(I have edited the original 2015 essay to include new information, contributions from thoughtful readers, and some ‘must read’ footnotes. For those interested in pursuing this issue further, please look at my most recent book, Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education.”)

“So, are they quitting because they’re fed up with their heavy-handed union bosses?” The hostility of the question took me by surprise. I was explaining to my dinner companion, a veteran lawyer, that 40% of teachers leave the field within five years, and right away he jumped to his anti-union conclusion disguised as a question.

No, I explained. Unions don’t seem to have anything to do with it; it’s most often related to working conditions: class size, discipline policies, and how much control and influence they have over their daily activities.

“It’s not money?” he asked, aggressively suspicious. Not according to surveys, I explained.

I described what I’d seen of a teacher’s daily work life. He interrupted, “How can it be a profession if you can’t take a leak when you need to?”**

While that’s not a criterion that social scientists use to define a profession, my cut-to-the-chase acquaintance might be onto something.

Can teaching be a true profession if you can’t take a bathroom break when nature calls?

Certainly, teachers and their supporters want teaching to be seen as a profession. They’ve won the linguistic battle. If you Google ‘the teaching profession,’ you’ll get nearly 3 billion references, while ‘teaching as an occupation’ and ‘the teaching occupation’ produce only 69 million.

Social scientists have no doubt about the status of teaching, according to Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania. “We do not refer to teaching as a profession. It doesn’t have the characteristics of those traditional professions like medicine, academia, dentistry, law, architecture, engineering, et cetera. It doesn’t have the pay, the status, the respect, the length of training, so from a scientific viewpoint teaching is not a profession.”  He carefully refers to teaching as an occupation, noting that it’s the largest occupation of all in the USA. And growing at a faster rate than the student population.

Jennifer Robinson, a teacher educator at Montclair State University in New Jersey, disagrees with Ingersoll. She believes our familiarity with teachers and schools breeds disrespect for teaching. “We don’t treat teaching as a profession because we’ve all gone to school and think we’re experts. Most people think, ‘Oh, I could do that,’ which we would never do with doctors.”

Robinson suggests that a significant part of our population–including lots of politicians–does not trust teachers. She cites the drumbeat of criticism in the media, blaming teachers for low test scores.

A common criticism is that teachers come from the lowest rungs of our academic ladder, a charge that Ingersoll says is simply not true. “About 10% of teachers come from institutions like MacAlester, Yale and Penn,” he says. “Perhaps 25% come from the lowest quartile of colleges,” meaning that close to two-thirds of teachers attend the middle ranks of our colleges and universities.

According to Ingersoll, one hallmark of a profession is longevity, sticking with the work. In that respect, teaching doesn’t make the grade. As noted above, his research indicates that at least 40% of new teachers leave the field within five years, a rate of attrition that is comparable to police work. “Teaching has far higher turnover than those traditional professions, lawyers, professors, engineers, architects, doctors and accountants,” Ingersoll reports. Nurses tend to stick around longer than teachers. Who has higher quit rates, I asked him. “Prison guards, child care workers and secretaries.”

(The always thoughtful Curtis Johnson had a response: “There are now some 75 schools where teachers are in charge, have authority over everything that counts for student and school success. At EE we called them ‘teacher-powered’ schools. In these schools, the teachers are in fact professionals and turnover is very low. For readers who find this interesting, check it out at http://www.teacherpowered.org.”)

(A contrary view came from James Noonan: “Howard Gardner may be best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, but he has spent a far larger proportion of his esteemed career studying the role of the professions in creating a more just and ethical world (see http://www.thegoodproject.org). The framework that he and his colleagues developed would suggest that teaching (in the U.S.) is not a profession, but that’s not to say that its status is inevitable or immutable. Many countries and systems of education (like Finland, as you suggest, and Ontario and Singapore and a host of others) have placed teachers on par with other professionals and they have found great success.
        … Teaching is not a profession currently, but the first step in changing that is envisioning something different and creating spaces (like the “teacher-powered” schools mentioned above) where teachers can experience what true professionalism feels like.”)

Perhaps teaching is a calling? Those who teach score high on measures of empathy and concern for others and social progress, Ingersoll and others have noted. As a reporter and a parent, I have met thousands of teachers whose concern for their students was visible and admirable.

