Practical Theory

Dear Mr. President,

I'm not one for the Hallmark Holidays. I don't make a huge deal over Father's Day. My wife and I agree every year that Valentine's Day is a good excuse to have a nice dinner and not much more. So I wasn't going to make a big deal over Teacher Appreciation Week. It's a lovely thing, especially this time of year when teachers are pushing through to the end of the year, but it isn't usually the kind of thing I usually really think that much about.

Except this year.

This year, you chose National Teacher Appreciation Week as the week you also chose to declare as National Charter School Week.

Why would you do that, Mr. President?

I've wracked my brain all night long trying to figure out why. It's not like you didn't know it was National Teacher Appreciation Week - after all, Secretary Duncan posted about it on the Department of Education blog. So why conflate the two, Mr. President?

This is the week we could be celebrating all teachers - public, charter, parochial and independent. All over this country, every day, teachers in all kinds of schools do their best to help America's children, and this could be a week where we don't care about the management divide of schools, but rather took the time to simply be thankful that over four million Americans choose to make their career's work teaching America's children.

But that idea - or at least the idea that your Administration supports all teachers - rings hollow now. When you - in the same week - celebrate one kind of school, when you say that one management structure serves "as incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country" to the exclusion of other kinds of schools, you - intentionally or not - send the message that the rest of us count less, matter less, innovate less, teach less.

And you did that the same week that we could be elevating all members of the profession. Why?

If this was not a deliberate attempt to marginalize those of us who choose to teach in the public school system, then it was exceptionally poor timing. If it was a deliberate attempt to do so, why would you choose to do that? I really don't know how many body blows public school teachers are supposed to take. Here in Philadelphia, for exampe, we are feeling more than a little frustrated lately, so these kinds of mixed messages are particularly hurtful right now.

Most teachers do good work in anonymity. Every now and then, we get mugs or ties or thank you notes, and honestly, they make a difference. You, as leader of our nation, could have simply said thank you to all of the wonderful men and women who teach America's children. Instead, you let us know that some teachers are more equal than others, based simply on the kind of school they teach in.

And as a public school educator, all I can say is this:

Duly noted.

Yours truly,
Chris Lehmann

So… I've come out of retirement.

I'm coaching again.

Roz Echols and I are coaching SLA Ultimate - we've got 30 kids coming to practice at 6:30 am every morning to work together build two amazing teams and one incredible community. And I've been reminded of how much I really, really love coaching. There is something incredible about working with kids first thing in the morning, all of whom have chosen to be there, working toward a common goal that is bigger than ourselves as individuals that has always just been incredible to me.

I love it. And I missed it even more than I realized.

And it got me thinking about the way we progress in the education realm, where with every move "up" away from the classroom, there is less and less direct contact with kids. I'm a really hands-on and involved principal, but, with the exception of my advisees, I have never been able to be as close to a specific group of kids as I was to the kids I coached. (Individual kids, sure… but not a group…)

And that seems wrong.

Having that incredible relationship where we, as educators, really have the opportunity to care for kids and have that transactional relationship where both teacher / coach / mentor and student make a difference in each other's lives, is a big part of what makes teaching such a profound profession.

Why is it that, in most districts, we discourage our administrators from working directly with kids?

What would happen if curriculum directors were still basketball coaches? If special education case managers ran the drama production at a school? If assistant superintendents ran after-school math help a few days a week? What if a district prioritized that and created the time and space for it?

How about this… what if corporations that had products in the "education sphere" actually had their employees and executives volunteer in school several days a week - not just as a one-off, but actually establishing the kind of caring relationships that we desperately need?

What if we worked to ensure that everyone who works with schools or works in education didn't merely talk about how important it is to make a difference in the lives of kids, but rather actually did. Not indirectly, not through a policy or a product, but by working directly with and caring directly for kids.

Wouldn't that move us just a little closer to building the kind of educational community -- in and out of schools -- that we so very much need?

