Charles
Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission
to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Last week’s blog tried to address some of the
complexities affecting funding in public education. And, just to be clear, when
talking about school funding, we are talking about personnel – teachers mostly.
The complexities of preparing, recruiting, and deploying teachers are many. I
won’t address all those issues. I want to talk about deployment, especially in
the context of improving student outcomes.
A consistent argument in education is that those close to students are in the best position to know what and how to address the challenges that confront those students. The education system, for the most part, recognizes the truth of that argument. Ministries of education establish the broad framework within which the system operates. In consultation with teachers, parents and experts of various kinds, Ministries establish curricula, set standards and the means of measuring progress toward those standards, and provide resources to school boards. School Boards are locally elected to govern school districts and to hold their superintendents accountable for the management of schools.
The professional staff – teachers and administrators –
may exercise considerable professional latitude in how they organize for, and
carry out, their instructional and other responsibilities. One hopes, of
course, that they do that in accordance with accumulated professional knowledge
and close attention to what they understand about the students for whom they
are responsible. If they are on top of their game, teachers build their
instructional program on what students know and can do now, and where the
program they devise will take them.
Despite the impressive experience possessed by their
peers, most teachers plan on their own. They will share knowledge generously
with one another, but only on occasion will they plan a school’s instructional
program together. That is too bad. That does not mean that individual effort is
unimportant. Every teacher makes a difference. Good teaching is indispensable
to student success. Improving student outcomes is too great a burden to place
on teachers individually. But the absence of genuine collaboration reflects the
design of timetables and teaching assignments (something that has been referred
to as an “egg-carton” culture) and an unfortunate belief that teaching is more
art than a skill.
Let me make clear that teachers do collaborate with one
another episodically and unsystematically. However, the collaboration that has
occurred over the past quarter century is constrained by a structure that limits
collective discussion and decision-making.
Greater gains in student performance can be achieved
by teachers working together at the school level. The collective knowledge and
experience of the school’s staff is indispensable to organizing and planning to
educate students beyond the boundaries of the current knowledge and experience.
Teachers know their students well. After students have
been in school for more than a year, they are known by several teachers. As she
progresses, the knowledge that those staff members have about her accumulates
and can be seen from multiple perspectives. Teachers who feel stymied because their
efforts with the student do not seem to be paying off can consult with peers
about approaches they have found successful.
The conventional pattern is for students to be assigned
to class groupings that remain permanent throughout the school year. The
teacher assigned to that grouping is responsible for determining the
instructional program. In intermediate grades and continuing through high
school, both teachers who enroll a class (enrolling teachers) and teachers who
provide specialized support (non-enrolling teachers) must work together to
address learners’ needs that can only be understood by knowing how students
learn and socialize throughout the school community.
Helping each student to progress is essential. Collectively
optimizing the success of all students is even better. School staffs are
increasingly attentive to using data to inform decisions. What is often missing
is collective decision-making about the way the school implements instruction.
Rarer still is collective decision-making about student placement. It is almost
unheard of for a school staff to decide to organize (and reorganize) learning
groups dynamically as student performance is monitored throughout the year.
Last year in British Columbia, the ratio of students
to teachers was about 19 students for each teacher. That ratio improves when
you add in the non-enrolling teachers (teachers of students with special needs,
students for whom English is not their first language, teachers who run
libraries, counsellors, etc). With the non-enrolling in the mix, the ratio
drops to about 16.6 students to every teacher.
Picture a school to which enrolling and non-enrolling
teachers were assigned consistent with the requirements of the teachers’ collective
agreement. But, instead of the conventional determination of teaching
assignments, the teachers and principal would consider the data about student
performance and outcomes together and determine what course of action they
would pursue as a school and how they would monitor performance. They would
take collective responsibility for student success.
Instead of making assignments based on non-enrolling
formulae, school districts would assign the same number of teachers generated
by the formula to the schools but allow for collaborative professional
judgement among school staffs to determine teacher placement. Such placements
might be planned to differ during the day or over the semester or year. For
example, in situations where it is determined that students would benefit from
large-group explicit instruction, one teacher could take responsibility for
fifty students, freeing up other teachers to work collaboratively to improve
student opportunities and outcomes.
My prediction is that, if teachers worked well
together instead of approaching the task as masters in their own classroom, students
would be more successful, and the teachers’ work would seem less onerous and be
more satisfying. Teachers would be better together than they would be working primarily
on their own with limited interaction with their colleagues.