If we want teachers to stay, leave them alone and let them teach

Let’s begin with the premise that teaching is challenging work and that good teaching is even harder. Some teachers work hard but fail through inexperience, poor planning, poor preparation, ineffective staff development programs, lack of good mentoring, poor administrative support or a deadly combination of all of the above.

My first suggestion for those who want to teach is don’t do it if you don’t like kids. Seems so simple, but you might be surprised at the number of people who want to teach because they get summers off. Ha!

Jim Arnold

That’s like the kid who told me he wanted to quit high school and join the U.S. Marines because he was tired of people telling him what to do. Great teachers will tell anyone who will listen that teaching is a calling. If you are not called, don’t answer.

Because it’s not easy.

We have loaded teachers’ plates with many jobs that used to be called “parenting.” Somewhere along the way we forgot that relationships and personalized learning are the foundation of an effective education for every child. If we overload teachers with extraneous stuff that misguided politicians or administrators think is “a great idea,” they won’t have the time or inclination to do what we actually hired them to do.

In an unscientific and informal survey, I asked nearly 100 teachers over the past several months what they thought were the issues that made teaching unenjoyable and/or unbearable.

These are the joy killers:

It’s not just one of these factors at one instance that push teachers out. It’s almost always a cumulative effect that eventually brings them to the breaking point.

So what can you do to help stanch the rapid flow of teachers out of the profession and encourage students to enter what was once a respected vocation?

Here are the suggestions of the teachers I surveyed:

• Believe in and support teachers. Poverty is the culprit behind achievement gaps. Period. Teachers don’t cause poverty but, if they are supported, can effectively end it for many students.
• Professional learning and development ought to be built around experienced teachers working in small groups with new and beginning teachers. Pay good teachers to share their knowledge, experience and ideas in ways that allow them to stay in the classroom. One good teacher working with three or four novice teachers is a powerful tool. Large groups listening to an “expert” they don’t know is not. Ever. (Note to professional development presenters: Teachers resent playing “get to know you” games. You are wasting time they could be spending in the classroom. Stop.)
• Pay good teachers more to work in rural schools and/or schools in impoverished areas.
• Eliminate standardized testing for anything other than diagnostic purposes.
• Magic bullets don’t work. The answer to improving education is found in the power of teachers to reach students on a personal level. Invest in people, not programs.
• Technology is a tool for teachers and not an educational answer unto itself.
• Modernize the school calendar. Six hours of instruction over 240 days makes more sense from an educational standpoint than the current calendar held over from an agrarian society.
• Hire administrators with the courage to support teachers. How can you tell an effective administrator? Visit the schools where teachers don’t quit. Teachers know poor administrators before the central office does.
• Help prevent legislative meddling in teaching and learning. Politicians with unfunded mandates and attempts to provide standardized solutions and legislate excellence have done far more to hurt education than to help.
• Find ways to encourage students to enter the teaching profession. Several colleges are now offering paid tuition for students agreeing to teach for several years after graduation.
• We also need to tell our stories of success and not allow negative voices to be the only ones heard.