said I was not convinced. I am not convinced it is possible to do as it needs to be done.
I am convinced that there is much wisdom and insight in what Brady has presented.
Those thinking about how to make what happens in our schools connect more effectively with our students will find this book useful for expanding their thinking, even if they decide they cannot fully implement all Brady suggests.
Teaching 2030: an important book on teaching by teachers
this is slightly modified from the original which appeared at Education Review
Berry, Barnett, and the Teacher Solutions Team (2011). Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools — Now and in the Future.
In all of the public discourse of what we need to do to fix public schools and educate our young people for the future, one set of voices has until now been conspicuously absent. It is the voices of teachers.
This new book, put together under the auspices of the Center for Teaching Quality established by lead author Barnett Berry, and with generous funding from the MetLife Foundation, is an important attempt to include the voices of teachers in helping frame the discussion of how we address our educational needs.
Those of us in classrooms, unless we choose to be oblivious, recognize that our profession needs to be redefined. We lose too many good teachers from classrooms because too often the only path for professional and financial advancement is through administration. In the meantime, we see the students arriving in our classrooms changing as society changes. Often we are prevented from changing what we do in order to meet them where they are. We know this has to change.
This book is the product of an extensive discussion among professional educators. Much of it was conducted online. The final product list 12 authors besides Berry, all themselves notable classroom teachers. They are the ones who sat down with him to put together the book as we have it. But that final product also included material offered by others in online discussions through the various arms of the Center for Teaching Quality, especially its Teacher Leaders Network, of which I am member. Thus while I was not part of the actual author group, I appear 3 times in the work. I do not think that disqualifies me from examining the work and encouraging others to read it.
The teachers participating in this endeavor collective bring a diverse set of experiences to it. Renee Moore taught English high school students in the Mississippi Delta, where she now teaches at a community college. Ariel Sacks and Jose Vilson teach in New York City middle schools. Laurie Wasserman has almost 30 years as a teacher of special education. After a distinguished career in a classroom, Shannon C’de Baca has spent a number of years doing online education. Jennifer Barnett now functions as school-based technology integration specialist in rural Alabama. Kilian Betlach is a Teach for America alumnus who was well-known as a blogger and is now an elementary school assistant principal. Carrie Kamm is a mentor-resident coach for an urban teacher residency program in Chicago. Among these and others in authoring group are winners of State Teacher of the Year (including one finalist for National Teacher of the Year), Milken award winners, Lilly Award winners, and so on. All have experience in trying to improve the teaching profession beyond the reach of their own classrooms. One finds a similar range of diversity and an equal amount of accomplishment in the 33 teachers who are also thanked for their contributions in the online discussions in which we took part.
In addition, those functioning as authors were able to participate in webinars with a number of outstanding experts from across the nation, including on expert from Australia.
The result is a book rich in insight, analysis, and suggestions for the future, one that has already received praise from many notables associated with education and teaching. Of greater importance, it is a book that will speak to a wide range of audiences: those who prepare our new teachers, those who administer our schools, those who make policy, and most of all, to those of us who teach now or may teach in the future.
In his Prologue, Barnett Berry makes a couple of key points that help a reader understand the thrust of the book. The authors
They get to this point by examining what works now in order to describe what will likely work and be needed in the schooling of the future. The vision “emerges from a student centered vision” that takes advantage of new tools, organizations and ideas. It is based on four “emergent realities”:
1. a transformed learning ecology for students and teacher
2. seamless connections in and out of cyberspace
3. differentiated paths and careers
4. “teacherpreneurs” who will foster innovation locally and globally
These rely on six levers for changes: 1. engaging the public in provocative ways
2. overhauling school finance systems
3. creating transformative systems of preparation and licensure
4. ensuring school working conditions that they know promote effective teaching
5. reframing accountability for transformative results
6. continuing to evolve teacher unions into professional guilds
Each of these levers and each of the realities could be a separate volume. Thus the authors cannot fully explore the dimensions of each, yet they provide more than enough to lay out a vision that is clearly possible. In part that is because of the experience they collectively bring to the task, and what they have absorb from the webinars and from the exchanges with each other and with those who participated in online discussion.
The aforementioned Prologue is titled “We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine.” It is followed by two chapters that can be considered introductory:
1. The Teachers of 2030 and a Hopeful Vision
2. A Very Brief History of Teaching in America.
The next four chapters explore the four Emergent Realities, each in some specificity. For example, Chapter 5 explores the 3rd of these Emergent Realities, Differentiated Pathways and Careers for a 21st-Century Profession. In just over 30 pages the authors explore four subthemes:
1. Outgrowing a One-Size-Fits-All Professions
2. Redefining the Professions for Results-Oriented
Teaching
3. Teacher Education for a Differentiated, Results-Oriented Profession
4. Professional Compensation for Differentiated Profession
After these four chapters the book spends almost 40 pages exploring the six policy levers of change before concluding with Taking Action for a Hopeful Future, with a subsection on “What You Can Do to Build a 21st- Century Teaching Profession.”
