Voices of the Dropout Nation: Steve Peha Takes on Randi Weingarten
When it comes to the role of teachers in stemming the nation’s dropout crisis and crisis of educational failure, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and their allies in traditional public education tend to argue that they play no part in either solving the crisis — and that low-quality teachers and the system of teacher benefits and compensation that helps aid and abet them plays no part in fostering the problem in the first place. But, as Steve Peha argues in this Voices, such statements are, well, not exactly so. In light of the Los Ange;es Times’ report on the low quality of teaching in L.A. Unified Schools, Peha shines light on the role of teacher quality in solving the dropout crisis:
In her response to a recent speech on education by President Obama, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, used what has probably become the greatest cliché in all of education reform: “Teaching is a complex enterprise, and there are no silver-bullet solutions for our schools.”
This is a self-serving fallacy. There is a silver bullet and we all know what it is: competent teachers. Not rock stars. Not geniuses. Not Rafe Esquiths or Jaime Escalantes. Not carefully recruited, alternatively certified, finely tuned specimens of human capital. Not former four-star generals or ex-Fortune 500 CEOs. Not Six-Sigma-superstars or Seven-Habits-heroes. Just competent teachers acting in the best interests of the children and families they serve.
This works every time. In fact, it’s the only thing that seems to work. So why do we say out of one side of our mouth that teaching quality is the most significant influence on student achievement and then, out of the other side of our mouth, we say that, “Teaching is a complex enterprise, and there are no silver-bullet solutions for our schools.”
Teaching is a complex enterprise, but being a competent teacher is not. Being responsible for our competence can be challenging at times, but most of us get the hang of it after a while. If we don’t, we never grow up. And if we never grow up, it really doesn’t matter if we ever become competent. We’re the adults in the room. If we don’t act like adults, there’s no point in being in the room.
Teaching is hard. No argument there. But one advantage of its difficulty is that it’s not hard to figure out if you’re any good at it. Competence—yours, mine, or anyone else’s—is easy to gauge. Being responsible is how you become competent if you’re not, and knowing whether you’re being responsible is easy to gauge, too.
We could fix the competence problem if we applied the following principals of responsibility:
- If you know what to do, do it.
- If you don’t know what to do, learn.
- Iterate through challenges quickly.
- Assess your progress often and honestly.
- Apply Principal #1 or Principal #2 as needed.
This is exactly what we ask of small children, so we can be certain that we all understand it. Acting the same way we expect others to act is called modeling in the classroom. Another thing every teacher is familiar with. It’s called integrity in life. Integrity is easy to gauge, too. When we say that there are no silver bullet-solutions for our schools, we are out of integrity with what we know to be true.
I do not mean to trivialize the challenge here. But neither will I support the oft-repeated position that education is too complex to be tamed or that straightforward approaches can’t be implemented. How complicated is it to ask that adults who care for children take it upon themselves to be competent, and if they are not competent, to be responsible about achieving competence?
If you think you detect a lack of compassion in my tone, I encourage you to detect again. I know as well as anyone the pain of incompetence when the well-being of children for whom I am responsible is at stake. Few things I have experienced in my life have ever felt as awful, day after day, and for many days thereafter, as letting a group of struggling elementary school students go an entire year without learning a thing about learning to read. But over the ensuing summer, I read books on reading instruction, practiced on a few patient kids, and became a competent reading teacher—not a great reading teacher, just a competent reading teacher. And when September rolled around, I felt like a human being again. My own experience, and that of many teachers whom I have trained, leads me to believe that supporting every teacher in achieving competence is one the most compassionate gestures we can make on behalf of people who devote so much of themselves to what is often a very unforgiving vocation.
We must also have compassion for children, of course, especially for those who are most sensitive to poor learning conditions at school because they may not have the support at home that we would wish for them. The most compassionate gesture we can make on behalf of our children is the guarantee of a competent teacher in every classroom. It’s hard to live a good life these days without a good education. And every teacher I know— competent or not—feels the pain of poorly educated children as they head out of school, ill-prepared for the world that awaits them.
Competence is the “silver-bullet solution” for our schools. Any time we say it isn’t, we lie to ourselves and to our country. Competent teachers provide quality educations to the children they serve. This is a research-proven fact and an empirically tested hypothesis in our own personal lives. Tens of thousands of these people exist across our land. We all know at least a few of them. Some were our teachers.
Competent teaching is not a mystery. The mystery is why more of us don’t take ownership of our competence. Again, the word is “competence”. Not “excellence” or “perfection” or “greatness” or “self-less saintly sacrifice”. Just competence.
Every teacher working in every school today is either competent or has within his or her sole power the social, emotional, intellectual, financial, and temporal resources to become competent. Many of us may have to get a little training, we may have to read a book or two, we may have to practice a bit, and mess up a few times before we get our act together. But competence is within our grasp.
