This is the first in a series of blogs about enhancing “Teacher Talent: A Profession In Need.”
Teachers and the teaching profession “has a major image problem. Unfortunately, this perception of mediocrity has negatively affected the national reputation of teaching, initiating a cycle of undesirable outcomes that can be felt throughout the profession.”
Why Teaching Has An Image Problem
The fact that almost every adult in the US has attended school is a very good thing for the nation. It is not necessarily a good thing for the teaching profession. For example, the persons participating in the above poll are on the verge of graduating from college but have an uninformed sense of familiarity with the profession of teaching. They have been on the receiving end of teaching for more than fifteen years of their young lives and they perceive teaching through the eyes of a student. They, like the proverbial hotel patron in the television commercial, claim an expertise in a skilled profession (brain surgery) as the result of their wisdom in staying at a Holiday Inn Express. At the same time, these participants attach higher esteem to the professions of engineering, the law, medicine and scientific technology. There is a respectful “awe” associated with professions that are less familiar or with which they have very selective yet fanciful experience.
I choose the term “uninformed” familiarity, because being a student is not being a teacher. I have sat in the dentist’s chair and observed and felt the work of my dentists. As a consumer of dentistry, I appreciate the skills of a dentist in preventative and responsive care. But, I am unbelievably uninformed about dentistry. Each of us has an uninformed familiarity regarding aspects of our world. We need to be careful that we understand that such a limited familiarity may lead to uninformed conclusions.
In the functional assessment of professions, teaching is exactly like other professions and also very different than those professions. A teacher is college educated. A baccalaureate or master’s degree and certification by a teacher preparation program is a requirement for employment as a teacher in public education. Similarly, education and an academic degree is required for a civil engineer, certified public accountant, and psychologist. Many teachers also have earned master’s, specialist and doctoral degrees, just as lawyers, doctors and dentists add professional education programs to their undergraduate degrees. The definition of profession and professional is appropriately applied to teachers.
There is a body of knowledge, professional skills, and dispositions that are discrete to teaching just as there are to law, medicine and engineering. A state-awarded teaching license derives from the teacher’s major emphasis in her baccalaureate degree, such as English, math, science, business, French, or counseling. However, there is a distinction between a major in a particular subject and a teacher of that subject. An historian focuses on an understanding of history while a history teacher focuses on teaching children to think like an historian using history as the subject. A medical doctor practices the science of medicine while a teacher in a medical college teaches an understanding and sequential training of those sciences. Teaching itself is the understanding and use of pedagogical philosophy, arts and skills. Teaching that causes children to learn is a constant, reflexive process of teaching, assessing what has been learned, correcting and reteaching for learning errors or misunderstandings, followed by more teaching for extended learning. Teaching is cognitive and dispositional architecture and construction.
Yet, there are at least three distinctions that distract the public acceptance of teachers as esteemed professionals, beyond the familiarity issues. First, most teachers are paid by local and state tax dollars. It is difficult for many in our local communities to separate teaching and teachers from their annual property tax bills. Every household’s annual property tax bill states the amount of tax money allocated to local schools and this is an irritant. How can a professional be on the public “dole”?
Second, most teachers are employed for a ten month annual contract. The perception is that teachers have the summer months “off.” True, in many instances. Less true now than in the past when working nine months of the year was preferred by most teachers. Very appropriately, professional education and training in the summer makes teacher work today more like a non-educational employee who has four weeks of annual vacation. However, this uninformed generalization of a part-time professional employee diminishes the public image of teaching as a profession.
Third, most teachers historically have been unionized. A unionized profession seems like a contradiction in terms to many who are self-employed and others whose employment does not include paid benefits. As a union, the teaching profession has used collective bargaining to establish contractual agreements with school boards. Sometimes, unions have used labor actions as a tool of bargaining. Many apply a negative stigma to unions, bargaining, and labor actions and this stigma diminishes their esteem for teaching.
It is savvy with certain constituencies for politicians today to advocate for home schooling and parental choice of schools. It is fashionable to use reports of the low academic achievement of some children in urban schools, the “middling” achievement of US children on the PISA tests (international assessments of reading and math), and statements of parents who have “issues” with their local schools to ramp up disdain for public education. Political leverage has been created for partisan voting by pointing at tax-paid, part-time unionized professionals with full health care and pension benefits as an economic problem for the middle class.
In combination, a professional who is paid with tax money, works less than a full year, is unionized and can be faulted for unacceptable academic achievement by some children indeed suffers a major image problem.
