Never Underestimate Your Teachers

Instructional Leadership for Excellence in Every Classroom

Robyn R. Jackson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781416615286
• eBook ISBN: 9781416616276
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Développement professionnel

Any teacher can be a master teacher.

So says Robyn R. Jackson, author of the best-selling Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching.

In this book for school leaders, Jackson presents a new model for understanding teaching as a combination of skill and will and explains the best ways to support individual teachers' ongoing professional development. Here, you'll learn how to meet your teachers where they are and help every one of them—from the raw novice to the savvy veteran, from the initiative-weary to the change-challenged to the already outstanding—develop the mindset and habits of master teachers. Real-life examples, practical tools, and strategies for managing time and energy demands will help you build your leadership capacity as you raise the level of instructional excellence throughout your school.

To move your school forward, you must move the people in it. If you want a master teacher every classroom, you must commit to helping every teacher be a master teacher. That work begins here.

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Chapter 1

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What Is Masterful Teaching?

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Experiences where you are forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

—Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

Walk into Mr. Ishigowa’s^* classroom and you wouldn’t be impressed. There are no objectives written on the board. The bulletin boards display no student work. In fact, the walls are bare, save an ancient poster of Einstein and a chart illustrating different geometric shapes. Watching Mr. Ishigowa teach, you wonder why his students—mostly minority boys, with pants hanging well below their waists and baseball caps pulled low over their eyes—are even paying attention. Mr. Ishigowa doesn’t wow his students with dramatic lectures or entertain them with beguiling stories. He doesn’t group them into jigsaws or dream up clever games for them to play. He just teaches math. For 45 straight minutes he is at the board writing formulas, explaining angles, showing students how to calculate the slope of a line. Short, bespectacled, and thin; bald, save for a few wisps of gray hair that stick up on top; and wearing pants pulled up almost to his chest, Mr. Ishigowa’s physical presence defies the image of a master teacher. So does his quiet manner and heavily accented speech. And yet … he can take any student—even students who have failed geometry twice, even fourth-year freshmen—and help them pass the state geometry test. Mr. Ishigowa is a master teacher.

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In Mrs. Meneker’s classroom, music blares from the stereo on her desk. Half of the student desks are pushed casually against the far wall. Few if any of her 11th graders are sitting down, though: They are standing in corners talking or hunched over tables coloring while occasionally sipping sodas. Some are slouched in a row of beanbag chairs along the back wall of the classroom, eating chips and laughing as they flip through magazines. Mrs. Meneker works with one student at her desk, while the other 29 seem to be on their own.

But look more closely: The students standing in the corner aren’t just talking; they’re looking at a map and debating the value of the Louisiana Purchase. Those students coloring? They’re drawing maps of what the United States looked like before and after the Louisiana Purchase, discussing different possibilities for dividing the states, and debating which should be slave states and which should be free states—and using their maps to bolster their point. The students slouched in the beanbag chairs reading? They are looking through collections of political cartoons from the time and selecting which they will address in an argumentative essay. Mrs. Meneker and the student at her desk are reviewing the student’s last test results and setting long-term goals for the next assessment. Before the week is over, Mrs. Meneker will have a similar meeting with all of her other students. Even though some struggle now because they aren’t really prepared for the class, by the end of the year, all of them will pass the AP exam with at least a score of 3. Mrs. Meneker is a master teacher.

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Mrs. Marshall doesn’t work with students after school. She doesn’t stay in class during lunch and work with them, either. She doesn’t give make-up work and rarely offers extra credit. Her gradebook has few grades in it. When she lectures to her 6th and 7th graders, she does so from the front of the classroom using nothing but a short list of topics written on the chalkboard—no PowerPoint, no interactive whiteboard, no video, no technology at all. At the beginning of her lecture, she tells her students, "I am not a tape recorder, and there is no rewind button on me, so you will have to pay attention." After the lecture, her students work on their assignment sheets—and there is an assignment sheet almost every day. When asked, she will tell you that her students determine their own grades. If they want to pass, they will pass; if they want to fail, that is their choice as well. Every one of Mrs. Marshall’s students signs a learning contract for each unit of study. They are required to do a certain number of assignments, and if they do them, they earn a C for the unit. Those who want to earn a higher grade complete extra assignments according to the contract. And although the "choice to fail" is up to the student, few if any of them ever make that choice. Mrs. Marshall is a master teacher.