Don’t even try to tell anybody it isn’t, least of all yourself.
There have been many times when I wasn’t competent. Incompetence stalks me even fifteen years into this work, when situations arise that are new to me and for which I am not well prepared. Recently, for example, I realized I didn’t know nearly enough about helping kids with ADD and ADHD. I am not competent in this regard. So I e-mailed a few smart people, read a couple of good articles on the web, purchased a highly recommended book on the subject, and started to learn. I’m not competent yet, but I will be soon enough. Probably just in time to be faced with another situation in which I am not competent.
School is like that. It encourages us learn. Yet some of us manage somehow to avoid learning at school. That’s when the responsibility part kicks us in the ass. If we can feel the pain of our own failure, we can heal ourselves and move forward. If we can’t feel the pain, it’s time to welcome someone else up to the front of the room.
There is very little about competent teaching that is not stored somewhere ready for anyone to access, often for free. Some of it is in books. Some of it is on the web. Some of it is on DVD. Some of it is in training. Some of it is inside the brains of competent teachers and teacher trainers across our nation. But it’s all there somewhere.
In my personal quest to understand education, I have, in pursuit of competence, posed a seemingly endless stream of questions, few of which have remained unanswered for very long. The answers haven’t always been right for me or for my situation. But other answers have usually been available as long as I have been willing to look for them. The amount of knowledge we have about education is overwhelming. But no one needs to know it all; not even close. We just need to know enough—enough to be good enough. That’s what being competent means, being good enough. We don’t have to understand the universe of education, just our tiny part of it. And there’s nothing overwhelming about that.
We can say all kinds of things about how hard teaching is. No one’s going to disagree with us. But we can’t say we can’t all become competent because that’s just as much of a lie as saying there are no silver bullets. We’re the silver bullets, ladies and gentlemen. Competence is the gun. Responsibility pulls the trigger. Integrity holds us together and attracts into our lives other people who share our values and lend their support. In a spirit of community and compassion, we teach our way toward competence, and improve our education system one silver bullet at a time.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by RiShawn Biddle, Chad Sansing. Chad Sansing said: Peha take on "competence" as "silver bullet" via @dropoutnation http://bit.ly/9fMM5P; me: learning & kids=complex, if teaching isn't [...]
Tom Hoffman
540 days ago
Could I have some examples of schools that closed the achievement gap through simple competence?
Steve Peha
539 days ago
Tom,
You ask a very direct question, so I’ll give you a direct answer: It depends on how you define the gap and how you define competence.
Personally, I think a good way of measuring our collective competence is not in closing the achievement gap but in assuring college opportunity for all.
The reason I like this is that it allows for differences while providing equity.
You might zip off to Harvard right out of high school while I might start at the local community college. But two years later, I’m at a state 4-year school. Then, if I work hard, I’m getting an MA at a prestigious institution. And if I really dig in, and if further study is what I want, then maybe I’ll make it to Cambridge one day, too, just like you did.
My point is that there’s still a gap between us. But we end up with roughly the same degree of educational opportunity.
That’s how I define closing the gap.
Now back to competence…
In a heroic culture such as ours, competence doesn’t get its due. But just think of anyone you know who has a skill or knowledge base. Are they competent or not? If you make the snap judgment, you’ll probably find, as I do when I try this little test, that competent people are reasonably accomplished and, perhaps best of all, performing consistently and improving gradually.
I believe that if a community takes on the responsibility of educating kids for 13 years, it ought to define its collective competence as providing a “useful” education. I mean that term literally as in “the education I received was useful to me in my life after school.” or “Wow, I really did use a lot of what I learned in school.”
I think the best way to measure that is the extent to which our kids would qualify for some kind of post-secondary study. They don’t have to go. They just have to be able to go. Equality of opportunity is the goal for me, not equality of outcome.
I think “mere competence” (if practiced personally and collectively) is more than enough to make sure our kids make it to that level. The subtext of my piece i that few of us in education even approach competence or take the issue competence seriously.
More importantly, I think the heroics that we see in many schools today, while laudable, would be unnecessary IF we focused on individual and collective competence.
Like the old saying goes, “You can work harder or your can work smarter.” I choose the latter and I choose to believe that being competent means that I am indeed working smarter.
Let’s look at a simple example:
1. Grading a lot of student papers at home or after school. (not competent).
2. Teaching self-assessment, having kids grade their own work, using a multi-rater “wisdom of crowds” approach, and freeing up the teachers time to give practical feedback to individual kids through brief, focused, informal conferences while they are working rather than after the work has been completed (competent).
Approach #1 costs me a lot of time, maybe 10-15 hours a week if I’m a secondary Math or English teacher. And the research shows that this is a very unsuccessful way of helping kids learn.