Perhaps the power of the book can best be understood through the notion of “Teacherprenuerism” as it is explored in Chapter 6. The term first appears near the beginning, with the idea of teacher entrepreneurs serving in hybrid positions that don’t easily fit the normal way we classify teachers. Allow me to offer the paragraph from p. 7 which first presents the idea in some detail, after setting the stage by reminding us how already teachers, many National Board Certified and comfortable with using the tools of the web, are de-isolating teaching and offering cost-effective ways of propagating exemplary teaching practices:
Lest one think that a pie in the sky belief about the future, several members of the team that wrote this book - and several of those who like me served as additional resources - already partially function in this fashion. The book posits a day where such teachers would not only be known to wider audiences of parents, community and business leaders and policy makers, but would be respected and listened to. Some of those participating in this process already have that kind of respect, for example, Renee Moore, who has served on the boards of both the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and as the first educator still in the classroom on the board of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (California). John Holland has served as a classroom teacher, a blogger for the Pew Charitable Trust blog Inside Pre-K and moderates an online community of accomplished teachers. Others have similar experiences of attempting to create hybrid roles where they can leverage their expertise and knowledge while remaining at least partially classroom based. They use their experience to project to the future they envision. The process has begun already, but the authors are talking about something more than selling one’s good lesson plans on E-bay. As John Holland notes in Chapter 6,
As more teacherpreneurs appear they will serve as a primary agents in developing connected learning. As we get more teachers who have greater facility in using the power of the web, not only will teachers be less isolated, but the nature of teaching will begin to change, and radically, as Emily Vickers notes
In part this will be because students will be accustomed to different ways of obtaining information. We are already seeing this among our current students. They know how to quickly obtain information, although we may still have to guide them in how to evaluate the information they obtain. They are comfortable building websites and increasingly also putting together wikis. It is incumbent upon the educational professionals to adapt what we do not only to meet our students where they are now, but also to anticipate how much this will change the nature of what we do. Teacherpreneurs will be key to a successful transition to a new approach to education.
We still have a way to travel to even come close to such a radical rethinking of the teaching profession. The book points out how much we already know, and how we can begin to move in such a direction, even if the path may change over the next several decades from what even the most imaginative of our current teachers can foresee. A key to this is that others with whom teachers interact will need to rethink how they do their jobs. Administrators will need to spend more time in classrooms, even teaching, and most certainly embrace the idea of teacher leadership. Unions will need to rethink how they serve the teachers who are their members, being more open to diverse roles and with those diverse roles different models of compensation. Policy makers will have to be willing to support and invest in the development of the kinds of hybrid roles necessary to implement the kind of teaching we will need. University-based teacher education will have to change, being more connected with what is happening in classrooms, and working together with community-based organizations, as education moves to be more firmly integrated in the communities in which are schools are located.
There are the first five points listed in the concluding chapter. By themselves they represent a major rethinking of how we have been approaching education and teaching. There are examples of these kinds of changes. I teach in a school that serves as a professional development school for a local state university, and we have had an increasingly close relationship between those who serve as mentor teachers and the university faculty. The next step is for more of those who are skilled mentors moving into a hybrid role where they not only mentor within their own classroom, but perhaps serve as adjunct instructors in the university environment, overcoming the artificial divide between learning about teaching and learning how to teach.
For this to work requires three additional points, also covered in the final chapter. The communities must become more involved, helping encourage the new roles of teacher-leaders even as administrations and unions have to redefine their relationship with one another. Parents and students must be willing to advocate on behalf of the effective teachers, providing the support that will enable teacher leaders to help redefine the conversation about teaching.
Most of all, teachers will have to step out of the isolation of their individual classrooms. They will
The book is intended as a starting point for ongoing conversations. The authors do not presume that they have imagined every possibility. They want to encourage further discussion. They encourage people to visit them at either of two websites, that of the Teaching 2030 social networking site and by connecting with other teachers from the Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millennium Institute.
I am as I write this in my 16th year of teaching. I have been a participant in the discussions of the Teacher Leaders Network for the past few years. I have gotten to know electronically a number of the authors of this book, and have been fortunate enough to meet both Barnett Berry and John Holland. I know how seriously all of the authors take the profession of teaching, and how much they already give of themselves to try to make the teaching profession a more effective way of serving our students, which is ultimately the goal.
For too long the voices of teachers have been systematically excluded from the public discourse about education. In part this book serves as an important corrective, or at least the start of one.
I am not only a teacher, but also one who engages in policy. Like the authors, I wear several hats besides that of classroom teacher. Here you encounter me as one who regularly writes about books on education in order to encourage others to read them. Like many of those who authored the book, I regular write online about education. We are bloggers; it is part of how we connect with one another.
Our expert teachers are a resource that we should value beyond what they accomplish in the classroom, as important as that is. We need to tap their expertise and insight, we need to hear their voices.
If you read this book, you should get a sense of not only how important the teacher voice is, but also how much we all gain from including it in the discussions.
What the authors have proposed is in some ways radical. It has the promise of moving us in a far more productive direction in how we approach the future of teaching. Since I am in my mid 60s, it is unlikely I will still be teaching in 2030. Several of the authors will be. They are helping reshape the profession to which they are dedicating their lives.
I feel as if I should end with the voice of one of the authors. Each offers some closing words at the end of the final chapter. The last are offered by Renee Moore, whose work I greatly respect. It seems appropriate to end this review as the book ends, with the words she offers on p. 214:
I too am dedicated to improving the teaching profession for the benefit of the students entrusted to our care. It is because I am that I fervently hope Renee Moore is right. Read this book.
