The political leadership of Washington State got “dope slapped” by the US Department of Education. This was a good thing. Secretary Duncan revoked Washington’s waiver of No Child Left Behind sanctions as a result of the Washington legislature’s failure to meet waiver requirements. Sorry, Washington, but thanks. Every now and again, a public dope slapping helps the rest of us understand how the real world works. It keeps all of us honest and true to our word.

The dope slapping worked like this. The No Child Left Behind Act was flawed from its inception in 2001. In a nutshell, school districts were commanded by Congress to cause every child, 100% of all children enrolled in the district, to demonstrate proficiency in reading and mathematics on a statewide assessment or the school district would be punished. Although many in Congress understood/understand the flaws in the NCLB requirement and scheme of enforcement, Congress has not found the courage to repeal, amend or re-issue NCLB. Hence, the Obama administration used executive powers to create a waiver system that would allow school districts and states to escape the punishment of NCLB if the state would meet a set of USDE requirements. Because public education is a state function, it was left to the leadership of each state to enforce the commands and potential punishments. Hence, states were allowed to seek a waiver from the NCLB sanctions. Forty-two states plus the District of Columbia have been issued an NCLB waiver. Washington received a tentative waiver contingent upon meeting all of the USDE requirements, but time ran out on the Washington recalcitrance.

Sometimes children demonstrate a refusal to believe that they will be disciplined as a consequence of their continuous refusal to do what they are told to do. It often works like this.

Parent: I know that you don’t like eating liver, even though liver is good for you. And, even though I have asked you to learn to like eating liver, you and I know that liver makes you vomit and neither of us likes that. And, even though I told you that if you won’t eat the liver we serve once each week for supper I would send you to bed right after supper, neither of us is happy with that arrangement. So, I have a new deal for us. Are you interested?

Child: Good. I hate liver. What do I have to do instead of eating liver?

Parent: Instead of liver, you will need to eat a serving of beets, a sardine, and drink a glass of fruit juice. These three things also good for you. They will make you strong.

Child: Ok. I can drink the fruit juice and I suppose I can eat at least one beet. But, I don’t want to eat a sardine.

Parent: Please understand that the combination of beets, a sardine and fruit juice are really good for you, much better in fact than liver. But, beets, sardine and fruit juices need to be eaten as a group. If you can’t eat the sardine, then we will need to return to the liver.

Child: And, if I refuse?

Parent: Then, it’s lights out time and you are going to bed right after supper. That was the deal with the liver. Neither of us liked the liver idea, so I substituted three new foods. But, the deal now is just like the liver deal.  If you eat the beets and sardine and drink the juice, you can stay up. If not, then off to bed you go.

Child: Let’s talk tomorrow. (Tomorrow comes and goes.)

Child: Let’s talk tomorrow. (Tomorrow comes and goes.)

Parent: How are we doing with that sardine?

Child: I refuse to eat the sardine.

Parent: Say good night, then. (The lights are turned off and child is shuffled off to bed.)

At this time, political leaders in Arizona, Kansas and Oregon are in the same position that Washington was recently.  These three states are at risk of losing their NCLB waivers because of their recalcitrance to meet the USDE requirements for keeping a waiver. I would imagine that folks in Arizona, Kansas and Oregon are sniffing something that smells a lot like a sardine and looking over their shoulder at the light switch on the wall.

Professional.  Professional licensing.  Professional growth.  These three concepts attach to every teacher in public education. The first term is a definition. The second is a status. The third term is the heart of professionalism. Most teachers, however, enjoy the accouterments of a professional loosely. The continuing education of a professional teacher should not be left to happenstance or the managed events of governmental regulation; too much is at risk.

The definition.

By traditional definition, a teacher is a professional. A teacher must be trained as an educator by a certified educator preparation program, typically a college or university with a school of education. To qualify for a teacher endorsement as part of a degree program a prospective teacher must demonstrate the requisite knowledge and skills for their specific teaching degree. Teachers are college-educated. There was a widespread movement in the 198os to have teachers, like doctors, dentists, and lawyers, display their academic diplomas on a classroom wall to display proof of their professional training.

“A professional is a member of a profession. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and skills necessary to perform the role of that profession. In addition, most professionals are subject to strict codes of conduct enshrining rigorous ethical and moral obligations. Professional standards of practice and ethics for a particular field are typically agreed upon and maintained through widely recognized professional associations. Some definitions of ‘professional’ limit this term to those professions that serve some important aspect of public interest and the general good of society.