(Oh... and Go SLA Ultimate!!!)

[Note One:I need to go back and re-read Moral Leadership by Thomas Sergiovanni, because I want to line up these ideas with his ideas of "The virtuous school." It's been too long since I've re-read the book. ]

[Note Two: After reading this post, I realize how incomplete it feels to me. I don't know if the post itself is greater than the sum of the words on the screen. This feels like it might be one of those ideas that feels almost ephemeral - the very attempt to write about it makes it feel like less than it should be. I hope the ideas came across. By all means, let me know in the comments what you think or what the idea of the transformative school means to you.]

There are a lot of really good schools in the world - schools where kids learn from teachers who care about them, where kids get into good colleges and learn stuff and generally have a good experience with teachers who care about them. There's nothing wrong with those schools - they generally do right by kids, teachers like teaching in them, and generally teaching and learning in these spaces are enjoyable experiences.

But there's another level that schools can achieve. Schools can transform. They can eclipse content and skills and become about something more. They can be about realizing the best versions of ourselves.

There were a few realizations that really crystallized this line of thinking for me. First, I realized as much as I care about the skills that we attempt to measure, the most powerful interactions I had, the most important things that happened in the classroom were as much about social-emotional learning as they were about Hamlet or the five-paragraph essay. For the longest time, I just chalked that up to being an English teacher - "We get to teach about life," was my trademark answer. But I saw this happening in computer science classes as kids learned sticktoitiveness. (And yes, that's a word.) And I saw it on the basketball and Ultimate fields as kids saw the value in shared sacrifice toward a common goal.

The second (these weren't really sequential…) epiphany was this - I knew I wasn't as good a person as the kids thought I was, although I wanted to be. So I tried to be. And while I think I always fall short of the ideal, I think I'm a better person for the effort. The easiest place to explain how I felt about this was, not surprisingly, the basketball court. I was not a particularly good basketball player growing up. (I know, this comes as a shock to everyone.) And when I started coaching, I quickly realized that I had to learn like crazy to be worthy of a group of young women who showed up to practice every morning at 6:30 am. I had to be better. We could lose games because the other team was taller, faster, more talented. We could lose games because our shots just wouldn't fall. But I never wanted to lose a game because I wasn't good enough - I wasn't worthy of the trust those girls put in me. The same thing was (and is) true at SLA. I knew we'd be up against some pretty long odds to succeed, and I knew we might not make it, but I wasn't o.k. that the families and faculty that put their trust in our dream might be let down because I wasn't good enough.

Finally, there was the realization that not everyone had this experience in the classroom or in their school… that in so many places, kids were happy to just do what was asked of them, teachers were willing to keep recycling "good enough" lessons out every day, and administrators were happy to see classes that were functional, never asking if the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

And so… here are some (by no means all) of my components of the transformative school:

• The school has goals beyond the accumulation of skills and content, looking to educate "the whole child" in real, profound ways. At SLA, this is what leads us to talk about "thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind."
  
• The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. It's not just about "great teachers" and "great kids," but rather about an entire community that is better because it is together.
  
• And the very important corollary to that - each part is made better by the whole. (Or in other words, we are made better because we have been together.)
  
• Whatever values we want for the kids, we must want for ourselves - if we wish to transform the lives of kids, we have to be willing to be transformed ourselves. If we want kids to discover the best versions of themselves, we must be willing to do so ourselves.
  
• And when this happens, it should spread well beyond the walls of the school so that the community can share in the transformation.
  
• This doesn't happen by serendipity. There has to be systems and structures that allow everyone access to these ideas. At SLA, those are the core values, the essential questions, the individualized learning plans, the capstones, Advisory and so many other systems, structures and processes that we have put in place to make our school about much more than a discrete set of classes. As so many kids have said at the end of their tenure at SLA, "You did more than teach us a way to learn, you taught us a way to live."
  
