Teaching for Success

Developing Your Teacher Identity in Today's Classroom

Brad Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317271581
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching For Success is a comprehensive guide for navigating the process of becoming an effective teacher in the wake of contemporary and systemic challenges. Focusing on the core concept of teacher identity in clear, invigorating prose, the book illuminates how teachers can arrange, adjust, and assemble their own personal and professional teaching influences in conjunction with educational research into a coherent, unique, and successful whole. Olsen's attention to classroom practice, social justice issues, personal satisfaction, and teacher success stories offers a sharp and useful guide for teacher development. This revised second edition has been updated and includes a new chapter that guides both new and experienced teachers through emerging, thorny issues in educational policy and practice, including high-stakes testing, blended learning, the demands of networking, and the Common Core State Standards.

Chapter 1
The Complexities of Teaching

I think no one in their right mind would go into teaching for any other reason than a love of learning and the desire to help young people. Maybe people who do it even for those reasons are crazy, but people who do it for any other reason are crazier. For me, the impetus is that somebody helped me along the line—a lot of people, actually—and I want to give back. The students probably don’t realize it even though I tell them at least once a week: I learn a lot from them. We keep each other’s minds alive. It’s this weird contradiction to teaching and life: if you need something, give something—instead of asking for something—and you get it back. So these kids, the relationship that I have with these kids every year is phenomenal. They fill me up, and hopefully I’m doing them some good too.

—Stanley, a sixth-year California high school English teacher¹

I believe that all teachers want to be the best they can be. If you’re reading this book, it must be because of your commitment to such an endeavor. You understand teaching to be a difficult but rewarding profession, and you’re looking for ways to become a better teacher yourself. In this book, I hope to unravel the deep ways in which teachers grow and change and, in doing so, uncover some of the hidden things that might be getting in the way of your own success. In the next 150 or so pages, I hope you’ll find useful principles and techniques to apply to your own professional learning. If you engage the ideas of this book, reflect on them, and put them into practice, you will become a better educator. I promise.

You’re likely to be somewhat knowledgeable about teaching and learning already—from your own time as a student, your professional preparation if you’ve already had some, prior teaching experiences you’ve had, or other work you’ve done with children. You already know many of the challenges to successful teaching. You’ve probably encountered several along the way, including some massive ones, such as societal reactions to your career choice, the maddening complexity of education, and the fact that schools are the places where society often plays out its never-ending cultural battles.

I hope that by reading this book you will learn how to get better at the hardest profession in the world. I believe that the more deeply you reflect on yourself as a teacher, the better you’ll become at your work. Specifically, my focus in this book is on how multiple, often hidden, frequently personal influences on your own growth as a teacher are continually working to shape the educator you are—and are continually becoming. My hope is that if you can better understand the educator within yourself, then you can unlock your potential as a teacher and positively impact students in far greater ways than you ever imagined.

Building on my own research as well as on the research of others—and using as much wisdom of practice as I’ve accumulated during my work as a high school English teacher, university teacher educator, and education researcher—this book is meant to be its own teacher learning experience for you. The book introduces a model of teacher learning that illuminates how teachers—you, in this case—can systematically examine their own personal and professional teaching influences and work to adjust and assemble them in conjunction with education research into a coherent, successful whole. The result—that unique, successful whole—is what I call your teacher identity, and by better understanding it you will improve the kind of teacher you are in the classroom, the kind of learning you can offer your students, and the professional satisfaction you receive from your career.

Competing Histories of Teaching Shape Your Work

Let’s begin near the beginning. You’ve surely experienced dozens of reactions by others to your career choice—from the ambiguous “how nice” to the snarky “good luck with that;” from the slightly patronizing “that’s so admirable” to the smug “why would you want to do that?” Most reassuring (and most truthful, in my opinion) is the insider’s knowing response: “Welcome to the best and hardest profession in the world.”

Hanging over all these replies, and a hundred well-traveled variations on them, is a series of competing histories of teaching in the United States. The various ways that teachers and teaching have been viewed over the past 150 years exert a powerful though often hidden influence on your own professional development. These sometimes parallel, sometimes reinforcing, often competing histories of teaching—separately and together, regardless of whether you know it—influence your own work. This is because at the same time that you are defining for yourself what it means to be a teacher, it is also continually being defined for you … by other educators, by your teaching environment, by students, by policymakers, and by the larger society. What are teachers “supposed to do”? What defines “good” or “bad” teachers? What does a “successful” classroom, school, or student look like? These are just a few of the broad questions that illuminate the subtle ways in which past traditions of teaching still exert influence on your development as a teacher. They’re worth examining.

