To New Teachers: The Graduation Speech You Won’t Hear, But Should

This is a slightly longer version of an Op-Ed that appeared on the Los Angeles Times' Opinion page this morning.

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Let me begin by celebrating your calling to join one of our society’s grand professions. What is more important than to play a central role in the development of young people’s lives? Cherish this calling, for it will be tested.

You are entering teaching at a troubled time. For all the political talk about the importance of education, a number of cities and states are trying to balance their budgets through cuts to schools. You will also hear conflicting messages in the national conversation about education. Teachers are universally praised as the solution to our educational problems and simultaneously condemned as the root cause of all that’s wrong with our schools.

What underlies this bipolar craziness is an ideological battle to define what teaching is. And while there’s not much you can do to affect the economy, you can be tough-minded and vocal about what it means to teach.

As is the case in so many spheres of modern life, there is a strong push to define teaching in technical and managerial terms. Education policy is increasingly being shaped by economists who have little knowledge of classroom life. Curricula are “scripted,” directing the teacher what to do when. Student learning is reduced to a few scores on a standardized test. The teacher becomes a knowledge-delivery mechanism whose effectiveness will be determined primarily by the scores on those tests.

You hear little from either the federal Department of Education or the local school board about engaging young people’s minds or about teaching as an intellectual journey. You don’t hear about the values that brought you into teaching. So let’s talk about these things now, for they are the mind and heart of the work you will be doing.

Teaching is a profoundly intellectual activity, and this applies to kindergarten as much as to Advanced Placement Physics. Most people will grant the brain work in physics, but what is neglected is the intellectual chops it takes to teach any subject to any age. The good primary school teacher knows about child development and how to engage young people across a range of subjects. She takes in a room full of kids at a glance to see who needs help, thinks on her feet, knows how to respond to a wrong answer and provides the apt example or comparison to guide a child toward clearer thinking.

You might not fancy yourself an intellectual. New teachers sometimes say that they’re going into teaching because they “like kids.” But remember, this is a special kind of caring, a relationship focused on children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development. This is way more than affection; you are using your mind in the service of others.

Teaching, then, is a special kind of relationship. You’ll need to learn about the young people in front of you, where they come from, and what matters to them. This will call for special effort if you – like many teachers – are a foreigner to the communities in which you teach. Listen to your students. Try to understand the world as they see it. You will be both troubled and inspired by what you hear. And you’ll be smarter for it.

Don’t expect things to be reciprocal. Kids will not always respond, will even shun you. But stick with it. Show them that you’re serious and available even when they’re not. This will register. Young people are hyper-alert to betrayal and consistency. A veteran teacher I know tells her beginning teachers, “Don’t think that because a kid can’t read, he can’t read you.”

Get ready to fail. A lesson you slaved over will flop, or your understanding of a kid’s problem will be way off base. This will happen during your first year or two, but, believe me, it happens to all of us through the years. Education, wrote W.E.B. DuBois is “a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.”

For some of you, this will be the first time you’ve failed in a classroom. It will be painful and disorienting. So it is essential you know how to handle failure, for at those moments you will be vulnerable to your own insecurities and to those who are cynical about young people, some as close as the Teachers’ Lounge.

It is imperative, then, that the minute you walk through the schoolhouse door, you start figuring out who the good teachers are. Buy them coffee. Get to know them, for when you fail you’ll need them to help you make sense of things, to convert those failures into knowledge rather than doubt and bitterness. Learning to teach well is a long journey, full of deliberation and self-assessment. You don’t want to make that journey alone.

You’ve surely noticed by now that I haven’t given you any advice about what to do on Monday morning. This takes us back to the issue of what teaching is. Knowing the nuts and bolts of running a classroom is hugely important, and if your training was any good, you’ll have some plans in place. Furthermore, you soon will be swarmed with advertisements for products that promise to make your classroom hum.

I’m more interested in the way you think about what to do on Monday morning. Every good teacher I’ve known, regardless of grade level, subject, or style has the equivalent of what musicians call “big ears”; they are curious, open, on the lookout for anything they can use in the service of some larger goal. They possess a mindfulness about materials and techniques and have their fingers on the pulse of their students, figuring out if and how something will work with them. That is what it means to think like a teacher, and that thinking defines the work you are about to begin.

