Is anyone asking teachers?

In the March 15, 2010 front-page article, "Class masters", The Sunday Denver Post focused on teacher-effectiveness, recognizing that the teacher is the single-most important factor in the classroom. The article goes on to say, though, that we don't know what makes a "great" teacher "great", and districts don't know how to "impart the skills." to every teacher who needs them.

My first difficulty here is notion that we have no idea what makes an effective teacher. We have a great body of research on teacher effectiveness, including literacy effective studies such as Learning to Read: Lessons from exemplary first grade classrooms, (Pressley and Allington, 2001) and Reading to Learn: Lessons from exemplary fourth-grade classrooms (Allington and Johnston, 2002), and Ruddell's work with characterizing the influential teacher, those identified by former students as having had a profound impact on their academic and personal literacy lives (Researching the Influential Literacy Teacher: Characteristics, Beliefs, Strategies, and New Research Directions, 1997). These studies summarized other studies and added to the body of knowledge, resulting in comprehensive lists of characteristics, attitudes, and instructional strategies of exemplary teachers. We have many lists with much commonality.

Legislation that would create "career ladders" for teachers and provide additional pay for them to share their practices reflects the notion that excellent teaching consists of a set of skills that if "imparted" to teachers will result in excellence. Excellent teaching has been characterized as complicated, personal, passionate act, much like a surgeon who modifies a surgical procedure during a planned operation to successfully solve a medical emergency. No two patients are exactly alike, so no procedure will work exactly the same in every circumstance. No two children in any classroom are alike, responding to every learning situation differently. The highly effective teacher understands this and is able to make countless decisions daily that respond to the personal and academic needs of each student.

By comparing great teaching to "hard-core ponography", hard to define but you know it when you see it, this article depicts exemplary teaching as mysterious and rare, feeding the perception that most teachers are simple-minded slackers who need explicit, scripted instrution. Instead, fifty years of research have demonstrated relative ineffectiveness of such methods. The complicated part of teaching is the selection, organizing and planning instruction that meets the needs of increasingly diverse learners.

The fact that a "Council on Teacher Effectiveness" has a deadline of December to have this evaluation system done for the State of Colorado makes me fear that focus on performance pay, racing to the top, and the desire for a common evaluation system will result in a simplistic, one-size-fits-all, easy to measure definition of "great" teaching that will continue to minimize truly professional teaching.

We know the "what" of exemplary teaching; we lack "how" these teachers were supported from the beginning to develop integration of all the complex factors into a cohesive classroom instruction that intentionally responds to all learners. The teacher featured in the article identified the criticial mentoring, collaboration, feedback and idea sharing from teammates in her first three years. It seems to me that if we can identify highly effective, influential teachers that have earned and command the respect of students, parent community, administrators and colleagure, we have an opportunity to find out what they see as key factors in their development. Expertize doesn't happen overnight, and my hunch is that exemplary teachers will have many thoughts about how they got there--who their mentors were, which support was most effective, and how they continue to learn and grow.

I wonder--is anyone asking excellent teachers how they came to be "exemplary"?

Passion or Discipline?

I have been in a blogging slump. I have been mentally rehearsing, but have found no topic I think worthy of the time it would take me to compose it and for my dedicated thoughtful colleagues to respond to it. I have spent more time analyzing my thoughts about why blogging is hard for me than actually blogging.

I reread my last post, and I realized it was a topic I was absolutely passionate about. Nothing I have thought of recently matches that intensity, and I find without a deep connection, writing seems a waste of time to me. Sending it out to the cyber-universe seems ludicrous. WHO would want to read such drivel?

But then, the reason we are asked to blog is to develop the discipline of critical thinking, reading and writing skills. As with physical exercise, this mental exercise should be regular, if routine. I should be able to take any topic at any time and dissect it, analyze it, argue for or against it, and then take the idea further in some way.

So, is this about passion, or discipline? Perhaps my problem is wanting both.