Trying to elevate the profession’s status (or arguing about it) is a waste of energy. That’s the view of Robert Runté, an associate professor of education at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. In a fascinating essay** written more than 20 years ago, he wrote,

“Since one needs schools before one can have school teachers, teachers are stuck with their status as salaried employees working within large organizations. Teachers have always been and will always be subject to direction from their school board and the provincial bureaucracy. They are, to that degree at least, already proletarianized.  Consequently, the whole question of whether teaching is a profession, or can become one, is a red herring. The real issue is the degree to which teachers can resist deskilling and maintain some measure of autonomy within the school bureaucracy.”

To some, he may be going off the deep end when he asserts that the construct of ‘profession’ is a trumped-up label created to flatter workers and distinguish themselves from others.

The only feature that ever really distinguished the professions from other occupations was the “professional” label itself. What we are is knowledge workers, and as such we have a responsibility to both ourselves and to the public to become reflective practitioners. As reflective practitioners we can reassert, first our ability, and then our right, to assume responsibility for the educational enterprise. We must stop worrying about unimportant issues of status and focus instead on the real and present danger of deskilling.

(When this piece first appeared, reader Susan Johnson responded: A student of history knows that professions evolve over time. There was a time when a barber could do “surgery” and a lawyer could practice after being apprenticed to another lawyer. My own grandmother ran into trouble for delivering babies without the benefit of specialized training and credentials because that practice was fairly common in her place and time.
        When teachers first formed an association, they wanted the authority to make decisions about curriculum, instruction and personnel, but were only granted the ability to bargain for salaries, benefits, and working conditions. And so, this association became a union, which will only exist as long as teachers are not the decision-makers. So it is likely true that union bosses do not want to see professional independence for teachers. However, these unions have the potential to evolve into powerful professional organizations similar to the American Medical Association.
        But change is on the horizon: teachers are starting to take control of the schools in which they teach. When schools are run by teachers who make almost all decisions regarding curriculum, instruction, selection and retention of personnel, then they will be full professionals. When the next teacher shortage hits, and the “captive women” are no longer available to teach our children, I believe districts will start to offer professional autonomy to people willing to staff the nation’s classrooms.
        In the meantime, I hope talented young people who want to be teachers look for positions that guarantee professional autonomy. It’s time.”)

“Deskilling” is the enemy, a concerted effort to reduce teaching to mindless factory work. Remember that awful graphic in “Waiting for ‘Superman’” where the heads of students are opened up and ‘knowledge’ is poured in by teachers? That’s how some politicians and education ‘reformers’ understand the role of schools and teachers. And how much skill does it take to pour a pitcher? Not much, and so why should we pay teachers more, or even give them job protection? Just measure how well they pour (using test scores of course), compare them to other teachers (value-added), and then get rid of the poor pourers. Bingo, education is reformed!

Teaching has taken some big hits in recent years, driven in great part by the education reform movement that argues, disingenuously, that “great teachers make all the difference.” This position allows them to ignore the very clear effects of poverty, poor nutrition, poor health and substandard housing on a child’s achievement.

Most parents are not fooled by this. Their respect for their children’s teachers and schools remains high, which must frustrate the Michelle Rhee/Campbell Brown/Democrats for Education Reform crowd.

So what’s to be done? Professor Lethbridge asserts that teachers should embrace their role of ‘knowledge workers,’ and I agree, sort of. I believe that schools ought to be viewed as ‘knowledge factories’ in which the students are the workers, teachers are managers/foremen/supervisors, and knowledge is the factory’s product. In that model, students must be doing real work, an issue I wrote about recently.

To show respect for teaching and teachers, I suggest we leave the ‘profession/occupation’ argument to academics. Instead, let’s consider doing three things:

1) Supporting leaders whose big question is “How is this child intelligent?” instead of “How intelligent is this child?”

2) Electing school board members who believe in inquiry-based learning, problem solving, effective uses of technology, and deeper learning.

3) Insisting on changes in the structure of schools so that teachers have time to watch each other teach and to reflect on their work. These are givens in Finland and other countries with effective educational systems.

