New Ways of Paying Teachers

The edReformer blog today had an interesting article entitled How to Pay Teachers. The article describes how teachers are evaluated and paid at Summit Prep school in California. The upshot is that teachers gather evidence to demonstrate their competence in seven teaching areas. The seven areas are Assessment, Content, Curriculum, Instruction, Knowing Learners and Learning, Leadership, and Mentoring.

What I found so interesting about the article is how much control and influence teachers have over the information that is determining their evaluations as teachers. If a teacher thinks she is terrific in Mentoring, then she would be responsible for gathering documentation to show the value of mentoring, perhaps a series of lesson plans from a "mentee" showing progress over the year.

First off, I think that giving teachers control and influence over their evaluations just makes sense from a perspective of fairness. It also makes sense from the perspective of motivation. Workers who feel that they have control over important aspects of their work tend to feel more motivated. Finally, the Summit Prep system gets teachers thinking about what is being expected of them and how to show that they are doing it well. In my opinion, it is the last benefit that is going to pay the biggest dividends. One major aspect of teaching that I feel is weak for most teachers is reflection about the quality and nature of the teaching they do. Teachers at Summit Prep who do not reflect on their teaching will find themselves at the bottom of the pay scale for years at which time an administrator is likely to notice the teacher's lack of progress and fire him or her.

My only question, which does not seem to be addressed in the post, is whether spending time to gather all the information teachers need to be evaluated gets in the way of teaching. Other than that, this seems like a great system for evaluating teacher performance.

Teaching like a champion

I did get Doug Lemov's book Teach Like a Champion and I was very impressed. Before I read trhe book, I had thought that I would already be doing many of the 49 techniques that Lemov was going to describe. As it turns out, I was doing perhaps 6 of the 49.

The bad news is that I have a lot left to learn. The good news is that Lemov has done a great job of spelling out his techniques and showing how to do them in a classroom. The book also includes a DVD of examples of the techniques in use. I have not yet had a chance to look at the DVD, but I will see if I can get to it over the summer.

The interesting thing about the techniques listed in the book is that many of them are very small techniques that might save a few minutes a day. But, as Lemov points out, a few minutes here, a few minutes there, times about 200 days in a school year starts to add up to dozens of hours of extra teaching. And that extra time can easily be the difference maker for your students.

I would recommend Teach Like a Champion to any teacher who wants to improve their ability to reach their students.

How to improve teaching?

I just watched a video called Teached that touched on how important good teaching is in a public education system. In particular, teaching quality has a huge effect on underprivileged students.

The video got me wondering, what can be done to improve teaching? The first problem I thought of is how little teachers communicate about their jobs. We are all so busy, we rarely about how to do the job better. And we almost never talk consistently about how to do the job better.

So here is the challenge I am setting for myself. I challenge myself to schedule 15 minutes a week to talk to at least one other teacher about how to do our jobs better.

Here are the big keys:

1. The time is scheduled. All teachers involved have agreed to use this time for the purpose of improving.

2. We use the time to try and improve. To focus on how we could be better, what we could do better, how we can better serve our students. Anything else, specifically problem-focused, excuse-seeking talk is off topic and needs to be shut down.

So, that is my challenge to myself. If it seems to work, maybe I can convince other teachers to do it too.

Can teachers be trained?

My wife showed me a great article from the New York Times called Building a Better Teacher. The article looks at some attempts to figure out what knowledge and skills are important to teachers, and, more importantly, how to teach that knowledge and those skills to teachers.

The good news is that some people are having success both in terms of determining the required skills and knowledge and also in the teaching of those. Unfortunately, the list of skills is not short. One teaching taxonomy mentioned in the article contains 49 points. It is hard enough getting most teachers I know to think about one new thing. Trying to get them to think about 49 potentially new things is going to be close to impossible. Now, once a teacher looks carefully at the list, he or she is going to immediately see a lot of points and say "Oh, I do that!". The problem is getting a teacher, who is already busy and usually feels overworked and under appreciated, to even look at the 49 point list in the first place.

Still, it is good news to me that people are getting a handle on the skills and knowledge that are truly, provably relevant to teaching.

I will probably buy the book with the 49 point list, called Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. If it's good, I'll be sure to post about it.