How Do We Retain Excellent Teachers?

Yesterday, I had the privilege of Skyping with students of Kathleen Nolan (whose book, Police in the Hallways, I reviewed on this blog last summer). They are currently studying education reform and the urban teaching experience. One of the students asked about teacher burnout, and it sparked a need in me to write about it.

You hear the statistic often: Nationally, one-third of teachers leave after three years, and nearly half leave after five. And attrition affects urban schools more than it does suburban or rural schools.

We want excellent teachers to stay in classrooms. So the statistic seems worthy of investigation.

Why do so many teachers leave, and what can be done to prevent the best from going?

Burnout

"Poor working conditions" is among the reasons teachers cite when they leave the profession. But what does that mean?

I can think of a great number of stresses that come with any teaching job, particularly in a struggling school. Students bring trauma and emotional distress from home; administrators and districts sometimes hold expectations that seem unreasonable; dilapidated buildings and lack of equipment make your job more difficult; and, perhaps most challenging, most schools lack the resources to support teachers effectively.

Nearly every district offers a new teacher mentoring program on paper. But in my experience, a "mentoring program" can range from three written comments on a lesson from September by a "mentor" who was also my evaluator to three meetings in a year with another teacher in my building who observed me teach once coupled with monthly meetings run by a person from the district.

Mostly, though, districts spend their time and money on other priorities.

If you ask me, this lack of focus on teacher development is likely the strongest contributor to what I would refer to as "poor working conditions."

Excellent teaching in a high-needs school is an incredibly cognitively complex task. It requires a great number of skills, a vast store of knowledge, and dispositions that create behaviors that support students struggling with both behavior and academics (more on that here).

Nothing is more disparaging for someone who wants to take pride in what they do than feeling incompetent or incapable. But that is exactly how many new teachers are likely to feel in schools today (see more on that here).

One reason new teachers often struggle within urban schools is a lack of cultural understanding. One of the most serious problems inner-city communities encounter is their school staff's lack of knowledge about that community and background. It often leads to deficit thinking and overly punitive responses to student behavior.

Lack of Leadership Opportunities

Teachers are often required to spend an unreasonable amount of time listening to what outside "experts" have to say about the best ways to teach their students, even when a vast array of knowledge and expertise exist among teachers on staff.

It should be no surprise that people who choose a profession that gives them lots of control over a classroom also like to feel a sense of determination in the running of their school. Schools where teachers take on lots of leadership exist, but they are few and far between.

Lacking the opportunity to advance up the traditional career ladder, many of the type-A personalities who have been drawn into the teaching profession in the era of Teach for America have instead chosen to move on to administration after only two or three years.

I derive significantly more satisfaction from my work when I feel like I am influencing the direction of my school and district policies.

The more teachers have time to work with their colleagues and direct their work, the more likely they will be to stay in the profession.

Retaining Teachers

If we really want to retain teachers, we need to recruit motivated and intelligent people, support them in becoming excellent teachers, provide them with opportunities to direct school programs and curricula, and finally ask their help in supporting a new wave of incoming teachers.

This is far easier said than done. We are currently directing most of our money and energy getting on board with common core and finding quick gimmicks for improving data that matters to administrators and districts, but does not always translate into real learning and growth, and often harms it.

Life Lessons: 2012 (Whoops, I Forgot Some Things!)

I was reflecting on my last post, and I realized there were a few more things that really changed my thinking last year.

4) You want to teach somebody something? Better be sure you've got the cred to do it.

I was watching The Interrupters sometime last spring, a documentary about people interrupting violence in Chicago. And there's this part about three quarters of the way through when Ameena (one of the interrupters - you have to see it) is trying to teach this young woman who you can tell hates herself on the inside. She's angry and confused and frustrated and doesn't know how to move forward in life. But she's still listening to Ameena. She's connecting. Ammena's been through what she's going through. Ameena reminds her of herself.

And I thought back to one of my first years teaching - about a student I had in class just like the one Ameena worked with in the documentary. This girl was also angry and hurt by the world, but she didn't listen to me the way the young woman in the documentary listened to Ameena, even though I was conveying the same message. In fact, she screamed at me in the hallway in front of my assistant principal. "FUCK YOU!" she said. I'm afraid the only thing she learned from me, in her words, was that "white people don't know anything about black people."

Herbert Kohl wrote a book entitled I Won't Learn From You. He didn't call it I Won't Learn. There's a difference.

5) Trauma physically alters your brain structure. It can follow you around and destroy you.

We had a new student this year. I'll call him Jay. Like a lot of kids, he moved around a lot. He was one of those kids whose habits were exquisitely tailored to sabotage any prediliction for academics he may have had. He couldn't sit still; he couldn't take orders from adults; he couldn't not talk during class; he couldn't stop thinking about getting out of school. But put him in front of the class and let him talk about himself, and he was golden.

Come to find out this kid had a long history of trauma in his home life. And the trauma he experienced there caused tensions and stress at school for others. Whenever Jay was having a rough day because of something going on at home, he would lash out at school. He'd defy me just for the sake of defying me. He'd take a joke too far with another student and react angrily when that student got upset.

Sitting with me one day in my class alone, he gazed down at the floor and said quietly, "I just can't turn my brain off. All I can do is think about......"

All of that trauma from home - it made the days of everyone around him at school more difficult and stressful. Like ripples emanating in a pond, trauma doesn't stay in one place.