• Know that you -- the school and all the members in it - are always a work in progress, and the knowledge of how much growth is left in front of you should be a profoundly humbling experience each and every day.
  
• Know that good ideas evolve over time… transformative schools are evolutionary in nature. Schools that are healthy for all members rarely go through hard 180 shifts in directions. They change over time, often slowly, but always in ways that should make sense given the mission of the school.
  
• Never settle. Never think you are done. Never be o.k. with just being a "good school." Never stop learning, growing and attempting to be that best version of what you -- and the school -- can be. And never underestimate how hard this is.
  

I don't know that SLA is a transformative school - I like to think that on our best days we are. We certainly aspire to be. No matter what, it is a worthy effort.

[Today, I found out that one of my colleagues from my teaching days in NYC, Jon Goldman, passed away. Jon started at Beacon the first year of the school and had taught for several years before that. Jon was ten years older than me which doesn't seem like much now, but when I was a 25 year old first-year teacher, that made him a wise old veteran of teaching in my eyes. Jon was one of those teachers who looked out for other teachers. He always felt that the job had to be livable…. that as amazing as we wanted to be for the kids, we had to make sure it didn't come at the cost of our own sanity. It was an important lesson for a young teacher like me to learn, and one I've kept with me ever since. It is with Jon in mind I write tonight.]

The overwhelming majority of the teachers I know work incredibly hard. When one factors in the paper grading, calls home in the evening, email answering and lesson planning (to say nothing of coaching and other extra-curricular work), the hours spent can easily push up and over the 60-70 hour a week level. Moreover, the hours themselves can be incredibly intense, working with students who bring all that they - good and bad - to the classroom each day. Learning how to successful navigate the minefield of student emotions, classroom expectations, state standards, test scores, parent expectations and every other pressure point in the teaching life can be daunting, and it doesn't surprise me when people cite statistics about how many young teachers leave the profession. Turns out, the job is hard.

So it falls to teachers and administrators and policy makers at every level to really look at the teaching life. What do we ask of our teachers every day? How can we figure out how to do this job well, do it with true commitment and care, and do it over time, such we can develop a truly masterful teaching faculty in our country… one that can see a roadmap to teaching for a career with passion and grace. The energy of a youthful teacher must transform into the skill and technique of a veteran teacher so that the job does not always need to be done by Herculean effort alone. And we must always ask ourselves - how much gets put on a teacher's plate? Is it always a livable life? Hard? Sure… but doable, achievable, rewarding for good, hardworking people of honest intent.

If we want teachers to be advocates for our children, we must ask ourselves - are we advocates for our teachers? Let us make sure we build schools that understand the value of sustained and sustainable excellence of all members of our school communities.

Rest in Peace, Jon. Thank you for teaching me that valuable lesson.

Something every principal faces is the inevitable conflict between students. For me there's always a frustration in that I wasn't there, I didn't see what happened, and it is always too easy to see both sides of the story. In that moment, students will look to us as leaders, as principals, to take their side, to do what's right, even when we know that taking a side isn't necessarily what's right.

The hardest thing about those moments is getting aggrieved parties to listen to one another. It's a natural instinct in that moment to want to be valid, to want to be told that your actions were not wrong, to know that what happened to make you feel hurt was not your fault. And certainly, there are moments where one student is simply trying to pick on another student - and yes, we must always be vigilant about bullying in our schools. But it is my experience that days where one person was absolutely right and another was absolutely wrong are not as common as one might think and most confrontations between students happened because both parties were acting from their personal place of hurt and, in that moment, could not see another solution except to cause hurt themselves.

