The current methods of teacher training and induction are failing us. K–12 teaching is a craft that takes years to master yet is never perfected. It is not, however, a craft like woodworking or pottery, where the practitioners toil in isolation and throw away their mistakes unseen. Teaching is a craft learned in front of an audience of students. It cannot be mastered by attending professional development, reading books, or talking into a mirror. Our many errors have witnesses and consequences. Some of our errors cause students, parents, and administrators to be upset with us. Our more agonizing mistakes cause students not to learn.
Teachers need to start collaborating with each other much more, and those with a proven record of successfully getting students to learn must lead a united effort to improve the instruction at each school site. There are experts in teaching at almost every school, but their expertise is not being effectively shared with the teachers who need help. Instead, teachers are working tirelessly on their own reinventing the wheel, and reinventing it, and reinventing it.
We need a strong community of professional teachers working collaboratively, discussing their craft, and taking responsibility for each other’s growth. Novices benefit greatly from watching each other and experts perform, and by discussing their craft with those who have been there and done that. It’s the only way we are ever going to maximize the success of our schools.
To be sure, there are teachers who already mentor and help each other, and these interactions are often the most successful way for struggling teachers to get through their first years. But for significant and measurable improvements to be made in our schools, the transfer of expertise needs to be more dramatic. Teachers need to fully share our lessons, materials, techniques, strategies, assignments, tests, and results with our colleagues. Teaching is not a competition. Teachers need to openly learn from each other and know what each other is doing.
If students are succeeding particularly well in one class, other teachers, especially those in the same grade level or subject, should be interested in knowing how that is being accomplished. If there seem to be areas of trouble in a classroom, the struggling teacher should know that they have the full support of their colleagues at their school. Most teachers at one time have been there too.
It’s important to keep in mind the purpose of collaboration. It’s to create support and the transfer of expertise. It is not standardization. Administrators constantly push teachers to teach material in the same order and the same way as their colleagues. They do this because it makes it easier for them to implement testing and to relocate students to other classrooms midyear. These are not good enough reasons for any teacher to change a method that is working successfully. Expert teachers have other ways for students to adapt to a new classroom and catch up. Administrators’ emphasis on standardization of methods is just another way they overstep their limited expertise and try to control what they don’t understand.
Improvements in teaching practice can only come from repeatedly guiding a group of students. Those who believe that schools can achieve widespread excellence by staffing themselves with poorly paid novice teachers and having unqualified administrators train them have been fooling themselves. Expert teachers understand more about educating students than administrators, education researchers, politicians, and pundits ever will, and expert teachers need to be leaders of what goes on inside our classrooms.
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