The next generation of leaders in our country is sitting in our classrooms today. Many are concerned these students have been over-praised and under-worked in their years in schools so far. We clearly need a shift in how we praise students and what we commend them for. Rigor has a definite role here, especially in terms of how students challenge themselves and work for the true art of learning rather than the A they hoped to attain.
The following article does a solid job describing what this can look like and how educators can help change the dialogue and role of praise in their classrooms...
In schools, self-esteem boosting is losing favor to rigor, finer-tuned praise
By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: January 15, 2012
For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates — but few, if any, academic gains.
Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments. Consider teacher Shar Hellie’s new approach in Montgomery County.
To get students through the shaky first steps of Spanish grammar, Hellie spent many years trying to boost their confidence. If someone couldn’t answer a question easily, she would coach him, whisper the first few words, then follow up with a booming “¡Muy bien!”
But on a January morning at Rocky Hill Middle School in Clarksburg, the smiling grandmother gave nothing away. One seventh-grade boy returned to the overhead projector three times to rewrite a sentence, hesitating each time, while his classmates squirmed in silence.
“You like that?” Hellie asked when he settled on an answer. He nodded. Finally, she beamed and praised the progress he was making — in his cerebral cortex.
“You have a whole different set of neurons popping up there!” she told him.
A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities. As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are “persistence,” “risk-taking” and “resilience” — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.
“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”
Dweck’s studies, embraced in Montgomery schools and elsewhere, have found that praising children for intelligence — “You’re so clever!” — also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.
But children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.
Brain imaging shows how this is true, how connections between nerve cells in the cortex multiply and grow stronger as people learn and practice new skills. This bit of science has proved to be motivating to struggling students because it gives them a sense of control over their success.
It’s also helpful for students on an accelerated track, the ones often told how “smart” they are, who are vulnerable to coasting or easily frustrated when they don’t succeed.
That’s how teachers at Rocky Hill Middle started talking about “neuroplasticity” and “dendritic branching” during training sessions. They also started the school year by giving all 1,100 students a mini-course in brain development.
“This is the most important thing you are going to learn this year,” Hellie said she told her students before playing a YouTube video that explains how brains grow. “It has to do with the way you are going to live the rest of your life — whether you will continue to learn, be curious, have an active, growing brain or whether you are going to sit and let things happen to you.”
An online curriculum called Brainology developed by Dweck and another researcher in 2009 has been used in 300 schools. Joshua P. Starr, the new Montgomery schools superintendent, selected Dweck’s book, “Mindset,” for the inaugural session of a book club he created to introduce his education philosophy.
Dweck’s work builds on other research about motivation and the malleability of intelligence that has stirred significant changes in curriculum, teacher training and gifted instruction in many school districts.
In Fairfax County, for example, students are no longer labeled “gifted” but considered on a spectrum of “novice” to “expert” in each subject — the kind of language that is seeping into teacher praise, said Carol Horn, coordinator of advanced academic programs for Fairfax schools.
Education experts have long warned about the dark side of praise.
Alfie Kohn, author of the book “Punished by Rewards,” has said most praise, even for effort, encourages children to be “praise junkies” dependent on outside feedback rather than cultivating their own judgment and motivation to learn.
Michelle A. Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor, often recounts a story about how her daughters’ many soccer trophies are warping their sense of their athletic abilities. Her daughters “suck at soccer,” she said in a radio interview for Marketplace last January.
“We’ve become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we’ve lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things,” Rhee said.
Underlying the praise backlash is a hard seed of anxiety — a sense that American students are not working hard enough to compete with students from overseas for future jobs.
In an oft-cited 2006 study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, U.S. eighth-graders had only a middling performance on an international math exam, but they registered high levels of confidence. They were more likely than higher performing students from other countries, such as Singapore and South Korea, to report that they “usually do well in mathematics.”
Praise should be relevant to objective standards, said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. Whether it’s given to make children feel good or because “at least they tried,” it’s not helpful if students are still “50 yards from proficient,” he said.
“Winning or losing also matters in the real world,” Finn said. “You either beat the enemy or you don’t. You either get the gold medal or you get the silver.”
Dweck said it is important to be clear with children about what proficient or gold-medal performance looks like so they know what to strive for. (Unhelpful: “You were robbed! Those judges must be blind!”)
But she stresses the importance of using praise to encourage risk-taking and learning from failure in the classroom, experiences that make way for invention, creativity and resilience.
“Does the teacher say: ‘Who’s having a fantastic struggle? Show me your struggle.’ That is something that should be rewarded,” she said. “Does the teacher make it clear that the fastest answer isn’t always the best answer? [That] a mistake-free paper isn’t always the best paper?”
Changing the language of praise can be difficult for adults who grew up thinking that an “A for effort” was a consolation prize.
During his book club, Starr recounted how his 3-year-old son recently discovered that the word “brown” starts with B.
“My wife says, ‘You are so smart,’ ” he recalled. When he discouraged her from praising his intelligence, Starr said, “she looked at me like I was crazy.”
Typically, young children don’t second-guess praise. But teenagers understand when feedback is useful and authentic. “Great job!” doesn’t tell them what was great about what they did, experts say.
“They know that everything they do isn’t ‘Magnificent!’ ” Hellie said.
And so her class is becoming accustomed to awkward silence.
The same January morning, another seventh-grade boy struggled to figure out what was wrong with this sentence: Un chico soy inteligente.
One classmate started to answer, but Hellie stopped her. Another classmate volunteered, in newly acquired vocabulary, why the boy needed to persist on his own. “He’s trying to connect pathways in his brain or whatever,” she said.
Finally, the boy understood.
“Soy un chico inteligente,” he said.
“What does it mean?” the teacher asked.
“I am an intelligent boy?”
