We've Got the Teacher Shortage We Deserve in 2023

 American school systems are experiencing a teacher shortage so severe that some positions go months and months unfilled due to lack of applicants. This is especially true in some certification areas like math, science, and special education. And, I would add that policymakers can't apply band-aids fast enough to fix this problem, because it is a problem that unfortunately we deserve. 

In the past 30 years, education leaders and policymakers have done more to make teaching so unpalatable, that fewer and fewer people are choosing to become teachers. This is not a problem that we can easily market or buy our way out of, yet we have education leaders and politicians still trying to do just that.

Has anyone considered that perhaps we should look at what teachers are being asked to do? Maybe the work just stinks.

Educators’ Quixotic Quest for Magic Potions and Elixirs to Make Learning Happen

 “In nature, there are no separate events. Nothing happens in isolation—not touching your head, not holding someone else’s hand, not looking at the stars, not breathing—nothing.” Alan Watts, Just So Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

There is a great deal of wisdom that educators ignore to their own peril. Alan Watts’ body of work is often ignored because of its heavy emphasis on eastern religions, such as Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism. It may be because his thought is too incomprehensible to Western Thought. It also may be because much of what he has to say disrupts our conventional ways of thinking about life and the universe. It does have the power to disrupt some of our thinking as well about education too.

Take the current belief that educators still hold onto that there is a solution out there that can be applied in teaching situations and bring about a desired result. That simple way of thinking has been at the heart of teaching since the turn of the twentieth century, and it seems sound. However, have really gotten any closer to finding the magical cures that will ultimately bring about the learning results we desire?

The data says we still struggle to close learning gaps and obtaining the results we desire. Why is that? It is rather simple, but much of the educational establishment stands with their fingers in their ears, like a little child who refuses to hear what they do not wish to hear. They want to continue to pour torrents of energy and effort into the search for the one measure A that can be applied to Student B and get result C.

I’ve written about this before, here and elsewhere. We are so caught in this quixotic quest for the miracle, we ignore the very wisdom of Eastern religions and what Watt’s so clearly points out: “Nothing happens in isolation.”

So how does this apply to educational thinking? It is rather simple: The search for a single practice or method to produce desired educational results is futile. Education, Teaching, Learning, Classrooms, Schools, Systems, Teachers, Students…are complex, and trying to approach the act of teaching by ignoring CONTEXT is a futile exercise and akin to a searching quixotic quest for magical potions and elixirs to make learning happen.

But, and I have to add this BUT to this information. But, the educational system and those that inhabit it like this status quo. As long as there hope that a magical method of teaching or learning exists, then snake-oil consultants and professional development pitch-persons have wares to sell. They can stand in the cyber-square of the internet hawking these wares and gobble up tax money galore. One can’t help but question for whose benefit such a system provides.

Time for School Leaders to See Teaching as 21st Century Profession, Not Assembly-Line Work

School leaders and policymakers have a serious misperception about the role and job of teaching that undermines teaching as a profession and perpetuates the view that the role of teaching is akin to being an assembly-line worker. It is no wonder American politicians, policymakers and corporate reformers have bought wholeheartedly into the idea of value-added teacher evaluations. When you hold a deep-seated view that a teacher’s job is simply to “add value” in the form of knowledge as students roll through the classroom assembly line, then the perception is that the “physical act of imparting knowledge"---or teaching in this view---is just about being physically in front of students and nothing else.

Americans have long held the belief that teachers aren't doing their jobs unless they are in front of kids. Planning periods and professional development as well as tasks like grading papers are never calculated into the teacher workday, and that demonstrates fully that the American education system stubbornly holds on to a dated and ancient view of both what exactly is the act of teaching. In short, we just can’t give up the view that teachers should only be paid for the actual time they are in front of kids. We then expect them to spend hours in the afternoon-evenings and on weekends grading papers, lesson planning and attending to their professional development.