It's not that students don't see that they were causing another pain, rather what they felt in that moment was that causing pain was justified because of the pain they were in. And to me, that's the moment where we can step in and teach. That is the moment of empathy. Because when the student is in pain, and when they feel justified in acting out of that pain and therefore causing others harm, we can ask them to combine both emotional intelligent and rational intelligence to draw a lot of conclusions of their actions. The problem is, too often we are looked to in that moment to mete out some sort of justice, as if a suspension or detention or some sort of punishment can make up for the harm caused. And while there are moments where that is needed, more often than not the best solution is to help students see the world through other eyes, to teach empathy, and rarely can we ask people to be empathetic when we are punishing them or telling them that their feelings which caused the actions were wrong.

So when a conflict between students reaches my desk, I try hard to look for reasons not to punish. I try hard to listen to both parties, and I try to get them to listen to one another. It is in those moments that inquiry often is most useful. When we can ask questions, when we can ask students to think both about their own feelings and about the feelings of others, when we can ask students to ask questions of each other – honest questions, real questions, questions asked with an open heart and an open mind – we can help students see the world from a wider perspective than their own.

In the end, the punishments students want us to enforce on the other are often the punishments they feel that they were create in the confrontation itself so they look to us to finish the job. In those moments, we should seek not to broker a winner's peace, but instead ask students to listen to one another, ask them to ask questions of one another, and ask that they increase the amount of empathy in the world, starting with the way they treat – and listen to – one another.

There are those in the educational and political landscape these days who would dismantle the entire institution of school, and those people would use the tools we love so much to argue for the irrelevance of school itself. It can be a seductive argument especially when so many schools frustrate us with the degree to which they underserve children. However, the fundamental purpose of public school -- the idea that create physical spaces that are comitted to educating a nation -- is a good one.

There’s no question that how we conceive of school must change, but the why we have them remains as vital today as it ever has been. In an age where segmentation of markets, segmentation of society, keep people apart from those who think differently, who look differently, who live differently than they do, schools bring us together to learn from and with each other.

There is a subtle and yet vital difference in the fundamental role of school in the modern world. For the past 100 years, in most American schools, the school was important because it was where the information was... it was where the teacher was. The classroom was important because it was where people came together to get the information from the teacher. And while this is an oversimplification of the pedagogy of the past 100 years, it is, sadly, an accurate description of the dominant paradigm in American education. It is the Prussian model that Horace Mann brought back from Europe and instituted across the country with great success.

And let’s be clear - this model educated a nation with greater success than the world had ever seen - and so it is understandable to see why it has been so hard to let go of the old vision of what schools look like. Much of we see with the “No excuses” charter school model, No Child Left Behind and other current “reform” movements seem like an attempt to recapture the hazily remembered nostalgic days when students sat and patiently absorbed information from caring teachers. But to quote the song, “the good old days weren’t all that good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

So if the reason to come together in a classroom isn’t because the teacher is there to dispense the knowledge, why come together in a classroom?

It’s because that’s where we come together to learn.

Let’s never forget that.

A vibrant classroom, filled with active learners is a wonderful place that deserves to be nurtured. Learning can happen in many ways, and not all moments of learning have to be social, but equally, not all learning moments should be solitary as well. All over the world, there are classrooms where students learn together with caring, dedicated teachers. In these places, the social learning means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the promise of these classrooms, these schools that we must grasp onto.

And they are not as rare we think.

In every school, there are teachers who make the classroom into something special. They listen to students, push them to reach beyond what they knew their grasp could be. There are students who look forward to class those classes so that they be in deep learning environments. And in all those places, the learning goes far beyond acquisition of knowledge and skills and content. In all those places, there is meaning and wisdom and passion.

And at schools like High Tech High in San Diego and MET Academy in Providence, RI and Science Leadership Academy, students and teachers and administrators have come together to build entire communities that learn this way. And there are many, many more schools that have build powerful learning communities out there. We just have to do a better job of looking for them.

That is what school can be. As a nation, we can imagine many different models for school, but the fundamental idea that we build places where all children can come together to learn remains one of the best ideas we’ve ever had as a society.

We shouldn’t lose it. We just have to make sure our schools reflect the time in which we live.

