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Humor me for a minute and think of the education policy landscape as a basketball game. On the outside you have the point guard setting up the offense — the policymakers operating at different levels. For any consistent offense, though, you need to feed the ball to big men in the paint. Think Roy Hibbert versus LeBron James. Teachers are the Roy Hibberts of education, the bread-and-butter of your education offense.
Teachers guard traditional pedagogy and hold to their personal style. Policy, on the other hand, takes the opposite paradigm: consistency, objectivity and modernization. Harvard Education Press published a book recently on the “black box” of the classroom: how policies break apart on the rocks of the variation of how each teacher and their students work together. The past two decades of education reform have placed the traditional teaching model squarely at odds with high-stakes standardized testing and streamlined curricula. Reformers such as Margaret Spellings stand for accountability in student performance and nationally-measurable progress.
Back to the basketball analogy: implementing a high-stakes testing regime into a traditional school environment is akin to changing your offense without letting your players practice it. The implications for teachers should be considered in implementing greater accountability measures on standardized tests to produce a better balance. For when it comes down to it, education policy reform is at odds with the conventional wisdom of teaching practice.
An article by the American Society of Curriculum Development (ASCD) on student mastery laid it out this way when asking how educators can truly know when students have learned. “Education has a long-standing practice of turning worthy learning goals into lists of bits.” Assessments and high-stakes state testing have the same reductive effect on student learning, turning what John Dewey lamented with “the pupil learns the symbols without the key to their meaning.” How does this affect what the teacher must do? I find myself pushed to teach more by rote than with creativity, teaching to a singular mindset about increased student achievement rather than the colorful and variable process of learning.
The alternative I have learned from veteran teachers with sustained classroom success is this: student mastery comes from teaching to content standards rather than to tasks. If teachers are given for their curriculum a series of skills students need to be able to apply with mastery by the end of the course and then have latitude to adapt and adjust, then we can unlock the creative potential of our teachers. Our country will always seek high quality teachers, but we can accomplish as much with teacher efficiency (allowing teachers to access their full instructional time and potential) as we can with teacher effectiveness.
A benefit to unlocking teachers, to letting the big men work their game in the paint, is leveraging their identities. Among the “successful teacher” narratives in the United States — the opposite of the Freedom Writers Superman narrative — is more like the Stand and Deliver narrative. Teach For America should encourage the Stand and Deliver model as it has done in San Jose more than the current recruiting model which produces criticisms such as a “jobs program for elites.” We need teachers who pull in their emotions and motivations into their communities to teach content creatively. As the education theorist Paolo Freire said:
“Teaching should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history”
Or, as Roy Hibbert might say — “just feed me the ball.”
Image may be NSFW.
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