Berry, Barnett, and the Teacher Solutions Team (2011). Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools — Now and in the Future.
In all of the public discourse of what we need to do to fix public schools and educate our young people for the future, one set of voices has until now been conspicuously absent. It is the voices of teachers.
This new book, put together under the auspices of the Center for Teaching Quality established by lead author Barnett Berry, and with generous funding from the MetLife Foundation, is an important attempt to include the voices of teachers in helping frame the discussion of how we address our educational needs.
Those of us in classrooms, unless we choose to be oblivious, recognize that our profession needs to be redefined. We lose too many good teachers from classrooms because too often the only path for professional and financial advancement is through administration. In the meantime, we see the students arriving in our classrooms changing as society changes. Often we are prevented from changing what we do in order to meet them where they are. We know this has to change.
This book is the product of an extensive discussion among professional educators. Much of it was conducted online. The final product list 12 authors besides Berry, all themselves notable classroom teachers. They are the ones who sat down with him to put together the book as we have it. But that final product also included material offered by others in online discussions through the various arms of the Center for Teaching Quality, especially its Teacher Leaders Network, of which I am member. Thus while I was not part of the actual author group, I appear 3 times in the work. I do not think that disqualifies me from examining the work and encouraging others to read it.
The teachers participating in this endeavor collective bring a diverse set of experiences to it. Renee Moore taught English high school students in the Mississippi Delta, where she now teaches at a community college. Ariel Sacks and Jose Vilson teach in New York City middle schools. Laurie Wasserman has almost 30 years as a teacher of special education. After a distinguished career in a classroom, Shannon C’de Baca has spent a number of years doing online education. Jennifer Barnett now functions as school-based technology integration specialist in rural Alabama. Kilian Betlach is a Teach for America alumnus who was well-known as a blogger and is now an elementary school assistant principal. Carrie Kamm is a mentor-resident coach for an urban teacher residency program in Chicago. Among these and others in authoring group are winners of State Teacher of the Year (including one finalist for National Teacher of the Year), Milken award winners, Lilly Award winners, and so on. All have experience in trying to improve the teaching profession beyond the reach of their own classrooms. One finds a similar range of diversity and an equal amount of accomplishment in the 33 teachers who are also thanked for their contributions in the online discussions in which we took part.
In addition, those functioning as authors were able to participate in webinars with a number of outstanding experts from across the nation, including on expert from Australia.
The result is a book rich in insight, analysis, and suggestions for the future, one that has already received praise from many notables associated with education and teaching. Of greater importance, it is a book that will speak to a wide range of audiences: those who prepare our new teachers, those who administer our schools, those who make policy, and most of all, to those of us who teach now or may teach in the future.
In his Prologue, Barnett Berry makes a couple of key points that help a reader understand the thrust of the book. The authors
...have come together, in harmony if not always in lock-step, about an expanded vision for student learning in the 21st century and for the teaching profession that will, in myriad ways, continue to accelerate that learning. (p. xiii)
They get to this point by examining what works now in order to describe what will likely work and be needed in the schooling of the future. The vision “emerges from a student centered vision” that takes advantage of new tools, organizations and ideas. It is based on four “emergent realities”:
1. a transformed learning ecology for students and teacher
2. seamless connections in and out of cyberspace
3. differentiated paths and careers
4. “teacherpreneurs” who will foster innovation locally and globally
These rely on six levers for changes: 1. engaging the public in provocative ways
2. overhauling school finance systems
3. creating transformative systems of preparation and licensure
4. ensuring school working conditions that they know promote effective teaching
5. reframing accountability for transformative results
6. continuing to evolve teacher unions into professional guilds
Each of these levers and each of the realities could be a separate volume. Thus the authors cannot fully explore the dimensions of each, yet they provide more than enough to lay out a vision that is clearly possible. In part that is because of the experience they collectively bring to the task, and what they have absorb from the webinars and from the exchanges with each other and with those who participated in online discussion.
The aforementioned Prologue is titled “We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine.” It is followed by two chapters that can be considered introductory:
1. The Teachers of 2030 and a Hopeful Vision
2. A Very Brief History of Teaching in America.
The next four chapters explore the four Emergent Realities, each in some specificity. For example, Chapter 5 explores the 3rd of these Emergent Realities, Differentiated Pathways and Careers for a 21st-Century Profession. In just over 30 pages the authors explore four subthemes:
1. Outgrowing a One-Size-Fits-All Professions
2. Redefining the Professions for Results-Oriented
Teaching
3. Teacher Education for a Differentiated, Results-Oriented Profession
4. Professional Compensation for Differentiated Profession
After these four chapters the book spends almost 40 pages exploring the six policy levers of change before concluding with Taking Action for a Hopeful Future, with a subsection on “What You Can Do to Build a 21st- Century Teaching Profession.”