The class broke into applause.
Full article available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-schools-self-esteem-boosting-is-losing-favor-to-rigor-finer-tuned-praise/2012/01/11/gIQAXFnF1P_story.html
Super Teacher's Job is Never Done!
Photo courtesy of DiscoveryEducation.com
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
We must respect our teachers as professionals!
Time and time again, international studies have demonstrated that teacher quality and retention is directly related to how professionally they are treated in their schools. This article is no exception.
Teacher Quality, Status Entwined Among Top-Performing Nations
Teaching is the most popular career for high school graduates in Finland, one international report found. Training programs typically choose just one in 10 applicants from the top quarter of their classes. The nation's modern facilities include schools such as Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School, in a suburb west of Helsinki.—Stuart W. Conway
Prestige and respect, not only salary, are seen as crucial elements in the quest for a truly professional teacher workforce
By Stephen Sawchuk
One of the most troubling things that the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, hears about her profession can be summed up in a single observation: the idea that she and other top-performing colleagues are "just" teachers.
The word "just" serves as a reminder of a subtle mindset among some in the United States that a career in K-12 teaching, while considered noble, is nevertheless somehow seen as beneath the capacity of talented young men and women.
"People go into teaching because they are committed to young people, because they are incredible communicators or experts in their field," says Wessling, a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa. "But many people in our country see teaching as though it's a second-choice profession."
It is a sentiment that is virtually unheard of among countries such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea that top the charts on high-profile international assessments.
Highlights From the Report
Executive Summary: Equipping U.S. Schools for the Global Fast Lane
Overview: U.S. Education Pressured by International Comparisons
"Teaching is a similar career to a lawyer or a medical doctor. It's an academic profession, an independent profession," says Jari Lavonen, the director of teacher education at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. "There is lots of decisionmaking at the local level, and teachers enjoy freedom and trust. They work as real experts."
Similarly, in territories within other nations that have led the pack on improvements to their systems, such as Canada's Ontario province, leaders credit investment in their teaching force as an important reason for their improvements.
"The key idea to get better student performance was to help teachers to get better, and to expect them to get better," says Ben Levin, a former deputy minister of education in Ontario, who helped oversee reforms begun in 2004. "But we wanted an approach that was respectful of teachers as professional educators, as opposed to assuming that they needed to be slapped into line in some kind of way."
Even nations such as Chile that still have a steep hill to climb to improve student learning have focused policy efforts on improvements to the profession and are beginning to see dividends from those undertakings.
The specific strategies deployed by these countries to raise the status of the profession have been filtered through their own political and cultural contexts, but several common themes stand out. They include a movement toward rigorous recruitment and training regimes, more competitive teacher salaries, and support systems to help teachers perfect their craft.
"The combination of better working conditions, higher pay, and higher share of pay based on effort and performance all work together to attract people who are smart, hard-working, and want to make a difference," says Emiliana Vegas, the lead economist for education at the World Bank, in Washington.
In short, successful nations have made teaching a respected and supported profession, if perhaps not a lucrative one.
There's little disagreement that U.S. educators deserve a similar degree of prestige, but the translation of that lofty goal into effective public policy is anything but clear—and the policy levers at hand are not easy ones to pull.
The 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, of the Johnston Community School District, in Iowa, is introduced by President Barack Obama at a Rose Garden ceremony. She worries that many see teaching as a second-choice career.
—Alex Wong/Getty Images-File"The institutional structure for training, employment, and compensation in medicine [in the United States] is radically different from K-12 education," notes Dan Goldhaber, an associate professor of economics at the University of Washington Bothell campus, who has studied the structure of the teacher labor market. "[The medical profession] has higher starting salaries, higher eventual salaries, much more rigorous selection up front, and many fewer training institutions. ... I don't think there's any short-term fix, bottom line."
A Different Landscape
One of the key challenges to building on the lessons from international practices lies in the fact that the United States' teacher-quality system differs so greatly from that of most other nations. To name just one significant difference, the sheer size of the United States, coupled with its federated structure, has produced a complex melange of 50 different licensing and preparation systems across some 1,400 training institutions. Even accounting for population differences, that's almost three times the proportion of such institutions in Canada or Finland.
And unlike smaller, centralized nations, the United States trains nearly all interested aspirants to teaching and filters out only a small percentage. Those filters consist both of formal ones, such as the licensure, certification, and evaluation systems states have created, as well as informal ones, such as high teacher turnover, particularly at the lowest-performing schools.
Alternative-certification programs, meanwhile, have sprung up partly to meet market needs in shortage subjects or locations. Some of them, like the Teach For America program, are among the most prestigious and selective routes to teaching in the nation. Yet teachers note that the nation's patchwork selection system carries a downside.
"When I'm driving to the airport and see a sign saying, 'Become a teacher in six weeks,' I don't think that sends a message that teaching is a profession," says Wessling, the Teacher of the Year. "I think it sends the message that we need bodies."
Teacher-quality measures in many top-performing countries begin with a highly selective process, in which candidates are screened closely before entering classrooms, and hiring decisions are closely matched to projected demographic needs.
In its most recent admissions cycle, the University of Helsinki accepted just 7 percent of the approximately 1,700 students who applied to the teaching program, according to Mr. Lavonen. In addition, entry standards to teacher preparation include a review of high school work and a written assessment asking teachers to read and analyze 250 pages of material from academic journals, among other steps.
According to profiles of the country prepared by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, mainly a group of developed nations, teaching is the most popular career for high school graduates in Finland, and training programs typically select only one in 10 applicants from the top quarter of their classes.
By contrast, the United States' elementary-level teachers continue to hold below-average high school grade point averages and SAT scores, despite some recent improvements in those figures. Few teacher-training schools, meanwhile, can boast the selection ratios seen in Finland, and states set generally low entry requirements, including cutoff scores on required licensure exams that frequently fall far below the 50th percentile of test-takers.
