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Tell our School Leadership 2.0 community a little bit about yourself. Feel free to post your email address and website. Also feel free to list your areas of interest. This will help other members dialogue with you.: I have just spent a year under state imposed house arrest finishing up the PROTEACH process to keep my state license. This process took over 1000 hours above and beyond my full time teaching. I was putting in 20 additional hours a week to do this as well as taking all my vacation time. I started in Aug. and now am finishing in June. It cost me over $1000 to do this, as well as cost time with my family, friends, health etc. putting on hold my family life, my outside responsibilities. Many of us in our cohort are questioning what other professions require this with out any paid time, without any professional training, without any pay compensation for this process. Yes we could have done the National Boards, but I have a family and I would not have wanted to inflict this for two yrs on them. This year there were three at my school doing this, next year there will be another three. Teachers who have completed this process have stated this has not made them a better teacher and during the process made them not only a worse teacher but a worse person because of how consuming this process was. We all suffered from poverty of time. My interest is in finding out who funded for this to happen in the first place, what is the evidence out there that this does make for better educators, what the drop of out teaching rate is for those doing this, etc. Are there other states doing this to their teachers. Do charter school teachers have to do this? I feel it is a union issue to work full time hours and then be required to complete this process involuntarily during the school teaching months, and having it take the amount of time it takes. When asked for a substitute for professional days to gather data I was told there is no money for from either the state or the district for funding this. Our cohort leader has had no training(she was National board certified) but it was like the blind leading the blind on this process. This is another loophole we as teachers have to jump through to maintain our license (to do within 5 yrs of teaching) and for many of us we have no choice because out student loans are so out of the sky, or a young family or...
I have never felt more angry and pissed about something imposed on my time as this especially when unlike your masters it does not give you a financial incentive. It is just a glorified test not of teaching ability but of perseverance. The questions are so conflicting that we are told not to ask anyone but the Proteach trained people for the interpretation.We are told to ignore grammer, ignore conventions, that just make sure you have met the rubric. The interesting thing is in many of the questions, the rubric is not aligned to questions. We are given about 2200 characters for each entry yet the questions and rubric we respond to are about 1800 characters. We were told yes you will not be a good teacher this year, that you need to focus your lessons on meeting the requirements of your Proteach. This process was clearly designed by a committee without having had anyone on the committee themselves having to do this. My guess is most people who designed this are probably also not current educators and possibly never were educators. My interest is to put a stop to this insane process for the next generation of teachers.

What is your present job title?: Teacher

At what school level do you work?: Elementary School

Where do you work?: Other location in USA

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