Perhaps the power of the book can best be understood through the notion of “Teacherprenuerism” as it is explored in Chapter 6. The term first appears near the beginning, with the idea of teacher entrepreneurs serving in hybrid positions that don’t easily fit the normal way we classify teachers. Allow me to offer the paragraph from p. 7 which first presents the idea in some detail, after setting the stage by reminding us how already teachers, many National Board Certified and comfortable with using the tools of the web, are de-isolating teaching and offering cost-effective ways of propagating exemplary teaching practices:
The fruits of those labors have been realized in 2030. About 15% of the nation’s teachers - more than 600,000 - have been prepared in customized residency programs designed to fully train them in the cognitive science of teaching and to also equip them for new leadership roles. Most now serve in hybrid positions as teacherpreneuers, teaching students part of the day or week, and also have dedicated time lead as student support specialists, teacher educators, community organizers, and virtual mentors in teacher networks. Some spend some of their nonteaching time working closely university- and think tank-based researchers on studies of teaching and learning - or conducting policy analyses that are grounded in their everyday pedagogical experiences. In some school district, teachers in these hybrid roles earn salaries comparable to, if not higher than, the highest paid administrators.
Lest one think that a pie in the sky belief about the future, several members of the team that wrote this book - and several of those who like me served as additional resources - already partially function in this fashion. The book posits a day where such teachers would not only be known to wider audiences of parents, community and business leaders and policy makers, but would be respected and listened to. Some of those participating in this process already have that kind of respect, for example, Renee Moore, who has served on the boards of both the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and as the first educator still in the classroom on the board of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (California). John Holland has served as a classroom teacher, a blogger for the Pew Charitable Trust blog Inside Pre-K and moderates an online community of accomplished teachers. Others have similar experiences of attempting to create hybrid roles where they can leverage their expertise and knowledge while remaining at least partially classroom based. They use their experience to project to the future they envision. The process has begun already, but the authors are talking about something more than selling one’s good lesson plans on E-bay. As John Holland notes in Chapter 6,
The combination of self-publishing and the use of the internet as a platform for communication has already given rise to the “communities of practice” around topics ranging from lessons in how to teach fractions to using brain research to perform the teaching act as the highest levels. Teacherpreneurs will increasingly be leaders in these communities, which will stretch far beyond the confines of their school or district - a virtual domain where they are able to impact the profession on a large scale. (p. 143)
As more teacherpreneurs appear they will serve as a primary agents in developing connected learning. As we get more teachers who have greater facility in using the power of the web, not only will teachers be less isolated, but the nature of teaching will begin to change, and radically, as Emily Vickers notes
Teachers will, in fact, be orchestrators of learning - a concept we talk about today, but one that will force itself upon most everyone who expects to be a teacher in 2030. (p. 145)
In part this will be because students will be accustomed to different ways of obtaining information. We are already seeing this among our current students. They know how to quickly obtain information, although we may still have to guide them in how to evaluate the information they obtain. They are comfortable building websites and increasingly also putting together wikis. It is incumbent upon the educational professionals to adapt what we do not only to meet our students where they are now, but also to anticipate how much this will change the nature of what we do. Teacherpreneurs will be key to a successful transition to a new approach to education.
We still have a way to travel to even come close to such a radical rethinking of the teaching profession. The book points out how much we already know, and how we can begin to move in such a direction, even if the path may change over the next several decades from what even the most imaginative of our current teachers can foresee. A key to this is that others with whom teachers interact will need to rethink how they do their jobs. Administrators will need to spend more time in classrooms, even teaching, and most certainly embrace the idea of teacher leadership. Unions will need to rethink how they serve the teachers who are their members, being more open to diverse roles and with those diverse roles different models of compensation. Policy makers will have to be willing to support and invest in the development of the kinds of hybrid roles necessary to implement the kind of teaching we will need. University-based teacher education will have to change, being more connected with what is happening in classrooms, and working together with community-based organizations, as education moves to be more firmly integrated in the communities in which are schools are located.
There are the first five points listed in the concluding chapter. By themselves they represent a major rethinking of how we have been approaching education and teaching. There are examples of these kinds of changes. I teach in a school that serves as a professional development school for a local state university, and we have had an increasingly close relationship between those who serve as mentor teachers and the university faculty. The next step is for more of those who are skilled mentors moving into a hybrid role where they not only mentor within their own classroom, but perhaps serve as adjunct instructors in the university environment, overcoming the artificial divide between learning about teaching and learning how to teach.
For this to work requires three additional points, also covered in the final chapter. The communities must become more involved, helping encourage the new roles of teacher-leaders even as administrations and unions have to redefine their relationship with one another. Parents and students must be willing to advocate on behalf of the effective teachers, providing the support that will enable teacher leaders to help redefine the conversation about teaching.
Most of all, teachers will have to step out of the isolation of their individual classrooms. They will
... need to band together to document their professional practice and assemble both empirical evidence and compelling stories about what works in their classrooms and their communities - and, therefore what matters most for public policy. (p. 210)
The book is intended as a starting point for ongoing conversations. The authors do not presume that they have imagined every possibility. They want to encourage further discussion. They encourage people to visit them at either of two websites, that of the Teaching 2030 social networking site and by connecting with other teachers from the Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millennium Institute.
I am as I write this in my 16th year of teaching. I have been a participant in the discussions of the Teacher Leaders Network for the past few years. I have gotten to know electronically a number of the authors of this book, and have been fortunate enough to meet both Barnett Berry and John Holland. I know how seriously all of the authors take the profession of teaching, and how much they already give of themselves to try to make the teaching profession a more effective way of serving our students, which is ultimately the goal.