6) Our learning is mostly unconscious - and we do it best through stories.

Teaching 9th-graders has been eye-opening. They're a testament to how much humans can learn and still be completely unaware that they've learned anything.

Ask nine out of ten kids what they learned on any given day. "Iono."

A major mark of maturity is becoming more conscious of who you are, how you're changed by things, and what's really going on inside you (so much exists in our subconscious!).

Whether we know we're learning or not, it's happening. Last summer, I was killing time on the internet playing one of those bubble shooter games. My first few trys were pretty lame. But after an hour, I was really making progress. Someone looks over my shoulder and says, "Wow. You're pretty good. What's your secret?" I looked at him blankly. "Iono."

If you really want to encroach on the schemas others hold for making sense of their world - you know, really put them into some cognitive disequilibrium - I find it mostly works best to do it as implicitly as possible. Explicit lessons are neither as powerful nor as long lasting at disturbing our thinking as are the implicit ones. (And if you have to give that explicit lesson, you better remember lesson number 4 above.) And nothing is more powerful at delivering the implicit lesson as story. It's in our DNA. Best that we make use of it in schools.

So here are my ingredients for authentic learning in schools:

- Heaps and heaps of implicit lessons through consideration of complex and powerful reality and fiction
- Equal time for discussion, reflection, and guiding questions
- A sparse dose of explicit lessons for support

Everyone creates and stores knowledge in their own way. Trying to impose the knowledge you've created on others is, to say the least, superficial.

Life Learnings: 2012

I'm a few weeks late in doing this, but another year is down and it's time, once again, to reflect on the things I've learned this past year, both in teaching and in life. In 2009, most of my learning was about the corruption and disgusting nature of gritty inner-city politics. In 2010, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what constitutes real, valuable, meaningful knowledge and how we go about acquiring that and passing it on. And last year, my learning seemed to be all over the place - although much of it was about finding success in schools and democracy.

This year, I'm going to focus on just a few things, because one thing I've been reminded of a lot recently is that less is often more. In 2012 I finished my first year in the Highline School District and began my second. I spent the summer traveling and reading and writing about the impact of Latin American immigration on education in the US. I had two articles on ELL instruction published in EdWeek Teacher (here and here) and one in ASCD Express. Back on the West Coast, I've spent less time thinking about politics and more time thinking about the ins and outs of schools and instruction.

1) Literacy is the capacity to decode and interpret, and to be human.

In 2012, I made a major breakthrough in my understanding and stance toward the extraordinarily broad concept of "literacy." As I wrote here, I understand it now as a form of teaching humanity. The way we read, write, and interpret all sorts of codes is a major part of how we construct our identity - it is how we exist.

2) We are all the same and all different simultaneously. We all want to be a part and be separate simultaneously.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about identity this year and what makes identity. As I wrote here, a teacher's job, in many ways, is to negotiate the tensions that arise out of our (and in this case students specifically) desire to both be part of a group and simultaneously establish a unique identity. The more I allow this idea to roll around in my mind, the more it fascinates me.

There seem to be some parts of our identity that we have more control over than others. The parts we have no control over (cultural background for example) often define our behavior without us even realizing it. We unconsciously allow others' expectations for who we are and how we should act to influence us. And, most fascinatingly, when we don't conform to others' expectations for our behavior, others often peer pressure us back into the box they've prescribed for us - and they often don't even realize they're doing it. This is a major barrier for many students in finding success in school. They've taken on identities that prescribe behaviors antithetical to finding academic success.

3) Are we one thing or 7 billion different things?

In the same way we understand our bodies as one thing rather than a collection of trillions of different microorganisms, cells, atoms, etc; it would be equally reasonable to understand humanity as one thing rather than a collection of 7 billion different human bodies.

There are lots of different reasons we might consider humanity one thing. An individual human body is, in many ways, part of other bodies. Our brains alter the structure of other people's brains routinely through the sharing of conversation and ideas. And as Eula Bliss points out in Harper's this past month, the physiological functioning of our bodies is intimately connected to the functioning of others'.

I point this out to my world history students in an attempt to demonstrate the power of history. I tell them the story Henry Molaison, who lost his ability to remember when a surgeon cut into his brain in 1953. I ask them to consider, for a second, what it would be like if you had no memory. If you could not remember what happened even 60 seconds ago. We all agree that you would be nobody - that you would have no identity. I point out that if you choose to understand humanity as one thing, then history is synonymous with memory - and that if we didn't have history, we would, like Henry Molaison, be without identity. My students often go on to think that if we didn't have history, we would probably invent it in order to develop identity, which leads us to a philosophical discussion around which is more important: historical accuracy or historical agreement.

Students, however, are often resistant to the idea that humanity could be one thing. Many of them believe that, were you to make a list of all the ways we're different and the ways we're the same, the list of ways we're different would be vastly longer. This is, of course, untrue. Identity, or the unique social space we attempt to occupy, is an attempt to obscure how similar we are. I find this fascinating given how desperate all of us are to fit in.

Wrapping Up

I notice that my thinking and writing on the West Coast is much less about politics and much more about the more interesting questions that come up in life. Washington State is still largely protected from many of the harmful education policies affecting the schools I worked in in New York and DC. I am much happier and healthier out here. It's been a good year, and I think 2013 will be even better.