New York City released the rating of thousands of teachers in grades 3-8 on Friday. These ratings are flawed for any number of reasons, as detailed in a lovely article on insideschools.org. And even Bill Gates - arguably the father of the teacher rating movement - has come out against releasing the scores, and his argument is a good one.

For me, my reasons against releasing the test scores comes down to one simple statement.

You will never, ever bully a teacher into caring for children.

Period.

How can anyone think differently is beyond me.

Was it really just a week ago?

For the fifth time, SLA invited its personal learning network to come spend three days to come to our funky little school and learn with us. As conference co-chair, I'd grown to lament that I never seemed to spend as much time learning as I wanted to at the conference. It was always a great learning experience, but for me, I always spent a lot of necessary time running the conference and trying to be a good host.

This year, I was a lot less needed as the students and parents of SLA took care of everything. O.k. - it's quite possible that the difference was I was able to let go more, too. They're pretty amazing every year. But we're all getting better at doing the logistics of the conference, so that seniors are teaching younger students, veteran parents are working with new parents, and teachers continue to give up time after classes, after grading to work on the conference. So this year, I actually spent five of the six sessions in facilitated conversation sessions that were really lovely. (O.k. - one was mine, but I thought it went well.)

So what are my take-aways? There are many:

1) I love my community - both my immediate SLA community and the larger EduCon community. The students and parents and teachers of SLA amaze me every day, but EduCon really does blow me away every year. Watching our student co-chairs, Alaya and Ryan, put the work in to manage an incredible staff of student volunteers, watching Jeff and the EduConcierge team take care of what seemed like every need of the conference attendees, watching the parents take such pride in their children's school, and watch student after student give a tour, talk to adults, present their ideas and just generally take part in this amazing conversation about education just makes me proud beyond words.

2) I loved this year's Friday night panel, but the quote that stands out the most for me was Dan Barcay citing Steven Johnson about innovation meaning being willing to "chase the adjacent possible." That phrase is going to marinate with me for a while, because I think there is a lot there for us in education.

3) It was really interesting to have a Philly politician give the welcoming remarks, instead of a district official. I thought Councilman Green gave a very different perspective on Philly education and how it needs to change than previous officials have. And I greatly appreciated that the councilman and his staff spent much of the conference in sessions as learners and participants. What if more of our elected officials took the time to just learn about education and how educators are innovating, rather than listening to more moneyed voices? Wouldn't we be in a better place as a nation?

4) This year, we reached out more to educators of color to come to EduCon as it was a justified critique of the conference in years past that there were too few. And while we still have more to go on this front -- especially recruiting more educators of color to present -- this was the most racially diverse EduCon we've ever had. Folks like Kyra Gaunt and Chris Emdin spoke powerfully about race and innovation on the panels and as session facilitators, and we are better for it. And there were more educators of color speaking in sessions as participants and lending their ideas and wisdom. This is a trend we will work to see get better, and there's no question that we will be a better conference for it.

5) David Jakes is doing some really profound work with his design thinking workshops. During his "What if" session, I found myself at a science table with Bill Fitzgerald, Michael Wacker, Darren Kuropatwa and others discussion our best "What if" ideas and building from there. The design thinking manta is so easy at its root, and yet so powerful, and David is a wonderful facilitator who gets people spinning ideas quickly and powerfully.

6) One reason I love the facilitated discussion model of session is that I think it creates a situation where everyone in the room is a learner (much like SLA classes.) Pia Martin and I ran a conversation called "What Happens When the Kids Run the School?" which was about what progressive discipline (and I still don't like the word choice of 'discipline' there) and how we try to structure it at SLA. The conversation was really lively, and folks really were having some fantastic conversations in small and large group. As a result, the ideas and questions that were flowing were really great. Session participants were more than willing to push back on ideas and challenge each other and us. As a facilitator, that forces me to really listen deeply to what people were saying, both to help people hear each other but also to give thoughtful answers when I was directly asked questions. As a result, people got me to a place where I was framing some of my core beliefs in ways I had not before. For example, I was asked about whether or not showing kids empathy and care would be doing them a disservice because the real world isn't as caring. I answered with two ideas that I don't think I'd ever really framed that way before. One was, "The kids have the rest of their life to learn that people can be cruel, they don't have to learn that from me," and two was, "we should create our schools so that they mirror the world, not as it is, but as we hope it could be." Both of those ideas are going to lead to longer blog posts, as they have given me a new lens to think through a core belief. I would not have gotten that lens were it not for the really wonderful folks in Room 208 who processed their ideas aloud with me.