For too long the voices of teachers have been systematically excluded from the public discourse about education. In part this book serves as an important corrective, or at least the start of one.
I am not only a teacher, but also one who engages in policy. Like the authors, I wear several hats besides that of classroom teacher. Here you encounter me as one who regularly writes about books on education in order to encourage others to read them. Like many of those who authored the book, I regular write online about education. We are bloggers; it is part of how we connect with one another.
Our expert teachers are a resource that we should value beyond what they accomplish in the classroom, as important as that is. We need to tap their expertise and insight, we need to hear their voices.
If you read this book, you should get a sense of not only how important the teacher voice is, but also how much we all gain from including it in the discussions.
What the authors have proposed is in some ways radical. It has the promise of moving us in a far more productive direction in how we approach the future of teaching. Since I am in my mid 60s, it is unlikely I will still be teaching in 2030. Several of the authors will be. They are helping reshape the profession to which they are dedicating their lives.
I feel as if I should end with the voice of one of the authors. Each offers some closing words at the end of the final chapter. The last are offered by Renee Moore, whose work I greatly respect. It seems appropriate to end this review as the book ends, with the words she offers on p. 214:
We stand on the cusp of a great opportunity to end generations of educational discrimination and inequity, finally to fulfill the promises of our democratic republic. I believe the noblest teachers, students, and leaders of 2030 will be remembered by future generations as those who surged over the barriers to true public education and a fully realized teaching profession - while myopic former gatekeepers staggered to the sidelines of history.
I too am dedicated to improving the teaching profession for the benefit of the students entrusted to our care. It is because I am that I fervently hope Renee Moore is right. Read this book.
Save Our Schools March - who we are, part 1.
Last Sunday, January 23, I introduced you to Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, where I told you that
For the future of our children,
we demand the following . . .
* Equitable funding for all public school communities
* An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation
* Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies
and that the date of the event was July 28-31, 2011.
Starting today, I will begin to introduce you to some of the key people organizing the event, and explain why we are committing our time and energy to this important effort to save our schools.
Today I would like you to meet Katherine Cox.
From our About page you can learn that
I asked Katherine why she was volunteering in this effort. She told me the following:
Katherine is just one those dedicated to the well-being our our students and health of our public schools who has stepped up to the challenges we face.
We ask that you join us in supporting Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, July 28-31.
You can see who has endorsed us (and there you can find out how YOU can endorse us)
You can contribute to help us.
See how YOU can help us in this effort.
Thanks for reading.
Please consider helping let others know about this effort.
Help us Save Our Schools.
Peace.
For the future of our children,
we demand the following . . .
* Equitable funding for all public school communities
* An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation
* Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies
and that the date of the event was July 28-31, 2011.
Starting today, I will begin to introduce you to some of the key people organizing the event, and explain why we are committing our time and energy to this important effort to save our schools.
Today I would like you to meet Katherine Cox.
From our About page you can learn that
Katherine McBride Cox, who grew up in Louisiana, initially began her career as a college English instructor. She recently retired after 35 years as an educator in Arizona where she was a classroom teacher, an elementary principal, and a high school principal. She developed a nationally recognized career education program for 5th and 6th graders called Window on the World. She taught self-contained gifted students for eight years and later worked with at-risk middle school students. She also served as an instructional coach, coaching other teachers. She serves on the Information Coordination Committee and the Blogging/Social Networking Sub-Committee.
I asked Katherine why she was volunteering in this effort. She told me the following:
When No Child Left Behind was passed, I was not as wise as others.
Arizona is one of the most poorly funded states in the nation as far as K-12 education goes. I was glad that we would be getting additional monies.
It took me awhile to see that we had made a pact with the devil. Standards actually were lowered because the state had to make the new state tests easier year after year in order to get enough students to graduate. The tests became meaningless, yet schools were ranked according to their test scores.
In order to get the excelling label, principals were telling teachers to drill and kill on the subjects tested – reading, math and writing – and to neglect science, social studies, p.e. and the arts. In the past, at least 75% of our students were on grade level or better. Now I could see that the top 75% of our students were getting a worse education than these students had received before NCLB.
As a high school principal, I could see a train wreck heading down the track. If freshmen had not had 4th grade geology – the rock cycle, including sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rock or 5th grade human body systems -- were we supposed to introduce these concepts for the first time to freshmen in biology and physical science classes?
Learning became tedious for students and teachers alike. No longer were we attempting to ignite fires in the minds of our students. I ended up retiring in December of 2009 and set up my website, In the Trenches with School Reform.
I began following teacherken on Daily Kos, as well as bloggers such as Anthony Cody, Nancy Flanagan, and Valerie Strauss. I continually said in my blog – I’m tired of talk. Others like me have been talking and explaining for years. It’s time to take action.
Anthony Cody and Victoria Young made contact with me and eventually I was asked to join this group. I was delighted to be asked to help.
I had spent 35 years as a teacher and principal trying to make our schools better and better. For a long time, I believe I succeeded. After NCLB came along, it seemed that my life’s work had been for nothing. Everything I had helped build was dismantled. For what? I knew that we had fallen into the rabbit hole where everything is upside down and nothing makes sense.
