Teaching Life

Our Calling, Our Choices, Our Challenges

Armand Doucet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138370630
• eBook ISBN: 9780429765476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

In this engaging book, Armand Doucet, a globally respected and recognized teacher, provides a clear roadmap for championing classroom-focused change in a technology-advanced society. Teaching Life brings the voices of teachers into the global conversation about educational reform to offer a how-to for implementing into classrooms design thinking, technology integration and a holistic education based on competencies, social-emotional learning and the literacies. With the innovative ideas in this book, educators can create a foundation for sustainable, honest, transparent leadership and work toward building a true community of local and global learning.

Part I
Our Calling

1
TEACHERS STAND ALONE

My first teaching job was a long-term supply placement that began in January, halfway through the school year. I thought I had arrived well-prepared. Months earlier, I met with the teacher I was replacing: an experienced, well-organized professional who happily shared her teaching plans with me and offered advice on teaching methods and the school’s culture. I had the support of the principal and vice principal. However, nothing prepared me for the level of exhaustion I felt at the end of my first day of teaching.

Walking in on that first day, I thought ‘okay, I’ve got this.’ And then reality set in. I was teaching eight different subjects—grades 6, 7 and 8 science, grades 6 and 7 social studies and grade 6 math and French. I had a degree in kinesiology and a bachelor’s degree in education, with which I can teach elementary and secondary school, but math and French were not my specialties. Yes, I was raised in a bilingual family and I obviously needed math to study kinesiology, but knowing a subject and knowing how to teach a subject are two different skills. Nonetheless, I did what all new teachers do: I plunged in, staying up late into the night to review my lesson plans for the next day and following my predecessor’s detailed notes.

I came home that first night exhausted, and as the week progressed my exhaustion grew. Teaching class after class of 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds is emotionally draining. At this age students require a mix of foundational blocks of learning, the tail end of their elementary education, and higher critical thinking and creative learning, the precursor to what awaits them in high (secondary) school. Throw in the hormonal, physical and emotional changes of puberty and you have the crazy, exhilarating mix that is middle school. A typical day could mean teachers must balance explaining basic algebra alongside the drama of first dates and the inevitable first breakups, or English literature amid student anxiety and feelings of low self-esteem. Teachers around the world face this every day, and they do so in isolation.

This is a defining feature of our current education culture: Teachers stand alone. Certainly, that has been the model that successive education systems have followed for centuries. The singular sage on the stage: a well-respected, educated individual standing at the front of the classroom, lecturing their students who sit quietly in neat rows of desks, passively listening and learning. It is a model adapted from the previous industrial revolution and instituted in our schools. Even though this has been the dominant model, there have been previous attempts to introduce alternate teaching models. For instance, the progressive teaching movement in England of the 1960s and ’70s had varying degrees of success. However, it was denigrated by the global managerial reform movement in education, which emphasized checks and balances. But while the teaching profession struggled to change with the times, outside education other industries were evolving, introducing more collaborative and fluid workplace models. It is with a sad irony that I note teachers are increasingly encouraged to teach collaborative decision-making and team building to prepare students for the world of work in the 21st century while their own work environment remains wedded to the past.

Prior to becoming a teacher, I worked a decade in sales and marketing for a multinational food and beverage company. Within a couple of weeks of being hired in New Brunswick, I was flown halfway across the country to the company’s Canadian headquarters in Toronto for a week of team building and corporate training. Alongside other new recruits, we learned the ins and outs of the company, its expectations of us and how to support each other as we adjusted to our new roles. I left that week feeling confident in both my role within the company but also in the network of support available to me. My personal success was the company’s success. I was part of a team.

Juxtapose that with my teaching career. Every day I walk into my classroom and I am offand running. The old image of teachers hanging out in the staff room is an outdated stereotype that doesn’t reflect the reality of today’s teaching profession. We enter our classrooms ahead of our students and the official start of the school day, which usually starts around 8:20 a.m. We are there through each period in the morning, with only a couple of minutes between classes that is usually occupied by students lingering to chat or for extra help. Over lunch we provide extra help or run a school club. After wolfing down a quick lunch, we are back in front of our whiteboards or smart boards, teaching the next subject with little prep time between classes. After the final bell rings, we might be volunteering with another school club, talking with parents about a struggling student or settling in to mark student work, documenting their learning through detailed charts, forms and computer software designed to measure and analyze student achievement. The typical school day leaves teachers with no time to collaborate with our peers, to bounce ideas off each other or to seek support and guidance. What’s the best practice for interacting with parents? What relationship should I expect and receive from administrators? How can I integrate design learning into the curriculum? How do I support my peers and how do they support me? Questions that in another profession would be answered in the first week are left unasked and unanswered by most new teachers.

