Tag Archive for 'professional practice'

Protect Teachers? Or Protect the Profession?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 18, 2009 in Education Leadership, Teaching and accountability. 14 Comments

On Brittanica Blog, Dan Willingham takes a look at teachers’ wish for greater respect and the role of unions in winning it.  He observes that unions perform two important functions that are fundamentally at odds with each other: they protect the rights of individual teachers in personnel matters, and they undertake public relations and other activities in an effort to promote the profession.

On the one hand, if your mission is to protect the members of the profession from unfair termination, you will insist on a rigorous process by which their incompetence must be demonstrated. On the other hand it must be admitted that in any profession employing several million people some are incompetent, and if your job is to protect the reputation and integrity of the profession, you should want those people to leave.

Since the process of determining who is or isn’t a good teacher is far from foolproof, mistakes will be made, Dan notes. So the question becomes what kind of mistake do you prefer: firing someone who is actually a good teacher?  Or failing to fire an incompetent teacher?  If you’re cautious about not allowing good teachers to be fired, you’ll inevitably allow more poor teachers to remain.  If protecting the reputation of the profession is your main concern some good teachers will end up being drummed out of the corps unfairly. 

“If your diagnostic is imperfect, you’re going to make errors,” Willingham writes.  “All you can do is choose the proportion of error types.”  He argues that teachers unions have handled this tradeoff badly, harming the reputation of teaching as a profession. 

While Dan’s post is at Brittanica Blog, the debate over it is at Eduwonk.  Teachers’ unions “are in a purgatory of their own creation,” opines Andy Rotherham. ”They don’t want to use data to evaluate teachers and they don’t want to use managerial discretion.   I guess that leaves the Magic 8-Ball?”  After much back and forth about the union’s preferred role Willingham makes an observation that seems unassailable: “The President is talking about getting rid of poor teachers,” he writes. ”It appears likely that something is going to be done, so you may as well try to take control of the situation so it’s something you are doing, rather than something that is done to you.” 

Lead, follow, or get out of the way, in other words. 

N.B. Dan has a brilliant new book out called Why Students Don’t Like School, which if I had a magic wand would appear on the desk of every teacher in America. Absent that, I’m thrilled to report that Professor Willingham will be taking over the Core Knowledge Blog all of next week to talk about some of the insights from his work and his new book while I take a week off from blogging.  Don’t miss it.

The Color Purple

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 4, 2008 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

Teachers in Australia have been told to stop marking schoolchildren’s work with red pen because it is an “aggressive” color.  Over at Flypaper, they’re regarding this with arched eyebrows.  Indeed, this is one of those seemingly trivial arguments that make outsiders think educators have lost their minds. Alas, this is not a new trend, as this five year old article from the Boston Globe will attest. 

A mix of red and blue, the color purple embodies red’s sense of authority but also blue’s association with serenity, making it a less negative and more constructive color for correcting student papers, color psychologists said. Purple calls attention to itself without being too aggressive. And because the color is linked to creativity and royalty, it is also more encouraging to students.

Lots of teachers are being trained to use “softer” colors like green and purple.  The bigger issue for student work remains what — and even whether — to correct.  A staff developer I worked with used to insist that it was only appropriate to correct the skill being worked on at the moment, not every error on a student’s paper.  That makes a lot of teachers see red.