On Teaching

The other day, my college buddy Bruce Scrogin, a voracious reader, forwarded to me an article from The New York Times Magazine by psychiatrist Daniel Carlat, “Mind Over Meds.” (4/25/10) Dr. Carlat bemoans the split in contemporary mental health care between the pharmacological approach and the talk therapy approach, not a new observation but the article had several gems in it, like this quotation from pioneering psychopharmacalogist Leon Eisenberg, “…in the first half of the 20^th century, American psychiatry was virtually ‘brainless.’ . . . In the second half of the 20th century, psychiatry became virtually ‘mindless.’”

The passage that particularly caught my eye – and it is relevant to the concerns of this blog – was this:

Like the majority of psychiatrists in the United States, I prescribe the medications, and I refer to a professional lower in the mental-health hierarchy, like a social worker or a psychologist, to do the therapy. The unspoken implication is that therapy is menial work — tedious and poorly paid.

The elevation of the technical and the diminishment of the human and relational is, as many social commentators have observed, a characteristic of our time. Reading Dr. Carlat, it struck me how much this diminishment of the human and relational applies to teachers and teaching.

Certainly his comment on status and pay applies: as you move up the administrative chain of command, the work in education becomes more bureaucratic and these days, technocratic – and is more rewarded financially. But I’m interested in another aspect of Dr. Carlat’s comment: the focus on the technical side of teaching with increasingly less frequent mention of values, passion, or artistic touch.

This technical focus has been amped up and institutionalized in our time by NCLB. The teacher is reduced to a knowledge-delivery mechanism that prepares students for high-stakes tests. The Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” is not much different. “Effective” teachers are praised; however, effectiveness is defined by the scores students get on standardized tests.

Another manifestation of this technical orientation is the increased focus on teaching techniques and, in a similar vein, best practices. Before going on, I want to be clear about this: I’m all for pinpointing good techniques – from gestures to ways to ask questions – and I do believe that some pedagogical practices (for example, particular ways to address grammatical errors in student writing) are, one the whole, better than others. Teaching does involve a good deal of technique, skill, tricks of the trade, and good teacher education and professional development includes a worthy dose of such knowledge.

But good teaching also involves values, emotional connection, belief systems, artfulness, instinct born of experience. I certainly appreciate that fact that these factors are harder to measure than, let’s say, the frequency of certain kinds of questions, but because there’s not an easy metric for them does not diminish their importance.

This issue was recently brought home to me by an article in the New York Times Magazine, another Gotham piece sent to me by a student of mine, Shirin Vossougi. (It’s my friends and students who keep me up to date.) The article “Building a Better Teacher” (March 7, 2010) is written by education reporter Elizabeth Green. It is a welcome addition to the current wave of mainstream articles and commentaries in that it isn’t hostile to teachers and attempts to stay close to teaching itself. But what made Shirin and then me uneasy is its exclusive focus on two aspects of teaching: on techniques that some claim work regardless of context (for example how to give directions) and on content knowledge in subject areas, mathematics, science, literature. The article is set up such that the two are treated pretty much as separate entities, and little else about teaching is addressed.

At the end of the article, Greene wisely takes us to the obvious next step, and moves toward a combination of the two approaches. But she doesn’t mention that many people before this moment have given a lot of thought to this very blend, from John Dewey to educational psychologist Lee Shulman. For that fact, with the exception of two paragraphs on the Normal School and early schools of education, there is a historical and cultural flatness to the discussion of teaching. One gets the sense that teaching is strictly a technical pursuit. There is no mention of the other factors that contribute to good teaching, from value systems to a love of the subject. Nor is there a reflection of the long and rich discussion of teaching that, in the West alone, goes back to Plato.

I’m not laying the blame for this narrow treatment on Ms. Greene, for she is rendering a current big buzz – though I wish she would have been a bit more critical of it. The sad thing is that we have come to this place where influential school reformers and policy makers conceive of building a better teacher in such mechanistic terms. This is our new common sense about teaching and learning.