7) There are many educators doing incredible work that the EduCon / ed-tech world are not aware of. We try to bring those voices to the Sunday morning panel every year. Pam Moran and Chris Walsh are known to many in the EduCon world, and they were amazing on the panel, but Karen Tal, Chris Emdin and Wyneshia Foxworth are largely unknown to the EduCon world. We - all of us - really have to keep working to find amazing folks who are doing great work and amplify their voices. Chris Emdin is doing some of the most incredible work in urban STEM education, and when he said, "The problem isn't when transformative ideas get institutionalized, it is when they get co-opted," it was as if I had been hit with a 2 x 4. That was yet another lens that I'd been looking for.

Dan Barcay is cool. I mean… he was great on the panel… his session was a ton of fun… and I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time talking to him… but he's really cool because like Jeff Han before him, he had his most fun just talking to the SLA kids about math, computer science and life. And in doing so, he modeled joy of learning, humility, kindness and care in the most wonderful way. The kids in Room 521 in Friday… the kids who sat around the table in the SLA office with him on Sunday… they had an experience they will never forget. Maybe it shouldn't be amazing when non-educator folks who don't have to be kind to kids and take joy in their presence are, but Dan was tireless and we are a better school for it.

9) For me, meaning really is so often socially constructed. The conversations I had with folks in sessions, at lunch, at dinner, on Twitter were incredible. I love being alone with my own thoughts sometimes, but I also love making meaning by sharing ideas with others. I was in sessions facilitated by Kirsten Olson, Glenn Moses, Kyra Gault, Chad Sansing, Christina Cantrill, David Jakes, Glenn Moses and Michael Wacker and in every session, these incredible teachers created space for participants to take apart ideas together. I listened to a young woman in a private school tease out how she could be a better advocate for LBGT kids in her school. I listened to folks talk about moments when they were uncomfortable in their identity. I talked to teachers as they tried to figure out how they could get more teachers over their fear of change when it came to incorporating changes in pedagogy and more modern tools into their practice. Every session was filled with people making meaning together in practical and theoretical ways that I hope will have meaningful impact in their classrooms and schools.

And perhaps that should bring me to 10). I know I'm still learning. I don't look for EduCon or any other conference to provide me with the epiphany that will cause some Copernican shift in my thinking. I think I'm still open to that, but I'm pretty well-read on education issues, and I'm surrounded by some pretty serious thinkers at SLA every day, so I have a pretty deep set of beliefs about what education can be. But EduCon still provides me with the opportunity to interact with over 500 really amazing educators who push my thinking, reframe ideas for me, deepen thoughts, push boundaries and generally allow me to think about "the adjacent possible." It's up to me to make sense of it when it is over, and to figure out what the little 'e' epiphanies were and how they will impact my practice in the year to come.

Thanks to everyone who came this year and made me think. And thanks to everyone in our funky little school community who worked so hard to put the conference on.

See you at EduCon 2.5!

One of the things I'm always meaning to do on my blog but don't do as often as I'd like is break down how we do some of the things we do at SLA. So when someone asked a really good question on Facebook, it seemed like a perfect time to turn the answer into a blog post. Here's the question:

I have been involved with schools that have an advisory system -- but it seems very challenging to bring it into the public school system since teachers are not trained to be advisors. How do you suggest we work towards solving this issue?

