Obviously, educators in independent schools care deeply about their work, and consider themselves professionals, but the complexity and needs of our time demand that we all reach for a higher level of professional engagement. There is much we can do to improve our knowledge and skills, as well as our ability to adjust to cultural changes, incorporate new technologies, and adapt our programs to the latest research — in the best interest of our students and our communities.
One longstanding obstacle to improving the professional culture in schools is the independent school community’s tradition of minimal preparation for new teachers. The idea of hiring liberal arts graduates with excellent subject-area knowledge and a passion for teaching will always be a good one, but we need to acknowledge that this alone is not enough. I suspect that many independent school teachers and leaders (mostly former teachers) have a cautionary story about their induction into the profession that resembles my own. It was the fall of 1970, right after my graduation from college at the ripe mature age of 22, with zero experience in any of the job requirements, when my wife and I arrived on the campus of Woodberry Forest School (Virginia) eager and ready, we thought, to teach, coach, advise, and “parent” in the dorm. The English department chair at the time, still a colleague and friend to this day, was wonderfully helpful (even lending a hand to unload our very few possessions from our lime-green Ford Pinto) and welcoming (hosting us for dinner many times to get to know other faculty members). But the only job training he offered was this bit of advice: “Make sure you give the impression when the bell rings that you had more to say.” Not surprisingly, my first months at the school were a nightmare. I never knew what lessons would work. Some days, I was excessively over-prepared; other days, woefully under-prepared. Without a clear understanding of how to proceed in any area of school life, I was quickly and hopelessly overwhelmed by the boarding school regimen of teaching, coaching, and nightly supervision.
My strongest memory of those first months was collapsing each night to read the classifieds section of the Wall Street Journal, looking for some other job that wasn’t so enervating. The low point occurred in November, when I came home rather despondent, saying to my wife, “You are not going to believe what happened today — our advisee Charlie just ran away from school.” To which she replied, “Oh my God! I saw him hitchhiking with his backpack, and I gave him a ride to the train station.”
What can we do to improve the professional culture within schools? We can start by acknowledging that, while trial and error, over time, does work for most independent school teachers, the alternative — mature, integrated, team-based, mentor-driven professional development programming — is the better path. Once we acknowledge this, we can look at other professions that do it right. We know, for instance, that the professions of medicine, law, engineering, and architecture share common factors that make these fields function at high levels. The key professional elements that they all share include:
- recognition for achievement;
- a clearly defined career path;
- teamwork and collaboration;
- high entry requirements and standardized skills testing;
- mentoring as the norm and integral to career advancement;
- research-informed practice;
- accountability at every level; and
- shared decision making.
We also know from current motivational theory, captured so clearly in Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, that what motivates people in all organizations, including for-profit enterprises, is not money but rather autonomy, mastery, and purpose. While no other organizations that I can think of give their employees more opportunity for autonomy, mastery, and purpose than independent schools, we often get caught up in a myopic focus on the autonomy part of the equation — and don’t pay enough attention to mastery and purpose.
A high degree of autonomy, of course, is essential to good teaching — but so are ongoing collaboration, thoughtful evaluation, mentoring, and continuous professional development. Arguing for these latter qualities is not an argument for dictating what teachers do each day in the classroom. It’s an argument for preparing them better so that they can make daily professional decisions in the best interest of each and every student.
So, the second part of a school strategy for developing a professional culture would be to offer less autonomy in preference for more teaming and collaboration; to “direct the path” — to borrow a phrase from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard — towards greater mastery. In my first year of teaching, any collaboration that helped me gain greater mastery would have significantly strengthened the value of my autonomy.
We know from all the studies of countries with high performing public education systems — such as those in Finland, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom — how to produce system-wide professionalism via job-embedded, sustained, contextual, collaborative teacher professional learning that leads to substantive improvements in teaching. And we know what structures must be in place to achieve it: in the context of challenges facing teachers in their classrooms, 10 hours/week of collaborative lesson study or rounds or “action research” related to specific issues of pedagogy and learning (see John Murray’s article on page 18). In contrast to the collegial environments of these high-performing countries, many observers have noted that the culture in American classrooms favors privacy and isolation. Such a predisposition in U.S. education produces impermeable and impenetrable silos that militate against a collaborative culture of professionalism and fosters what clinical psychologist and independent school consultant Lynn Friedman calls “a culture of unaccountability.”
So, the third part of a school strategy for developing a professional culture would be for leaders to set new expectations of accountability for the teaching staff, such as participating on an action research team and establishing a structured induction system for new teachers (initially reduced teaching load to allow for observations, mentored lesson-planning, and the like), much like internships in other professions and the ancient guild model of apprenticeship.
When it comes to purpose — the third motivator — using the argument that independent schools “educate the future leaders well” may not be purpose enough for our sector any more. Independent schools are increasingly developing a much broader, and higher, public purpose — that is, striving not only to educate future leaders but also to help solve current social problems locally, nationally, and globally. To this end, empowering teacher-leaders to professionalize the profession may well be the lever we and the nation need. How? Among other things, there is a clear and growing sense that developing a true professional culture in school may even be a significant path to advancing the public purpose of independent schools. A professional culture may lead to partnerships with our neighboring public school faculties, which will create relevant and local professional learning communities (PLCs).
As Milbrey McLaughlin, professor emeritus at Stanford University, has noted, “The most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement is building the capacity of school personnel to function as a professional learning community.”3 The new news is that PLCs are no longer school-bound. We know from the emerging energy around web-based professional learning communities (i.e., PLCs such as ISEnet, the Independent School Educator’s Network) that there that is a global community of independent school teachers who are already highly motivated to collaborate and experiment, and that they often find professional soulmates and fellow travelers outside of the small neighborhood of their own school. Just about every hour of every day, these educators are sharing ideas, teaching each other and learning from each other.
So, the fourth part of a school strategy for developing a professional culture would be to create the conditions for teams of teachers, in school and online, to research and apply solutions to practical challenges they face in their classrooms: closing the achievement gap; differentiating instruction; flip teaching; iPad integration; integrating sustainability and globalism; project-based learning; etc.
Of course, we know from such thought exercises as this one, that teachers are often skeptical when leaders announce new initiatives aimed just at the faculty. Perhaps, then, schools will have more success initiating the process of professionalizing the profession if they work on three parallel roads simultaneously. While the faculty learns to develop new skills in collaboration and mentorship and engage in multi-tiered professional development, school leadership teams and boards of trustees can also engage in those activities that will improve the professional climate in the school community. Equally important, they can let teachers know that changing the culture of the school is a shared responsibility. In all three of these areas, there is much work to be done. Professionalizing leadership teams and governance is a topic for another column. For now, however, what is perhaps most important is that we all agree to face this need together and head on.
When we start down these long-neglected paths, we take giant strides toward becoming the sort of professional learning communities we know we can — and should — be.
Notes
1. See “Independent Perspective” columns, Independent School, Summer 2006 and Spring 2007.2. Adapted from “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Teachers,” by Katherine C. Boles and Vivian Troen, from Recruiting, Retaining, and Supporting Highly Qualified Teachers (Harvard Education Press, 2005), reprinted in Independent School, Spring 2007.
3. Mike Schmoker “Tipping Point: From Feckless Reform to Substantive Instructional Improvement,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 2004.