Would it be possible to move the needle if the United States' training institutions were to recruit stronger students in the Finland mold? However common sense that proposition, it remains something of a best-guess theory. Studies linking teachers to student-achievement growth have failed to find any "silver bullet" preservice teacher characteristics that consistently predict higher student achievement. Determining who, on the front end, will prove to be an effective teacher remains an imprecise science.
Nevertheless, several clues exist within the data. Specific measures of academic competence, such as high verbal ability and college-entrance-exam scores, do appear to give those who hold them an edge in the classroom in the earlier grades. At the secondary level, math content knowledge also appears to be correlated.
Finally, there is the observation that so many of the highest-performing countries have made rigorous recruiting of teachers with strong academic qualifications one of their guiding educational principles. "It's difficult to imagine that we wouldn't be in a better place with the education system if we had more-capable teacher-candidates to choose from," Goldhaber says.
Japanese teachers, such as this Kyoto high school instructor, meet frequently with one another outside the classroom to plan lessons.
—Keren Su/Corbis-FileA handful of teacher-training programs in the United States have embraced a similar theory of action. Two years ago, Indiana University began a system whereby those high school students with a minimum of 1100 on their SAT and a 3.7 GPA who are interested in becoming teachers can be directly admitted to its education school. (Typically, Indiana University undergraduates must have a 2.5 GPA in their lower-division courses to enter the school.)
About a third of those who enter undergraduate teacher preparation now come through the direct-admit program, said Gerardo M. Gonzalez, the dean of the school of education. And the program has had the added benefit of making the school more prestigious.
"High-quality students want to be with high-quality students," Gonzalez says. "We're competing for the best students with every field."
Yet obstacles, both cultural and financial, have served to slow widespread adoption of more-rigorous recruiting endeavors in the United States.
"I think there's a lot of validity to the argument that when you raise standards, you attract better-quality students," Gonzalez says. "But there's also, I think, the understanding that, in many cases, institutions are working against significant social and professional attitudes, and frankly, the reality of the marketplace. They will not always be able to recruit the kinds of students they want to because of the competition."
The incentives built into an increasingly tuition-based higher education system also pose challenges, teacher educators acknowledge.
"It is profitable, certainly in the for-profit realm, to produce as many teachers as you can," says Arthur E. Wise, the president emeritus of the Washington-based National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. "Frankly, [that incentive] exists even in the public sector, because training a teacher is still pretty cheap, the way it's practiced."
Best and Brightest
In the United States, the idea of recruiting the best and brightest is complicated by the sheer numbers of candidates needed for a professional workforce the size of public K-12 teaching, which counts about 3.2 million individuals in all.
School districts face the challenge of balancing increased selectivity with the need to recruit enough teachers to meet demand. That is especially true in higher-poverty schools and districts, where turnover is typically higher and recruiting more difficult, notes Matthew Di Carlo, a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank that receives support from the American Federation of Teachers.
"You can't quite recruit teachers the way you recruit Navy SEALS or traders at Goldman Sachs. Those fields require comparatively fewer candidates," Di Carlo says. "We need to be careful about applying this small-scale thinking to a very large, diverse, and geographically dispersed labor market."
One of the particular downsides to the teaching profession in the United States, economists point out, is the relatively low starting compensation relative to comparable occupations, and the many years it takes to achieve a maximum salary. And while few prospective teachers go into the profession for the salary, wages in the U.S. are generally associated with prestige.
OECD data show that U.S. salaries for teachers with 15 years of experience are, on average, just 60 percent of the full-time earnings for 24 to 64 year olds with college educations, compared with 80 percent in other OECD countries. Meanwhile, studies suggest that, in the United States, the most highly skilled college graduates who select teaching over other occupations for which they're qualified can forfeit thousands of dollars in wages.
Here again, international practices provide stimulating food for thought. In a relatively short time frame, Chile's performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, an international exam, improved enough to surpass its South American neighbors'. Though not a top-performing country, it now approaches the mean score of all countries affiliated with the OECD.
Chile's dramatic improvements are thought to be partly related to its investments in salaries, which were gradually tied to reforms, including a new teacher-evaluation system in 1996, and later, several bonus-pay programs, the World Bank's Vegas says.
See AlsoRead more about preparing prospective teachers in this Quality Counts 2012 article: "Teacher Training a Careful Balancing Act"Between 1990 and 2007, the country raised teacher salaries by more than 150 percent; during that period, applications to teacher education programs increased by 39 percent, and the average score of entrance exams increased by 60 percent, according to research on the country's labor force.
As for the United States, a market-research analysis by McKinsey & Co., a New York City-headquartered consultancy, concluded that if teacher salaries here began at $65,000 and maxed out at $150,000, the number of high-performing college graduates who would consider the profession would rise from 14 percent to 68 percent. (Beginning teacher salaries in the United States average about $39,000 and rise to $67,000, the report states.)
Raises for all teachers could be prohibitively expensive in the United States, given its current fiscal state. The alternative approach—salary differentiation targeted to specifics at certain career milestones, subject taught, performance, or other criteria—has won the support of economists, who view the nation's current compensation system as too flat and inefficient.
"You can't repeal the laws of supply and demand, however much you think you can," says Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, who urges, for instance, higher pay for math and science educators. "The kind of skills these teachers have demands a market price."
Such efforts have traditionally been frowned on by teachers' unions. But several new experiments, in cities such as Pittsburgh and Baltimore, are beginning to restructure teachers' base compensation to identify top-performers, and those plans have been approved by the local unions.
