Raise Your Hands!
The so-called “Four Eyed Technologist” recently posted on educators as learners, and his call was for the professionalism of educators to include self-learning and exploration.
In short, he suggested several action items:
- Spend a portion of your day honing professional practice.
- Establish a professional learning network.
- Establish a virtual learning space.
- Make professional reflection and scholarly work a public priority.
- Model professional learning.
These sound wonderful, and they remind me of myself, I have to confess… I read, I create, I participate in online discussions, and I try to model these behaviors for our teachers.
But I feel the flaw in his call is that the public education system does not foster an environment for these learning opportunities or action items.
We try hard where I work, but let’s take a more typical place:
- Can’t get online to social networks because they’re blocked.
- Paid for contract time that begins with a duty, and ends once the kids walk out.
- May or may not have a school-issued computer.
- Self-guided time learning doesn’t count towards professional development requirements of the system.
- Scholarly work? Now, where’s the time for this?
I think these action items might be identifiers for very motivated and top-shelf educators (by saying I do some of this, I’m not trying to express any vanity), but you’d expect the better educators among us to be doing some of these things… right?
I use technology to stay focused, aware, and on top of trends, tools, and techniques. But I spent the majority of my days in front of a screen; I have no kids, and I frankly have more leisure time than your average teacher. Add an active family life, a 1 hour commute each day, time for vacation, and time for coping with a typical day: I’m supposed to drag my colleagues kicking and screaming to read my blog? At this point, I send out a weekly newsletter. I give away prizes if you read it. If they don’t care by this point, then… it’s not worth my time.
I simply don’t think our education system supports an environment for these action items to be carried-out. And I wish it were different.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Like the post. Raises some good questions. In my current assignment our secondary school assigns about 150 students per teacher. Sometimes I think if we were to lower the student load to around 100 with money of course being no option we would arrive at a point where teachers would have more time and freedom to spend implementing the tools technology provides. But then again it would take life long learners who would capitalize on the opportunity as opposed to filling the day with more bitching.
April 12th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Hi John:
I understand where you are coming from on many of your points and I noted early that many learning organizations ARE NOT providing these opportunities so it is on the educator to do so.
I could list off all my responsibilities that keep me from doing things and so could every other teacher, student, and professional. What is important? Is all of this worth it? Is becoming a better professional worth it? If so, what are we doing to accomplish this?
In staying fair to your post, here are my thoughts on the “typical place”.
Can’t get online to social networks because they’re blocked.
Can you at home? At work, why not approach administration and IT about allowing access to certain sites for teacher profiles?
Paid for contract time that begins with a duty, and ends once the kids walk out.
So, if I read this correctly, teachers aren’t contracted for time to learn. Wow…
May or may not have a school-issued computer.
Home computer?
Self-guided time learning doesn’t count towards professional development requirements of the system.
This is a great point and one that I continue to discuss as VITAL for institutions to review. The change wouldn’t take much but a rethinking of documentation. I tend to like Danielson’s Model with a few tweaks.
Scholarly work? Now, where’s the time for this?
Sad that we are back on the time issue but I’ll bite. Should K-12 organizations ponder something like Boyer’s Model?
Thanks for the thoughts and for pushing me forward.
April 12th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
A friend recently asked me why my Facebook page’s status message often says “Bea is…loving her job.” Well, it is the first time that learning is an integral part of my job.
Still, Charlie is right. I can see how time could be devoted to less productive endeavors with the wrong crowd.
I hope you don’t mean that one last line, though. You’d be giving in to that one teacher who asked, “Why does he bother?”
April 12th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
When I wrote this, I felt I was in the “pessimistic John” mode. From time to time, I switch between “pessimistic John” and “optimistic John.” Perhaps I should make these both new blog entry categories.
i appreciate all the comments thus far.
@Charlie : I think efforts can be made at the school level, as you suggest, but alone they likely won’t be enough. We need changes to be made at the local, district, and larger state and national levels each to foster real change.
@ Bea: Progress and change does happen, even though I don’t think we really “expect” it with the pay, time, and benefits we provide teachers. Those that do roll with the times and tweak their classroom practices (and I should extend that both in and out of the classroom) are the superlative ones.
School reform is a whole other issue I’d love to discuss; but I’m not an expert at it. I have my ideas, however. I’d love to see teachers have significantly higher pay (and perks) but also have much higher expectations. My ideal model would weed-out those who’d take advantage. Our current public education system doesn’t deal particularly well with teachers who aren’t willing to learn and grow in the position.
@Ryan – you had some great ideas and I support them amid a different climate. We started just this month with our own social network at our district. And teachers can override the filter to go anywhere they please (within reason – pornography is still blocked).
Teachers aren’t paid to learn, no. They’re paid for the time they show up and leave. They’re paid to attend mandatory professional development – which can vary greatly in quality. I don’t much care for this system, but it’s what we have right now. I think contract hours ought to go.
Home computer – many of our new teachers cannot afford a nice home computer. We have provided ours with laptops since 2001, but we aren’t typical yet, I’m afraid.
Scholarly work – I think colleges and universities are still the place to find ongoing research, and likely we could better partner with them in using schools as a place to conduct scholarly research. I think a master teacher program (with more pay) might be an interesting model, where the master teacher teaches less (but does not give it up completely), mentors younger teachers, and spends maybe 20-25% on research. I’m not familiar with Boyer but will consult – thanks.
When I ask too much of a teacher, and they remind me with excuses why they can’t do this, or why they’ll fail at that, I look to business. I don’t think expectations we have for teachers should go beyond what you might get working for a business. That’s vague, yes. But there are some nice perks: days off for professional development, courses, etc. Keeping work now at the office is changing, unfortunately.
I plug in at home more than most… and some of our teachers do. But I don’t think its fair to ask teachers to plug in for anything on THEIR own time unless we’re paying them for it. Again, I’m interested in a different payment/perk scenario whereby asking teachers to stay connected, maintain a culture of learning and development, and networking among their local peers and their worldwide colleagues can take place–professionally and regularly.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
John,
What is the reward for being an engaged educator, besides the intrinsic value of doing a job the best way you can? Why should I spend the hours honing my skills and reading the latest research when the teacher down the hall, who doesn’t, gets the same paycheck I do? Why should I look for new and innovative ways of doing things when the teacher down the hall does the same thing year after year and gets paid more because he has taught for more years than I have? Why try to improve my teaching when I have tenure after only 5 years?
I agree with almost everything in your post, however, all this will not come to pass until teachers are seen, and start acting like the professionals they should be. What you are suggesting is the latter and the former will come with time. In a perfect world i totally agree with you, but I can’t see that happening when states will give any Joe off the street a license to be a warm body to stand in front of a classroom. It’s hard to be a professional when most folks on the street do not believe that teachers have a skill set worth paying for.
Well, i guess pessimism begets pessimism, John. I feel better now.