A Discussion of Teachers and Teaching

From the Marshall Memo #433

In this Harvard Educational Review article, Anthony Bryk (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning), Heather Harding (Teach for America), and consultant Sharon Greenberg coordinate a round-table discussion about teaching and learning. Some excerpts:

• “The idea that great teaching is somehow magic is crazy!” says Steven Farr of Teach for America. “I cannot get over how wrong that is.” Ten years ago, we didn’t know exactly what characterized effective teaching. Now we have specifics on teaching practices that work. “Sadly,” Farr continues, “what we see in less-successful schools is a very diluted definition of ‘great teaching.’ In some schools where we place TFA teachers, out teachers are told they are ‘great’ simply because their students are generally on task and the room is generally quiet. The definition of ‘great’ is really, really watered down and too often is about what kids are not doing instead of about dramatic student progress.”

• Edward Liu of the Boston Teacher Residency Program says we need to talk more broadly about teaching rather than teachers. “Teachers are coworkers,” he says. “They are in a joint social enterprise, and I think that is what makes teaching quite unique and especially challenging as a profession. So I think the challenge is how do we spread effective teaching practices, and how do we build supportive context, organizations, and policies for the development and use of these practices with focus on increasing effective teaching to teach the neediest kids and all kids as well?”

• Pam Grossman of Stanford University says, “I’ve watched people watch teaching where they think, ‘Oh, this is fabulous teaching!’ And they miss the fact that the content is wrong. It’s not fabulous teaching if the content is wrong, and you need to know the content in order to assess the content.” This makes her worry about teacher evaluation done by generalists. Even elementary reading requires a particular kind of expertise. 

• What does it take to get a highly effective teacher to work in a high-need school? Money is nowhere near the top of most people’s list, says Ann Clark, chief academic officer of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. What they say is, “I want to go as part of a team of highly effective teachers, and, by the way, I want you to take some highly toxic teachers out of that school before I get there.” Clark describes how the district has organized teachers by grade level and subject and provided “just in time” coaching support for those teams. “This has probably stretched our teachers more than anything else that we’ve ever done,” she says, “rather than just hoping it’s going to happen within the school context.” 

• “You can mitigate individual weaknesses in dispositions and skills by having a good culture around people,” says Farr, “so people who may not be able to do it on their own can do it in a collaborative world… Healthy, supportive context is what turns this work from heroic to sustainable. Great leadership, especially at the campus level, creating a culture of excellence is how we will take great teaching to scale.”

• “Watching a lot of classrooms,” says Grossman, “in general, I think there is a lack of intellectual challenge. Even when kids are busy and doing work, they’re not being pushed, and at other times there is that push without the kind of support to help them be successful.” Jesse Solomon of the Boston Plan for Excellence agrees: “The level of intellectual demand in pretty much every classroom that I go into is nowhere near where I think it needs to be.”

• Grossman also worries that the push for individual teacher accountability misses the importance of teacher teams. “In my work with English departments,” she says, “it’s really the collective work that’s going to contribute to student learning, and we all need to be responsible for this and provide the rewards to teams – grade-level teams or departments as opposed to individuals. This might press for more collective accountability, because part of what you want to see is teachers pushing each other to get better, teachers being responsible for the improvement of a colleague’s practice. Right now, that is so far from the norm in teaching. You know the teacher down the hall maybe isn’t doing a good job, you get her students, so you actually have evidence… but most teachers would say, ‘That’s not my job, that’s not my problem.’”

“Contextual Influences on Inquiries into Effective Teaching and Their Implications for Improving Student Learning” by Anthony Bryk, Heather Harding, and Sharon Greenberg in Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2012 (Vol. 82, #1, p. 83-106),

http://www.hepg.org/main/her/Index.html