In some cultures, the term is used as shorthand to describe a particular social stratum of well-educated workers who enjoy considerable work autonomy and who are commonly engaged in creative and intellectually challenging work.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional

The status.

Each teacher must hold a valid teaching license issued by the state in which he or she teaches as a requirement for employment. In Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction issues teaching licenses. An initial license is issued based upon the verification of training by the teacher’s educator preparation program. Subsequent licenses are based upon state-defined programs of professional maintenance.

“Requirements to renew a license or permit depend on the type of license an applicant holds or held and when the educator completed his/her educator prep program.

In general, those who completed after September 1, 2004, must complete a verified, multi-year Professional Development Plan (see http://tepdl.dpi.wi.gov/pdp/professional-development-plan).

Educators who completed their program before September 1, 2004, can choose either to complete a verified PDP or to take six semester credits from a regionally accredited college or university. Continuing Education Units (CEUs) cannot be used in place of credits for license renewal. Emergency licenses/permits have separate requirements for renewal (see http://tepdl.dpi.wi.gov/licensing/emergency-license-and-permit).”

http://tepdl.dpi.wi.gov/licensing/license-or-permit-renewal

Licenses are renewed for five-year intervals. Prior to the completion of a current license, a teacher wanting to renew a license must complete a PDP or credit program and submit verifications to the DPI. Setting aside the theory of professional development plans for the purpose of license renewal aside, most teachers approach PDPs like credit-based courses. They are hurdle-type events to be accomplished in order to renew a license. As hurdle-events, professional development must be constructed for the purpose of verification by a PDP committee or a course instructor. The professional development of a PDP is a distant remove from the professional growth a practicing teacher needs in order to remain a professional.

The future

Assume that a first-year teacher is well-trained and ready to begin instructing children. Good to go. However, a teacher’s readiness to teach is as tenuous as the lifespan of a good laptop computer. Initially, learned teaching skills and dispositions and the most up-to-date laptop serve very well. Teaching skills and laptop software would continue to serve well for a long time if time and life stood still and happenstance was held at bay. “State of the art’ has a very short half-life. Very soon the original applications on the laptop must be updated or replaced with newer, more powerful and more contemporary applications. Similarly, educational practices must be constantly reconsidered for their effectiveness is causing every child to learn. It is the learning that drives education, not the perpetuation of a curriculum or pedagogy.

Professional growth requires a teacher to

• Be aware of what is happening broadly in the world of education. This is an awareness of trends and fads, controversies and institutional challenges, politics and finances. A professional must be continuously informed regarding her profession and able to discuss relevant issues with non-professionals.
• Understand how the key issues in the world education apply to the teacher’s school. Some issues remain distant while others bang the school house door. Discernment based upon an informed point of view allows a professional take an active role in shaping local public education.
• Become engaged and participatory in the discussion of how pedagogy affects valued or politically-important educational outcomes. Given enough time, effective pedagogy, and appropriate resources, teachers can cause children to learn anything. Pedagogy is the teacher’s professional tool box.
• Participate in strategies that will achieve measured improvement in true educational outcomes. Some of these outcomes may be institutional, but most reflect the learning achievements of children. Professionals understand strategies, outcome targets, measurements, and how their personal work contributes immediate and longer-term educational goals.

These four criteria are well beyond the duration of a teacher’s initial preparation and relicensing requirements. The criteria also are well beyond the scope of how most teachers view their current professionalism.

The reality of work life is that most teachers today commit 8 to 10 hours each day to teaching and supervising children. Class time teaching comprises the majority of this time, but because teachers are universally responsible for children, duties begin well before the first bell and last long after the last bell. Teachers are committed to 2 to 5 hours each day to other school duties, extracurricular assignments, committee work, parent meetings, and instructional preparation. Most teachers use 1 to 2 hours each day for commuting between home and school. This leaves several hours for meal preparation, home responsibilities, and family life. And, sleep. Only the naïve believe that teachers with these daily commitments are actively engaged their own continuous professional growth during the school year. However, professional teachers must be.

Educational leadership at the local and regional levels must find strategies to assist all teachers with their professional growth. The best strategies for assisting others with their professional growth call upon the best instructional practices.

