What is a good teacher? And what does it take to become one?
In one way or another, the current debates about teacher salaries, teachers’ unions, and education reform all come down to some version of these questions. They are extremely complicated questions. And they are exceedingly difficult to answer.
Teachers who participate in the National Writing Project know that. This past weekend, twenty teachers from NWP sites around New York state gathered in Albany, NY, as part of a meeting of the Empire State Writing Project Network to talk about effective teaching and writing instruction. Most were veteran teachers; a few were newer teachers. All are dedicated. They spent the weekend, without extra pay, carefully examining what it means to teach writing effectively and how we can help schools support the development of effective teachers. They looked at student writing and considered how to identify growth in writing proficiency. They discussed how to see strengths in student writing and how to address weaknesses. And they shared ideas about creating ways to become better teachers in their own classrooms and schools. These intense, in-depth discussions highlighted many important insights about writing and teaching. One of those insights can be summed up this way: Teaching, like writing, is enormously complex, and it cannot be easily defined or measured–certainly not by standardized tests or canned evaluations that reduce both writing and teaching to absurd levels of simplicity.
One big challenge that teachers from the National Writing Project, like those who gathered in Albany this weekend, is communicating a sense of the complexities of writing, teaching, and learning to their colleagues, administrators, and parents. Many people have deeply held misconceptions writing and to teaching and easily fall prey to the platitudes that get thrown about in public debates about education. It can be frustrating for teachers who dedicate themselves to developing genuine expertise as writers and teachers to have to listen to the oversimplified ways that politicians, pundits, and policymakers talk about these matters.
Here’s one example. This morning I came across an essay by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff in which Kristoff, who usually has insightful things to say about important issues like education, reinforced the same tired idea that we can easily measure teacher performance. In an otherwise laudable essay arguing for better pay for teachers, Kristoff writes that teacher pay “should be for performance, with more rigorous evaluation.” On the surface, it’s hard to argue with that sentiment. But like many commentators, Kristoff never explains just what it means to connect pay to “performance” or what a “more rigorous evaluation” looks like. That’s typical. The assumption is that we can evaluate teachers fairly and “rigorously” on the basis of “performance” (which often means the scores their students earn on standardized tests), yet we never hear about the monumental challenges of doing so. Anyone who has spent any time genuinely trying to understand how to teach well (which NWP teachers do all the time) knows that there is no easy way to evaluate teachers’ “performance” or measure a teacher’s impact on a student. Moreover, good teaching takes many years to master and can’t be captured in formulaic strategies or classroom techniques. These realities all too often are ignored in the debates about education reform–even by thoughtful writers like Kristoff.
Kristoff does point to some recent research indicating that effective teachers, defined in comparison to their peers, can result in significant increases in what their students earn over their lifetimes. But truly dedicated teachers know that teaching–and schooling in general–is not just about enhancing their students’ future salaries. Is a teacher less “effective” if she inspires learning that leads her students to pursue career paths that benefit their communities but earn only modest paychecks, like social work or counseling–or teaching?
The truth is that good teaching contributes to the well-being of students and their communities, and that can’t be measured by standardized test scores or future salary levels. Kristoff is right that we should try to attract the very best people into teaching–not only by offering better salaries but also by treating teachers with respect and holding them, in Kristoff’s phrasing, in high esteem. But we also have to recognize, as the National Writing Project has for more than three decades, that effective teaching is a matter of lifelong dedication to genuine inquiry into the complexities of teaching and learning–a process that can be as difficult as it is rewarding and one that many teachers never truly engage in.
The teachers from the Empire State Writing Project Network who gathered in Albany this weekend know this. Every one of those teachers, no matter how experienced or accomplished, learned something new and important this weekend about writing and teaching. And they learned by working together to delve into difficult and complex questions about student writing.
It takes more than higher salaries and “rigorous” evaluations to create good teachers. It takes dedication to sustained and often challenging professional learning of the kind routinely demonstrated by NWP teachers.
Bob Yagelski
Director, CDWP