I’m in this battle to take our schools back and make them better. But first we must wrestle them away from the likes of the Michelle Rhees and Bill Gates of the world – and the grip of the federal government.
Katherine is just one those dedicated to the well-being our our students and health of our public schools who has stepped up to the challenges we face.
We ask that you join us in supporting Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, July 28-31.
You can see who has endorsed us (and there you can find out how YOU can endorse us)
You can contribute to help us.
See how YOU can help us in this effort.
Thanks for reading.
Please consider helping let others know about this effort.
Help us Save Our Schools.
Peace.
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action
For the future of our children,
we demand the following . . .
* Equitable funding for all public school communities
* An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation
* Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies
* Curricula developed by and for local school communities
Those the four key demands of an important initiative on public education.
It is geared towards a gathering in our nation's capital,
It is geared towards a gathering in our nation's capital, July 28-31 sorry - I had wrong dates before.
We want your help and support.
Here's our website
Let me tell you more, including why I am involved, and you should be as well.
This is an outgrowth of efforts by many educators to have our voices heard in the discussions over education policy over the past few years. When Anthony Cody established the movement of Teachers Letters To Obama, we got the support of thousands, but in conversations with the Department of Education, including with Secretary of Education Duncan, somehow we were not listened to, but rather talked at.
Let me share from the About Us page of our website:
I am honored to be a part of this group, although there are others doing far more than am I. They include university professors, retired principals, teachers, parents, educational advocates.
Our list of endorsers can be seen here, although it is hard for us to stay up to date, as more and more people involved with education, well known and ordinary people, step up to support us.
We are planning a four-day event. It will include a gathering near the White House. It will include workshops and addresses based at American University. Diane Ravitch has already agreed to speak to us.
Those of us involved in doing the work to prepare for this are doing it on top of our other responsibilities, because we believe in its importance. We are working with a professional organizer who has previously helped organize similar events in DC for non-profits. We understand what we have to do for permits, we have reserved space for both the demonstration and for the conference.
But now we need more.
We need support.
We need endorsements.
We need more volunteers.
We can surely use contributions.
Look again at some of the major names in education who have endorse this
Diane Ravitch
Deborah Meier
Alfie Kohn
David Berliner, past president of American Educational Research Association
Yong Zhao of Michigan State University
Kenneth Goodman, emeritus at U of Arizona
Sam Meisels, President of the Erickson Institute in Chicago - an expert on early childhood education
Note the leaders of parent groups:
Julie Woestehoff of PURE in Chicago
Rita Solnet of Parents Across America
Mona David of New York Parents Charter Association
we have former state teachers of the year
we have university professors
we have film makers
we have ordinary teachers and principals
We have much of the leadership of Rethinking Schools
we have ordinary folks who care deeply about what is happening to public education
We are not being funded by the Gates or Broad Foundations.
We do not have the access to media of Davis Guggenheim with Waiting for Superman, or Michele Rhee being on the covers of Time and Newsweek
We have something far more important. We have the voices of those most committed to public education and the student in all of our schools, including charters.
We need more.
We need you.
Please consider how you can help.
You can contribute
You can sign up to stay informed.
You can volunteer by emailing our volunteer coordinator at elwaingortji at cbe dot ab dot ca
You can pass on the information about Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action to others - via email, Twitter, Facebook or other means.
Thank you in advance for anything you can do.
Remember:
July 28-31, 2011
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action
Peace.
For the future of our children,
we demand the following . . .
* Equitable funding for all public school communities
* An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation
* Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies
* Curricula developed by and for local school communities
Those the four key demands of an important initiative on public education.
It is geared towards a gathering in our nation's capital,
It is geared towards a gathering in our nation's capital, July 28-31 sorry - I had wrong dates before.
We want your help and support.
Here's our website
Let me tell you more, including why I am involved, and you should be as well.
This is an outgrowth of efforts by many educators to have our voices heard in the discussions over education policy over the past few years. When Anthony Cody established the movement of Teachers Letters To Obama, we got the support of thousands, but in conversations with the Department of Education, including with Secretary of Education Duncan, somehow we were not listened to, but rather talked at.
Let me share from the About Us page of our website:
Getting to this point has been a long journey. For the last few years, thousands of teachers and parents have been calling for action against No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and, more recently, questioning Race to the Top (RTTT).
Teachers, students, and parents from across the country have staged protests, started blogs, written op-eds, and called and written the White House and the U.S. Department of Education to try to halt the destruction of their local schools.
Numerous efforts have been made to get U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama to listen to US – the teachers, parents, and students who experience the effects of these disastrous policies every day. WE know that NCLB is not working. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to make our voices heard. Although we have the knowledge, the expertise, and the relationships with students that make education possible, we have been shut out of the conversation about school reform.
We, like all teachers and parents, want better schools. For our children’s sake, we are organizing to improve our schools – but not through the vehicle known as NCLB. It has been a disaster. Although there are various opinions about the many issues involved with school reform, it is now time to speak with ONE VOICE – that is, No Child Left Behind must not be reauthorized. We reclaim our right to determine how our children will be educated. We are organizing to revitalize an educational system that for too many children focuses more on test preparation than meaningful learning.We demand a humane, empowering education for every child in America.