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In Mr. Davis’s classroom the students, all male, sit in rows—razor-straight rows, facing the board. They raise their hands for permission to sharpen their pencils; often, their requests are denied. Mr. Davis doesn’t like a lot of movement in his classroom. He refers to his 4th graders by their last names and insists that they refer to him as "Sir." Mr. Davis runs a tight ship. At first, it seems a bit much for 9- and 10-year-olds. After all, they are still children, and such military precision seems a little draconian. But for this group of boys, the structure helps them focus on planning the class garden using sophisticated tables based on average rainfall, crop yield, and the merits of organic compost over commercial fertilizer. The structure helps them concentrate on developing their own hypotheses about the optimal time to plant and whether it is better to start the seeds in a pot in the classroom or plant them directly in the soil. The structure helps them resist using yardsticks as swords rather than using them to measure the proper size of their lot. And the structure helps them develop the self-discipline to work independently or in small groups without becoming distracted. They’re learning to think like scientists. Mr. Davis is a master teacher.

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If I were to ask you to close your eyes right now and picture a master teacher, odds are that you wouldn’t conjure up Mr. Ishigowa, Mrs. Meneker, Mrs. Marshall, or Mr. Davis. We each have a sense of what a master teacher "looks like" and what a master teacher does. And yet in classrooms all around the world there are teachers doing a masterful job of helping students meet or exceed the standards who don’t look at all like what we would imagine and who may not engage in the laundry list of best practices we would expect. There are also many teachers out there who conform exactly to our personal "master teacher" schema and yet have students who are making little to no progress and may even be consistently failing.

We need a better schema.

What Is Teaching?

Before we pin down what masterful teaching is, we should backtrack to consider teaching in general. All teaching is a combination of skill and will.

Skill is the science of teaching; it involves a teacher’s pedagogical and content knowledge. It determines how well teachers know the subject and how well they can help students learn it. Will has to do with a teacher’s passion; it is the art of teaching. It involves teachers’ drive to help all students be successful. Master teachers have high skill and high will. They don’t just know their craft; they also have the drive and determination to be the best at it.

Because teaching is such a complex act, cursory feedback and standardized support can never help teachers grow to the master level. Unless you understand both their skill and their will, you cannot provide the targeted help that they need. Rather than rely on Hollywood images of effective teaching or our own notions of what good teaching should look like (based on how we were taught or what we ourselves did as teachers), assessing a teacher’s effectiveness requires a much more objective and comprehensive idea of what masterful teaching looks like and how it incorporates both skill and will.

Teacher Skill

As noted, the skill component of masterful teaching comprises both content knowledge and pedagogy. Teachers who understand content but cannot figure out how to help students understand it cannot be effective in the classroom. Neither can teachers who know several strategies for helping students learn but not how to apply these strategies in different situations and tailor them to all learners, or teachers who are excellent instructional designers but poor classroom managers. Pedagogy and content-area knowledge are intricately intertwined and cannot be separated into two distinct categories; teachers must have both to be considered skillful.

Teacher skill is rooted in the seven principles of effective instruction (Jackson, 2009), a concept we will explore in greater detail in Chapter 2. In short, though, highly skilled teachers start where their students are, know where students are going, expect to get them there, support them along the way, use feedback to help themselves and their students get better, focus on quality not quantity, and never work harder than their students. As a result, highly skilled teachers are good planners. They know how to structure a lesson and a unit to ensure that students learn and understand the material. They plan both formative and summative assessments and use the feedback these assessments render to adjust their instruction throughout the unit. Those with high levels of skill structure lessons so that learning becomes inevitable rather than accidental. They understand how to sequence instruction, how to anticipate student confusion, and how to explain difficult concepts in ways that help students develop increasing understanding over time. They know different ways to explain concepts and how to match their collection of instructional strategies to individual students’ needs.

Another essential component of teacher skill is classroom management: knowing how to structure the classroom so that students can focus on learning. When inappropriate behaviors distract students, highly skilled teachers know how to help students quickly get back on track. They know how to balance structure and support with autonomy and how to help students take responsibility for and ownership of their own learning and behavior over time.

