Teachers at the Core of Learning

8 16 22- Teachers at the Core of Learning

Can we be treating teachers better?

I think so.

Students are the reason we all show up at school. They’re the reason we do what we do. But what about the teachers? I strongly believe that teachers, along with students and families, create the core of the school.

We can say that, but what does that mean?

Here’s a quote about the matter from 1966 by David Hawkins, a psychiatrist, physician and educator.
“The personal knowledge of practitioners was significantly deeper than anything embedded in the beliefs and writings of the academically learned.”

First let’s distinguish between practitioners and academically learned. By the latter, I believe Hawkins wasn’t referring to the educated (as teachers certainly were and are), but to academics and researchers who were scholars in the new-ish field of child development, who were not trained as educators but as scientists who did not bear daily responsibility for the learning and well-being of children in their care.

The personal knowledge that Hawkins refers to is not just the professional expertise that knowledgeable and skilled teachers bring to their practice, but to the deep knowledge of students that teachers carefully develop over time. These relationships go beyond student academic records, into stories, habits, personalities and gifts. Teachers can truly be the experts in their subject matter and their students.

So why aren’t teachers treated well enough to begin with?

I don’t think this happens because admin, coaches, or district staff think poorly about the teachers. All but a tiny minority started out as teachers and taught for years if not decades. One important reason why the attitude shifts when teachers become admin-there’s the data, which becomes central to the existence of a school leader, but something also happens when you go from seeing students as unique individuals and developing a strong relationship with them over time to seeing a body of students with grade averages and test scores.

Sometimes the prescriptive and inflexible attitude taken towards teachers by school and district admin comes from a place of urgency and unmet expectations. We do need to keep students in our focus, especially when there is so much inequity in our school systems and so many of our students, especially those who have been systemically underserved, are not getting the education they deserve and need. It can be really hard to watch students of a teacher not learning because the teacher hasn’t learned how to facilitate a discussion or manage a classroom.

Many administrators know their students and are supportive of teachers’ growth and attentive to their needs. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everyone, and given the power dynamics at schools where teachers already feel unsupported, they won’t advocate for themselves to be treated any better. This happens in schools with and without unions.

So, returning to our question, what does it mean to treat teachers better?

Well, for one thing we can include them in more decision making that goes on in their own classrooms and even in their schools. We can be attentive and empathetic to the adult learning going on in our schools.  

We can facilitate the creation of professional learning teams so that educators can learn and experiment together and set their own goals and expectations for learning. We want students to love learning in a warm environment, so wouldn’t we want to set that up for teachers too? More to this point, we can design ways to engage teachers in professional learning that is interesting, meaningful, and dare I say it, fun!

It comes back to placing teachers at the core of the school, along with students and families. Teachers aren’t the vessels through which district goals are transferred to students. Teachers are at the heart of school, and deserve to be nurtured and cared for in a school setting.