Where we are today is due to the efforts of many people. Diane Ravitch had the integrity and the courage to speak up when she saw first-hand the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind. Jesse Turner (Children are More than Test Scores) walked from Connecticut to Washington, D.C. in support of public schools. The list of those who have inspired us goes on and on.
Ken Bernstein (teacherken), Nancy Flanagan, Anthony Cody, Rita Solnet – so many people began to step up, saying, “It’s time to do something.” And here we are in January 2011. With thousands and thousands of voices shouting, “No, no, no” to NCLB and RTTT, and with few policymakers listening, we say, IT IS TIME TO TAKE ACTION.
I am honored to be a part of this group, although there are others doing far more than am I. They include university professors, retired principals, teachers, parents, educational advocates.
Our list of endorsers can be seen here, although it is hard for us to stay up to date, as more and more people involved with education, well known and ordinary people, step up to support us.
We are planning a four-day event. It will include a gathering near the White House. It will include workshops and addresses based at American University. Diane Ravitch has already agreed to speak to us.
Those of us involved in doing the work to prepare for this are doing it on top of our other responsibilities, because we believe in its importance. We are working with a professional organizer who has previously helped organize similar events in DC for non-profits. We understand what we have to do for permits, we have reserved space for both the demonstration and for the conference.
But now we need more.
We need support.
We need endorsements.
We need more volunteers.
We can surely use contributions.
Look again at some of the major names in education who have endorse this
Diane Ravitch
Deborah Meier
Alfie Kohn
David Berliner, past president of American Educational Research Association
Yong Zhao of Michigan State University
Kenneth Goodman, emeritus at U of Arizona
Sam Meisels, President of the Erickson Institute in Chicago - an expert on early childhood education
Note the leaders of parent groups:
Julie Woestehoff of PURE in Chicago
Rita Solnet of Parents Across America
Mona David of New York Parents Charter Association
we have former state teachers of the year
we have university professors
we have film makers
we have ordinary teachers and principals
We have much of the leadership of Rethinking Schools
we have ordinary folks who care deeply about what is happening to public education
We are not being funded by the Gates or Broad Foundations.
We do not have the access to media of Davis Guggenheim with Waiting for Superman, or Michele Rhee being on the covers of Time and Newsweek
We have something far more important. We have the voices of those most committed to public education and the student in all of our schools, including charters.
We need more.
We need you.
Please consider how you can help.
You can contribute
You can sign up to stay informed.
You can volunteer by emailing our volunteer coordinator at elwaingortji at cbe dot ab dot ca
You can pass on the information about Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action to others - via email, Twitter, Facebook or other means.
Thank you in advance for anything you can do.
Remember:
July 28-31, 2011
Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action
Peace.
Why Great Teachers Quit: And How We Might Stop the Exodus
If teachers, parents, school boards, administrators, community members, and lawmakers can listen to each other and work on this problem together, we can lessen the tide of teacher attrition, ultimately improving the learning and working environment in schools for everyone. (p. 156)
Those are the final words of this new book by Katy Farber. Depending on what statistics you use, we lose up to 30% of new teachers in the first three years, up to 50% in the first five. Some clearly should not have been teachers in the first place. But others bring the passion, knowledge and, at least potentially, the skill we need for all of our students. Some of those we lose early in their career are already great teachers, others are potentially so. The reasons that cost us these teachers also cost us those later in their careers, who all recognize are great.
This book can help us begin to address the problem.
Katy Farber was mentoring another teacher at her school in Vermont when that teacher quit after only two years. She was stunned. Her mentee was enthusiastic, creative, and the kids loved her. Farber decided to study the issue of teacher attrition, why we lose so many so early, and in the process began hearing consistent messages from teachers across the country. This was also at a point in her own professional career that potentially represented a cross-roads for her:
A perfect storm of difficult parents, a new principal, and a new teaching partner brought many of these issues to the forefront for me (p. xiii)
This book is something you can choose to sit down and read through, but the design makes it clear that there are other approaches you can take. After the various introductory materials, there are eight chapters, followed by a brief set of Final Thoughts by the author, a list of references, and an index. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a specific area that is a source of tension and possible disillusionment for teachers. In order, these are
1. Standardized Testing
2. Working Conditions in Today's Schools
3. Ever-Higher Expectations
4. Bureaucracy
5. Respect and Compensation
6. Parents
7. Administrators
8. School Boards
Each chapter presents a real-life scenario, drawn from Farber's contacts with teachers through conversations, posts on blogs, emails, and other forms of communication. The scenarios are followed by discussions containing thoughts from additional teachers, as well as a list of suggestions Farber describes as "practicable, applicable recommendations for administrators and teacher leaders" (p. xvi).
It is fair to say that while there is no one single reason causing teachers to leave the profession, a large number of the reasons that influence them, and which Farber explores in this book, could be generally classified as experiencing a lack of respect. That lack of respect applies to skill, knowledge, work conditions, salary, treatment by administrators, and treatment by parents.