Approach #2 saves me all that time, forces me to give “in process” feedback to kids when they can actually use it, improves differentiation, and raises student ownership and engagement. The research is clear on the benefits of all of these things.
So in #1 I’m working harder. But in #2 I’m working smarter — and getting a better result. The latter approach is competent; the former is not.
Note that neither approach is innovative or in any way outside the mainstream of educational thought. In fact, to describe approach #2, I just opened a few books I have here on my bookshelf. So what I’m suggesting as competent practice isn’t even new or in any way original to me. Assessing kids’ learning, so as to improve my instruction and their ability to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, is what I consider to be one of the most basic skills a teacher must possess. So in one sense, we may be talking about basic skills here.
Speaking purely from own experience, I have made huge gains in my own effectiveness whenever I have made the move toward competence. And I have seen the same large gains when I have helped other teachers make that move.
Heroic acts, large sums of money, long school days, special rules, etc., are “scaffolds” for competence. They’re not bad. But just as the construction workers take down the scaffolding when the building can stand on its own, we can, once we know how to do our jobs well, remove the “scaffolding” of heroic measures — if we choose to do so.
We may not choose to do so in many cases, however. For example, what if I run a “heroic” school and I, as the heroic leader, know that it is unlikely I will stay very long? What if my data shows that very few of my teachers teach very long? What if my bottom line shows that my funding may not last for very long? In this situation, it makes little sense to nurture competence because there isn’t much point in taking the time to develop it.
But if I’m looking at longer time horizons, or if I’m looking at a system larger than one small school, then investing in competence makes sense. Competence is not only beneficial, it’s sustainable. Heroism is exciting and emotionally moving. But it’s hard to maintain over education-size chunks of time.
In school system, a “generation” is 13 years for a kid. It’s 25-30 years for an educator. So competence is a good investment on both sides of the teacher’s desk.
But in the heroic model, the time horizon is much shorter and competence is not the best investment; raw talent is. The best investment is in recruitment and succession for the purpose of maintaining the heroic tradition with a steady flow of heroes.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It’s just harder to scale. By contrast, however, it gets better results faster than the competence approach, so it’s very attractive in what we may think of as more dire circumstances.
To get back to your excellent question, I’m not sure it has an answer that would be satisfactory to you. I have certainly been in schools with high degrees of competence and they certainly seem to educate their children well. I have read the Sanders and Rogers research from Tennessee which seesm to show, at least in my opinion, that the gap does indeed close if kids have competent teachers several years in a row.
Perhaps, then, the question is not about gaps but about competence itself. To me, if you’re a teacher, competence means facilitating learning. How much? Enough, in my opinion, so that students are able to attend and succeed in some kind of post-secondary schooling, even if it’s just a two-year school or a certificate program.
Maybe in the minds of others, this level of success is not considered competence. Maybe this is considered greatness.
But not to me.
If I sign up to educate your kids, I sign up to make sure your kids are well educated. Competence does not mean minimum competence, at least not in my lexicon. Competence to me means “getting the job done.”
I just happen to think that the job is producing well-educated children. Furthermore, I believe that the value of collective of competence is so high that we have no idea in our nation how much our kids can learn or how much their schools can teach them. I believe we will one day look back in horror at our low expectations during this time of reform.
I also believe that collective competence is the best way to look at the work we do and how we do it. And, finally, we should all remember that the pursuit of competence does not preclude the achievement of greatness. It is, however, a required developmental step.
Thanks for your question.
Steve Peha
President, Teaching That Makes Sense
Pinetree
538 days ago
Many would argue that English teachers do have to grade papers, Steve. So we have a long way to go before we agree on what competence looks like. I’d like to add that a strong curriculum, faithfully implemented, makes it easier to be and seem competent. When you spend a year of frustration unable to help kids read, that was largely a curriculum issue, I’ll bet.
Steve Peha
529 days ago
Dear Pinetree,
You’re absolutely right: most people would argue that teachers have to grade papers. But research and common sense suggest otherwise.
Robert Marzano and Thomas Guskey have shown in several books that we have almost 100 years of research showing that the traditional “point-percentage” method of grading distorts learning, does not help teachers guide instruction, and does not give useful feedback to kids that helps them learn. English teachers, as it turns out, are typically the least accurate graders versus teachers in all other subject areas. But accuracy is not the issue; utility is.
Grades are just a form of feedback. And they happen to be one the worst forms we have. So I’ve put together two other assessment systems — one graded, one non-graded — that offer what learners need most: good feedback as well as what teachers need most: good information about what to teach next. Drop me a line and I’ll send them to you if you’re interested. They’ve been used widel and with great success all over the US and in many foreign countries.
Without these two good feedback for kids and good planning information for teachers, no approach to assessment or evaluation is worth either the students’ or the teacher’s time.