The prestige associated with the teaching profession, as many teachers volubly remind policymakers, comes from more than just higher salaries. Teachers enter the profession for its intrinsic rewards, such as influencing young people. Their reasons for leaving the profession often have to do with feeling as though factors outside their control are impinging on that goal.
Research on teacher mobility, for instance, shows that teachers' decisions about whether to stay in a specific school are more strongly linked to working conditions, including the quality of their principal, as well as characteristics of the student body, than to their salaries.
In Wessling's view, one of the biggest differences between teaching and high-prestige professions such as medicine is the perceived lack of trust in educators and absence of professional autonomy in schools.
Nurses and doctors are vested with the power to collaborate and are trusted to diagnose and solve problems; teachers, by contrast, often work in isolation, and the profession in general offers few opportunities for leadership or advancement, she notes.
"The culture of schools is really powerful," Wessling says. "Amazing teachers can come into a school, but if that culture is so stifling, all their creativity can go unused."
Many of the highest-performing systems have gradually helped schools and educators build their skills, but without a strict, top-down approach. It is the key lesson from Ontario, according to comparative case studies conducted by analysts for the OECD.
Beginning in 2003, the province's education ministers began crafting reforms to raise students' literacy and numeracy skills. They chose not to use an approach that, for example, required specific time allotments for certain reading activities, fearing that the best teachers would find such an approach off-putting. Instead, the province's education leaders convened teams of expert researchers on those topics to build capacity in each school, says Levin, the former deputy education minister.
Lagging Behind
American public school teachers with 15 years of experience do worse in terms of salary than their colleagues in a broad swath of industrialized nations when compared with college-educated workers overall, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The difference is most stark at the high school level, where experienced teachers in the United States earn about a third less than the average salary for college-educated workers among some two dozen countries surveyed.
The chart shows how the salaries of high school teachers with 15 years of experience stack up against the average of all full-time, college-educated workers ages 25 to 64 among a group of nations surveyed by the OECD.
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development"We emphasized consistency of practice around classrooms and did a lot of work to create teams of teachers in the schools," he says. "You get commitment to the practices because teachers believe in it. It's about building people's sense of professional commitment and skills."
The percentage of students reaching basic reading and math goals in the province has risen from 55 percent to about 70 percent since 2004. Importantly, the changes also appear to have stemmed a teacher shortage by making the profession more appealing, Mr. Levin says.
Opportunities to improve one's craft are better integrated into the school day in several other top-performing countries, too. Teachers in OECD countries spend 700 hours a year, on average, engaged in face-to-face instruction of students; in South Korea and Finland, where much of the school day is spent planning and refining lessons with colleagues, that figure drops to 600 hours. Teachers in the United States, by contrast, average about 1,100 hours a year.
Countries such as Singapore couple professional development with a career ladder, so that teachers identified as being especially effective are given opportunities to advance to positions in which they are given formal responsibility for coaching and helping colleagues improve.
Take, for example, Japan and China's Shanghai province. They use "lesson study" as a form of professional development. Teachers watch a colleague teach a lesson and then meet as a group to discuss ways in which it could have been strengthened. In such a system, teachers whose skills fall behind both have incentives to improve and higher-skilled role models to emulate.
The McKinsey group has identified a handful of school systems in the United States that have developed similar practices around professional development, including the Long Beach, Calif., district.
Current Efforts
Interest in teacher-quality policy in the United States has increased considerably under the Obama administration, which has put it at the front of the agenda.
The administration has emphasized changes to teacher-evaluation systems as the central component for improving teaching, its theory holding that establishing common definitions of good teaching and measuring performance will help knit together other aspects of the profession. For instance, such systems could identify top-performers for promotion or extra pay, help improve the relevancy of professional development, and identify which teachers should be counseled out of the profession. A handful of districts, including Hillsborough County, Fla.; Pittsburgh; and New Haven, Conn., are beginning to institute these systems.
Some scholars, such as Goldhaber of the University of Washington, see promise in the movement toward improved teacher evaluation. He believes that such initiatives could build constructively on the nation's back-ended teacher-selection system. Research suggests, for instance, that teaching performance in the first few years on the job is a significant predictor of future performance.
The evaluations could be tied to other ideas to boost the profession's prestige, such as a national teaching certificate to recognize those identified as being especially effective, he said.
"The fact that we have 50 different licensing regimes makes a teaching credential less valuable because it's less portable," Goldhaber says.
Yet observers say many nuanced issues remain to be worked out before evaluations can effectively be used to improve teacher performance.
"The design and implementation of new teacher evaluations—what they consist of, how they are used, and whether the results are presented to teachers in a useful manner, will determine their success or failure," says Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute, who has blogged on a number of occasions about those issues. "I'm concerned that these details are taking a back seat, when they should be driving the process and debate."
The move toward incorporating student test scores into evaluations has been hugely controversial in the United States, and one where there is little international precedent. Though other nations do look at student work and some, such as Singapore, review student scores, standardized tests generally receive less weight than other sources of information, including parent surveys, inspections, and peer review. Indeed, teacher evaluation is generally broader in scope and less formalized in countries where much professional accountability comes from colleagues rather than outside monitors.
For Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, such examples offer a frustrating contrast.
"We talk about the conclusions from these international reports, but we don't dissect and deconstruct them in a way that follows how they got to those conclusions," she says. "Singapore has embedded professional development in evaluation so it becomes about improving practice. That's something we should learn from."
She contends the evaluation systems currently being created in the United States "are not about board of education responsibility, school superintendent responsibility, student responsibility, or parents' responsibility. They're only about teacher and principal responsibility."
For her part, Teacher of the Year Wessling is unsure where the teacher-evaluation discussion will lead, but she believes that attempts to raise the prestige of the profession will need to be comprehensive—a point of view that reflects the conclusion of most international-comparison studies.