Teacher Will

The will component of masterful teaching is rooted in the desire to help all students learn and the determination to ensure that all students do learn. It’s more than simple motivation, however; will encompasses a teacher’s entire attitude and approach to teaching and to students. It’s what powers a teacher to find ways to reach students even in the face of huge obstacles. It’s about persistence, trying strategy after strategy until one succeeds. Teachers with very high levels of will see teaching not as a job but as a vocation.

Will is what drives the teachers who continually refine and hone their craft, reflect on practice, and embrace data and feedback. It’s why these teachers set high expectations of themselves and their students, why they are not content with the status quo. They want their students to keep growing and reaching, and they model that in their own practice. Teachers with high levels of teaching will understand the importance of relationships and work hard to make sure that every student in the room is safe, engaged, and connected.

An individual teacher’s will is affected by countless factors, including working conditions, personal problems, relationships with colleagues, passion about a particular subject, district constraints, school climate, and student attitudes. Will can fluctuate throughout the course of a career, a school year, or even a day. Teachers often start their careers with high will but, because they don’t receive the right kind of support, become discouraged and frustrated and lose their will over time. Conversely, a teacher may begin a school year with low will and meet a group of students that is so inspirational that the teacher’s will skyrockets during the course of the year. Teaching will is not static and must constantly be nurtured if it is to be sustained.

The Will/Skill Matrix: Where the Path to Professional Development Begins

Given that teaching comprises both skill and will, and that teachers possess varying degrees of each, considering where an individual teacher falls on a simple matrix of skill level and will level (see Figure 1.1) gives us a new way to think about that teacher’s professional development needs.

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Figure 1.1 The Will/Skill Matrix

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The matrix allows us to identify four teacher profiles or "types"—high will/low skill, low will/low skill, high will/high skill, and low will/high skill—and these designations offer an approach to the analysis and development of masterful teaching that is far more useful than the familiar stereotypes and the same old received wisdom. Each type of teacher has a different set of needs and, thus, needs a different type of instructional leadership. Understanding where teachers in your school fall on the Will/Skill Matrix will help you identify a leadership approach that directly addresses their individual needs.

Let’s take an initial look at the four general types. You’ll learn more about each in the pages to come.

High Will/Low Skill

High-will/low-skill teachers are often enthusiastic about teaching. They know that they have areas they need to work on, and they want to improve. They often seek out a supervisor’s feedback, enthusiastically participate in professional development, and try new strategies or ideas in their classrooms. But because their practice is not rooted in principles, their reliance on strategies makes their instruction disjointed.

High-will/low-skill teachers tend to be new to the profession. However, veteran teachers who have not found ways to integrate their teaching knowledge over time can also fit the profile. High-will/low-skill teachers often have very lofty ideals about teaching, which unfortunately can lead them to implementing instructional strategies that do students more harm than good. Or, in their eagerness to improve, they may try out several instructional strategies without giving much thought as to appropriateness for their students.

High-will/low-skill teachers are willing to learn. With the right kind of support, they can quickly get better. The danger is that without the right kind of support, these teachers can quickly lose their enthusiasm and become low-will/low-skill teachers.

Low Will/Low Skill

Low-will/low-skill teachers have, in many ways, simply given up. They see teaching as a job rather than as a profession or a calling. Many are "retired on the job" or are biding their time until they can move on to other things. They "phone it in" and do not seem invested in their craft. Low-will/low-skill teachers do not buck the status quo; theirs is a more passive resistance to change. They tend to stay out of the way and do only what is absolutely necessary and no more. They do not volunteer for additional duties. They participate marginally on teams, letting others take on the bulk of the work, and passively attend meetings without contributing anything. They work hard at being invisible.

In some ways, the low-will/low-skill teacher is the most difficult to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Any Teacher?
• Chapter 1. What Is Masterful Teaching?
• Chapter 2. Understanding and Diagnosing Skill
• Chapter 3. Addressing Skill
• Chapter 4. Understanding and Identifying Will
• Chapter 5. Addressing Will
• Chapter 6. Putting It All Together
• Conclusion: Every Teacher, Every Leader
• Appendix: Tools
• References
• About the Author
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• Copyright