This article appeared as "What's the Problem?" in the Winter 2023 issue of Independent School.
It happens every year. Teachers receive a new student roster, their gradebooks still empty, their LMS pages waiting to be filled. And sometimes, before the year even begins, school leaders ask teachers to set professional goals—providing more timely feedback on student work, for example, or offering students a wider range of assessments. While these goals may be grounded in the best intentions, genuine self-reflection, and a desire to engage in new practices, they also can be unchecked by subjective biases, instructional data, or classroom realities. Schools might defer to SMART goals or other frameworks borrowed from the corporate world or higher education. But these systems weren’t designed for today’s educators, who are striving to address the complexities of teaching and learning amid the unprecedented demands on schools and teachers.
For quite some time, teachers have relied on internalized systems for instructional improvement: Things don’t go well in one class, they make adjustments in the next; a unit doesn’t resonate with students, and they revise accordingly. Yet, these shifts are rarely documented; they often occur without feedback from colleagues, and their impact on student learning can be unclear. Schools need to create more systematic and responsive approaches for instructional improvement. An annual goal-setting exercise is simply not adequate in a field that is so dynamic.
What happens when schools reconsider annual goal-setting alongside ongoing opportunities for teachers to better meet the needs of each student? What if we focused on the problems teachers face instead of an idealized version of what it means to be an educator?
The Naming Game
Teaching problems are the challenges teachers face in helping a student realize their fullest potential. Also referred to as “problems of practice,” they can offer us the richest kind of professional learning because they are grounded in tangible, observable student and teacher behaviors. For example, weekly student reflections might illustrate a power dynamic between a gifted math student and other members of the class. Assessment portfolios might indicate biases a teacher carries in how they give feedback. Class discussion transcripts might reveal that three white students are not engaging in class discussions of a Toni Morrison novel. These are teaching problems. They are real, intractable, complicated problems grounded in classroom data that impact student learning. They can exist for individual teachers, a department, a grade level, or a division.
This is not to say that goal-setting isn’t a valuable exercise. However, when it exists in isolation from a culture of deep reflection and self-study, it risks misunderstanding— and even avoiding—the very problems it’s intended to address. If we define a teaching goal as what we want our students to be able to do, then our professional learning systems should proactively address the challenges that students and teachers need to overcome. If the goal is for every sixth grade student to achieve mastery in a given set of academic skills, for example, then teachers need practice addressing what inevitably might get in the way: a difficult class dynamic, a wide range of students’ prior knowledge, content gaps in the teacher’s knowledge, poor student self-esteem, etc.
What if professional learning were grounded in these problems? Like many aspects of school change, success is dependent on a healthy culture of faculty learning and growth. Teachers need to trust that these problems exist for all educators, arguably in every class, with each new semester, and in every year of their careers. They deserve a culture in which this reality is acknowledged and embraced, and where space is created to address these problems collaboratively and without judgment. When we normalize teaching problems, we foster a culture in which teachers are less anxious, have greater self-efficacy, and feel more supported in their professional growth.
Habits of Practice
In contrast to an annual goal-setting moment, a professional learning cycle invites teachers to analyze their practice and student-learning outcomes throughout the academic year. It cultivates a teaching faculty in which colleagues are growing together, both in their ability to serve students and to coach each other. To build a culture of problem-solving, consider a learning cycle that embeds the following skills.
Pick problems worth solving. While schools may have their own rationale for identifying a teaching problem, two criteria seem nonnegotiable. First, teaching problems should focus on student learning. The critically important ideas shaping pedagogy today—culturally responsive teaching, grading for equity, and anti-racist curriculum—are ongoing growth areas for every educator. We don’t ever “finish” the work of analyzing how our own identities intersect with teaching. Feeling inadequate, though, is not a teaching problem. What makes a teaching problem worth solving is that student learning has been compromised, and our greatest teaching problems are those that impact our most marginalized students.
Second, we should have evidence that a given problem exists. Evidence can be quantitative, qualitative, deliberately tracked or anecdotal, but helping educators see their practice with greater clarity requires the ability to identify and work with classroom-based data.
Identify high-leverage interventions. An intervention is any action a teacher takes to address a teaching problem. It is not, though, a definitive solution. Inventions create the mindsets necessary for authentic growth: They assume multiple opportunities for trial and error and a process that is cyclical, not linear.
Educators do, however, need to be strategic. Interventions should be informed by expertise on the research of teaching and learning, identity development, and equity and inclusion. The extent to which a faculty can generate high-leverage interventions is in direct relation to their knowledge of and facility with research-based practices. Equally important, the work of instructional improvement requires designated time and space and groups of teachers who are willing to have fidelity to protocols with clear constraints and limitations. There are places in school communities for organic, free-flowing dialogue, and there are places for targeted, strategic questioning, and listening. Generating interventions that will address challenging teaching problems requires the latter.
Assess the impact. No professional learning cycle should exist without some measurement of its impact. This is one of the most challenging skills to develop, as it is rarely possible to know the many ways in which a single intervention could impact student learning. Classroom data sources can be powerful indicators: Student performance and learning outcomes, well-designed exit tickets, and individual or small group conversations can help teachers see their impact. Depending on the teaching problem, social-emotional check-ins and evidence of growth mindsets or other learning dispositions can also inform a teacher’s understanding. While the process of measuring impact isn’t entirely scientific, it makes student learning trends visible in new ways and can be affirming to educators, regardless of their years of experience, their content area, or the nature of the challenges they face.
Naming teaching problems requires deep examination of student experience, a willingness to confront the self, and courage. When we ask teachers to set teaching goals without a thorough examination of teaching problems and learning outcomes, we may be setting them up for superficial growth trajectories that undermine efforts to build trust, self-efficacy, and genuine instructional improvement. While naming problems may seem counter-cultural, the act of making teaching visible can be transformational, both for rebuilding faculty culture and responding to the remarkably complex pedagogical challenges of our time.