She adds that teachers must play a role in the transformation, both by making their voices heard by those who set policy, and by setting an example in their own schools of how teachers can reshape individual school environments to reflect the professional practices of teachers in the best-performing countries.
After all, she reasons, cultural change begins from within.
"Teachers and educators can't subscribe to this outside perception of what we are," she said. "The responsibility for defining the profession is ours."
Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at www.joycefdn.org/Programs/Education.
Vol. 31, Issue 16, Pages 12-16
Full article available at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/12/16teachers.h31.html?print=1
Teacher Quality, Status Entwined Among Top-Performing Nations
Teaching is the most popular career for high school graduates in Finland, one international report found. Training programs typically choose just one in 10 applicants from the top quarter of their classes. The nation's modern facilities include schools such as Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School, in a suburb west of Helsinki.—Stuart W. Conway
Prestige and respect, not only salary, are seen as crucial elements in the quest for a truly professional teacher workforce
By Stephen Sawchuk
One of the most troubling things that the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, hears about her profession can be summed up in a single observation: the idea that she and other top-performing colleagues are "just" teachers.
The word "just" serves as a reminder of a subtle mindset among some in the United States that a career in K-12 teaching, while considered noble, is nevertheless somehow seen as beneath the capacity of talented young men and women.
"People go into teaching because they are committed to young people, because they are incredible communicators or experts in their field," says Wessling, a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa. "But many people in our country see teaching as though it's a second-choice profession."
It is a sentiment that is virtually unheard of among countries such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea that top the charts on high-profile international assessments.
Highlights From the Report
Executive Summary: Equipping U.S. Schools for the Global Fast Lane
Overview: U.S. Education Pressured by International Comparisons
"Teaching is a similar career to a lawyer or a medical doctor. It's an academic profession, an independent profession," says Jari Lavonen, the director of teacher education at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. "There is lots of decisionmaking at the local level, and teachers enjoy freedom and trust. They work as real experts."
Similarly, in territories within other nations that have led the pack on improvements to their systems, such as Canada's Ontario province, leaders credit investment in their teaching force as an important reason for their improvements.
"The key idea to get better student performance was to help teachers to get better, and to expect them to get better," says Ben Levin, a former deputy minister of education in Ontario, who helped oversee reforms begun in 2004. "But we wanted an approach that was respectful of teachers as professional educators, as opposed to assuming that they needed to be slapped into line in some kind of way."
Even nations such as Chile that still have a steep hill to climb to improve student learning have focused policy efforts on improvements to the profession and are beginning to see dividends from those undertakings.
The specific strategies deployed by these countries to raise the status of the profession have been filtered through their own political and cultural contexts, but several common themes stand out. They include a movement toward rigorous recruitment and training regimes, more competitive teacher salaries, and support systems to help teachers perfect their craft.
"The combination of better working conditions, higher pay, and higher share of pay based on effort and performance all work together to attract people who are smart, hard-working, and want to make a difference," says Emiliana Vegas, the lead economist for education at the World Bank, in Washington.
In short, successful nations have made teaching a respected and supported profession, if perhaps not a lucrative one.
There's little disagreement that U.S. educators deserve a similar degree of prestige, but the translation of that lofty goal into effective public policy is anything but clear—and the policy levers at hand are not easy ones to pull.
The 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, of the Johnston Community School District, in Iowa, is introduced by President Barack Obama at a Rose Garden ceremony. She worries that many see teaching as a second-choice career.
—Alex Wong/Getty Images-File"The institutional structure for training, employment, and compensation in medicine [in the United States] is radically different from K-12 education," notes Dan Goldhaber, an associate professor of economics at the University of Washington Bothell campus, who has studied the structure of the teacher labor market. "[The medical profession] has higher starting salaries, higher eventual salaries, much more rigorous selection up front, and many fewer training institutions. ... I don't think there's any short-term fix, bottom line."
A Different Landscape
One of the key challenges to building on the lessons from international practices lies in the fact that the United States' teacher-quality system differs so greatly from that of most other nations. To name just one significant difference, the sheer size of the United States, coupled with its federated structure, has produced a complex melange of 50 different licensing and preparation systems across some 1,400 training institutions. Even accounting for population differences, that's almost three times the proportion of such institutions in Canada or Finland.
And unlike smaller, centralized nations, the United States trains nearly all interested aspirants to teaching and filters out only a small percentage. Those filters consist both of formal ones, such as the licensure, certification, and evaluation systems states have created, as well as informal ones, such as high teacher turnover, particularly at the lowest-performing schools.
Alternative-certification programs, meanwhile, have sprung up partly to meet market needs in shortage subjects or locations. Some of them, like the Teach For America program, are among the most prestigious and selective routes to teaching in the nation. Yet teachers note that the nation's patchwork selection system carries a downside.
"When I'm driving to the airport and see a sign saying, 'Become a teacher in six weeks,' I don't think that sends a message that teaching is a profession," says Wessling, the Teacher of the Year. "I think it sends the message that we need bodies."
Teacher-quality measures in many top-performing countries begin with a highly selective process, in which candidates are screened closely before entering classrooms, and hiring decisions are closely matched to projected demographic needs.
In its most recent admissions cycle, the University of Helsinki accepted just 7 percent of the approximately 1,700 students who applied to the teaching program, according to Mr. Lavonen. In addition, entry standards to teacher preparation include a review of high school work and a written assessment asking teachers to read and analyze 250 pages of material from academic journals, among other steps.
According to profiles of the country prepared by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, mainly a group of developed nations, teaching is the most popular career for high school graduates in Finland, and training programs typically select only one in 10 applicants from the top quarter of their classes.