Collaboration with peers, the ability to interact with experts and time for self-reflection on practice, pedagogy and students are all vital to answer complex questions involving the interplay between forces outside your classroom, or outside the school, which may be in conflict with each other; the politics of school committees; local politics and its influence on education; the impact of political shifts on education programs and the classroom; topics such as language of instruction; religion in schools; sex education; educating refugees and immigrants; and education for work vs. education for self-actualization. These are complex questions and no one teacher can answer them. Collaborating with peers and experts and being given the time for self-reflection can help in trying to find answers and solutions that are appropriate for each teacher’s context.

Teachers, as the old saying goes, “aren’t here for the money.” Becoming a teacher is more than a career choice; it is for many of us a calling. Take for instance Estella Afi Owoimaha-Church of California. She says her parents’ belief in education made her want to enter the profession. The daughter of immigrants, Estella is the eldest of three children and the first in her family to graduate college. There was always a lot of pressure on her to do well in school to repay the debt to the country. And on top of that, she was taught that moving through the world in service of others was the way to go. An example of that was her dad helping them pack their lunches for school and packing extra lunches either for kids at school who needed them or for any homeless person they might pass on the way to school. For Estella, teaching was the best way to serve and give back to her community.

On the other side of the world in Vietnam, Nam Thanh Ngo knows what it’s like to grow up in poverty and the sacrifices his family made to pay for his education, including paying for textbooks, uniforms and school fees. When choices must be made to spend money on food or school, education doesn’t usually win. Yet Nam’s parents still sent him to school. In grade 5 his curiosity was awakened by Ms. Hoa, who used creative lessons and experiments to coax Nam to excel at school. Her efforts continue to inspire Nam, who decided to become a teacher to spark other children’s love of learning in the same way Ms. Hoa sparked his, and in doing so, helped him lift himself and his family out of poverty.

For me, it was the day my mom took me to see my first film in a movie theatre. It was E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and I can remember it as if it was yesterday: the red carpet going into the cinema; the smell of popcorn and the excitement of settling into those big comfy seats as the lights dimmed. I was mesmerized by the story. I smiled over the Reese’s Pieces, bounced excitedly in my seat when Elliott freed the frogs and I cried— really cried—when the adults watched impassively as E.T. lay dying. It was gut-wrenching. On the walk home, I asked my mom why the adults wouldn’t help E.T. and she said something that has stayed with me.

What is someone’s perception may not be the same for another. You need to try and understand each other to build bridges to understand and live together. Not everyone wants to build consensus. When someone only wants to be right, that’s when the world has problems.

Right then and there, I knew I wanted to be one of the people that helped build bridges for the greater good. It’s why I love coaching and it is why I finally made my way to teaching. Being a teacher allows me to stay true to the promise I made to myself all those years ago.

However, as with many professions, the reality of today’s educator workplace doesn’t live up to the dream.

You want to be innovative, but the standardized test gets in the way.

You want to be around the content, but you’re teaching a subject you flunked in high school.

You want to individualize and inspire, but you are not allowed to differ from the mandated lesson plan.

You would like to spend time doing extra help, but you have paperwork to do.

You want to work and build community, but there’s no time to work with fellow teachers or outside resources.

You would like to do technology integration, but half the class can’t afford technology.

You would like to spend some time with your family, but you have marking and planning to do.

You would like to do extracurricular activities, but your spouse gets mad at how much time you spend away from your family.

This is why teachers leave.

They are broken because they realize wanting to make a difference in their students’ lives isn’t valued as much as it once was.

They lose hope because administrators and bureaucrats dissuade them from doing something different or creative in their classrooms.

They become discouraged because they feel powerless in the face of politically motivated curriculum and funding changes.

They are disheartened by the ‘teach to the test’ demands of high-stakes testing and assessments that drive funding.