The above conditions are real. When most adults in the working world are asked for their understanding of teaching, these are the characteristics they most frequently cite. Yet, these conceptions are far removed from what teachers do every day in their classrooms, labs, music rehearsal halls, gymnasiums and theaters. Teachers cause children to learn. These simple five words – teachers cause children to learn – are the reality of teaching and embody the talent of teachers possess that should result in popular esteem. A clear understanding of the talent required to be a teacher can raise public esteem for teaching.
Teacher Talents That Warrant Esteem
Teaching is using a natural desire to learn to create an educated person and an educated population.
The human brain is born to learn. Rousseau believed a child could learn all that she needed to know if left to her own designs in a natural state. In the aggregate, a group of children would be the proverbial herd of cats, all wanting to learn but with the diverse attention span and focus of cats. Teaching grouped children takes a trained capacity to motivate, create focus in multiple minds, monitor and adjust the rate and degree of learning, reinforce successful learning for some while extinguishing incorrect learning in others, and doing this continuously. And, this is just a snapshot of what a trained teacher needs to do for every child in a group of children while working all children toward learning targets that are always just beyond their natural grasp. This work requires a professionally trained talent.
Teaching is causing children to do real things with what they learn.
Teacher talent is causing children to read and write, to use mathematics to solve quantitative and qualitative problems, to use science to explain how the world works, to use music and art to express values that are beyond words, and to explore the passions that will carry them into their adult lives.
For instance, reading is not a natural act like speaking and listening. Reading requires training a child’s brain in coding and decoding written symbols, understanding syntax and rules of grammar, and working with the dynamics of a language that is always changing. Reading fluency and comprehension, especially the growth of an expansive vocabulary, is the metric that distinguishes advanced learning. This work requires professional skills.
Teaching is more complex than doing. The uninformed have said, “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” Ironically, before anyone can “do”, they must learn “to do” and almost all of learning to do is the result of teaching. It is relatively easy to demonstrate the solution to a geometric proof or to read a chapter of Spanish literature or to solo on the violin. It is an entirely different proposition to teach a class of children to understand and apply the laws and rules of mathematics, to understand the grammar and idioms of a foreign language, or to read a score of music and be able to interpret notes into how to bow and finger violin strings. Teaching requires the capacity to simplify, begin with fundamentals, and grow a child’s cognition and physical skills incrementally. Many can point out errors in what a child says or does, but only a trained listener and observer can identify what is wrong in a child’s thinking or performance, make corrections in the errors, and cause the child to learn new, accurate and correct knowledge and skills. Interestingly, a great deal of effective teaching is committed to correcting learning.
Teacher talent is an interpersonal connection that lights a child’s imagination, motivates a child’s willingness to do more than is expected, to create the unexpected, and to do so again and again. One can accurately say that a parent or grandparent or mentor also can do these things for their child, grandchild or special mentee. True. The talent is doing these things for hundreds of children every year, children who are not family members or in any other way attached to the teacher beyond the fact that they are children to be taught. Creating and nurturing interpersonal connections with strangers takes unusual talent.
Teacher talent reaches beyond the tears of a child’s momentary frustration to help the child overcome what seems insurmountable and have an “aha!” moment. Educational accountability today drives teachers toward defined and demonstrable student learning. Each grade level and course has a body measureable and tested content, skills and dispositions and these are the targets for teaching. More to the point, contemporary educator effectiveness requirements assess and publicize every public school’s efficiency in meeting state academic standards and teacher evaluations are directly drawn from the specific achievements of the children they taught. There are no recalls of educational defects as there are every year in manufacturing. School is not Toyota or General Motors. A child who does not acquire third grade reading or math problem-solving skills will have tremendous problems in each subsequent grade level. Once a child advances to the next grade level or sequential course, there are few opportunities for do overs.
Teacher talent is what adults remember fondly when they talk with later-life friends and try to explain where and when and how they grew up. It is the name of a well-remembered person who helped them as no one else could. Everyone has one – the teacher who connected with them in grade school or in high school or college. It is the teacher who caused them to learn. The capacity to create this immeasurable and unforgotten effect is an extraordinary talent.
We, as a nation, have created a real problem related to our perception of teachers and teaching and it is one that we need to fix. Education is the ticket for renewed financial prosperity and closing gaps of economic inequalities. Educational achievements need to rise in international comparisons and each generation of children need to be career and college ready. Educators, on the other hand, are held in low esteem and the teaching profession is demeaned. We can’t have it both ways. It is time to align our national and personal goals with strategies for accomplishing them; it is time to value teaching.