• Have clear professional growth targets, including academic and pedagogical achievement.
• Understand what is educationally important versus that which makes the nightly news report about the “ain’t it awfuls” in education. Focus on the important things.
• Make professional growth personal – I am here to help you. Professional relicensure can be impersonal; professional growth must be personal.
• Chunk learning so that it can be consumed by a “heavily time committed” teacher; but be persistent in delivering consumable chunks. Too busy is not a reason to avoid professional growth.
• Take the long view for affecting change. Theories of reinforcement and application really do work.
• Use measured effects. Take systematic measurements to reinforce movement toward desired change. Discuss measurements in a clinical yet personal way.
• Celebrate achievement. Teaching is a “closed environment” profession and public appreciation of accomplishment renews professional pride and constancy.

Professional growth is an investment in the most valuable resource schools have for affecting child learning – professionally trained, professionally licensed, and professionally growing teachers.

Since the time I sat at the keyboard to begin writing this piece, my phone buzzed with an incoming text message followed by a different buzzing pattern for three e-mails. My wife yelled from the downstairs bedroom where she is spring cleaning our closet, and our cat jumped on the desk to lay behind the fan port of my ThinkPad. In order of priority, I stopped tapping keys to assure that favorite old sweaters made the “keep” pile in the closet, glanced at the three messages, and rubbed the cat’s chin. It often is hard to keep my mind on my morning’s commitment to write. Life can be disturbing. And, these disturbances to my focus do not include the decisions I have been making on the content, organization, and the voice of my writing. Staying mind-on the work at hand is difficult. And, significant to the amount of mind-on time I have given to my writing, I have been reading notes and data from two monitors attached to my computer to formulate the content of my writing. Mind-on has been the amount of time in which I have been fully engaged in conceptualizing, writing, and making immediate and needed corrections. As focused as I try to be, mind-on time has been only about twelve of the past thirty minutes.

Why am I concerned with mind-on time? As a retired public school educator, my time is my time, except for the time my wife and grandchildren require. Correction. Most of my time is my time. As a retired educator still engaged in the field, I am concerned with the proliferation of media, print, e-, and broadcast, that blares the failures of our schools to educate children. A 2013 Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa study says that only “17% of Americans agree that that US high school graduates are ready for the world of work, and 29% agree that they are ready for college.”

The same Gallup poll asked “What do you think are the biggest problems that public schools in your community must deal with?” Responses ran the gamut of problems that schools have faced for several decades

• Lack of financial support (35%)
• Lack of discipline (8%
• Overcrowded schools (7%)
• Lack of parental support (5%)
• Testing and regulations (4%)
• Difficulty in getting good teachers (3%)
• Drug use (3%)

http://products.gallup.com/168380/state-education-report-main-page.aspx

While it may be true that each of these organizational and environmental problems affects the teaching and learning environment, none of these are as directly related to the execution of teaching and learning as mind-on time.

As a superintendent, several secondary teachers constantly reminded me of the incessant school disturbances to teaching and learning time. “My students and I have not had the benefit of five contiguous days of teaching and learning this school year. We seldom have an entire class period without some form of school disturbance.” They went on to correctly tick off the fingers of both hands with the number of disturbances that were part of our “normal” school life.

• Four or five PA announcements calling children to the school office or telling of changed basketball practice schedules every class period.
• Twenty-one special days and observations required by our state’s DPI/state statutes.
• Nineteen days of testing – state testing, school testing, pre- and post-testing, interventional assessments, college admissions testing, special education assessments.
• Seven all-school assemblies and eight class meetings.
• Nine fire drills, two tornado drills, a variety of disaster drills with practices of each drill so that everyone knows what to do during the drill.
• Professional development meetings held eighty miles from school that not only require a full day for the meeting and transportation to the meeting but hours of preparation for a substitute teacher and hours of re-teaching during the days after the meeting.
• Snow days. He smiled and didn’t necessarily hold cancellation of school on days when more than a foot of new snow clogged the local roads.

There were right, of course. How could we expect teachers to conduct quality instruction and children to commit to quality learning when their school leadership incessantly disturbs any sense of mind-on time? I observed classes to see how these disturbances really affected teachers and children. PA announcements are just a pain for everybody. A loud voice coming through the classroom speaker interrupts talking and listening, invades student reading and writing time, and almost always causes everyone to stop doing what they were doing. Interestingly, fewer than 15% of the students on our school ever heard their name voiced over the PA. Yet, how principals, counselors, and attendance offices connect with scores if not hundreds of children every day?

There are ways. These are strategies that mind-on schools can use to diminish school-caused disturbances to mind on teaching and learning.

