Yes, we know what great teaching looks like — but we have an education system that ‘utterly fails to support it.’ What’s wrong and how to fix it.
You could be forgiven if you have gotten the impression that we are still trying to figure out exactly what great teaching looks like. In recent years, the teaching profession has been under assault by those who have sought to deprofessionalize it, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on various projects and studies to find out the so-called “secret sauce” of great teaching.
Actually, we do know — and as this post explains, we also know that the education system doesn’t support it.
It was written by James Nehring, who taught middle and high school for two decades and is now an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.
Nehring has co-written a book coming out in June that looks at the complexities that go into great teaching and how to create a system that supports it. The book, written with Stacy Szczesiul and Megin Charner-Laird, is titled “Bridging the Progressive-Traditional Divide in Education Reform: A Unifying Vision for Teaching, Learning, and System Level Supports.” (Yes, it’s a mouthful.)
In 2013, he won a Fulbright award to work with and learn from schools in the United States and Britain that are doing great work with students in marginalized communities, particularly deeply sectarian neighborhoods in Northern Ireland.
Here is his piece, which tackles an issue as central as any to our great education debate: teaching.
[Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust.]
By James Nehring
Good teaching is really complex. Anybody who’s been impacted by a special teacher will likely agree. The problem is that, in the sausage-making of regulatory policy, we act like teaching is simple. The result is a system that makes it just about impossible for good teachers to teach.
I’ve long suspected this was true, but it wasn’t until I teamed up with two other former teachers — Stacy CONTINUE READING: Yes, we know what great teaching looks like — but we have an education system that ‘utterly fails to support it.’ What’s wrong and how to fix it. - The Washington Post