By contrast, the United States' elementary-level teachers continue to hold below-average high school grade point averages and SAT scores, despite some recent improvements in those figures. Few teacher-training schools, meanwhile, can boast the selection ratios seen in Finland, and states set generally low entry requirements, including cutoff scores on required licensure exams that frequently fall far below the 50th percentile of test-takers.
Would it be possible to move the needle if the United States' training institutions were to recruit stronger students in the Finland mold? However common sense that proposition, it remains something of a best-guess theory. Studies linking teachers to student-achievement growth have failed to find any "silver bullet" preservice teacher characteristics that consistently predict higher student achievement. Determining who, on the front end, will prove to be an effective teacher remains an imprecise science.
Nevertheless, several clues exist within the data. Specific measures of academic competence, such as high verbal ability and college-entrance-exam scores, do appear to give those who hold them an edge in the classroom in the earlier grades. At the secondary level, math content knowledge also appears to be correlated.
Finally, there is the observation that so many of the highest-performing countries have made rigorous recruiting of teachers with strong academic qualifications one of their guiding educational principles. "It's difficult to imagine that we wouldn't be in a better place with the education system if we had more-capable teacher-candidates to choose from," Goldhaber says.
Japanese teachers, such as this Kyoto high school instructor, meet frequently with one another outside the classroom to plan lessons.
—Keren Su/Corbis-FileA handful of teacher-training programs in the United States have embraced a similar theory of action. Two years ago, Indiana University began a system whereby those high school students with a minimum of 1100 on their SAT and a 3.7 GPA who are interested in becoming teachers can be directly admitted to its education school. (Typically, Indiana University undergraduates must have a 2.5 GPA in their lower-division courses to enter the school.)
About a third of those who enter undergraduate teacher preparation now come through the direct-admit program, said Gerardo M. Gonzalez, the dean of the school of education. And the program has had the added benefit of making the school more prestigious.
"High-quality students want to be with high-quality students," Gonzalez says. "We're competing for the best students with every field."
Yet obstacles, both cultural and financial, have served to slow widespread adoption of more-rigorous recruiting endeavors in the United States.
"I think there's a lot of validity to the argument that when you raise standards, you attract better-quality students," Gonzalez says. "But there's also, I think, the understanding that, in many cases, institutions are working against significant social and professional attitudes, and frankly, the reality of the marketplace. They will not always be able to recruit the kinds of students they want to because of the competition."
The incentives built into an increasingly tuition-based higher education system also pose challenges, teacher educators acknowledge.
"It is profitable, certainly in the for-profit realm, to produce as many teachers as you can," says Arthur E. Wise, the president emeritus of the Washington-based National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. "Frankly, [that incentive] exists even in the public sector, because training a teacher is still pretty cheap, the way it's practiced."
Best and Brightest
In the United States, the idea of recruiting the best and brightest is complicated by the sheer numbers of candidates needed for a professional workforce the size of public K-12 teaching, which counts about 3.2 million individuals in all.
School districts face the challenge of balancing increased selectivity with the need to recruit enough teachers to meet demand. That is especially true in higher-poverty schools and districts, where turnover is typically higher and recruiting more difficult, notes Matthew Di Carlo, a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank that receives support from the American Federation of Teachers.
"You can't quite recruit teachers the way you recruit Navy SEALS or traders at Goldman Sachs. Those fields require comparatively fewer candidates," Di Carlo says. "We need to be careful about applying this small-scale thinking to a very large, diverse, and geographically dispersed labor market."
One of the particular downsides to the teaching profession in the United States, economists point out, is the relatively low starting compensation relative to comparable occupations, and the many years it takes to achieve a maximum salary. And while few prospective teachers go into the profession for the salary, wages in the U.S. are generally associated with prestige.
OECD data show that U.S. salaries for teachers with 15 years of experience are, on average, just 60 percent of the full-time earnings for 24 to 64 year olds with college educations, compared with 80 percent in other OECD countries. Meanwhile, studies suggest that, in the United States, the most highly skilled college graduates who select teaching over other occupations for which they're qualified can forfeit thousands of dollars in wages.
Here again, international practices provide stimulating food for thought. In a relatively short time frame, Chile's performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, an international exam, improved enough to surpass its South American neighbors'. Though not a top-performing country, it now approaches the mean score of all countries affiliated with the OECD.
Chile's dramatic improvements are thought to be partly related to its investments in salaries, which were gradually tied to reforms, including a new teacher-evaluation system in 1996, and later, several bonus-pay programs, the World Bank's Vegas says.
See AlsoRead more about preparing prospective teachers in this Quality Counts 2012 article: "Teacher Training a Careful Balancing Act"Between 1990 and 2007, the country raised teacher salaries by more than 150 percent; during that period, applications to teacher education programs increased by 39 percent, and the average score of entrance exams increased by 60 percent, according to research on the country's labor force.
As for the United States, a market-research analysis by McKinsey & Co., a New York City-headquartered consultancy, concluded that if teacher salaries here began at $65,000 and maxed out at $150,000, the number of high-performing college graduates who would consider the profession would rise from 14 percent to 68 percent. (Beginning teacher salaries in the United States average about $39,000 and rise to $67,000, the report states.)
Raises for all teachers could be prohibitively expensive in the United States, given its current fiscal state. The alternative approach—salary differentiation targeted to specifics at certain career milestones, subject taught, performance, or other criteria—has won the support of economists, who view the nation's current compensation system as too flat and inefficient.
"You can't repeal the laws of supply and demand, however much you think you can," says Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, who urges, for instance, higher pay for math and science educators. "The kind of skills these teachers have demands a market price."
Such efforts have traditionally been frowned on by teachers' unions. But several new experiments, in cities such as Pittsburgh and Baltimore, are beginning to restructure teachers' base compensation to identify top-performers, and those plans have been approved by the local unions.
