What Makes an Effective Teacher?

All of the sudden, talk of education reform is everywhere. From the "Waiting for Superman" film to articles in the September 20 issue of Time Magazine to NBC's Education Nation summit in NYC this week, suddenly the media is buzzing about education. I've been following the conversations in mainstream media and watched all of the programming on MSNBC this weekend, from "Meet the Press" on Sunday to the Teacher Town Hall Sunday afternoon to the "Waiting for Superman" panel last night to President Obama's speech on education this morning on the Today show. Frustratingly, it seems many of these panels and discussion forums keep inviting the same people (Geoffery Canada, Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, Davis Guggenheim) to talk about education and I'm starting to see the media focusing in and perhaps steering the national conversation to focus on two or three themes, the main one which is that much of the problem with the education system lies with ineffective teachers, the tenure system, and unions blocking district's attempts to reform their systems for evaluating teachers and removing them if necessary.

First of all, I have been in education for five years and I had never heard of teacher tenure. I had to do a little research to find out that in the state of Texas, we don't really have tenure and union contracts as teachers in other states do. From my understanding, the Texas Education Code allows for districts to offer three kinds of contracts: continuing (the closest thing to tenure that Texas has), term, and probationary. Only a few districts offer the continuing contract; most offer only term and probationary contracts, with term contracts usually being 1 or 2 years. However, I still commonly see teachers that I would consider to be poor teachers have their contracts renewed term after term and I'm not sure if membership in a union plays a role in that or not. I personally am not in a union so I am limited in my knowledge on what kind of protection union membership provides, but I just haven't observed the unions playing as big of a role here in Dallas or Texas in general as the film and the national conversation seems to imply. BUT with that said, I am wondering then what is holding adminstrators here in Dallas back from being more forward in evaluating and removing ineffective teachers from classrooms...because they do exist and I see them all the time.

The union's side in all of this is that they feel that instead of demonizing and scapegoating teachers there needs to be more support and more tools for teachers. According to them, there needs to be more support in developing and growing good teachers through professional development and training. While I agree that there needs to be better preparation BEFORE entering the classroom, I personally think that there is a ton of wonderful resources and professional development opportunities available for teachers already in the classroom. In Texas, education service centers such as Region 10 in our area provide all kinds of free trainings, workshops, and seminars that are really, really good! Most large districts provide all kinds of professional development, technology training, instructional coaches, etc. etc. etc. Then there is an endless array of online learning opportunities and resources, lots of which is free to educators. Technology has opened the door to just an amazing selection of free resources to really enhance instruction in the classroom. What I see is not enough teachers taking these opportunities seriously and not enough teachers being open-minded enough to embrace new ideas and approaches to instruction. Yes, I have been to plenty of pointless trainings, but I have also been to really some great ones. And usually, good or bad, there is always something to take away. It's all in the attitude of the teacher. Teachers who constantly self-reflect, constantly want to improve, constantly want to adapt and innovate to achieve even greater results, are eager to take part in any kind of learning opportunity. Mediocre teachers who are comfortable with mediocrity see professional development as a waste of time and just something else to do and these are the ones you see on their cell phones throughout the entire workshop. I'm not really going to say that we need to pour more resources into better teacher professional development until we start taking full advantage of what is already out there. I truly believe that teachers in this district have the learning resources and development opportunities available to improve their instructional practices if they really wanted to. So I'm not fully buying what Randi Weingarten is arguing on that point.

However, I do agree that there needs to be better feedback and better evaluation tools for teachers. When I was in the classroom, it was RARE that an administrator came in to observe (maybe only once or twice out of 180 school days) and one of those times was for the annual evaluation report. The feedback I received as a first and second year teacher was almost non-existent. Even as a librarian, I receive almost no feedback from anyone on what kind of job I'm doing. I think teachers would better know which professional development opportunities to pursue if they had more feedback on what they needed to work on....constructive feedback on a regular basis. That is why I'm glad that part of this debate is focusing on teacher evaluation tools....but I'm still not sure how I feel about teacher evaluation being linked directly to student standardized test scores. Perhaps that should be a small part, but certainly not the weightiest part of a teacher's effectiveness rating. I feel that would place even more undue focus on the test and even lead to more unethical practices on the part of teachers who are feeling pressured to achieve a certain test score percentage in order to receive a paycheck or even keep a job. Therefore, while I'm a strong proponent of re-vamping how teachers are evaluated, I'm not necessarily a proponent of the merit-based pay system. I just think there is too much focus on these stupid tests anyway and that student achievement needs to be measured in other ways beyond a test score, just like teacher effectiveness needs to be meausured beyone test scores. High-stakes testing coupled with bad teachers are two of the most fatal ingredients in our failing system, in my opinion.

So how do you know if a teacher is effective beyond test scores? That's what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to find out through a huge research study being conducted right now called Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET). Our district is actually participating in this project and I am the school project coordinator for this campus. Last year I was pretty frustrated with all the extra work that came with participating in this study. There are ten teachers in this school that I had to video four times, plus administrer extra surveys, tests, etc etc etc. There is more to it that I won't go into. I wasn't particularly happy about my new assignment. But now as I've begun to listen more closely to what is being discussed on the national scene, I'm actually glad to be a part of this research, which is taking place in five major school districts across the country and collecting over 70,000 hours of classroom teaching on video. The goal of the study is to identify effective teaching practices that can be used to develop evaluation tools and even to help re-shape teacher preparation programs. I hope they can come up with standards and tools that measure all aspects of a good teacher beyond just once-a-year test scores.

The tricky thing is that so much of what makes a good teacher cannot be measured. Like I said in my previous post, so much of it is passion. So much of it is what your attitude and philosophy towards the kids is. So much of it is the relationships and rapport that you develop with the kids. So much of it is a person's creativity in overcoming the obstacles and challenges that their kids bring to to the table. So much of it is just pure content knowledge and academic expertise. So much of it is the teacher's desire to just personally and professionally grow and improve. So much of it is a gift of being able to talk to and relate to kids in relevant ways. So much of it is selflessness. How do you measure those things? How do you put a value on those characteristics?

The most important thing that is coming out of this discussion is a focus on "other people's children." When evaluating a teacher or a school, we all need to ask, "Is this what I would want for my child?" We have got to start wanting for all children the things that we would want for our own children. It may still be fuzzy how to define an effective teacher, but we all know one when we see one before we ever see his or her test scores. We all know when we see a teacher that we would trust our own child with. We've got to work toward making sure our own children would be okay going to any school in Dallas or in Texas or in America. We've got to work towards figuring out how to get those kinds of people, not just those kinds of test scores, in every single classroom.

More to come....just taking a break for now!!