Oh, and bathroom breaks when necessary….****

** Susan Graham, a teacher, was upset by this. “It seems to me that taking a bathroom break whenever the individual feels the urge has little to do with professionalism and a lot to do with time, context and management of workflow.  Do lawyers take a “potty break” when ever they want? I can’t remember a single episode of Law and Order where a recess was called for Jack McCoy to “take a leak” or “Claire Kincaid to “go to the ladies room.” Of course that’s just TV. A lawyer would tell you that they spend most of their time meeting with clients, collecting information, reviewing case history, meeting analyzing potential outcomes, negotiating with other lawyers, and preparing presentations. The courtroom is just the tip of the iceberg.
        The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an awareness that the time in front of the classroom is the tip of the iceberg of teaching. No, teachers don’t get to “go” whenever they need to. For one thing, teachers are expected to practice in isolation, something neither “professionals” or “knowledge workers” rarely do. Not having “enough time to pee” isn’t as much of a complaint as not having enough time to plan, to assess student work, to collaborate with colleagues, to do or read research, to make meaningful contact with parents. Teachers don’t expect to stroll out of the classroom for a potty break any more than lawyers expect to “take a leak” during the middle of cross examining a witness. What they seek is acknowledgement that teaching is highly complex work.
        Whether you call us “professionals” or “knowledge workers”, what we want is enough time to do our job well; the discretion to apply the knowledge and skills we have worked to acquire; sufficient collaboration to continue to inform and improve our practice; and respect for our intention to act in the best interest of our students.”
***: Is Teaching A Profession? Reprinted from Taylor, Gerald and Robert Runté, eds.
Thinking About Teaching: An Introduction. Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

**** Richard Hersh, a distinguished former college president, shared this excerpt from his essay, “Teaching Ain’t Brain Surgery-It’s Tougher!”
        “In 1983, school reform efforts were catalyzed by the report of “A Nation at Risk.” Reform to date has largely failed. Today we are a nation at greater risk educationally but the political pandering about “Leave No Child Behind” will get us nowhere because the issue of quality teaching is ignored.
        High quality teaching is the single most important factor in helping students to learn, a truism confirmed by many years of research. This fact has been blithely ignored by critics and politicians attracted to the siren calls for facile remedies such as school uniforms, computers, vouchers, and the latest bromide, high-stakes testing. The result is inadequate student achievement and more than 50% of all teachers who leave teaching in the first three to five years of their career.
        The reasons for this state-of-affairs are straightforward and swept under the rug– the training of teachers and the conditions for teaching are grossly inadequate. Moreover, in the face of an acknowledged short and long-term teacher shortage, the imperative for excellent teachers and teaching conditions is profoundly undermined by a patronizing “teaching ain’t brain surgery” mentality–the belief that anyone with an undergraduate degree can teach. Teachers in a very real sense operate on the brain too but teaching ain’t brain surgery–it’s tougher!
        How are brain surgeons educated? Four years of undergraduate work, at least four arduous years of medical school, and several additional years of internships and residencies are required to master the knowledge and skills to operate on the finite topography of the brain. With such training, these superbly prepared surgeons are expected by society to operate on one anesthetized patient at a time supported by a team of doctors and nurses in the best equipped operating rooms money can buy. For this we gladly pay them handsomely.
        How are teachers educated? They receive a spotty four-year undergraduate education with little clinical training. At best, an additional year for a Master’s degree is also required for professional certification. Teachers are expected by society to then enter their “operating rooms” containing 22-32 quite conscious “patients”, individually and collectively active. Often the room is poorly equipped, and rarely is help available as teachers also attempt to work wonders with the brain/mind, the psychological and emotional attributes of which are arguably as complex to master as anything a brain surgeon must learn. For this we gladly pay teachers little.
Conditions for professional service matter. Contemplate the results if our highly educated and trained brain surgeons were expected to work in the M.A.S.H. tent conditions equivalent to so many classrooms. In such an environment we would predictably see a much higher rate of failure. 

