[So I struggled with trying to find something new to write for the Blogging for Real Reform project that happened on Nov. 22nd. I wasn’t sure how to tackle the big issues right now, because whether it is the NYC Chancellor fiasco where the mayor doesn’t think that having a leader who has any connection at all to public education or Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Wireless Generation which guarantees the continued creep of massive for-profit in education or Bill Gates and Arne Duncan negating the years I’ve spent both in graduate school and in my career honing my craft, it all feels a little overwhelming. Then last night, I guest taught a grad school class for a friend of mine, and talked a lot about the ideas I’m really passionate about. And then I got a question – "What can we do now?" So, this is going to be the first in what I hope to be a series of blog posts about what different stakeholders can do to affect change. Most of it is small-scale.. I don’t know how to win the big fights right now, not front on. But maybe if we can change the conversation at the grass roots level in thousands of cities and towns all over the US, we can make change. But we have to start focusing on zones of control and affect change at the level we can. We can’t throw up our hands or just try to teach our kids and be unaware of what the larger landscape is. With that…]

A pre-service teacher asked me yesterday, "What can we do to affect change?

Here was my answer… made more coherent over the passage of time.

Don’t just take any job. Work in places that you agree with. And ask a ton of questions when you interview. Include some of these:

• What is the pedagogy of this school?
• How do you nurture, support and develop that pedagogy?
• (To a principal) – What is your theory of action? How does innovation happen here?
• (To a teacher) – How does what you do in your classroom relate to the whole of learning in the school?
• What is the common language of teaching and learning here?
• How do you create systems and structures to support and enhance that language?
• How do teachers learn and grow here here?
• What is the role of the student here? (And don’t settle for "To learn.")

And only work in the places where the answers are in line with what you believe. And never work in the places that cannot answer those questions.

Teachers have more agency that we know. We can choose to work in healthy, nurturing places, or we can choose to work in toxic places. Thinking that you can be the martyr… the best teacher in a bad place… won’t help your development as a teacher or as a person. The more teachers demand to work in healthy places, the more teachers work to make sure they can work in places that share a pedagogical vision, and the more teachers "manage up" – even in the hiring process – they can move principals to develop better answers to those questions, and they can help schools to find the right teacher matches.

It’s easy to feel powerless to affect large-scale change as a pre-service teacher. But schools are looking for the next generation of great young teachers. The profession needs to replace an aging workforce. If young teachers (and older teachers) have a commitment to the idea that schools that work have a shared pedagogical mission, shared systems for implementing that vision, and a common language of teaching and learning, young teachers can make a powerful difference before they ever teach a class, and they will be more likely to be a strong teacher, and they will be more likely to escape the "martyr syndrome" and many of the issues that cause so many of our young teachers to leave the classroom so quickly after they find it. And then our young teachers will have the time, space and support to truly make a difference in the lives of the kids in their care.