Research and common sense tell us that “in-process” feedback is more useful than “post-process” feedback. Simply put: kids learn a lot more when we tell them how they’re doing while they’re doing something — rather than waiting until long after they’re finished and have no chance to apply comments or to learn from a letter grade on their paper, a grade that cannot possibly speak to specific skills or techniques for improvement.
Furthermore, by offering feedback to individual students in short 2-3 minute conferences — several times during an assignment — focusing on specific techniques, we can give each kid the exact feedback they need, and easily monitor their progress at the same time. This improves differentiation and teacher-student rapport because each kid gets exactly the help he or she needs, and they get it from a person, not from a red pen.
Between frequent conferences and having kids share work in class, I know the kids and their work very well long before they’re finished. And, by teaching kids how to self-assess their work, they know it well, too. So, in the end, after many assignments, both teacher and student know a lot about each other, and a lot about the particular set of skills or knowledge in question. A serious of grades in a grade book tells us little by comparison.
So the idea, at this point, after conferences and sharing and other discussion, that we would take a stack of papers home, grade them, and put comments on them wouldn’t make sense to the kids (who already got individualized feedback) nor would it makes sense to us (since we already know from our notes what to teach next after having seen the kids’ work in-process).
As Guskey points out, research shows that “Teachers don’t need grades to teach and students don’t need grades to learn.” And if you think about all the learning and teaching situations you’ve been in outside of school, you’ll see why he’s right. Grades serve a purpose other than helping kids learn and teachers teach. Therefore, as Guskey suggests, we should be honest about what this purpose is and not let it interfere with instruction or the acquisition of knowledge and skills.
What all learners need most by way of evaluation is detailed, personalized feedback that is specific to their strengths and weaknesses — feedback that can be applied while they are working. When I have that information, and the kids have it, too, it’s very easy to decide on a grade for a course, even if we don’t have individual grades for each assignment. (Again, I’d be happy to share the system I’ve developed if you’re interested.) So we can have our cake and eat it too: good feedback for kids, good assessment info for teachers, and still a way of determining a grade that is fair, fast, and accurate at the end of a grading period. Plus, we can stop wasting 10-20 hours a week grading papers and maybe catch up on those really cool Mad Men episodes everyone has been telling us about.
Also, by not grading individual pieces of work, we avoid the problem of averaging which distorts the learning kids may have accomplished — or the skills they need to develop. This is especially important. For example, what would it mean that a student got a “C” on the first paper and an “A” on the second? Averaging would produce a “B”. But what if the first paper was a persuasive essay and the second was narrative? The skill sets required differ, at least slightly. So there’s no way to say, “This kid is a “B” writer.” without distorting the truth, in this case, which is that the kid handles one type of writing considerably better than the other — and therefore needs more specific help on the weaker form. Better even than the grades would be the list of things the kids does well and the list he or she needs more help with.
All in all, there is no support whatsoever for teachers marking papers outside of kids’ presence. And actual letter grading is contra-indicated by research, especially research from the broader world of human performance assessment and human capital improvement outside of education. Can you imagine getting a grade from your boss on how you performed in a meeting and then another grade two days later on how a memo turned out? And, finally, having your paycheck determined by the average of many such gradings? That would be ludicrous. Which is precisely why it is never done. More likely, if your boss really wanted you to improve, she might tell you what it was she liked about your presentation — ideally before you gave it — and how your memo might be improved, again, at an early draft stage so you could, in fact, improve it. In either case, no grade would be given, nor would any averaging be done. When it came time for your six month review, you would likely know, just as your boss would, what you were good at and what you needed to do to improve. Your boss would also know how to tell you how to improve — and even support you in improving.
Still, Pinetree, I am in 100% agreement with you that most people in the United States, teachers or not, think that grading papers is essential. The problem, however, is that if any of these people has read any of the research — or reflected on how they are assessed in the world of work — they will note that no serious research, or even basic logic, supports the notion of grading individual assignments or even using the traditional letter grade system at all.
The system — and the notion that it is essential — is just a tradition. There are many things our society cherishes and that it is unwilling to give up. But if we applied 300-year old practices to our kids’ healthcare, for example, I don’t think any of us would be very happy with that.
We also wouldn’t want to use 300-year old transportation to get kids to and from school. Nor would we want 300-year old laws that barred certain kids — because of the color of their skin, for example — from becoming educated. And I suppose a 300-year old notion of the curriculum probably wouldn’t be so useful either — at least certainly not in the sciences, to so say nothing of all the classic literature and history written after 1700 that kids would miss.
Still, we like 300-year old grading for some reason.
Grading is just an old tradition. Granted it is one we love dearly in a society that would rather punish than teach. But it is just a tradition. And if we ever want to improve the way we educate our children, we’ll have to learn to give up some of our educational traditions, just as we have given up traditions that no longer serve us in virtually every other aspect of our lives.
Thanks for your comment. You make an important point about the power of tradition in our school systems.