It’s time for school administrators and policymakers to remember that good teaching starts with all those things teachers do outside of the classroom too. It’s too bad we can’t let go of this factory model view of teachers and start to discuss some real 21st century solutions that will allow teachers to increase their professional capacity by restructuring both the time and amount of time teachers spend in front of students. After all, are our teachers babysitters for parents while they work, or are they professionals who are actually engaged in one of the noblest of professions?

In his book, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

“In lower-secondary schools, on average, Finnish teachers teach about 600 hours annually (i.e., 800 lessons of 45 minutes each). This corresponds to four teaching lessons daily. According to the OECD, in the United States the average annual total teaching time in lower-secondary grades is 1,080 hours, which, in turn, equals six or more daily lessons or other forms of instruction of 50 minutes each.”

In other words, the Finnish education system sees teaching much more broadly than we in America do.  They see those activities---professional development, tutoring, grading student work, providing remediation---as much a part of “teaching” as being in front of the classroom. For years, American education has expected teachers to do these things on their own time, even with paltry efforts to provide planning period time during the school day.

If we wanted to do one thing that would have the greatest impact on teaching and student learning, perhaps we need to more broadly define “teaching” as the Finns do. For example, we might:

• Consider teacher planning times as sacred and not fill them up with mundane and mandated meetings. Allow teachers to use that time for planning, grading, and even re-mediating students.
• Rethink our views of “teaching” to include all the things effective teachers do---planning, creating new learning activities, grading/providing feedback, tutoring, professional development. We really do need to stop thinking of teachers as only doing their job when they’re in front of kids.
• Hold professional development during the regular workday rather than expect teachers to sit in the afternoons after spending all day teaching. I still remember how scattered and tired my mind was at the end of the day was after facing multiple classrooms full of students. Professional development need to be melded to the act of teaching. It should be included as part of the workday.
• Look at how we can restructure our school days to allow for more time to do all the things required to be a good teacher instead of expecting that teachers do these things on their time, at home or after school. It’s no wonder teachers burn out and tire of the profession. How many other professions are expected to work without pay? We need to create schedules that allow teachers to devote time to all the tasks of teaching.

We Americans, especially school leaders, politicians, and policymakers have a mistaken perception of what should be included in the act of “teaching” when it comes to how we structure compensation and what teachers do day-to-day. We like to boast about 21st century schooling and teaching, while at the same time we hold on stubbornly to a 20th century perception of the teaching profession. Maybe it’s time we let that go. We need to redefine teaching broadly in how we manage our schools and include time for teachers to do all that teachers do in their school day.

Establishing a PBL-Friendly Culture in Your Classroom, School or District

“PBL (Project Based Learning) offers a unique opportunity for teachers and students to join together in the inquiry process.” Thom Markham, Project Based Learning: Design and Coaching Guide

With the advent of Common Core Standards, there's a great deal of talk from school districts about moving to Project Based Learning because the kinds of learning asked for in those standards can better be approached through a PBL model.  I have heard several districts speak about this change in instructional approach as if it were some kind of basic cosmetic change that could make to their schools. Many still view PBL as instructional strategy that can be added or bolted into their existing schools and classroom systems. Unfortunately, Project Based learning won’t work that way. It can’t be bolted on top of the existing classroom practice. To be successful with PBL requires a fundamental change in teaching philosophy for everyone, from the teacher in the classroom to the school board member. 

Because teaching is fundamentally different in a PBL classroom, for that instructional model to work, a deliberative effort must be made to establish a “PBL-Friendly Culture,” as Thom Markham calls it in his book, Project Based Learning: Design and Coaching Guide. This is no easy year-long agenda of PBL workshops and get-togethers either. Changing a school into a PBL friendly culture means letting go of a lot of conventional school beliefs and norms and deliberately fostering new ways of thinking about school.

