People hate the teacher unions enough to suspend common sense. There are around 75,000 teachers currently teaching in NYC public schools. The state is so concerned with the performance of these teachers it forces principals from other schools to evaluate them. This makes no sense. What is the intended outcome of observations? One might assume it's to remove bad teachers, however between the subjective nature of observations and the variable nature of randomly taking three snapshots of someone's classroom, it often falls short of achieving this goal. One might argue it's accountability, however teachers often find ways to game the system (i.e. change their lesson and demeanor specifically for observations) or do not care because of tenure. When I find teachers talking about how they change their entire way of teaching for an observation, I know that that accountability isn't occurring, only bureaucratic appeasement. Why do we keep pursing this? Well, it's because we have an inherent distrust of teachers due to their vilification by many politicians. I'm not here to exonerate teachers. I think teachers are employees, much like any other company, where there are good ones and bad ones. We need to treat teachers similarly to how ethical companies treat their employees.
Oversee Principals who will then oversee Teachers
The current system we have for observations is a classic case of micro-managing. We need to trust that the principals in charge of schools are observing their teachers fairly. But how can we trust principals? Well simply put a Principal's success is tied closely to how their teachers perform. So principals have an incentive to keep high performing teachers and get rid of those performing poorly. Even more than a simple hire versus fire dichotomy is the motivation to help coach and support teachers. Principals will realize that their success is tied to their teachers' success and so rather than firing many teachers they will instead choose to support struggling teachers.
Of course this then gets tied to the question of how hard it is to fire a teacher. I honestly don't think this is as big of a deal as people make it out to be. The firing process for a teacher exists to protect the teacher from reckless Principals that would use their authority to gain better control over their staff. In this way unions are completely justified in demanding a fair and extensive process that determines whether a principal has attempted to support a teacher in every way they can before firing. While it can be annoying, the reality is that principals have plenty of reasons to fire teachers for things other than performance. Perhaps a personality trait is clashing with the principal and while the teacher is an excellent teacher, he breeds defiance in the staff. Well that's a good reason to fire anyone, but we often forget that's a person's livelihood and it should not be taken away due to a personality clash. Or as I mentioned before, nothing breeds fearful respect of a Principal than a random firing of someone who was doing something menial (perhaps showing up late to Professional Development) in order to wake the rest of the staff up. While these are all probably effective techniques in terms of corralling the troops, the cost of potentially ruining an individual's life is too great. There are plenty of other ways for principals to make you feel miserable at work (I'm not condoning this behavior, I'm merely pointing out that we have no real reason to demand teachers be fired more easily). A magic eraser isn't necessary for motivation.
Furthermore, the long firing process encourages a mindset of help and nurture rather than alienation and removal. If a Principals knows it can only fire realistically 2 to 3 individuals from their staff, then they're more likely to focus on helping the majority of teachers on their staff succeed, rather than attempt to clean house every single time difficulty occurs. Principals essentially become married to the staff they receive and must deal with what they have. Similar to a baseball manager in the midst of reconstruction, the principal must focus on accentuating the talent that already exists on the staff, while minimizing the deficiencies. For example, if all of your special education teachers are first year teachers, then they may need extensive help writing IEPs (a skill never explicitly taught to you in graduate school). So set up a Professional Development teaching them how to do it. Create documents assisting them through the process. Give them the support they need, but won't ask for. Trust me as a first year teacher I spoke up about everything, but always felt bad doing so.
Principals should decide pedagogical choices
With a shift in oversight from teachers to principals comes the reality that your classroom will in some ways be dictated by your principals, This already happens in many schools, but certain provisions in the current teacher union contract in NYC afford unnecessary rights to teachers. For example, teachers have the right to choose their lesson plan format. This is absolutely unnecessary. The reason this right was demanded was in response to principals who would often demand 4 to 5 pages per lesson plan. That is clearly excessive, but giving full autonomy to a teacher is the other end of the spectrum. It's very easy for me to merely hand my principal a mostly blank piece of paper with my Learning Objective and a copy and pasted description of the 5 main parts of a lesson and it would be acceptable. Principals should be able to hold teachers accountable for proper planning and if there is a reasonable request made by the principal (e.g. have a section detailing possible misunderstandings), teachers should be responsible for doing it. On this count I would side with the principals, simply because their jobs are on the line according to how their teachers perform. If they believe a ridiculous 4 to 5 page lesson plan will bring about success, then they can demand it. Whether it gets done by most teachers or done well by most teachers is another problem, but in the end the buck stops with them. As I noted before in exchange for job security, teachers must be willing to adapt to their principal.
Included in this adaption is the pedagogical philosophy in the classroom. Meaning principals need to have a degree of control over the pedagogy you employ when teaching. In my school, all teachers are expected to use small group instruction every single day they teach. This means as teachers we do not address the entire class (after the lesson), instead we only teach a small group of students, leaving the rest of the class to complete independent work. For many teachers this sounds like a nightmare, but when an entire school commits to it, the results are splendid. That kind of commitment can be sought by principal. Of course at first it may not give her many fans, but if the pedagogy is successful and people are given the proper support and guidance, then the results will speak for themselves.
