(Today's post is a
guest post from Caroline Lewis,
author of Just Back Off and Let Us Teach. Her bio and info about her
book is at the end of this article. Thanks so much Caroline for a thought
provoking article! - Pat)
“Can we make the teaching profession noble again? ”
Yes we
can, and, more importantly, we must!
Teaching is losing its magic. Every year, the profession
prematurely loses some of our most effective colleagues, AND we fail to attract
to the profession enough top college graduates with the talent and passion for
teaching.
Many
of us blame the education reform movement for this. They are perhaps well intentioned,
but leaders ignore the reality that successful public education requires
development of three key pillars or legs of a stool: (A) the readiness-to-learn
of the learners; (B) the quality of the teachers; and (C) the culture and tone
of the school (leadership, resources, parental involvement, etc.)
We
seem fixated on only one of the pillars, teachers, and not in ways that improve
quality, but in ways that undermine, place blame and seriously demoralize too
many good teachers. Somehow,
in the debate on what constitutes successful education, the spotlight has
become laser-focused on a teacher’s ability to get students to pass tests.
What’s easily
measurable isn’t always what’s significant in teaching-learning
environments. We
have to recognize that effective teaching is about so much more. What a teacher truly contributes to an individual student’s
attitude, ambition, choices, career paths, and so on may never truly be known.
Teacher effectiveness is a complex issue as I detail in my book, and much is
undocumented of the rich classroom exchanges between teachers and students.
For
too many, teaching is now reduced to robotic drilling of information in
preparation for tests. Teachers as caring, scholarly, creative, pedagogical
wizards, is not the ideal being presented or acknowledged. The joy of teaching
has been diminished, and the wind has been knocked out of teachers’ sails. They
do not feel validated, much less fulfilled, and are vulnerable to burnout and
despair in the current climate.
We must rethink our education strategy
and change the current debate. I like to remind those who disagree with me that we cannot—we
categorically cannot—reform public education if our pool of effective teachers
continues to shrink. We must extol, not vilify,
teaching, restoring nobility to the profession—it is the thing that drew
me in. I fell in love with teaching in my early teens as I drank in the
opportunity I saw teachers had to educate, engage, and make a difference in
learning, lives, and schools. Back in
the 70’s teaching was still an honorable profession and it called out to me.
We can
and must make the profession noble again. Let’s change the
focus of education reform, attend to all three legs of the stool, and
put people like me on the team in charge of the TEACHING leg.
Here’s
what I would do:
a.
Stop spending millions of education reform dollars
on designing new systems of instruction and measurement every few years at local,
state, and federal levels.
b.
Take this money and re-direct it to teacher
salaries and meaningful professional development for teachers and
administrators, including department chairpersons.
c.
Work, over the next five years, to raise the
starting salary for teachers to $75K. This
will go a long way to attracting and retaining the brightest and the best.
d.
Require a certified Masters in Education for all
teachers, and fund or heavily subsidize it for the brightest applicants with
the talent and passion
for teaching.
e.
Use these strategies to elevate the ranks of the
teaching profession -
• Keep the
pay scale high; require specific certification/training;
• Recognize our
effective teachers and weed out those who don’t belong; and
• Attract
and hire only the best teaching candidates.
Then we can Just Back Off and LET THEM TEACH…
About Caroline Lewis:
After spending 22 years as a science teacher and
school principal, Caroline Lewis became director of education for Fairchild
Tropical Botanic Garden and developed the award-winning Fairchild Challenge to
engage students in environmental issues. As founder and CEO of The CLEO
Institute, she applies her educational leadership skills to promote
solution-oriented approaches to address climate disruptions. A native of
Trinidad, she earned an MS in Educational Leadership in 1999 and is committed
to elevating and celebrating the teaching profession.
Visit the author online:
About the Book:
If America wants to reform public education and
regain its status in the world, it must start valuing teachers and stop the
present policy of commissioning study after study and revising measurement
tests every few years. That assertion is made by author Caroline Lewis, who
outlines reform in her new book Just Back Off and Let Us Teach: A Book for
Effective Teachers and Those Who Champion Them. Both descriptive and
motivational, Lewis' book defines five skills distinctive of effective teachers
called SCOPE (Sensitivity, Communication, Organization, Professionalism, and
Enthusiasm) Skills. Lewis encourages all teachers to self-examine and grade
themselves on their own effectiveness using SCOPE Scores.
