Whether we’re losing our democracy or just forging ahead to a new consensus, the labor in school progress comes from the teachers. Competent administration can provide the organization, valid evaluation can assess the growth, and politicians can take the credit, but with parents and colleagues alike, teachers take the blame. The accountability issues, the tenure debate, the evaluation processes, the public reporting all take place outside the classroom and in a vocabulary and structure external to the labor site. Joan Winderman, a long term colleague and former neighbor, writes of the discussion in these columns:
Whew! Glad I don't have to read and think like that anymore. Too much educationese for me. I was only happy trying to figure out how to interest kids in getting to the next step and finding out what it was they wanted to know about. And Whole Language was the way I thought and learned and so guessed others did too even tho I was aware everyone had their own style of learning. But keeping them at it in a rich environment so they could find their own way.....that is all I knew. It worked for me and I hope some of them.
This response opens the dialogue on the level of how teaching really happens. The teacher got in the job for reasons more humble than competing with China or preparing tomorrow's entrepreneur. The teacher teaches from love of an experience of nurturing children and a view of how that happens with a devotion to a particular skill, content and/or instructional philosophy. The teacher finds meaning in the students' inquiries and success in their product. The measures of school effectiveness so prominent in our political and media debate are only tangentially related to the teacher’s experience of success. When a student writes a great story, a team wins a tournament, the kids apply the taxonomy to local flora, or the school play is fun- that's the stuff that makes and keeps teachers in the business. The average percentile of the class in converting fractions to decimals is not the joy of instruction. The teacher assumes that these scores will progress incidentally as the student accumulates these sets of positive experiences. But when the numbers and evaluation tools become the primary criteria for feedback or reward, the curricula and methodology move to formats which have the greatest score impact.. And that is teaching methods that most directly resemble the evaluation. This is the much reviled teaching to the test.
The resulting staff meetings, paperwork for progress reports, and parent notices and information circulars are viewed as a disruption and diversion from the true acts of education. The enthusiastic teacher is looking for students ready to learn through activities that match the teacher's most treasured interests and knowledge. Since there is a high correlation between the "good" student in class performance and objective test outcomes, there is a natural belief that good teaching will produce positive results along the way. But when accountability pressures and promotional criteria align with multiple choice exams and we grow increasingly facile with growth measures and proficiency goals, there is a deep dissonance between the teacher's drive and what is reported and rewarded.
Virgil Walker
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