The Leader's Guide to Working with Underperforming Teachers

Overcoming Marginal Teaching and Getting Results

Sally J Zepeda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138855779
• eBook ISBN: 9781317518044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Under increasing pressure in the face of teacher evaluation systems and accountability measures, schools must focus on those teachers that exhibit marginal to incompetent teaching behaviors in their classrooms. This book is a vital resource for educational leaders who are responsible for instructional programs and teacher evaluation. Zepeda's tried-and-true strategies will help you take the necessary steps to support and mentor struggling teachers by detecting underperformance, developing strategies to help teachers, engaging in difficult conversations to enact plans of improvement, and following legal requirements. The practical tools found in this book will help teachers improve their instruction, assessment, classroom management, and teamwork.

1

Framing the Issues About Underperforming Teachers

In this chapter…

● Purpose of the Book–Is the Glass Half-Full
or Half-Empty?

● Thorny Issue on the Use of Terms

● The Range of Teaching

● The Context of Accountability and Teachers

● Teacher Quality and Teacher Effectiveness

● The New Work of Principals and Assistant Principals

Purpose of the Book–Is the Glass Half-Full or Half-Empty?

The structure and information in this book serve as a bridge between research and practice to help leaders create the “right” conditions for the conversations that are critical in developing a broad range of skills that signal effective teaching. The work of principals and other leaders now must center more fully on the instructional program that is played out in every classroom filled with children who deserve competent, caring, and effective teachers.

Everyone suffers with an underperforming teacher. Students receive sub-par teaching, fellow teachers don’t like walking the halls in which an underperforming teacher is assigned, and parents are concerned when their child is assigned to an underperforming teacher’s classroom. Administrators have to answer the call to do something about the underperforming teachers in their buildings. More emphatically, school leaders can no longer engage in “passing the trash” or in the “dance of the lemons,” allowing underperforming teachers to negatively affect students’ ability to reach their full potential (Zepeda, 2013). Mead, Rotherman, and Brown (2012) share that “decades of inattention to teacher performance have been detrimental to students, teachers, and the credibility of the teaching profession” (p. 3). Davis ( 2013) is resolute that “improving teaching quality and reducing the variability within that quality is a primary responsibility of school district leaders, building level leaders, and teachers” (p. 3). Teachers are the makers or breakers of student success.

This book focuses on school leaders and their work with underperforming teachers because “the fate of our country won’t be decided on a battlefield, it will be determined in a classroom” (Weber, 2010, cover page)–a somber thought in light of the responsibility that teachers assume for student learning and the work in which leaders must engage to support all teachers, especially underperforming ones. The helicopter leader who focuses attention on teaching and learning only when there is a problem will not influence teacher development.

This book outlines the critical components framing the processes leaders can follow to work with teachers who have varied instructional, professional, and possibly personal issues that impede the overall instructional program. The work is necessary because the impact of underperforming teachers occurs both in and out of the classroom. Although the approaches and strategies offered are geared to work with teachers who are struggling and who, for all practical purposes, can be considered underperforming, most of the ideas can be used universally to support all teachers.

As a leader, take a few minutes to reflect about teachers. In your mind’s eye, think about the best teacher you had as a young child. Now take even a few more minutes to think about the worst teacher. These two extreme images of teachers need to be in the forefront of your mind while reading this book and while enacting instructional leadership in your school, where you are more than likely the principal, the assistant principal, or possibly a central office leader who supervises site-level leaders.

Thorny Issue on the Use of Terms

Question: What’s in a name? Answer: A lot! While framing this book, there were tensions about what word to use to describe teachers with issues–marginal, incompetent, woeful, sad, borderline, underperforming, sub-par, or struggling? Let’s return to the images of the best and the worst teachers. Chances are strong and definitive words and terms emerge to describe the best and the worst teacher you have experienced as a student. Take a minute to jot down (in Table 1.1) a few terms you have used to describe these teacher extremes.

Table 1.1 Words or Terms Used to Describe Best and Worst Teachers

Words or terms used to describe the best teachers	Words or terms used to describe the worst teachers

There is a problem when teachers do not make the mark in the classroom. The problem is that the education of children is negatively interrupted and, all too often, gaps in learning are not filled. As a consequence and in many instances, the gaps for some students continue to widen from year to year; the students never catch up. The moral imperatives and the consequences of not working with underperforming teachers are examined more fully in Chapter 9.