The prestige associated with the teaching profession, as many teachers volubly remind policymakers, comes from more than just higher salaries. Teachers enter the profession for its intrinsic rewards, such as influencing young people. Their reasons for leaving the profession often have to do with feeling as though factors outside their control are impinging on that goal.
Research on teacher mobility, for instance, shows that teachers' decisions about whether to stay in a specific school are more strongly linked to working conditions, including the quality of their principal, as well as characteristics of the student body, than to their salaries.
In Wessling's view, one of the biggest differences between teaching and high-prestige professions such as medicine is the perceived lack of trust in educators and absence of professional autonomy in schools.
Nurses and doctors are vested with the power to collaborate and are trusted to diagnose and solve problems; teachers, by contrast, often work in isolation, and the profession in general offers few opportunities for leadership or advancement, she notes.
"The culture of schools is really powerful," Wessling says. "Amazing teachers can come into a school, but if that culture is so stifling, all their creativity can go unused."
Many of the highest-performing systems have gradually helped schools and educators build their skills, but without a strict, top-down approach. It is the key lesson from Ontario, according to comparative case studies conducted by analysts for the OECD.
Beginning in 2003, the province's education ministers began crafting reforms to raise students' literacy and numeracy skills. They chose not to use an approach that, for example, required specific time allotments for certain reading activities, fearing that the best teachers would find such an approach off-putting. Instead, the province's education leaders convened teams of expert researchers on those topics to build capacity in each school, says Levin, the former deputy education minister.
Lagging Behind
American public school teachers with 15 years of experience do worse in terms of salary than their colleagues in a broad swath of industrialized nations when compared with college-educated workers overall, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The difference is most stark at the high school level, where experienced teachers in the United States earn about a third less than the average salary for college-educated workers among some two dozen countries surveyed.
The chart shows how the salaries of high school teachers with 15 years of experience stack up against the average of all full-time, college-educated workers ages 25 to 64 among a group of nations surveyed by the OECD.
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development"We emphasized consistency of practice around classrooms and did a lot of work to create teams of teachers in the schools," he says. "You get commitment to the practices because teachers believe in it. It's about building people's sense of professional commitment and skills."
The percentage of students reaching basic reading and math goals in the province has risen from 55 percent to about 70 percent since 2004. Importantly, the changes also appear to have stemmed a teacher shortage by making the profession more appealing, Mr. Levin says.
Opportunities to improve one's craft are better integrated into the school day in several other top-performing countries, too. Teachers in OECD countries spend 700 hours a year, on average, engaged in face-to-face instruction of students; in South Korea and Finland, where much of the school day is spent planning and refining lessons with colleagues, that figure drops to 600 hours. Teachers in the United States, by contrast, average about 1,100 hours a year.
Countries such as Singapore couple professional development with a career ladder, so that teachers identified as being especially effective are given opportunities to advance to positions in which they are given formal responsibility for coaching and helping colleagues improve.
Take, for example, Japan and China's Shanghai province. They use "lesson study" as a form of professional development. Teachers watch a colleague teach a lesson and then meet as a group to discuss ways in which it could have been strengthened. In such a system, teachers whose skills fall behind both have incentives to improve and higher-skilled role models to emulate.
The McKinsey group has identified a handful of school systems in the United States that have developed similar practices around professional development, including the Long Beach, Calif., district.
Current Efforts
Interest in teacher-quality policy in the United States has increased considerably under the Obama administration, which has put it at the front of the agenda.
The administration has emphasized changes to teacher-evaluation systems as the central component for improving teaching, its theory holding that establishing common definitions of good teaching and measuring performance will help knit together other aspects of the profession. For instance, such systems could identify top-performers for promotion or extra pay, help improve the relevancy of professional development, and identify which teachers should be counseled out of the profession. A handful of districts, including Hillsborough County, Fla.; Pittsburgh; and New Haven, Conn., are beginning to institute these systems.
Some scholars, such as Goldhaber of the University of Washington, see promise in the movement toward improved teacher evaluation. He believes that such initiatives could build constructively on the nation's back-ended teacher-selection system. Research suggests, for instance, that teaching performance in the first few years on the job is a significant predictor of future performance.
The evaluations could be tied to other ideas to boost the profession's prestige, such as a national teaching certificate to recognize those identified as being especially effective, he said.
"The fact that we have 50 different licensing regimes makes a teaching credential less valuable because it's less portable," Goldhaber says.
Yet observers say many nuanced issues remain to be worked out before evaluations can effectively be used to improve teacher performance.
"The design and implementation of new teacher evaluations—what they consist of, how they are used, and whether the results are presented to teachers in a useful manner, will determine their success or failure," says Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute, who has blogged on a number of occasions about those issues. "I'm concerned that these details are taking a back seat, when they should be driving the process and debate."
The move toward incorporating student test scores into evaluations has been hugely controversial in the United States, and one where there is little international precedent. Though other nations do look at student work and some, such as Singapore, review student scores, standardized tests generally receive less weight than other sources of information, including parent surveys, inspections, and peer review. Indeed, teacher evaluation is generally broader in scope and less formalized in countries where much professional accountability comes from colleagues rather than outside monitors.
For Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, such examples offer a frustrating contrast.
"We talk about the conclusions from these international reports, but we don't dissect and deconstruct them in a way that follows how they got to those conclusions," she says. "Singapore has embedded professional development in evaluation so it becomes about improving practice. That's something we should learn from."
She contends the evaluation systems currently being created in the United States "are not about board of education responsibility, school superintendent responsibility, student responsibility, or parents' responsibility. They're only about teacher and principal responsibility."
For her part, Teacher of the Year Wessling is unsure where the teacher-evaluation discussion will lead, but she believes that attempts to raise the prestige of the profession will need to be comprehensive—a point of view that reflects the conclusion of most international-comparison studies.
