Teachers Collaborating to Improve Education: Fantasy or the Future?

Here's a classic scene: Teacher alone in a room. Bell rings, low-income kids file in, wait diffidently, daring anyone to help. Teacher, rheumy-eyed from over-work, strides to the front, pulls a one-liner, waxes charismatic in equal measures tough and gentle, captivating them to learn. Lives change, miracles happen, a community soars.

That is "teacher as hero", perpetuated by the media: Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, Mr. Holland's Opus--a basic template for movies about America's teachers.

Here's the truth though: one human being, teaching over-crowded classes against all odds, without resources, support or feedback, is an incredibly antiquated and ineffective way to construct 21st century learning environments.

One designed to fail the vast majority of the time.

But, what are the options? What other teaching models/strategies could we be using?

Check out this article in Education Week, Working Smarter By Working Together, about a high school, Adlai E. Stevenson, in the suburbs north of Chicago.

Sure, regular caveats apply: affluent suburb, mostly white kids, a school with every advantage that accrues to being ahead of the "success" curve in America. But, they do deserve credit for effectively utilizing the skills and capacity of their teachers:

Eric Twadell, the superintendent of Stevenson High, a one-school district, describes the professional learning community, or PLC, as “teachers working smarter by working together.” From the beginning, he said, the idea was not to create something new or different, but simply to foster an atmosphere in which teachers could learn from one another and share their colleagues’ expertise so that, in the end, students would benefit.

In a professional learning community, each teacher has access to the ideas, materials, strategies, and talents of the entire team. At Stevenson, teachers meet in course-specific, and sometimes interdisciplinary, teams each week to discuss strategies for improvement; craft common assessments, the results of which are analyzed to improve instruction; and brainstorm lesson plans.

Instead of the isolation of their classrooms, they spend their time between classes and before and after school in open office areas where their desks abut those of their course peers. The arrangement ensures that the give-and-take between teacher teams is almost constant.

And isn't this what we want and expect out of our schools, an actual culture of learning? I mean, that is the very mission of education, isn't it--to foster an atmosphere of inquiry, learning, sharing and collaboration?

I believe it is.

Check this out:

Each freshman, for instance, is assigned a support team to monitor his or her emotional well-being and progress in achieving academic goals. Students who fall behind academically are given an extra hour of study time each day and specific intervention, if needed.

Every Tuesday at Stevenson, classes start 35 minutes later than other days, but teachers arrive early for their team meetings. The teams range in size from three to 20. Some teachers belong to more than one team, but all the school’s 300 teachers are on at least one...

“It is our way of gathering and checking in. … We have much better results when we speak to each other and come up with different solutions,” Mr. Weil says.

A few doors down in the 4,500-student school, five members of a math “problem-solving” team are putting their heads together. They talk about different ways of doing problems. Someone wonders if grading tests as a team might be a good idea.

Disagreement occurs sometimes when teachers sit down to brainstorm, but even when that happens, says math teacher Victoria Kieft, they eventually agree on what is in the students’ best interests.

Yet, America's schools have been incredibly slow to invest the kind of time, energy and resources to develop "learning communities" or any collaborative approach. And so, today, just as in the 19th century, most of America's teachers go it alone--as if they lived on the frontier and their only connection to the outside world was Pony Express.

Well, The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future is out with a new book, actually a series of essays, about teaching in the 21st century, Building a 21st Century U.S. Education System. (It is fully readable or downloadable online.)

While there is some overlap, even some clear disagreement amongst contributors, I want to recommend Chapter 4, Teaching for the Future, by Thomas Carroll.

In it, Carroll talks about the clear need for moving to a more collaborative model of teaching:

At the end of the 19th Century, the factory model of teaching
and learning emerged in response to: the demands of an industrial economy; the prevalence of behaviorist learning theory; and the dominance of scientific managementprinciples in the workplace. The convergence of these forces produced “Teaching 1.0”, which enshrined the delivery of standardized content, by stand-alone teachers, who wereexpected to do uniform work in self-contained classrooms. In Teaching 1.0 the role of the
teacher was to transmit a fixed body of knowledge and skills to students who would use it to engage in predictable careers and pursuits.

Now “Teaching 2.0,” is emerging in response to a 21st Century convergence of forces that includes: a knowledge-based global workforce; a new understanding of how people learn;and a widespread adoption of collaborative teamwork in the workplace. Teaching 2.0 is customized to individual learning needs. In Teaching 2.0, teachers and students co-create coherence and meaning out of the wide range of learning experiences they can pursue in an open learning economy that is enriched by smart networking and user generated content.

At last, someone who "gets it". And more, Carroll is able to get his mind around the truth that today's young teachers are more disposed to, and more capable of, collaboration than previous generations.

Further, he correctly points out that the real reasons behind America's devastating educator dropout rate, (@50% in first five years) are exactly connected to the kind of isolation that the current system inflicts on young teachers.

In 1994, former U.S. Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley, warned the nation that we would need to hire two million teachers within the next 10 years to offset Baby Boom retirements. Over the next decade we beat that goal by hiring approximately 2.25 million teachers – but during thatsame decade we lost 2.7 million teachers, with over 2.1 million of them leaving before retirement.

Our current school staffing model is in a state of collapse, and the industrial-era belief that we could recruit our way to better teaching will not solve our problem. Until we recognize that it is time to develop new ways to organize teaching and learning,we will continue to engage in a costly annual recruitment and hiring cycle, pouring more and more teachers into our nation’s antiquated classrooms only to lose them at a fasterand faster rate. This will drain public tax dollars, undermine teaching quality, and stymie
efforts to prepare students for the future.

I happen to agree with most everything in this chapter and heartily recommend that every new teacher read it; it isn't very long. But, for those that can't or don't have the inclination, Carroll is recommending the following to move us beyond the current systemic weaknesses:

It is essential that we transform our schools into 21st century learning organizations as quickly as possible. Closing the education gap, so that every child has an opportunity tosuccessfully participate in a flat world is a demanding challenge. No teacher should beexpected to do this job alone. They need:

1. Schools that are genuine learning organizations;

2 Preparation to teach effectively in those organizations;

3. Career paths that engage them in the growth of learning organizations;

4. Authentic teaching standards and learning assessments to guide their work.

This is not a fantasy, as you can see from looking at the model currently employed at Stevenson High near Chicago. But, because education is now a political football that gets tossed and kicked by people with no real experience, understanding or interest in learning, it becomes imperative that each of us in education learn these basic principles and fight for them at every turn.

1. Schools that are genuine learning organizations;

2 Preparation to teach effectively in those organizations;

3. Career paths that engage them in the growth of learning organizations;

4. Authentic teaching standards and learning assessments to guide their work.

It's time to for teaching to make that great leap forward, from the 19th to the 21st century in a single bold burst--and because a new generation is rising in the ranks and about to take the reigns.