This post may be controversial and considered to be naive and shortsighted, but I wrote this simply from my own observations through my first year of teaching and the knowledge of the documented failures of the current observation process. Stop making teachers nervous about being randomly fired or given low ratings. Let them teach and focus on allowing principals the tools and oversight to produce great teams of excellent teachers.
Oversee Principals who will then oversee Teachers
The current system we have for observations is a classic case of micro-managing. We need to trust that the principals in charge of schools are observing their teachers fairly. But how can we trust principals? Well simply put a Principal's success is tied closely to how their teachers perform. So principals have an incentive to keep high performing teachers and get rid of those performing poorly. Even more than a simple hire versus fire dichotomy is the motivation to help coach and support teachers. Principals will realize that their success is tied to their teachers' success and so rather than firing many teachers they will instead choose to support struggling teachers.
Of course this then gets tied to the question of how hard it is to fire a teacher. I honestly don't think this is as big of a deal as people make it out to be. The firing process for a teacher exists to protect the teacher from reckless Principals that would use their authority to gain better control over their staff. In this way unions are completely justified in demanding a fair and extensive process that determines whether a principal has attempted to support a teacher in every way they can before firing. While it can be annoying, the reality is that principals have plenty of reasons to fire teachers for things other than performance. Perhaps a personality trait is clashing with the principal and while the teacher is an excellent teacher, he breeds defiance in the staff. Well that's a good reason to fire anyone, but we often forget that's a person's livelihood and it should not be taken away due to a personality clash. Or as I mentioned before, nothing breeds fearful respect of a Principal than a random firing of someone who was doing something menial (perhaps showing up late to Professional Development) in order to wake the rest of the staff up. While these are all probably effective techniques in terms of corralling the troops, the cost of potentially ruining an individual's life is too great. There are plenty of other ways for principals to make you feel miserable at work (I'm not condoning this behavior, I'm merely pointing out that we have no real reason to demand teachers be fired more easily). A magic eraser isn't necessary for motivation.
Furthermore, the long firing process encourages a mindset of help and nurture rather than alienation and removal. If a Principals knows it can only fire realistically 2 to 3 individuals from their staff, then they're more likely to focus on helping the majority of teachers on their staff succeed, rather than attempt to clean house every single time difficulty occurs. Principals essentially become married to the staff they receive and must deal with what they have. Similar to a baseball manager in the midst of reconstruction, the principal must focus on accentuating the talent that already exists on the staff, while minimizing the deficiencies. For example, if all of your special education teachers are first year teachers, then they may need extensive help writing IEPs (a skill never explicitly taught to you in graduate school). So set up a Professional Development teaching them how to do it. Create documents assisting them through the process. Give them the support they need, but won't ask for. Trust me as a first year teacher I spoke up about everything, but always felt bad doing so.
Principals should decide pedagogical choices
With a shift in oversight from teachers to principals comes the reality that your classroom will in some ways be dictated by your principals, This already happens in many schools, but certain provisions in the current teacher union contract in NYC afford unnecessary rights to teachers. For example, teachers have the right to choose their lesson plan format. This is absolutely unnecessary. The reason this right was demanded was in response to principals who would often demand 4 to 5 pages per lesson plan. That is clearly excessive, but giving full autonomy to a teacher is the other end of the spectrum. It's very easy for me to merely hand my principal a mostly blank piece of paper with my Learning Objective and a copy and pasted description of the 5 main parts of a lesson and it would be acceptable. Principals should be able to hold teachers accountable for proper planning and if there is a reasonable request made by the principal (e.g. have a section detailing possible misunderstandings), teachers should be responsible for doing it. On this count I would side with the principals, simply because their jobs are on the line according to how their teachers perform. If they believe a ridiculous 4 to 5 page lesson plan will bring about success, then they can demand it. Whether it gets done by most teachers or done well by most teachers is another problem, but in the end the buck stops with them. As I noted before in exchange for job security, teachers must be willing to adapt to their principal.
Included in this adaption is the pedagogical philosophy in the classroom. Meaning principals need to have a degree of control over the pedagogy you employ when teaching. In my school, all teachers are expected to use small group instruction every single day they teach. This means as teachers we do not address the entire class (after the lesson), instead we only teach a small group of students, leaving the rest of the class to complete independent work. For many teachers this sounds like a nightmare, but when an entire school commits to it, the results are splendid. That kind of commitment can be sought by principal. Of course at first it may not give her many fans, but if the pedagogy is successful and people are given the proper support and guidance, then the results will speak for themselves.
This post may be controversial and considered to be naive and shortsighted, but I wrote this simply from my own observations through my first year of teaching and the knowledge of the documented failures of the current observation process. Stop making teachers nervous about being randomly fired or given low ratings. Let them teach and focus on allowing principals the tools and oversight to produce great teams of excellent teachers.
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