All For One and One For All

I recall early on in my teacher education hearing a half-joke from a practicing teacher that "teaching is the only profession that eats its young."  It was my first exposure to what would become a semi-regular contribution from experienced teachers to aspiring educators.  These sentiments always seemed to be wrapped in a coating of concern and caring, but attention to the delivery would often reveal a subtext of presumed naivete and even contempt.  "Poor little dummy," they seemed to say.  "You have no idea what you're getting yourself into, and if you had half a brain, you'd get out while you still have a life in front of you.  Save yourself.  It's too late for me."  While I was always a little irritated by it, the fact that the sentiment was so commonplace did not escape me, and having worked with pre-service teachers in recent years, I can more fully appreciate the gulf that can exist between rookie and veteran educators.

In those pre-career years (roughly 17 years ago) the prevailing statistic that always seemed to bounce around in conversations with my fellow education students was that "half of all teachers will quit in the first five years on the job."  That statistic seems to have endured throughout the years, although a little digging suggests that it is a predominantly American statistic.  Canadian retention rates appear to be slightly better, but evidence still suggests that the profession is not kind to its fledgling members here either.

Naturally, jurisdictions everywhere are spending time, energy, and cash in efforts to curb teacher attrition.  A common theme among educational research, scholarly reviews and policy recommendations made to and by Education Ministries is to include mentoring of new teachers as a critical part of any retention strategy.  It seems that the educational community is fairly unanimous in its view that new teachers would benefit from observing and working directly alongside experienced teachers.

And I certainly can't disagree.

However, in an era of educational reform, mentorship cannot be reserved only for the emerging educator.  The other significant barrier to systemic change that I mentioned in my last post, is one of the most persistent qualities of teaching in a public system -- isolation.  We teachers are islands.  And the more specialized and focused our programming in schools become, the more alone we tend to be.  While there is a lot to be said for autonomy, the lack of critical feedback beyond our few years in teacher college and an often terse and cursory evaluation or two from an administrator during our probationary years can understandably give rise to stagnant and repetitive practices.  It is all too easy in the absence of scrutiny (and the countless other pressures on our time and mental energy) to carve out pedagogical "gravity wells" that keep teachers from exploring novel practices, or finding the escape velocity necessary to propel a new approach into an effective orbit.

Apologies if the physics metaphors got a little out of hand there.

In the emerging educational revolution, most practicing teachers are to some degree or another "new."  Most of us were educated with predominantly traditional pedagogy.  Most of us were pretty good at predominantly traditional pedagogy.  So most of us likely find a level of comfort there in our teaching.  We can all orate, assign, and test with relative ease and as a matter of default.

The transformations toward richer and more meaningful, relevant educational experiences, however, demands more of us.  To be able to deliver on that requires an approach that is not common and, quite possibly, not easy:

We need to work together.

Literally.

I don't mean in the metaphorical "rah rah, let's go team, we're all in this together" sense.  I mean we actually need to put practitioners of the art of teaching, experienced or otherwise, together in a room with the same group of kids and teach them as a team.  We need to do this as a matter of routine, and not just as an occasional novelty to round out a school's Full-Time Equivalent calculation or to support a brand new teacher.

Of course this is something that already happens.  Team teaching is a thing.  It's a good thing.  Most educators I've spoken to who have had the chance to team teach find it to be rewarding.  Research going back at least as far as the 1960s supports the model as an effective, if not superior, framework.  But team teaching and its various forms appears to be more common during the elementary years where generalists outnumber subject specialists, and more teachers within a school are responsible for delivering particular curricula.  The practice diminishes in frequency as we ascend the rungs of the K-12 ladder.

Recently, I had the good fortune of transitioning in my practice from an island of one to an island of two, moving from a traditional classroom setting to a team setting in our Building Futures program.  This is by no means an exercise in hubris, but I am passionately serious when I say that working directly alongside another professional with the same group of students in the same space (even though we're not teaching the same material) has been an absolute game-changer.  The science teacher in me knows the risk of putting too much statistical value on data from a small sample, but the significance of my personal experience is hard to shake.  Quite simply, I wish for every colleague to have a "buddy" who they can teach with.  I believe that its potential for being vitally transforming in a single teacher's practice cannot be overstated.

Education is in flux due in no small part to the fact that the world is in flux.  The education systems borne out of the industrial revolution were molded to meet the needs of industrial societies.  The education systems emerging from the current information revolution must also adapt, and this adaptation will require a responsiveness to community.  To investigate and explore the needs of our communities requires that we act communally.  Within education, this can be accomplished by finding more ways to collaborate, share, critique, and reflect as teachers in teaching communities.  Richard Buckminster said that “you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."  I propose that the existing model of isolationist teaching be made obsolete by new models that are communal and collaborative.

In coming posts, I'll highlight some places and spaces where I think this concept is being employed and having positive effects already.  I'll also share specifically how it's having a positive impact on my own practice.  Hopefully there will be food for thought along the way regarding ways that we might explore and promote other opportunities for increased collaboration and teamwork in other places and spaces.

TL;DR: Teachers shouldn't be working alone.  Teamwork is better for us and for kids.

Vive la revolution!