In our district every week we have a late start day so that teachers and administration can participate in collaboration. Some weeks it’s by grade level, some by content area, and some, as whole staff. Quick disclaimer: as a whole I think my district has one of the more progressive and supportive approaches to collaboration in the state. Recently as a whole staff we spent an hour essentially being told we didn’t really know how to teach. And here are some strategies to fix that. Keep in mind we have nine National Board Certified teachers on our staff. Nonetheless, our instructional coaches, principal, and area director, loaded us up with strategies and formative assessments (because, it was implied, we aren’t developing or making use of those) they used when they were in the classroom that would improve our student’s learning.
Now every one of the strategies presented were good and worthwhile in their own right. The issue was the tone in which they were presented: if you just did these things (because the strategies you are currently using are not increasing MAP/MSP scores sufficiently) students would be learning. No acknowledgement of what teachers are currently doing that is working, no celebration of success.
While the message to a seasoned staff that we have a lot to learn about how to teach is troubling enough, what really bothers me is the attitude that district leadership has about its teachers in light of the new teacher/principal evaluation system coming down the pike
Both Mark and I have touched on the need for professional development of evaluators in our recent posts about the new teacher/principal evaluation system. I have been optimistic that administrators and teachers would approach this coming change by assuming positive intent from all parties. What I heard recently left me disheartened and worried. If my district is currently working on an assumption of deficit model, the transition to a growth continuum model (even with heavy PD) will be rocky at best, if possible at all.
Mark-yes, it is the TONE that feeds my concern. Like I said, the suggestions in and of themselves were good and worth trying.
What is troubling outside of the evaluation issue is if leadership is looking at teachers from a deficit model, how are they looking at kids? Every building in my district has data walls with the names of kids not meeting standard by grade level. Those walls then fuel meetings about what are we going to do to “fix” these kids. Enter RTI. The kids know if a specialist comes to work with them it is because they are failing/not good at something. How does it affect kid’s attitudes toward learning when they begin to see themselves through the deficit model lens? How does that instill the drive for life-long learning. Wouldn’t a strengths based approach be more effective?
The deficit model approach is always demoralizing and always hinders trust. This true for adults-I can attest after watching the energy be sapped out my colleagues-how much more so for children?
No acknowledgement of what teachers are currently doing that is working, no celebration of success.
Yikes!
Two things we might want to keep in mind:
1. Administrators are under incredible pressure right now. Yes, so are teachers, but since we’re the ones actually teaching, we have a direct outlet for our pressure: we can actually increase our performance. Administrators, on the other hand, can’t. Their only response to increased pressure is to try to get US to increase OUR performance. There’s a big difference.
2. Unsolicited advice ALWAYS sounds like criticism. Even when it isn’t. When someone suggests a new approach to a teaching situation, the suggestee always interprets this as an implication that what they’re doing now is crappy.
The administrators in my district do the same thing: they assume that cramming more curriculum into the teacher’s toolbox and pushing for more data collection will fix our AYP problems. No one seems to be looking at other causes for falling scores. Every year we get more training, more advice from administrators (we call them school improvement officers) who come to our building and observe, then tell our principal what is needed. We should have SIOP objectives posted for every lesson, we should have tiered intervention in 30 minute slots, etc, and since we’ve been ‘given’ all these tools, why are our scores still falling short? Must be us teachers.
I’m very concerned.
The tone! That’s what I’m having issues with as well in some staff meetings. There seems to be the assumption (sometimes, from some administrators) that we teachers don’t get it because we haven’t been through an admin program. I feel sometimes like the administration-to-teacher dynamic is treated like the teacher-to-student dynamic. They are not analogous. At all. In our classrooms, we are experts, inculcating those without the experience, knowledge, or skills that we seek to provide. The same cannot, and should not be said of teachers from an administrator’s perspective.
That said: I’m pretty lucky that I knew my current evaluator when he was a teacher, and I know the caliber of his skills and expertise as an educator, so I have trust and confidence. The larger climate and tone, though, is the problem.