• Use technology to make your announcements. Post them through the school Internet and wifi systems. Children and teachers will read posted announcements and messages on their personal or school computes or check them on their personal devices. Regardless of school rules, kids checks their phones several times during the hours of a school day for messages. Message these announcements.
• Pre-publish a “Disturbance Plan” so that everyone knows the schedule of testing dates, drills, and meetings. If my teacher colleagues disliked class time disturbances, they really disliked not knowing in advance when the usual types of disturbances could have been “planned around” so that teaching and learning could be chunked for optimal mind-on time.
• Hold required drills at the usual transition times of the school day, such as leading into a passing period or going to lunch time, or just prior to school dismissal. It is impossible to predict when an emergency will arise, but posting drill procedures in all school rooms so that “what to do” is well known and means that you only need to drill safe and orderly procedures.
• Hold student meetings during lunch and right after school. Kids will eat and listen if the substance of the meeting is worth their interest. Adults do this all the time, especially with the content of the meeting is informational and not interactive. And, publishing a schedule of days when after school bus transportation will be delayed twenty minutes creates a correct sense of school priority. It would be so affirming to announce to parents and day care providers, “we will delay dismissing the buses for twenty minutes so that we assure teachers and children have uninterrupted time to complete their class assignments.”
• Connect teachers as often as possible to webcasted professional development or bring the training to the school. Webcasts that allow for replay have additional value. More importantly, the message that undisturbed teaching and learning time is a school priority is essential for parents, community, professional developers as well as teachers to hear. Also, spending some extra funds to reduce teacher travel time and keep teachers with their students even for an additional hour on a professional development day reverberates with all teachers.
• Flip the presentation of supplemental educational information so that teachers and children can read, listen or watch the information on their time. Prepare information about those special observance days as videos or PowerPoints that can be read after school or in the evening. Everyone knows what “token” time is when an hour or more is carved out of the school days for compliance with a state mandate. “Token” time is resented and is not mind-on, so don’t waste the time; flip it out of the teaching and learning day.

As I scratch my cat’s chin once again, it dawns on me that I have had more than an hour of undisturbed writing time. As mind-on opportunities are important for a blogging writer, mind-on time is essential for a child reading and committing essential information to short-term memory or trying to construct a compelling argument in writing, or doing a science lab, or a teacher explaining what Robert Frost meant when he said that “writing poetry without rhyme and meter would be like playing tennis without a net.” Undisturbed mind-on time is essential for reading and listening, writing and speaking, doing hands-on art, music and technical work, and just thinking. We owe teachers and learning children as much mind-on time as we can give them.

It’s late April in Wisconsin. Although spring weather has not shown itself yet, newly elected members are present and being seated at their respective school boards. Congratulations new board member, your community voted and you should be proud of their confidence in you. The easy part, achieving election, is over for these new school officials. The hard part, doing the work of a school board, is just beginning.

The official work of the local school board is governance of the school district as outlined in Chapters 118 and 120 of the Wisconsin Statutes. It is relatively easy to be a member of a governing board. A member can read agendas and pre-meeting briefs, listen to reports, consider policy recommendations and discussions and go with the flow. Just vote with the majority and let the work of the school district unfold. However, the acts of governance provide only an organizational structure and process for a school board member’s real work.

When you speak of yourself as a school board member, in what context and how many times do you use the word “children?” If school district governance is the legal responsibility of a school board member, provision of a quality education for every child is the essential purpose of a board member’s work. Children are a board member’s clients. Each and every child in the school district is a board member’s ultimate constituency.

You may shake your head and say firmly, “I was elected by the local taxpayers to control school spending.” Or, “a group of parents concerned with (fill in the blank) asked me to run for election to see what I could do to resolve their concerns. I need to speak for them.” Or, “politically, I believe in local control of education and will do all I can to assure that federal and state interests do not supersede our local interests.” Or, “our school community is divided by significantly differing points of view about the school. I will try to mend these differences.” As true as these and other statements may be, the interests of taxpayers and adult constituent groups do not address the purpose to which you were elected. They and their interests are secondary at best to your concern for children.