Addressing underperformance becomes more important as leaders work in environments that are constantly changing, signaling a need to keep a clear focus on the instructional program and the teachers who have been entrusted to inspire the next generation, our future, to achieve more, to be digital citizens equipped with 21^st-century-and-beyond skills, and to be ready with a clear career path when they graduate from high school. Because of the range of possibilities for underperformance, school leaders need a strong command of strategies to detect struggling teachers and to work with them, as well as the resolve to push forward in providing the types of support necessary to make future decisions based on improvement.

The Range of Teaching

In any give school, there are teachers who have varying experiences and exposure to professional learning opportunities, who have journeyed different paths to their entry into teaching (e.g., traditionally certified, alternatively certified), and who are approximations:

● Teachers who are underperforming may have learned to “fake it” during classroom observations.
Sometimes marginal teachers are able to hide because they may have strengths in keeping the peace in the class or they win their students over with low expectations. In the field, these teachers have mastered the dog and pony show, and their performance makes them contenders for a satisfactory or better rating. However, there are some teachers who are highly skilled in one or two areas, yet they have gaps in other areas that are large enough to negatively impact student learning. To do nothing about underperforming teachers puts the school leader in a defenseless position (see Chapter 9). Underperformance left unchecked for any extended time erodes morale, trust, and confidence in building-level, or perhaps system-level, leadership.

● Teachers who are flat-out incompetent are unskilled not only in the classroom (hard to prove) but also in the work associated with teaching. This may be demonstrated by not being a team member, not working with colleagues toward school improvement, not following procedures and processes, and not being present because they are chronically absent or show up late, etc.

So what about the rest of the teachers in the building? They have learning and developmental needs to expand further in their teaching roles and responsibilities. All teachers want to grow, and there are groupings of teachers whose performance ranges from satisfactory-to-good to exceptionally high and accomplished.

● At the mid-range are teachers who are satisfactory to good.
These teachers are average to above-average and, with some coaching and a sincere desire to improve their practices, they can perform at higher levels. But what does average look and sound like in the classroom? Think about the response to this question for a while. Effective teaching and its research base are examined more fully in Chapter 3.

Willingness has to prevail as the internal motivator to improve. With some gentle nudging in purposeful ways, including support through coaching, online professional development, and the like, these teachers can solidify skills and continually learn from their own practices and from colleagues who can coach them.

● Teachers who are high performers are exceptional and accomplished in the classroom.
These teachers are what I reference as Kahunas, a Hawaiian term associated with medical healers that brings with it numerous definitions (Donlin, 2010). Kahunas have been broadly defined as “magicians” … and “wizards” who are “expert in any profession” (Kahuna, 2004). Teachers who are Kahunas are magical in the classroom, bringing deep understanding of content but, more important, employing instructional strategies that are responsive to the needs of students because they purposefully work to personalize learning and so much more. Teaching and learning in a Kahuna’s classroom is transformative for students.

Every parent wants their child to be taught by a Kahuna. Every child deserves to be taught by a highly effective teacher. All school leaders want their teachers to be exemplary in the classroom. Unfortunately, administrators focus their attention on the borderline proficient, the “only acceptable” or, dreadfully speaking, the 15% of the teachers who are woefully underperforming.

Variation in Teaching Skill Ranges

The range of teaching abilities in any given building varies greatly. Research reports that between 5% and 15% of any teaching staff in any school building on the planet ranges from marginal to incompetent (Tucker, 1997, 2001). There is other research that believes the same range is true at the upper levels of accomplished teaching–the Kahunas.

Let’s do the math here. If we allow for the upper range of marginal teachers (15%) and the upper range of exemplary teachers (15%), then the rest of the teachers in the building (70%) are proficient, but is being proficient enough? In 2014, the National Center for Education Statistics reported there were 3.1 million full-time teachers in the United States. If 5% to 15% of the 3.1 million full-time teachers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Meet the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Framing the Issues About Underperforming Teachers
• 2 Teacher Evaluation in a Nutshell
• 3 Making the Commitment to Effective Teaching
• 4 Underperforming Teachers In and Out of the Classroom
• 5 Conversations Needed to Work with Underperforming Teachers
• 6 Improvement Planning with the Underperforming Teacher
• 7 The Complexities Leaders Face in Working with Underperforming Teachers
• 8 Keeping Classroom Issues out of the Courtroom: Legal Principles for Confronting Underperforming Teachers Ann Elizabeth Blankenship
• 9 The Consequences of Doing Nothing and Making Tough Decisions When All Else Fails
• 10 Final Perspectives
• Index