        Or, consider if the roles were reversed-that brain surgeons were educated and rewarded as if teachers. It is virtually impossible to contemplate because it is hard to conceive of any of us willing to be operated on by someone with so little education or clinical training in a profession held in so much public disdain.
        We take for granted that the current professional education, training, rewards, and working conditions for brain surgeons are necessary and appropriate for the complexity and value of the work performed. Not so obvious is that teaching well in one elementary classroom or five or six secondary school classes each day is as difficult, complex, and as important a task as brain surgery. But to do it well, to be truly a profession, teachers require exponentially more education, training, better working conditions and rewards than are currently provided. Unless and until we acknowledge this reality we will not solve the teacher shortage crisis and school reform will inexorably fail.
….
        To guarantee excellent teachers, effective school reform, and ultimately high student achievement, we first need to understand that teaching is at least as complex and as difficult as brain surgery and requires significantly greater education, training, monetary reward and supportive operating conditions. …
        Transforming the education and training conditions is only one-half the solution. The “operating” conditions in schools to enable professional teaching practice must be radically altered. Elementary and secondary teachers today find themselves isolated in their classrooms. Teaching has become professionally stultifying. With the additional school burdens of violence, drugs, multiple languages, bureaucratic impositions, mainstreaming, and the obvious personal needs of so many students across all social and economic strata, is it really surprising to find that so few are willing to enter or remain in this calling? The best trained teachers will fail unless we provide a school setting that enables students and teachers to be successful.”
       

Because complex stories invariably involve both winners and losers, journalists are schooled to ask ‘“Who benefits?” when doing their reporting.  Even in the worst of situations, some people and organizations seem to end up benefiting. For example, in a city with badly maintained roads, more cars are damaged and auto repair shops make more money; in a town with inadequate or unsafe drinking water, those who sell bottled water profit. And when reporters dig deeper, they often find that the beneficiaries are the major obstacles to remedying unfair situations.

However, I cannot recall anyone asking that all-important question about the exceptionally high rate of turnover–some call it churn’–in our teaching force.

So let’s ask it now: Who benefits from teacher turnover?

Precise “churn” numbers are hard to come by, but somewhere between 30% and 50% of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. Turnover is not evenly or randomly distributed: teachers in low-income neighborhoods leave in much larger numbers. I’ve been in schools with annual turnover rates of 25-35% every year.

Turnover is not inherently bad, of course.  When older teachers ‘age out’ of the profession, they retire and are replaced. Alternate-certification programs like Teach for America operate from the premise that most of its ‘graduates’ will not make a career out of teaching, adding to the churn.  Some new teachers turn out to be pretty bad and are let go, and others discover that teaching is a lot harder than they expected and look for greener pastures.

The churn, which seems to be increasing, has had a profound impact on our teaching force. As recently as 1987, schools were hiring only about 65,000 new teachers a year.  By 2008, the last year I found data for, schools were hiring 200,000 new teachers.  As a consequence of the churn, one-quarter of our teachers have less than five years of experience, and that’s a huge change: In 1987 the modal ‘years of experience’ was 15—we had more teachers with 15 years of teaching experience than any other.  Today the modal teacher is a rookie in her first year on the job. {{1}}

So, who benefits when schools have to find replacements for so many teachers every year?

The obvious answer would seem to be school boards (and taxpayers), because green teachers are cheaper than white-haired veterans.  Payments into retirement plans are lower, because those dollars are a function of salaries, and new teachers earn less. {{2}}

But I nominate schools and colleges of education as the primary beneficiaries of churn.  After all, someone has to train the replacements.  Consider one state, Illinois: In 2012, its institutions of higher education graduated over 43,000 education majors, presumably the majority of them trained to be teachers.{{3}}   Illinois K-12 schools employ about 145,000 teachers. If 20% leave in a given year, that creates 29,000 vacancies–I.E., jobs for 29,000 replacements.

If 10% opt out, the schools need 14,500 trained replacements.

But if only 5% of Illinois’ teachers left every year, there would be just 7,250 job openings for the state’s 43,000 graduates who majored in education.

So is in the interest of Illinois higher education and its teacher-training institutions to help make teaching a job that more people want to keep?  Or do they benefit from the churn?

As the lawyers say, asked and answered.

I don’t mean to pick on Illinois.{{4}}  Every institution in America that prepares teachers is on the horns of a dilemma.  They want classroom teaching to be seen as an attractive career option so undergraduates will choose to major in education instead of, say, sociology or nursing. But, on the other hand, they benefit when teaching jobs are plentiful, and so the exodus of teachers from the classroom works to their advantage.

So, who benefits from our wasteful churning system? Who benefits when teaching turns out to be an unsatisfying profession for so many?

If I am right about schools of education and school boards being the beneficiaries of churn, then it follows that neither of them can be entrusted with the responsibility for making teaching a genuine profession.  In fact, it may turn out that schools of education and school boards have been and will be obstacles to genuine change.

