I just want to be GOOD at this

At some point, the gap between posts gets so long you feel embarrassed...so for some reason you avoid sitting down to write, which of course, means the gap only grows bigger. It's actually amazing how often I encounter this very same failed logic in my own life. That pasta sauce looks like it's not so good anymore so I don't really want to eat it but WHY IN THE WORLD would I put it back in the fridge? Is it going to get younger and more appealing next week? My room is a mess so I don't feel like cleaning it, you get the idea.

But, the longer I wait the longer it's been, right? So let's cut our losses and move on.

The inspiration for this post came from a question someone asked me recently when, in a tough moment, I told them I just wasn't feeling as effective this year as I had hoped. My friend's response was, "Well, are there any other people telling you that you're doing a good job?" This comment got me thinking about the way we think about what makes a "good" teacher and the difference that good teaching really makes in the classroom.

I don't know everything, but there is one "THIS I KNOW" reflection that I've come away with so far: Excellent teachers really do make a difference, if not THE difference in the success of a group of students.

After quick consideration, my immediate response to this friend was, "It doesn't really matter what anyone else says. My job is to make sure my kids learn the material I'm responsible for teaching. If they didn't learn what I tried to teach, then no, I'm not doing a good job." Of course, there are many other things that play into whether or not students learn what you teach besides the effectiveness of your content delivery. And, underlying this whole conversation is the question of HOW you evaluate students' mastery of the material you're teaching (i.e. the standardized test debate), which is really important but also a whole different can of worms that I don't feel like opening here.

I am fortunate to work with a staff of teachers who, for the most part, are at our school for the right reasons and hold their students to high expectations. I don't care who the students are or where they came from, a committed teacher who knows how to build relationships, sets clear expectations, has mastered the content he/she is teaching, and puts in the time to plan purposefully towards what their students need to master can make almost anything possible in any classroom. This combination of skills doesn't always coincide with experience, but I do believe that for the most part, if you're a good teacher, you're a better teacher with a few years under your belt.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of those pop psychology books, "Blink", "The Tipping Point", etc. wrote an interesting piece for the New Yorker about the inevitable and frustrating X-factor that comes into play when trying to select "good" teachers. He compares predicting "good teachers" to predicting which college quarterbacks will end up as top-performers in the NFL (which, he contends, we haven't figured out how to do. Feel free to disagree if you know more about football than Malcolm and I do). Gladwell points out that many of our usual predictors of success (years of experience, degrees, etc.) don't necessarily correlate with effective teaching (based on a "value added" paradigm--read the article for a full explanation). One of the most interesting and controversial (given the current system) implications he comes up with is summarized below:

"...the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

This perspective on teacher compensation aligns in many ways to TFA alum and DC Chancellor of public schools Michelle Rhee's original approach towards reforming the DC public school system: essentially, she proposed that teachers who were willing to give up their tenure for a year to prove their effectiveness (based on students' performance on standardized tests balanced with a host of other metrics) would have the opportunity to earn enormous pay raises if they, indeed, proved to be highly effective.

The X-factor question is one that Teach For America has been working tirelessly (relentlessly, even...) to quantify through their selection model. The Atlantic recently published an article identifying some of the findings TFA has come to in refining this model over the past two decades. The qualities they came up with are the same buzzwords TFA has been pounding into our heads since we got involved: big goals, improving effectiveness, involving students and families, efficient use of classroom time, purposeful planning, and sustained intense effort towards reaching goals. Interestingly, another high area of correlation existed between effectiveness of TFA corps members and a "history of perseverance" through challenges in their own lives. In other words, if you're a gritty badass, you'll probably make a better teacher. And you wonder why there are so many comparisons between inner city urban education and the battlefield.

Although I don't necessarily agree with Gladwell's quarterback comparison, the ideas about effectiveness and compensation make a lot of sense to me. In what other profession are you guaranteed to keep your job regardless of how effective you are at it? (again, tabling the question of HOW we measure effectiveness and student performance for now, though I know they can't really afford to be ignored). It's also sort of intimidating for us new teachers who still feel like we're trying to find our stride, figuring out this incredibly complicated equation of how to be "good" at this job.

The question of teacher effectiveness and how to achieve it fascinates me. Probably because I've been trying to answer it for myself over the last year and a half. I have no grand conclusions here, but I will say that I've seen it come in all forms. Some of the most effective teachers at my school have approaches that seem very different from the one TFA endorses. And then again, some of the teachers who I've actually come to regard as the "best" at our school don't necessarily show the absolute highest test scores, but whose classrooms have an overwhelming feeling of community, where students have learned to treat each other and their teacher with respect and compassion, and where students are excited about what they're learning.

It's a statement my friends and I have uttered to each other in frustration and/or despair over the past year and a half: "I just want to be GOOD at this." And I know it's not black and white...I am better now than I was last year. I am better now than I was in September of this year. The best I can do is keep going back to the drawing board and adjusting, tweaking, observing, learning, working. Part of my frustration comes from doing something which, for me, has had such a long learning curve. Patience should probably be included in those "what makes a good teacher" lists (still working on that one too)...