She adds that teachers must play a role in the transformation, both by making their voices heard by those who set policy, and by setting an example in their own schools of how teachers can reshape individual school environments to reflect the professional practices of teachers in the best-performing countries.
After all, she reasons, cultural change begins from within.
"Teachers and educators can't subscribe to this outside perception of what we are," she said. "The responsibility for defining the profession is ours."
Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at www.joycefdn.org/Programs/Education.
Vol. 31, Issue 16, Pages 12-16
Full article available at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/01/12/16teachers.h31.html?print=1
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Got a promethean board in your classroom? Check these out!
Here are the top 10 downloads for Promethean Boards for your classroom. Check them out, and enjoy!
Weekly Top 10 Downloads
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Friday, January 27, 2012
Great Books to Teach Anti-Bullying!
Check out these great books and resources!
Nick Glass & Carin Bringelson, TeachingBooks.net for Curriculum Connections--School Library Journal January 10, 2012
No Name-Calling Week (January 23-27, 2012) is an opportune time to discuss bullying with your students. Books and multimedia resources on the topic abound, offering avenues to explore in conversations.
Consider using the multimedia resources presented in this month's column in conjunction with a range of titles for children in kindergarten through grade 12.
Watch this original TeachingBooks.net video of author James Howe as he discusses the power of words and his book The Misfits (S & S, 2001).
Howe's The Misfits, which inspired No Name-Calling Week, has two companion volumes: Totally Joe (2005) and Addie on the Inside (2011, both S & S).
Hear Sharon G. Flake share the inspiration behindThe Skin I'm In (Hyperion, 1998) in this TeachingBooks.net "Meet-the-Author" book reading.
When exploring the resources for this John Steptoe New Talent Award winner, note the six-trait writing lesson from WritingFix.
Use this guide from the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario when introducing students to Trudy Ludwig's My Secret Bully (River Word, 2003) and Just Kidding (Tricycle, 2006).
This 86-page resource offers extensive lessons for grades three, four, and five related to more than a dozen books.
Listen to this excerpt from Laurie Halse Anderson'sSpeak (Farrar, 1999) and the author's reminiscence of her teen years.
Anderson's website offers a variety of resources to accompany this National Book Award-winning book.
Refer to this book guide for Kevin Henkes'sChrysanthemum (Greenwillow, 1991) when you introduce the topic of teasing with young students.
This study guide from the Anti-Defamation League includes suggestions for vocabulary, dramatic play, and extension activities.
Hear author Sherman Alexie accept the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown, 2007).
In his acceptance speech, Alexie reflects on how many teens feel misunderstood. A transcript and an audio recording of the speech are available.
Play this dramatic audio excerpt of Robert Cormier'sThe Chocolate War for students who are reading this gut-wrenching novel (Pantheon, 1974) for the first time.
Numerous lesson plans are available for Cormier's book, which explores peer pressure and the abuse of power including this lesson from McDougal Littell.
Implement this lesson plan which uses Paul Fleischman's and Kevin Hawkes'sWeslandia (Candlewick, 1999).
This instructional plan from ReadWriteThink encourages students and teachers to explore diversity and acceptance.
Nick Glass and Carin Bringelson ofTeachingBooks.net appreciate books that start meaningful conversations. Do you have a favorite title to introduce the topic of bullying? Let us know atnick@TeachingBooks.net.
This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's enewsletterCurriculum Connections.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
We must EARN students' respect!
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Bring out your students' inner poets!
Do your students cringe when you say POETRY? Do they dread having to write their own poems? Mine often do, but there is help on the way! Check out these cool poetry resources recommended to me by my amazing Media Specialist:
Do You Teach Poetry? Here are 34 Web Sites You'll Love
Do You Teach Poetry? Here are 34 Web Sites You'll Love
Acrostic Poems- from ReadWriteThink; interactive
Best Books for Teaching About Poetry- from Education World; for young students
Complete Classics- "10,171 poems from 1,082 classic poets"
Giggle Poetry- humorous children's verse on the Web
Haiku- from PBS Parents; interactive
Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
Instant Poetry Forms- students choose from a list of titles and add their own words to create a poem
Library of Congress Poetry Lessons
Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
Instant Poetry Forms- students choose from a list of titles and add their own words to create a poem
Library of Congress Poetry Lessons
Magnetic Poetry for Kids- interactive site
Poem Hunter- 310,931 poems from 24,752 poets
Poetry- from Questia, the world's largest online library resource list
Poetry 180- a poem a day for high school students from the Library of Congress
The Poetry Archive- browse poets and poems
Poetry Class- poetry lessons
Poetry Everywhere- PBS series
Poetry for Kids- you will find games, lessons, contests here, all based on the works of children's poet Kenn Nesbitt.
Poetry Idea Machine- from Scholastic
Poetry Resources for Teachers- long list from TeacherVision; grade levels marked for every item (K-12)
Poetry Teachers- ideas for poetry contests, theater, and activities for the classroom.
Shadow Poetry- definitions for over 100 types of poetry, examples included; also poetry guide
Sonnet Central
Sonnets.org- archive of English sonnets, commentary, links and a forum for poets to share and discuss their works.
Types of Poetry
Sonnets.org- archive of English sonnets, commentary, links and a forum for poets to share and discuss their works.
Types of Poetry
World of Poetry
This blog began on this site in June 2011 and already has 499 subscribers. I hope that you have found the resources helpful for you in your classroom and continue to spread the word to others about A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet. Thank you for your support!
This blog began on this site in June 2011 and already has 499 subscribers. I hope that you have found the resources helpful for you in your classroom and continue to spread the word to others about A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet. Thank you for your support!
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