Instead, we may have to ask those who lose from constant churn to provide the leadership.

Who are the losers, and what can they do to make teaching an appealing job?  I have a few ideas about this, but I’d like to hear your thoughts first.

—-

[[1]]1. If you haven’t read ‘The American Public School Teacher: Past, Present & Future,’ I hope you will. (Harvard Education Press, 2011)  Lots of valuable essays, edited by Darrel Drury and Justin Baer. Full disclosure: I blurbed it.[[1]]

[[2]]2. If school boards help new teachers succeed by mentoring them as they learn classroom management and other tricks of the trade, then churn is not a way to save money.  However, my experience has been that many, perhaps most, school systems are content to let new teachers ‘sink or swim’ on their own.[[2]]

[[3]]3. The largest producer of teachers, Illinois State University, has more than 5000 would-be teachers enrolled, and its website reports that one of four new teachers hired in Illinois between 2008-2011 was an ISU graduate.[[3]]

[[4]]4. Catalyst Magazine reports that enrollment in pre-teaching programs is dropping in Illinois, which suggests that more young people are aware of what many call ‘the war on teachers’ that’s been going on for the past 10 years or so.  “After years of holding steady, enrollment fell significantly in 2011 and 2012—by 23 percent overall,” it reports.[[4]]

By rights teaching ought to have become a team sport years ago, because the majority of school superintendents have been drawn from the ranks of coaches for as long as I can remember. Who better than to inculcate team values than ex-jocks turned coaches turned school leaders? But it didn’t happen under their leadership.

Shouldn’t it be a team sport now? After all, our current Secretary of Education knows about the importance of teamwork. Arne Duncan was co-captain of Harvard’s basketball team and later a pro player in Australia. He’s still pretty darn good at the game, as he showed during NBA All Star Weekend. Hasn’t happened–we’re even more focused on judging individual teachers according to their students’ test scores, the antithesis of team competition.

Lots of people are now talking–often with passion and intensity–about teaching as a “team sport,” but wishing won’t make it so. As the old English saying goes, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Those who would like teaching to be recognized as a team effort have some work to do.

Teaching has been a solo job from its earliest days. Most of our first public schools were one-room schoolhouses, with, of course, just one teacher. When systems developed, they were what Deborah Ball of Michigan calls ‘cellular structures,’ set up so that any individual teacher could leave and be replaced without disrupting the whole system. Systems were, she said, designed for high turnover.

At the same time, the view took hold that teaching was essentially ‘learned on the job,’ not in colleges of education that passed along codified professional knowledge of the art and skill of teaching. Even today, according to Dr. Ball, most classroom teachers will say that their professional education wasn’t worth much. Their disrespect for their own training feeds the public view that teaching is not a serious profession like medicine, law or nursing.

(Or, to go back to my sports analogy, teaching in the United States is not only not a team sport; it’s also the minor leagues. That can and must change–more about that in a minute.)

I attended Dr. Ball’s informative presentation at “Teaching and Learning 2014” in Washington on Friday. This 2-day conference, sponsored by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, is the direct descendant of the “Celebration of Teaching and Learning” sponsored by WNET when Ron Thorpe was Channel 13’s Director of Education. When he took over NBPTS, he brought the concept to Washington, but he has redesigned it to make it less of a celebration and more of an intellectually stimulating exercise. As a reporter, I had intended to jump from session to session but got hooked by Dr. Ball’s presentation.

The conference {{1}}, which attracted many National Board Certified Teachers{{2}} and about 3,000 attendees in all, was a veritable cornucopia of riches, with at least half a dozen sessions going on simultaneously most of the time.

There were also several plenary sessions, two of which I attended. The session with Bill Gates was disappointing. He delivered a pedestrian speech about the Common Core State Standards that seemed to have come off a shelf at the Gates Foundation. His audience included our country’s most qualified and dedicated teachers, but he did not reach out to them. After his talk, he was joined on stage by celebrity interviewer George Stephanopolous of ABC for a Q&A session that was even less impressive. Although Mr. Stephanopolous had access to questions submitted by the audience of teachers, he asked instead about ‘flipped classrooms’ and his own children’s use of mobile devices. That meant that Mr. Gates was not pressed about his Foundation’s role in developing the CCSS or Race to the Top (when the Foundation gave states substantial assistance in preparing their applications), the wisdom of using test scores to evaluate teachers, or any other issues on the minds of teachers.

