Real Teacher Empowerment

Oh, the joys of retirement!  When I was still working as a teacher, I would have been at my desk before 7 AM, coffee in hand, developing my lesson plan materials.  Now, I still have my coffee in hand by 7 AM, but I can relax and catch up on the news.  Today I tuned in to "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and I was delighted to see that the focus of the entire show was on education.  My delight soon turned to frustration, however, as guests like Michelle Rhee and Chris Christie kept coming back to the old saws about how to quantify teacher evaluation, how to fire ineffective teachers, and how to battle the teacher unions.

Well, they can keep working on those areas, and I'm sure they and their union counterparts will continue to work toward a compromise solution, but that's not what's going to make teachers more effective.  Again, all we have to do is look at the facts.  The research is out there - it's been around for at least 30 years, and it continues to this day.  What truly makes teachers more effective is a non-evaluative system of peer mentoring - just Google "teacher coaching research" if you want to see how much evidence there is of the power of having teachers coaching other teachers.

Irrespective of evaluations, tenure laws, teacher unions, and the like, the basic fact I've seen in my 44 years in the profession is that teachers want to do a good job.  I've mentored plenty of teachers, from the most effective to the least, and I've never run into one who didn't get engaged in the process of improving effectiveness as long as the spectre of negative evaluation is taken off the table.

If someone gave me carte blanche to change the way a school was organized, here's what I would do:

• Train 20% of the teaching staff in the use of a method such as Cognitive Coaching for mentoring their colleagues.  I'd have to be careful not to allow administrative prejudice to enter into the process of selecting these teachers.
• Assign each of these trained coaches to 4 other teachers in the school.  During the course of the school year, each coach would go through a series of 4 or more observation cycles with each teacher assigned to him/her.  The observation cycle typically would consist of a preconference, a classroom visit, and a postconference.
• Make positively certain that all information about these observations and conferences is held in absolute confidence between coach and teacher.  This is key to the effectiveness of the process - just check the research by people like Carl Glickman.
• Allow the coaches to select a leader to coordinate the entire program and troubleshoot problems.  I've already seen good mentoring programs go down the drain because they were taken over by administration!
• Make sure that the teacher coaches are paid a fair stipend that is commensurate with the extra work they are doing, and also make sure they are given sufficient time to do the job.

Of course, this all costs money, so I'm not holding my breath until I see it happen.  But I'm willing to bet that most people would gladly pay more if they had access to a process that has been proven by research to be far more likely to effect change than traditional adminstrative supervision.

So let the politicians and school bureacrats keep battling over the process of hiring, evaluating, and firing teachers.  You want real change?  There is a way.

I welcome your comments on this and other posts.

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