One historical viewpoint of teaching is the old “if you can’t do, then teach.” This enduring view of teaching as easy-entry, semiskilled work defines teachers as those who couldn’t succeed at anything else and so have stumbled into teaching. Of course it’s offensive, and few actually utter the phrase in seriousness anymore, though its vestiges remain in characterizations of teachers as academically or intellectually weak, or as those who tried something lucrative or more challenging but couldn’t succeed, or as people who crave their summers off. I won’t deny that such teachers exist. But they aren’t the norm, and there aren’t enough of them to justify defining the profession in this way.

The distorted image remains because just about every adult has been a student and believes he or she knows what teaching is. From the vantage points and memories of members of the general public, teaching appears to be easy, protected, middle-status employment. Teaching is something that anyone can do. And the “clients” of teachers are children—among our most precious, but in practice least valued, resources. Additionally, people often think that all there is to teaching is the front-of-the-stage work (i.e., performing, managing students, reading stories, making bulletin boards). All the behind-the-stage work (the years of preparation, the nightly reflection and weekend lesson planning, the time spent keeping up with current research) is invisible. Few people who are not teachers have ever considered just how much work takes place out of the audience’s view. For them, teaching probably does look easy: only true teachers and those who are close to them know what’s hidden away from the stage lights.

The second long-standing view of teaching is the notion that it is predominantly women’s work, akin to child-raising. This idea has a particularly complicated history, being tangled up as it is in centuries-old notions of power, in population shifts and demographic changes, and in sexism in the United States. The view holds at its core the myth that a woman’s place is in the home and—the classroom being considered an extension of the home—that teaching is work for the nurturer, the matronly, the “softer side” of humanity. It holds that teaching is suitably nonintellectual, temporary, and low-paying work. Further, it perpetuates three circular falsehoods: that women are innately predisposed to teaching, that they are more interested in the charitable service of teaching as child-rearing than are men, and that women are content with mostly intrinsic rewards.

This women’s-work viewpoint is also linked to an American history in which education has long sought to hire cheap labor for its classrooms: for much of the twentieth century, college-educated women had few professional options and so took what they could get, often at whatever price was offered. Education historian Marjorie Murphy (1990) has pointed out that in the early twentieth century, teaching represented a kind of aristocracy for women workers—a step up in status from the blue-collar worlds of their fathers, but one that lacked the ability to confer the power and sense of control held by males in positions of similar status, not to mention the relatively low pay. Prior to World War II, female urban teachers often lived as boarders in the homes of school board members, had to sign loyalty oaths, were required to be in before sundown, and were expected to leave the profession if they should marry. Pregnant teachers were considered bad role models, and lesbian women were not permitted to teach.

Textbox 1.1 Married Women’s Right to Teach

The woman who led the fight against the ban on married teachers—in Boston, Massachusetts—was Grace Lorch. She married her husband when he was about to be sent to the Pacific theater during World War II and was promptly fired. She was offered her job back at a substitute’s salary and without job protection, but she refused and began organizing in defense of married women’s right to teach.²

Though it’s doubtful that this patriarchal history led you to choose teaching, I suspect that in various forms it continues to shape some of the contexts and roles of teaching in which you find yourself today.

On a more positive side of the ledger in the history of teaching, a third viewpoint sees teachers as content specialists with pedagogical expertise. This professional, technical view of teaching began as early as Socrates. Its modern incarnation originated in the late nineteenth century with European theorists, such as Friedrich Froebel and Jean Piaget, and moved into the early twentieth century with American educationalists, such as John Dewey, George Counts, and Edward Thorndike, before embedding itself into more recent school reform and teacher professionalization movements. This history frames teachers as experts in their fields who possess deep content knowledge and relish success at apprenticing young people into the fascinations and benefits of learning. It’s a history that sees teachers as experts who find joy in what they teach—literature, science, or mathematics, for example, or the psychosocial development of children—and who strive to guide students into continually deepening views of themselves and the world around them. It’s also a history that gives us our current emphasis on education testing.

