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It is a little disappointing that most of the recent strategies to improve education in the United States do not utilize the “nuclear energy” that could power positive change. We often fail to recognize and to reinforce the real mission of teaching – to help young people grow and develop.  That is what we, as educators, signed up to do.  That is what teachers and principals need to accomplish to be satisfied with their work.  If our strategies for change do not respect that mission, then they are just procedural efforts and will not last and will not have impact.

Michael Fullan^[1]identifies a couple of the wrong drivers for educational change such as accountability schemes and an emphasis on individual teachers.  When Fullan talks about the right kind of efforts he says, 

“The mindset that works for whole system reform is the one that inevitably generates individual and collective motivation and corresponding skills to transform the system.”

Given a meaningful opportunity, most teachers want to improve their practice if it will help them to reach students more effectively. That desire is much more powerful when it is experienced collegially.  For most of us, experiencing a real achievement in concert with others – a team if you will – magnifies the achievement/performance and reinforces the desire to continue to experience that collective growth.  If that sounds like pop psychology or locker room motivation, let me give you some examples from my own experience.

Example 1: TESA

Years ago, I participated in a district experience with a very simple, but research-based, program for making small, but significant improvements in teaching.  It was called “Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement” or TESA.  (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/04/06/30tesa.h24.html ) The program introduced simple teaching strategies such as moving around the room to get near students rather than sitting behind your desk.  It turns out that students were a little more alert if you were standing next to them.  Teachers were also reminded to use students’ names because they paid more attention if they thought they might be called on by name rather than relying only on the students who raised their hands.  They were about 15 simple strategies that were introduced one at a time and teachers had a week or so to try them out.  The interesting part of the program is that teachers were visited by other teachers who scored the degree to which a teacher used the strategy.  (It was hard not to score well when all you had to do is move around the room and score points as though you were bouncing around in a pinball machine.). The scores were not part of any formal evaluation.  It was successful as an ice-breaker that made it OK for teachers to talk with each other about teaching, which rarely happened in the teachers’ lounge.  It also organized those conversations around teaching practices that had been well researched.  Most teachers engaged with the program, became more enthusiastic,  and felt better about their practice. Today there are more sophisticated feedback opportunities for teachers to experience such as Charlotte Danielson’s Framework or other opportunities that center on best practices in teaching.

Example 2:  Observing a Lesson Before Hiring

I mentioned in the “about me” part of this site, that I worked in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  At one point after the district had gone through some initial steps a getting better, a new superintendent was hired, and I was made his assistant along with another gentleman who came in from out of the district.  The other assistant, who was to become a good friend and colleague, brought a practice to the district of observing a live lesson from every teacher who was interviewed for a position in the district, even those who were transferring within the district.  While it made sense in principle, I suppose many of us wondered if that would be practical or necessary, but we went along and found a group of students for every lesson to be observed, observed the lesson and then conferenced with the teacher.  Whatever reservations that I might have had were quickly obliterated.  It was a genius strategy.  It took a lot of training of school building and district administrators so that we knew how to do the observations and conferences, but the end results were impressive.  We had worried that potential teachers would find the process too intimidating and might not apply for jobs with the district.  In fact, the opposite was true.  While there might have been some nervousness, we found that good teachers would actively seek out the district and the interview process because they wanted to work where someone would appreciate the complexity of the teaching performance and give them opportunities for growth.  The lesson for me: when given the opportunities, teachers will drive toward improvement.  similar practices in use today provide the same insight into teacher’s inherent motivation to improve.

Example 3:  Collectively, Teachers Want Systems Change

When I worked at the state level in Iowa, we worked hard to have positive partnerships with the state associations representing teachers, school boards and school administrators.  We met both collectively and privately, and I learned from the perspectives of each of the membership groups.  After one productive meeting, I was speaking privately with the executive for the teachers’ association and complimented him on the stance of his organization for their willingness to engage in the process of improving the educational system.  He explained that only half the energy coming from his members was directed to improving the typical “wages, hours, and working conditions” that were the stuff of collective bargaining.  He said the broadest membership demand on the organization was to improve the educational system to better benefit students.  Current positions from AFT and NEA give evidence that organized teachers support positive education change, but that’s not often what you hear in the press.

This collective motivation should be at the forefront of our efforts.  We have to reject efforts that view all teachers and building leaders as the problem and instead harvest the motivation and provide the support to to help them actualize that mission.  Front line practitioners cannot succeed without the systemic changes mentioned elsewhere on this website, but they can be the soul of the needed changes if we give them the chance.

^[1]Michael Fullan, Seminar Series 2004, Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform.  Center for Strategic Education, April, 2011