The joint general secretary of the National Education Union in England, Kevin Courtney, in a 2018 Guardian article states that “81 per cent of teachers have considered leaving the profession in the last year because of workload, driven in large part by time-consuming data gathering that has little or nothing to do with children’s education.”¹ Another article in the Guardian by Sarah Marsh (2015) cited that

[Seventy-three] per cent of trainee teachers had thought to leave the profession.… More than 54 per cent said they did not think they’d be teaching in 10 years’ time… 76 per cent cited the heavy workload as the major reason… 53 per cent state they have insufficient time to reflect on their practice.… In France, a meagre 5 per cent of teachers feel valued.²

Is it any wonder that the world faces a shortage of 69 million teachers by 2030?³

According to the US National Education Association (NEA), there is a direct correlation between teachers’ economic positions over the last 20 years and the way they are recognized/valued in comparison to other professions with a similar amount of schooling. “Teachers earn 19 per cent less than similarly skilled and educated professionals today. This ‘teaching penalty’ has increased significantly in the past 20 years—from approximately 2 per cent in 1994 to 19 per cent in 2017.”⁴

In some regions, most notably some areas of the United States, teacher compensation is tied to high-stakes testing and assessment. For instance, the development of the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the early 2000s occurred just as politicians and policymakers were considering how to measure education results. PISA has famously become a way for countries and regions to compare their education system against the rest of the world. Now, I am not saying that we should not have standardized testing. I do believe that it does give you an idea of where you stand. But it should not be the driving force in long-term policy decisions, nor should it be used to reinforce top-down decision-making to drive more structure, accountability measures and strict guidelines.

In fact, PISA’s results point to the value of that statement. Finland and Singapore, which have consistently been PISA leaders, subscribe to a view of teaching that supports and encourages teacher professionalism and creativity in the classroom. Pak Tee Ng has written the definitive book on Singapore’s education system. Singapore’s uniqueness has given him the opportunity, as the associate dean of leadership learning at the National Institute of Education (NIE), to mentor all the principals and teachers in the city-state. He states that

quality will be driven by teachers and leaders in the schools, with ideas bubbling up through the system, rather than be pushed down from the top… they are in the best position to develop new approaches to engage their students.⁵

Change needs to happen from the bottom up, but also the top down.

Standardized testing used poorly leads to bad policy that forces teachers to ‘teach to the test’ and further reinforces their disillusionment. Just recently, New York State removed the mandatory use of standardized testing results as part of the teacher and administrator evaluation process. Teachers want to reach kids. Unfortunately, high-stakes testing can be disastrous for the teaching profession and (by extension) students if the results are not properly interpreted, recognizing the culture, values, social structures, health and economic ability of each region. Each can have a profound effect on student learning but are hardly ever mentioned when politicians start to talk about education. The world is constantly asking for educators to be trailblazers: to develop competencies, social-emotional learning, skills and curriculums while really concentrating most policy decisions on reform on standardized testing of curriculum content allocating resources toward this metric. It’s a paradox that isn’t lost on the classroom teachers who are facing pressures to be more professional, action-based researchers finding a way to manage all these pillars, while getting at the same time the real pressure of only needing one metric to survive: scores on a test. This needs to change for education to flourish for all. It is the dilemma that keeps me up at night. It is the dilemma that I see ripping education apart. It is the dilemma that is killing the teaching profession in many areas around the world.

Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, is considered one of the eminent writers and researchers on the American education system. In her blog, she states:

when the measure becomes the goal, and when people are punished or rewarded for meeting or not meeting the goal, the measure is corrupted.… Do not attach high stakes to evaluations, or both the measure and the outcome will become fraudulent.⁶

In our race to tell the big data story of a country’s relative success in education, we are omitting and devaluing the small data stories in individual classrooms. This is where change takes hold in education. Why? Because the story of education is the story of individual successes.

There is hope. Teachers are standing up for their rights as professionals, and what feels different is that teachers are actively fighting for a new path in education. Self-reflection on the purpose of education and the purpose of teaching is not being driven anymore from agendas outside of our school walls but from within the teaching profession itself. In 2018, teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona fought for support staff, appropriate classroom sizes and adequate school budgets to achieve educational outcomes. And teachers are not alone in their fight. Parents, nonprofits and businesses want to help local schools and teachers. “Teachers are turning this moment into a movement,” said American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten. She continued: “The walkouts not only secured immediate gains for kids’ learning and teacher pay, they were a catalyst for educators to run for office to fix the state and local governments that failed them.”⁷

This catalyst for rallying together for the greater good of education is seeing teachers take ownership of the profession and realizing that education is only going to improve if we the teachers are willing to change. We know that we need to develop competencies with more intent. We know we are going to have to do more social-emotional learning from K-12, getting our students ready to be resilient, adaptable and capable of managing their anxieties and worries as they face an uncertain future. We know we need to personalize education to help all learners reach their full potential. We know we need to protect our students from data collectors and arm them to navigate in this new age with the ability to understand who is trying to influence them. We know we need to integrate new technology to help them flourish in this digital age, but we also know that not all new technology is good. We know that knowledge and curricu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Our Calling
• Part II Our Choices and Our Challenges
• Other Praise for This Book
• Index