Elephants In The Room

What about that other elephant called teaching and teachers.

Rob, this is an elephant that needs to be bit off one piece at a time.  We all know teachers some teachers resist taking responsibility for their role in the educational progress of their students.  I think you have to be both relentless and gently humane.  I mean, you can get in their face and throw the research at them and remind them that it's all their fault, but that will only cause the resisters to dig in their heels even more.  I think it's important to give some empathy to teachers who feel that they are blamed for all the woes in society, but never let up the expectation that there are more effective ways to teach.  Highlighting teachers on staff who are making changes and getting results is something I like to do (ofcourse, even this causes problems for some as they see me showing favoritism - in their opinion - to a select few).  I have observed some teachers, though not nearly enough, come along as they have seen results of different behaviors in their teaching that have produced stronger results.  I think it underscores the fact that we change attitudes by changing behaviors and not vice versa.

In the end, all of the conversations around teaching being part of the problem are difficult and dicy.  By the way, has anyone read the authors other books Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations?  I'd like to get my hands on those and put some of those skills to practice as well.

Dan,
My response to those teachers who say I have favorites is, "You are right. I love great teachers and if you work as hard at the right things as they are you will be one of my favorites as well." I do not have a problem confronting those teachers who are not pulling their weight in a gentle coaching manner. I usually just indicate that I really feel they can make a difference in the lives of their students and ask them to remember how fulfilling it is when that occurs.

@David,

That explains why I just picked up Crucial Confrontations at the library.  This will be one of my professional goals for the coming year.

I think I'll go practice on my wife so I can get out to the golf course this week... On second thought, our couch is awfully small.

Cheers

Our biggest elephant in the room at my small charter school is the fact that the principal will never make drastic personnel decisions and it kills so many routes of change for us.  Most acknowledge that there are some very bad teachers at our school.  Due to the nature of our online environment we have uncommon access to their lesson planning, gradebooks, student interaction logs, etc.  We have a variety of ways to judge teachers that most don't in a traditional school.  This and the fact we work in an office environment with 20, 2 man cubicles all piled on each other, we know who is working hard and who is slacking off.

We discuss change a lot, we discuss reform a lot, and most of the teachers agree that there has to be some drastic measures taken to reform individual teachers or remove them.  But its not.  Year after year the same bad teachers come back and we all know that isn't going to change. How do you bring that up to your principal? How do you tell him that his lack of ability to make really hard decisions is what is preventing us from taking the next step at our school?  Its a big elephant.

What about that other elephant called teaching and teachers?

This is a very BIG elephant.  I had the privilege of working on a team of teachers when I taught high school biology.  Together, the four of us helped our students achieve the highest performance in the county on the end of year exams in biology (even though demographic data predicted that we would come in 2nd to last).  The next year another teacher was added to our team and we couldn't convince him to collaborate with us.  While he was personable to the rest of the team memebers,  he resented that the administration required him to attend team planning meetings and showed his contempt by exercising during the meetings.  Technically, he had more seniority at the school than any of the other team members.  At the time, we all felt powerless to do anything about it. 

Four years later, none of the four original teachers from that team are still at the school, but the troublemaker still is.  We all know that problem teachers can hurt student success directly, but they can also chase away their harder-working peers. 

Books like Influencer and Crucial Conversations would have been a great help to me back then.