By Mark
If you say the word too many times, it starts to sound funny (like if you say "moist" or "pancake" too many times and they start to sound strange…maybe that's just me). It seems like every sentence in my professional life includes that word "growth" in one context or another. Student growth scores, Professional Growth Planning, proficiency growth scales…
I like it. It does something more than grades or labels once did: talking grades and labels felt so static and permanent, talking growth is talking movement. Where I used to talk to kids about "bringing a grade up" (in other words, struggling to move something beyond themselves) now I find myself talking to students about developing their skills and growing toward proficiency. There is a real difference.
I attribute this directly to my professional and personal learning about the new teacher evaluation system.
Had that acronym not hopped the edutrend pendulum to swing into my life, I would probably not have considered focusing on so clearly communicating skills and proficiency levels to students. I probably would not have thought so much about whether I'm making clear my performance expectations to students. I certainly would not have been encouraging kids to reflect and track their own progress toward a long term skill goal without succumbing to the impulse to etch a grade on it along the way.
In my district, we are in year three of a very intentional transition to the new evaluation system. In our district of roughly 450 cert staff and administrators, year one was about six or seven of us getting together to learn. Year two was about enlisting about 100 to pilot, explore, and experiment. Year three is about further expanding so we can implement changes that ultimately have a whole lot more to do with being great teachers than with conforming to a law. While there was tremendous anxiety and concern–and some still remains–teachers are growing in their willingness to learn and adapt. Fewer and fewer teachers are coming along because "they" are telling us to; more and more are seeing that these shifts are actually bearing fruit and clear promise of potential to improve their practice and therefore impact student learning.
The acceptance of that change is sometimes seen by others as "drinking the kool aid" or "conforming," but the dirty little secret is what many of my colleagues are figuring out: it's not conforming, it's improving. That's growth.
That is what I want from my students as well: not conformity, but improvement. Because of the learning about TPEP that I began reticently (and to a degree, unwillingly) a few years ago, I've moved past conformity and compliance to real learning, growth and improvement. Simply put, I'm a stronger teacher because I made the choice to allow myself to grow rather than fight to maintain what I still believe worked quite well.
The great thing? "Quite well" is now "even better."
I do think that teachers need to be enlisted in implementation of TPEP… nothing sticks for long when it is “done to us” without sincere efforts to engage teachers in making the most of the process.
Interesting post, Mark. The conventional wisdom has been that change in education will only work when teachers buy into it or have had a hand in developing it. Yet with TPEP, most teacher with whom I work have more or less – mostly more – accepted it. And I think you’ve hit on the part that resonates with most teachers: this is about growth, not an assessment of talent.