Confessions of an Average Teacher
For the past few years, I’ve aimed to become an average golfer. If you had ever seen me golf, you’d realize that it’s quite an ambitious goal. Average sometimes gets a bad rep — no one, it seems, wants to be average. No teacher wants to be an average teacher and no school wants to be an average school.
For a portion of my teaching career, I was an average teacher. When I look back on those years, I cringe at the period of over-reliance on the textbook and the period of creative lesson planning with insufficient attention to formative assessment (I taught it, so they must have learned it). I always cared about my students but when I made the effort to really get to know my students (all 110 of them) and remembered to ask about the weekend football game and how a student’s family was doing with the new baby, I marveled at what a difference this made to student engagement. How could I have not known about the value of relationships?
I wasn’t born a fabulous teacher, but I’d like to think that I evolved to one. Perhaps one of the most significant things I did to improve my practice was to become National Board certified. The process required that I video lessons, collect evidence of good assessment practices and family engagement efforts, and reflect on my work. The process didn’t simply confirm that I was a good teacher, but instead it developed in me a critical eye that allowed me to continue to improve my practices after achieving certification. Following each teaching day I learned to reflect on the lesson structure, the degree of student learning, and other aspects of my teaching and was far more critical than any administrator that walked in my room; I was continually looking for ways to improve.
A Washington Post article, written by Steve Peha and summarized by Kim Marshall (Marshall Memo, 2014), focuses on the benefits of attending to improving the classroom methods of teachers that are neither superstars nor are least effective. Having teachers utilize better instructional practices can have a significant impact. Peha posits that “average teachers who trade inefficient techniques for optimized techniques experience above-average success.” “Pick the right 10 practices, implement the right 10 solutions, and average teachers would get above-average results.” It is through doing just this, every week, every month, and every school year, that average teachers become above average teachers, average schools become above average schools, and average districts become above average districts. Leaders need to have both the moral courage to advocate for improved instructional practices and the true care for their teachers who they believe can and should be more than average.
We have structures in place to look at instruction across classrooms and schools. Each month, “Power Hours” at each of our six schools include a learning walk with the principal and superintendent. Administrative team meetings (ATeam) also include text based conversations and reviews of educational research. Conversations may include posting and focusing on learning goals and essential questions, differentiating instruction to challenge every student, and applying strategies to improve student engagement. We are learning from the educational research as well as from our teachers and helping to spread the great practice of those teachers to others.
At the start of this new year and as I begin my second year in Smithfield I’ll also be looking to trade my own inefficient techniques for “optimized techniques” to experience above-average success so that I, too, can move from being average to being something more. While I have my own list of areas for improvement, I’m also open to input from staff and others.
As for golf, I’m going to continue my lessons with Sheldon so that I can replace my inefficient techniques for optimized techniques but I’m not ready to aim for anything more than average!
“A ‘Do-able’ Solution to Teacher Quality” by Steve Peha in The Washington Post, November 5, 2010, http://wapo.st/1CvSnU4
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