Let's focus on working conditions for a moment. Teachers have far less flexibility for things like bodily functions and meals than do most menial workers. There are also issues with unhealthy buildings, use of toxic substances to clean. There are real issues of safety. Imagine you have a college degree. Now imagine you may have to go three hours without being able to take a bathroom break, or that you may have a lunch period as short as 15-20 minutes to yourself. That is the real world of conditions for many teachers.
Or consider this. A significant proportion of teachers, particularly at the elementary level, are female. If they are starting families, and wish to breast feed an infant, is there any provision for a teacher to express milk during the school day? Or is our solution going to be that we are going to exclude nursing mothers from being in the classroom, even though we might thereby diminish the pool of highly qualified and effective teachers?
Farber offers thoughtful comments from teachers on all the topics she covers. Because the impact of testing is perhaps the most covered of these, I will not explore the valuable material she offers on that topic. But we should not avoid exploring the related topic of ever-higher expectations. Even without the imposition of such higher expectations, responsible teachers already feel crushed by the demands on the time they have. Increasingly, the demands “are not directly related to teaching students” which as Farber notes, is often the main motivation for teachers to be in the classroom. She also writes:
This state of affairs is exhausting and dispiriting. Many teachers shared that they simply don’t have enough time to do everything that they feel they should be doing. And it is eroding their personal and professional lives. (p. 44)
The advice offered by veteran teachers is to set limits, as one experience suggests to no more than 9 hours of school-related work daily. Yet this can create conflicts for those really dedicated to their students. If, for example, I were to limit my workday to 9 hours, of which 7.5 were in school, how could I conceivably read and correct papers from the vast majority of my 192 students in order for those corrections to be part of a meaningful learning experience? Do I limit the amount of work I assign in order to keep up with it? Do I shortchange the feedback to which my students are entitled? Do I allow the responsibilities of effective teaching to consume time that should be available for things outside of my school responsibilities? None of the three choices is truly acceptable, yet in reality for many teachers such are the options from which they can choose. Choices like this are just one example of the pressures that many good teachers experience, and that can help drive them from the profession.
Hopefully by now you have a sense that that book will connect you with the real experience of real teachers. The structure provides not merely their reactions, but a context from which those reactions flow, as well as material that can help ameliorate some of the problems that are contributing to our losing some of the teachers we really want to keep.
Just that justifies purchasing the book as a valuable reference tool. But that is not all one gets from this book. The final four pages of text, 153-156, are under the title of “Afterward: Final Thoughts” and these pages bring together final conclusions from the wealth of material Farber has provided. There are three sections, titled respectively, Why Teachers Teach,: To Educational Leaders, Policy Makers and Politicians; and To Teachers. In the first, Farber tells that most teachers look beyond the challenges discussed in the book.
They tend to be idealists. They strive constantly to improve their teaching, public education, and the lives of their students. It is our responsibility as citizens, educational leaders, parents, and politicians to support them in doing so. (p. 153)
In the 2nd, directed to those who are not teachers but have a great influence on education, Farber offers 4 points, the last of which is this:
Elevate the dialogue about public education by infusing your comments, thoughts, and ideas about education with respect for the hard work that teachers are doing in America. As you may have noticed from this book and several others like it, teaching is no easy task. Before making broad and sweeping pronouncements about education, think how your comments will forward the goals of educating children and supporting teachers. (p. 155)
Speaking as a teacher, were the public dialogue about education more respectful about teachers, we would likely be less resentful of others who do not understand the task of teaching and seek to impose “solutions” without regard to the real welfare of the students who are our primary concern.
Farber concludes with words directed towards teachers. You have already read, at the very beginning of this review, her final words. In this final portion of the book she refers to words by Jonathan Kozol about making the classroom “a better and more joyful place than when [the students] entered it” (from his Letters to a Young Teacher). Kozol also reminds us that we cannot let our concern for professional decorum overwhelm and suppress our very human need to reach out to and comfort our students. Farber concludes her quoting of Kozol with words from p. 208 of that book directed to teachers: “A battle is beginning for the soul of education, and they must be its ultimate defenders.”
Farber wants teachers to remember why we got into education, to reconnect with our beliefs, use those to fuel our energy. Or as she puts in the final sentence of her penultimate paragraph on p. 156: “Remember your core beliefs about life, learning, and teaching, and then let them guide and refresh you.”
For public education to properly serve our students and our society, we must focus on quality teachers. They are the most important in-school factor. We certainly do not want to discourage the best of them, to continue to see them leave the profession out of frustration.
This is a book by a teacher, with words of teachers, about teachers, and about the challenges they face. It can remind those of us who do teach why we do so, not only to reconnect us with our core beliefs, but also to motivate us to speak up beyond our individual classrooms on behalf of the well-being of our students and the ultimate success of public schools.
The book is also something that others concerned with education should read with care, if for no other reason that no meaningful improvement in public education can occur without a solid and continuing cadre of dedicated and committed and highly skilled teachers. Insofar as politicians, policy makers and others ignore that, they will undermine the possibilities of any meaningful reform.
We can no longer continue the ongoing loss of skilled teachers. It costs too much financially. It costs even more in lost learning and benefits to our society.
I highly recommend that anyone concerned about the future of public education read and absorb this book. That would be a good start towards turning our discussions about educational policy in directions less destructive of the core of skilled teachers we have but we are losing.
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