Let’s examine why children and not adult interests are the focus of a school board member’s work. You are elected to fulfill the state’s responsibility in educating its resident children. Very concisely, the Wisconsin constitution authorizes the State Superintendent to supervise public education and the legislature to establish school districts. The State Superintendent sets the goals and expectation for public education in Wisconsin and “…each school board should provide curriculum, course requirements and instruction consistent with the goals and expectations established under sub. (2).” Your elected purpose is to provide a local school system that fulfills the state’s requirements and regulations and standards for the education of all children. That’s it. The remainder of Chapter 118 supports this purpose. And, Chapter 120 authorizes the scope and governance processes available to the school board for conducting its purpose of providing a public education. There is nothing in the statutes about decreasing local taxes, assuring activation of the special interests of some parents or community members, engaging in federal and state politics, or acting as a community social worker. These ideas are the political grist churned up in an electoral process. The statutory purpose of the school board and each of its elected members is educating children.

Newly elected board member, when you take your board seat, think children. Think broadly about the scope of your district’s educational programs and assure that all children have access to the knowledge and skills and problem solving processes they will need to become the next generation of community adults. The breadth of 21st century educational programs continuously expands as you contemplate the yet unknown needs of the year 2050 and beyond. Even though you don’t know the specifics of that future, you are responsible for educational programs that must provide children with ideas, skill sets, and dispositions they can adapt for success in their future lives. Then, think vertically to assure that each child is receiving the education she or he needs. Your programs must be deeply stacked to challenge and advance the gifted child and the child that learns quickly, as well any child who needs special assistance achieve quality learning. And, while attending to the needs of these exceptional children, your decisions about educational programs must advance the hundreds or thousands of children in your district who are in the middle ranges of aptitudes and abilities and will become the majority of their generation.

Certainly, there are topics that may appear to be outside the term “children.” But, they are not. Once you have a grasp of programs, you must contemplate program delivery and that means personnel and facilities. Every time you think about school district personnel – a teacher, coach, advisor, custodian, cook, or bus driver – consider how this person relates to children. There are many people who are experts in their field – math or chemistry or vocal music, safe driving, building maintenance, and food preparation. However, if they cannot establish quality connections with children and advance the learning, well-being, safety and nurturing of children, they should not be in your employment. Schooling is a people business and at the center of all the people working for and with the school district are little people. Your consideration of school personnel must always begin, revolve around and end with your concerns for children.

Because most school districts in Wisconsin have existed for more than a century, aging school buildings and grounds and the quality of these facilities are on the agenda of most school boards. Current interests in “greening” and economic efficiency blend with needs to upgrade infrastructure, especially technology, and board discussion of school spending builds community interest and concern whenever these topics are on a board agenda. But, even in these decisions, the essential interest for a board member is the education, safety and well-being of children. Board discussion about school facilities must advance teaching and learning with a healthy and safe physical environment. Money is the vehicle for accomplishing these ends; children are the compelling issue in these decisions, not money.

The seemingly controversial issues of educational programming, personnel decisions and facilities management can command public attention, especially the attention of local media. They also invite the comments and sometime tirades of the vehement who support or oppose board actions. A school board member’s chair can become heated by the verbal pyrotechnics. Although the majority of a board member’s term will be involved with the routines of educational decisions, there is nothing like a business meeting packed with parents, community residents and the media to cause a school board member to wonder “why am I doing this?” But, you know why.

So, now the hard work begins. How will you use your term of office to advance the learning, well-being and future promise of each and every child in your school district? It may be hard work and most often under-appreciated, but it is the hard that makes working to improve the lives children great.

A teacher’s voice. We all have heard a teacher talking. The sound is a part of each of us who has been schooled, whether in a public, private or home setting. Part of our growing up was caused by the sound of a teacher’s voice. Some of those voices have been lost to time; but one or two of those voices still talk to us no matter how long we have been away from their teaching.

Part of my job is to listen to teachers talk. It is great work. Even though I have done this work for almost forty years and am highly trained in pedagogy and instructional supervision, I am never more than one more child sitting in a desk in the back of the classroom ready to learn from the teacher who is talking.

Adults listen to a teacher’s voice differently than how a child listens to the same voice.

We listen for expertise. We listen for certainty. We listen for a context and message that makes sense to us. We want the teacher to demonstrate a mastery of subject matter. If the teacher is talking history, we want to hear names and places, dates and events, cause and effect, interpretation and meaning. We want a story that creates mental images of the history we learned as children and reassures us that our children also will know those same stories. If the teacher is talking chemistry, we want to hear the names of elements and balanced equations. We want to observe a scientific approach to verified knowledge. We want the truth of proven or disproven hypotheses. If the teacher is talking French or Spanish or Manchurian, we want to hear a mastery of dialect and observe the structure of grammar even if we do not comprehend the words. We want our teacher’s voice to convey to children that their teacher knows what she or he is teaching.