The most important thing is this: Prioritize it. So what does that look like...

1) Schedule it with real time and don't make that time the dumping ground or the place you steal time from every time something comes us. Don't make it first thing in the morning so it is easy to skip. Treat it as a real extra class that teachers have to work to prepare for, because while it may not be as much work from a grading perspective, the time and energy teachers will spend caring for children, getting to know families, dealing with issues that come up is real. Advisory cannot be the thing teachers deal with after they have dealt with everything else or it will just be "homeroom" like it is in so many places. For us, that means scheduling time for Advisory for 50 minutes at the end of the day, twice a week, and teachers teach four classes plus Advisory instead of five classes plus homeroom as they would in other School District of Philadelphia schools.

2) Don't assume that teachers know how to care for children - teach them how to. I love Carol Lieber's book "The Advisory Guide" (published by Educators for Social Responsibility) as a foundation text. Do a book study with teachers about it. Then have a subcommittee that helps to draft a framework for the curriculum with broad themes for each year and examples of ways to execute them. Our committee has our Health teacher, our counselors and some of the teachers who are really invested in Advisory and they set the agenda (with me) on how to run workshops for our faculty.

3) Make it matter by making it a core function of the school. We don't have traditional Parent-Teacher Conferences here. We have Parent-Student-Advisor conferences where teachers all write narrative report cards which are then processed / talked about / reviewed by the parent, student and advisor together. This makes the Advisor the primary link to the families, which goes a long way toward really making the power of Advisory tranparent to families (and teachers.) If a child gets in trouble, advisors are looped in immediately. Our college counselor works with the advisors so that they are the primary school-based adults to help students make decisions about their college process.

4) Don't make it "just another class." Teachers know how to teach classes, but they may not know how to have a class that is really more group high school survival therapy than any other subject. So you have to help teachers resist the urge to create assignments that can be graded and have homework, etc... I always think of Advisory as a pressure value for kids, so if it becomes something that has a lot of homework and requires a lot of work for a grade, it defeats the purpose.

In the end, the shorthand we use for the way we think about how Advisory drives much of the way we think about the relationships between students and teachers can be summed up with two ideas - first, you have to think of Advisory as the soul of your school. Second, with everything you do, remember that you teach students before you teach subjects. At SLA, we believe there is a difference between saying, "I teach English" and "I teach kids English." Kids should never be the implied object of their own education. Advisory is the place in the schedule where that idea has its core and then it spreads into everything else we do.

The "great teacher" myth continues. This is the myth that says, "If only we could get rid of the really bad teachers, we'd have better schools." It's particularly pernicious because it sounds so easy, right? Let's just dump the bottom (5% / 10% / 33% - depending on who's writing) and even if we only replace them with "average" teachers, we'll be better off, right?

Right?

In his NY Times column today, Nick Kristof would have you believe it were so.

I'm not going to take this one on from the "how do you really know who the great teachers are?" lens.

I'm not going to (directly) take it on from the "we have a massive young teacher attrition rate that research has shown has little to do with pay and more to do with working conditions, so where are these great (or average) new teachers coming from?"

I'm going to ask this question, "When are we going to start asking ourselves why we make it so hard to be a great teacher?"

And this isn't about professional development for struggling teachers.

This is about school-level reform.

The nation - or at least its politicians, its pundits and its billionaires - has made this debate about labor (read unions) by atomizing this debate down to the teacher level. And while there is room for conversation there, it misses the larger picture. Our schools are structurally dysfunctional places which, therefore, makes teaching and learning much harder than it needs to be, so that teachers -- and students -- have to succeed despite the system, rather than because of it.

As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster, and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human -- and more humane - for all who inhabit them.

Let's stop falling victim to the soft thinking that just finding more "great teachers" and getting rid of all the bad ones is the way to reform education and start asking ourselves - "How do we create schools that make it easier for all students and teachers to shine?"