Arne Duncan’s plenary session was a revelation. The Secretary’s speech was aimed at his audience. He acknowledged their suspicions and concerns and said that he strongly supported teacher leadership as an important vehicle going forward. “Our aim is to encourage schools, districts, and even states all across the country to provide more opportunities for authentic, genuine teacher leadership that doesn’t require them to leave their daily role in classrooms,” Duncan said. “We’ll convene a group of teachers, principals, teachers’ groups, and district leaders. They will take the steps necessary not to create some white paper that will decorate shelves, but to create real commitments around new opportunities.” Immediately after his speech, he submitted to questioning by five classroom teachers, a lively back-and-forth that must have pleased many in the audience.

One day before the conference, Mr. Thorpe arranged for several dozen Board-certified teachers to meet with 16 of the medical doctors now serving in Congress, all of them Board-certified physicians. From all reports, the session was an eye-opener for doctors and teachers alike. The doctors were shocked to learn that not even 4% of America’s teachers have earned Board certification, because at least 85% of doctors are Board-certified. Teachers were reminded of how far their profession has to travel.

Can teaching become a team sport, and a major league one at that? “Teaching & Learning 2014” might point the way to big-league status. Mr. Thorpe has created a ‘big tent’ with room for Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, both teacher union presidents, and critics of test-based accountability like Pasi Sahlberg. Not under the tent this year were Diane Ravitch or Wendy Kopp, perhaps because their very different messages are seen as overly familiar and/or not helpful to raising the profession’s status.

Raising the bar for teachers–particularly for entry into the profession–is an essential step. But, as Dr. Ball noted, tougher admission standards admission for schools of education won’t be enough. What happens next matters more. The training must be challenging, stimulating and useful, she said, a message that Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford has also been preaching. Graduates of schools of education must believe that their professional training was valuable preparation for the actual work of teaching.

More skilled teachers must apply for Board-certification and the rigorous process that earning that status entails. States and districts must reward Board-certified teachers.

We also need to address the myth of the ‘born teacher,’ the ‘natural teacher.’ That myth contradicts the meaning of professionalism. While some personalities are better suited to classrooms (and some clearly don’t belong with children), most intelligent and hard-working individuals can learn the skills required to be an effective teacher. {{3}}

Don’t forget that a team sport requires teamwork–teammates having each other’s back. In teaching that means sharing ideas and curriculum; it means having the time to watch each other teach; it means setting aside time for the educational equivalent of medicine’s ‘grand rounds,’ a time when teachers who teach the same students share their observations about those kids.

These steps could bring teaching into the major leagues of professions.

At the same time, we need to explore the meaning of ‘team sport.’ To be precise, how does one keep score? By what measures do we determine who wins? What do we mean by ‘winning’? Winning is easy to figure out in basketball–the team with more points wins the game, and that appealing simplicity may explain why education relies on test scores, which are, after all, points. But the team sport of teaching has to be scored more like ice dancing, or dressage in horseback riding–it’s complex, partially systematic but also partially subjective.

That’s because the object of the team sport of teaching is not higher test scores. The goal is to help grow adults. And all three words matter. “Help” conveys the key concept of a team sport (parents are part of the team, of course). “Grow” indicates that teaching is a process that will inevitably involve setbacks, one that cannot be captured by a single snapshot. “Adults” is the outcome, not a test score, and that means that society has to have serious conversations about what we want our young people to be, and be able to do.

For teaching to become a team sport, we must reverse course and take a stand against test-based accountability, which is antithetical to teamwork. Of course, teachers must be held accountable, but that complex evaluation system must be developed by teachers, administrators and the general public. Could that be the ‘teacher leadership’ that the Secretary of Education says he supports?

Time to find out…..