We want our teacher’s voice to be directing. Teaching a classroom full of children is not a place for a timid voice or the sound of the unsure. Lessons that are planned for student learning also need a voice that directs children through the learning activities. We want a voice that can move twenty to thirty children from their innate, self-engrossed, highly social normalcy into a lesson created for them. It doesn’t matter if that voice is younger or older, female or male; the voice must be heard and listened to by children. The directing words vary greatly teacher to teacher. Some use humor. Some immediately connect the moment to yesterday’s lesson. Some are challenging and pose questions intended to cause children to turn their attention toward the teacher’s purpose. As adults, we want the teacher’s voice to the voice of THE adult in the room. Our teacher is in charge of children.

Our teacher’s voice needs to know the children being taught. When the teacher uses children’s names in an easy and familiar fashion, we are assured that our teacher knows these children. When the voice smiles or frowns at what children do, we know that this voice knows the individual child in the class. When the voice laughs and children laugh, we laugh with relief that our teacher and these children are okay together.

I hear the teacher’s voice and draw supervisory conclusions.

Then, the child in me listens.

My child wants to hear my name and see the teacher looking and talking with me not at or over me. As a child, I know if my teacher knows me. Some of my teachers look across the room with wide eyes that don’t see me or my friends; they see the class and they see children who are not paying attention. That is when the teacher’s voice changes and I know that that particular voice doesn’t know me or any other child in this room very well. This teacher wants her voice to be the most important voice in this room. I want my teacher’s voice and eyes and the look on her face to be one and the same; interested in me and concerned with my learning.

The child in me wants to hear my teacher listen. There is a sound to listening. It starts with the listener being quiet. I know that it is the teacher’s job to teach and that means to talk. But, if all I hear are the teacher’s words, I know that my teacher is not listening. Listen! When I hear my teacher using my words, I know that my teacher is listening to me. When she uses my friends’ words, I know that she is listening to them. It gets even better when my teacher says that she agrees with what she heard. If she says “that’s right” or “very good” or even “okay” now again, then it is much easier to pay attention when she also says, “let’s look at (or say that) again.” I want to get it right and when I know that my teacher wants to help me get it right, I want it even more. Listening to me takes time and even more time when what I say or do needs correcting or refining. And, when she says, “have you thought about…,” she has me hooked. My teacher’s voice hooks me and pulls on my learning and doesn’t let go.

I hear a lot of teacher voices tell me what to tell them. Usually that means my teacher wants me to know exactly what she said and be able to answer true or false or pick out the right answer to a question from three or four possible answers. This voice is teaching, I suppose, but I am not really learning. I can do this. I memorize and recall what I need to tell the teacher from what I remember her saying. I listen to telling teachers all the time. But, I am not really learning. The teacher who has me learning is the one who hooked me. She is more interested in my voice than hearing me repeat her voice.

Learning in school doesn’t stop at the last bell when I hear my real teacher’s voice. Her words, her questions, her interest in me stays with me when I talk to my parents about “how’d it go in school today?” I have no interest in telling them about my “telling” teachers, but I usually tell my parents more than they want to hear about my teacher who listens and cares about what I say and do. Her voice stays with me day after day and year after year.

It is difficult to be an adult when the child in me is listening to a voice that is about hooking the minds of children and causing them to learn. I want to remain in that child mode and not be supervisory. Supervision is for the voice of the telling teacher. However, it is easy to be a fellow professional with my learning teacher’s voice, because she will want to know what I heard and saw and thought. Just like the children she was teaching, there is a learning child in her that also wants to learn and not just be taught. She will learn more and more about causing children to learn and still not know enough. Our conversation will be so very different than a talk with a “telling” teacher.

After years of doing this work, I know that I have not heard enough classroom voices that touch the learning child in me. The good news is that there are lots of classrooms where children are doing what the teacher requires and those children and their teacher are very successful in school testing and the metrics that compare what children have learned with the expectation of what they should have learned. In fact, every day of every school year there are many more instructional successes like this than we ever hear about when news media is more interested in reporting on problems and failures. Still, when I hear the voice a teacher who is totally focused on how and what children think and problem solve than in repeating common knowledge, it causes the child and professional listener in me to be hooked once again.

I hear these teacher voices over and over again.  They teach me still.