This view of teaching is marked by an interest in the pedagogical sciences and learning theory. Informed by over a century of research on curriculum, instruction, content knowledge, and assessment, it’s a view of teachers as experts who pay close attention to processes of learning and teaching and find creative ways to help young people construct their own understandings of, and orientations to, the world. This viewpoint treats teachers as well prepared, knowledgeable, and committed: as professionals, in a word. My guess is that this view of teaching—the chance to know your subject well and guide your students successfully into its charms, challenges, and advantages—has held sway for you.

Finally, there is a fourth broad history of teaching to introduce: noble work focused on democratic social change. This is another view of teaching that I suspect is salient for you. It’s connected to traditions of teaching as political, humanistic work. This viewpoint holds that teaching is always a political act and wraps itself around progressive social goals, such as uplifting people from poverty, replacing structural inequities with fairness, warmly embracing diversity, and speaking truth to power. This view believes that the democratic ideals of our country can, will, and should be realized largely through education—in other words, through you.

In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Such a sentiment can remind teachers that many of the social goals of education may take a long time to become enacted, but that is no reason to concede them. From freedom schools in the segregated South to literacy movements for the working class, multiculturalism, antiracist pedagogies, and social justice education, this tradition of teaching as important, transformative work for social change has ebbed and flowed over the decades, and many teachers proudly embrace it.

Since the nineteenth century, these four histories of teaching have braided together in dynamic, complex ways to form the shifting landscape of teaching in the United States. Subtly but powerfully, these histories continue to inform many of the complexities of—and disputes about—teaching that we experience today. For example, the question of how schools should treat immigrants and second-language learners can be interpreted in multiple ways depending on how one views the larger purposes of education and the role of a teacher. Additionally, contemporary disagreements around what constitutes a “highly qualified teacher,” whether to put metal detectors in urban schools, or how to teach evolution are all concrete educational questions whose answers depend on competing value systems and how participants fundamentally define education. Historical views of teaching are still very active players in these educational debates.

As difficult as all this is to think about in the abstract, it’s even more complex for a teacher to actually negotiate in daily practice. As a current or prospective teacher, you probably find yourself pulled in several directions by different, often contradictory conceptions of what a teacher is “supposed to” be and do. Moreover, any particular teaching context—the school culture, the characteristics of your community, the unique contours of your students and colleagues—carries its own influence. A teacher must negotiate among historical influences, contextual forces, the students in front of her, and her own goals and abilities in order to strike an effective teaching balance.

The primary task of this book is to draw attention to how the many contexts and histories of teaching interact with your own personal history to influence the kind of teacher you are becoming, or can become. It’s my central premise that as you examine for yourself the embedded processes of your own ongoing development, you will be able to more consciously and effectively shape who you are becoming as a professional educator. Just think about it: you have the unique power to shape your own professional growth, to become more satisfied in your professional life, to be more successful in the classroom, and to become the teacher you want to be—and that today’s students intensely need you to be.

Teaching Is Hard Work

No matter how you conceive of your chosen profession or how history has conceived it for you, teaching is difficult work. It’s an enormously complex activity that is debated by almost everyone at every turn. Teaching requires use of the intellect, emotions, intuition, the senses, and judgment; knowledge of content, context, and kids; and kinesthetics, creativity, personality, and linguistic performance. Typically, several of these abilities combine; many times all twelve are called into simultaneous use. Teachers often work with dozens of children at a time; the children typically vary in ability, maturity, background, and likeability—and some of them do not even want to be in school. Moreover, teaching occurs within multiple and often competing organizational, social, and political contexts, exerting direct and indirect forces on what teachers think and do. Together, these constitute a tricky set of factors to manage, let alone control.

As I mentioned, just about everyone has been a student, and so the whole world believes it knows how teaching should be done. And we teachers hear this from everybody. Educators and non-educators alike are rarely shy about offering their opinions about teaching when we meet them in personal or professional settings. Additionally, school and district administrators, state and federal policymakers, and education stakeholders at many levels (including parents, politicians, professors, and pundits) all believe they know what’s best for teachers and students. This combination makes for a constant push and pull, a tightening and loosening, a tangled ball of charged and active beliefs and policies that make up contemporary education in the United States and abroad. As David Cohen and Barbara Neufield (1981) wrote, “[Our] schools are a great theater in which we play out [the] conflicts in our culture.” Furthermore, teachers are increasingly required to teach curricula created by others; they’re sometimes pressured to teach in particular ways for reasons with which they may not agree; their professional status is often linked to student scores on standardized and sometimes misaligned tests....