—
[[1]]1. Teaching and Learning 2014 is a welcome addition to education meetings, despite being held in Washington’s disastrous Convention Center, a cavernous space with poor signage where every hallway and corridor look nearly identical.[[1]]
[[2]]2. According to the organization, “There are now more than 100,000 National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) advancing student learning and achievement in all 50 states. These NBCTs have been certified in at least one of the 25 certificate areas, which span 16 content areas and four student developmental levels. Even though NBCTs are only a small percentage of the nation’s teachers, they represent the largest group of accomplished teachers as recognized by the profession. NBCTs have had a disproportionate impact on improving education. Nationwide, nearly 50 percent of NBCTs work in high-poverty schools. They are also among the nation’s leaders in math and science. Since 2008, more than 30 percent of all winners of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching are NBCTs. NBCTs are already informing educational policies and practices at the local, state and national levels with their expertise and experience.”[[2]]
[[3]]3. Elizabeth Green addresses this in her forthcoming book, “Building a Better Teacher,” coming out this spring from Norton; I’ve just started reading an advance copy and had trouble putting it down to finish this blog post.[[3]]

First I want to tell you about a terrific teacher–and then invite you to watch her at work. When I met Maria Eby, she was wearing a fluorescent green wig and was dressed all in green. As she passed me, I smiled and said something like “You’re either early for Halloween or late for St. Patrick’s Day.” She smiled and said something that I didn’t catch, but it didn’t matter. After all, we were filming in an arts-oriented elementary school, so it was perfectly logical that an arts teacher would appear in a weird costume.

As it happened, the film crew, producer Cat McGrath and I walked into Mrs. Eby’s class shortly afterwards, just as she was telling the first-graders that it was time to hear the story of Jack and the Beanstalk from the point of view of the Beanstalk. The light bulb went on in my head: She was the Beanstalk!

As you will see in the video, once she got into that role, she inhabited it. Not only did she explore the characters and elements of the story from the Beanstalk’s perspective, she also, as a representative of all plants, demanded to know from the kids what plants contribute to the world. The first graders knew the answers: oxygen, food and shade. Before long she invited students to join in the drama by playing other parts: the ogre, Jack and so forth, and they got into and stayed in their roles.

At one point I whispered to Cat that this woman was a terrific arts teacher. “No,” Cat whispered back, “She’s a regular first grade teacher.” Oh, wow…..

I asked Mrs. Eby to tell me how she came up with this approach. Here’s her response: “You look at your objectives for the upcoming week and you say, OK, I need to cover this, this this and this. (you ask yourself) what is the best way I can do this? What’s going to be engaging? What integrates more than one of the things at a time?”

Me: So you sat home and thought and thought, ‘I’m going to figure out a way to teach science, higher level thinking, literacy.’ Did you just dream this thing up?
Maria Eby: You kind of start at the end. You start off with what you want to accomplish and then you decide what is the best way to accomplish that, and which part of the arts can I bring into this to meet the needs of the goals and the objectives of my kids.

In other words, no one told Mrs. Eby how to get across the concepts of photosynthesis and role-playing and empathy. She’s trusted to be a the professional that she is. What a concept!

The teachers in her school, the Charles R. Bugg Creative Arts and Science A+ Magnet Elementary school in Raleigh, North Carolina, work together on curriculum, doing their best to integrate the arts into all aspects of learning. (You will see more of the school on the NewsHour soon.)

My favorite moment in the entire class was when one student said she did not want to take a role in the play because….well, you really have to see that play out, especially Mrs. Eby’s response.

Please watch this edited version of her class below (or click here.)

Maria Eby, 1st Grade Teacher, Charles R. Bugg Creative Arts and Science A+ Magnet Elementary
For 20 years Maria Eby worked in Michigan as a graphic arts designer in a company she ran with her husband. Feeling a need for a change after her 2 boys started school, she became a teacher’s assistant and eventually earned a teaching certification through Saginaw Valley State University. In 2008, when Michigan’s economy crashed, she looked for jobs in other, warmer, states. Because North Carolina and Michigan have reciprocal licenses and Wake County was recruiting, she found it an easy transition to move her family to Raleigh. Mrs. Eby took her first teaching position in her early 40s and over the past 6 years has had the opportunity to teach 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th grade. A self proclaimed “life-long learner” Mrs. Eby is currently in the process of obtaining her Masters degree in arts integration at Lesley University. This year, in addition to Jack and the Beanstalk, Mrs. Eby has integrated Theatre Arts into teaching her 1st grade class The Three Little Pigs and the The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff. Although she enjoyed dressing up as a pig and a troll, she says the beanstalk has been her favorite role because it is a unique perspective to think about how the beanstalk might have felt.