Principal teachers (INTERACTIVE! PLEASE COMMENT!)

A fascinating duo of cover stories has appeared in Time magazine over just the last few months. In July, David Von Drehle lays out “The Case Against Summer Vacation”, and just a couple of weeks ago, Amanda Ripley asked “What Makes a School Great?” in conjunction with the release of the documentary Waiting for “Superman”. Both of these pieces touch upon a common element that seems to pervade the search for “true”, “better” or “working” education reform. The secret ingredient: quality teaching.

All right, pick yourself up off the floor. I know that’s a revelation as shocking as Gandalf’s orientation. The idea’s been gaining a tad bit of momentum thanks to the President’s push for merit-based pay, to say nothing of his neighbor Michelle Rhee (whom Time also profiled two years ago), who has crusaded on the issue in the District of Columbia school system. The aforelinked profile characterizes her platform thus: “finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, [and] purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom.” There’s that ugly tail-side to the coin of merit pay: attacks on tenure. I think the hues and cries about the need to improve instructional quality skip a critically important step: defining what, exactly, constitutes good teaching.

I blame the tsunami of standardized testing and reporting – from state exit exams to the federally-mandated-but-state-constructed paeans to No Child Left Behind – for keeping this particular dialogue out of our national discourse, even though it seems to be as much a “duh” revelation as the conclusion of the first paragraph. The tests and their scores’ publication create the enticing illusion that now we can measure teaching and learning, even to the point of isolating an individual teacher to see how his/her brood has performed. It didn’t take long, however, for even Diane Ravitch, once a leading proponent of the law, to conclude that the focus on testing without an additional discussion of curricula has seriously damaged – some would say “corrupted” – public education in America.

We’ve seen how classroom instruction has devolved in the era of teach-for-numbers; it looks a lot like its eponymous peer in the art world. Super-scripted teaching. “Drill and kill” worksheets. No sense of individual voice from the pupils or the instructor. My parents took me to Catholic mass every Sunday growing up, and I couldn’t help noting how the congregations monotonously recited the Nicene and Apostles Creeds. These profess basic beliefs in the fundamental miracles of the faith – a God who forgives and His Son who rose from the dead and who will see a glorious return! Every time I heard these during mass, though, there was zero emotion in any of the voices. The prose spoke to a deep and proud conviction of the soul, yet the public spoke with a droning lack thereof. A part of me chuckled anytime the priest referred to the mass as a “celebration” of the Lord; it sounded like the polar opposite.

Religion and education share symbiotic purposes: they enable us to see the entire world through a particular point-of-view. Unlike most places of worship, which tend to focus on one specific perspective, the school may be the only place in our village where students can observe life from several different vantage points. I refuse to believe that the curious instincts of toddlers die out in our children once they approach puberty. I just think that schools aren’t offering them enough enticing perspectives. Part of this goes back to a school’s vision or mission statement. At some point, there are just too many curricular standards to be effectively taught and learned, and quite frankly, many of them are superfluous. Each school must collaborate with its outlying community to choose the learning goals that are crucial for its students. Every school should have a curricular point-of-view that is rooted in the native pulse of its neighborhood; students should be instinctively drawn to the learning goals of their local school.

That’s a painstaking, difficult step, but the other side of the coin poses an even greater challenge. Schools must consistently hire and support teachers that effectively deliver the kind of instruction that supports the school’s mission. This ultimately falls to the principals; they are the true stewards of their community’s educational principles.* How well can a modern administrator evaluate teaching, though? Are they trained to provide instructional guidance? A policy brief from a forum in June of 1999 suggests that three out of four principals do not have the skills to effectively shape curricula and pedagogy. The brief further details the typical hiring process for principals – rarely are the candidates evaluated based on their eye for quality instruction. One district in New York began placing principal applicants in classrooms to observe lessons. The observers would then be asked what “kinds of feedback they would give the teachers. The interviewers quickly discovered that many people who did well in other stages of interviewing could not accurately describe the lessons they had seen.” What a boon to our schools if more district-level interviewers experienced this kind of revelation before hiring a new principal. Unfortunately, the exercise isn’t even attempted in most other districts, leaving faculties nationwide to unwittingly discover this weakness within a year or two of their leader’s reign.

* Footnote: Why is it so difficult for my students to keep those two homophones straight? Why is an abstract concept or a core value inevitably dubbed a “principal”, while they describe the most important or critical element as the “principle” factor? I imagine students have never thought of their “pal” at school as an adjective, but that’s exactly how the term originated. Long ago, leadership of a school fell to the principal teacher; she typically retained her instructional duties while simultaneously handling the administrative work. Scotland still retains the “PT” position, but most of the industrialized world place their headmasters/directors/principals squarely in an office far removed from the classroom.

So what does constitute high quality teaching? The answers are as various as the belief systems that permeate our spiritual thought. Perhaps there is a connection, though. One of America’s most famous teachers, Annie Sullivan, was immortalized by author William Gibson (and Anne Bancroft on film) for her work with Helen Keller. Just the title of Gibson’s play, The Miracle Worker, sets a pretty high standard for all teachers, yet if we believe that any discovery that captures a young mind carries as much power as Helen’s “wah wah” at the well, then profound teaching may indeed take many forms. Just as there are hundreds of creeds around the globe, there are at least a hundred lessons that can inspire our youth at every grade level. Perhaps miracles abound in many of our classrooms, and the latent light bulbs of epiphany aren’t so hard to ignite.

Principals cannot go the Thomas Edison route, however, and try out thousands of instructors in order to find the ones that light their students’ spark. Let’s help them out:

In your experience, what are the qualities of outstanding teachers? Please comment below.