Establishing a “PBL-Friendly Culture” basically means to establish and classroom and school that “Builds on Trust and Care.” On the surface, this is a fundamental, must-have shift in thinking, from “controlling students” to moving toward a more learner-centered approach where students have a great deal of autonomy. In practical terms, it means showing students that you trust them by allowing them to take more control of what happens instructionally and culturally in the school and in the classroom.

According to Markham, three core factors can maximize our effort and desire to successfully establish a “PBL Friendly Culture” in your classroom, school, or district.

• Caring Relationships: It is a fundamental truth that people perform better when they know people care about them. If they don’t think people care about them, then instead of engaging in the tasks of the job, they look for escape. In a "PBL-Friendly Culture" a caring relationship begins with recognizing and respecting an individual student's autonomy. This means not seeing students as somethings to be controlled or objects of conformity, but as an individual to be accepted for who they are. It means giving them the freedom to inquire and learn. Autonomy, of course, does not mean there are no rules. It does mean that educators must rethink the nature of rules, in a word,  that students don’t exist for rules; rules exist for students. Rules should fundamentally help students become increasingly autonomous. No student is going to perform at peak levels in the cold, impersonal atmosphere where they have no autonomy and the expectation is that they must check who they are at the door. We must care for the students in the classroom to foster in them the desire to perform at the levels necessary for PBL to be successful.
• The desire for meaning and purpose: In a “PBL Friendly Culture” there’s no place for meaningless work, and busy work is seen as blasphemous. A teacher never, ever gives students work to “just keep them busy.” Assignments and activities must always have a place in the larger goal or purpose of the project. Our students are not dumb. They recognize busy work the minute it hits their desk. There’s no place in the "PBL-Friendly culture" for “Let’s-keep-them-busy-no-matter-what-thinking.” Giving students meaning and purpose in a PBL-friendly culture means doing that everyday all the time.
• The power of mastery: The key to giving students the “True Power of Mastery” which fosters good feelings about what they've done or are doing, is to give, all-the-time, meaningful and relevant projects and learning assignments. Students feel great when they have completed a particularly self-satisfying project. That makes them want to do even more on the next project. The power of mastery lies in its ability to tap into intrinsic motivation which is a key to establishing a “PBL-Friendly Culture” in your classroom, school, or district.

As Thom Markham points, if you want to establish a “PBL-Friendly Culture” in your school, you must establish a “drive and thrive atmosphere.”  In a nutshell, such a place is where students “work hard for results because they believe in themselves.” As Markham makes very clear:

“Check your beliefs here: If you hold a secret conviction that students are naturally unmotivated, or that they need to be frightened into learning, you will not get the results you want in PBL. Successful PBL depends on your belief that young people want to learn and will perform well when respected by an adult and guided appropriately.”

I fear that districts who talk about implementing project based learning across their schools, do not fundamentally understand all the changes necessary for successful implementation of PBL. Fundamental to making PBL work is establishing a culture that respects and accepts students as individuals, and that fosters student effort and desire to learn, not conform and make the next best test scores.

Reminder in Midst of the Negativity in Education About What's Important!

Most of us have repeatedly been reminded by the media and politicians about how bad the state of education is in our country. They've blamed teachers. They've blamed teacher-education programs. They've blamed administrators. Usually, those who make those inferences base them on test scores, which we all know is only a small piece of what we're really about as teachers. In case you're feeling a bit down about what you do as a teacher and educator, perhaps this will provide you with a bit of an uplift in spirit. This video from the New York Times reminds us what is really important in teaching and in life.

Powerful Opportunities for Content Creation & Publication in the Digital Classroom

I began teaching in 1989. My first classroom didn't have a phone in it and the prime piece of technology I had was one of those old fashioned turntables. I remember using that to share my love of blues music with students by playing a Muddy Waters album for them in connection to a short story we were reading. I had a cassette tape player too, and I remember sharing a dynamic dramatic reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells” using this device. I also had access to a VHS player, and I remember sharing scenes from the movie Roxanne with my students as we read the play Cyrano de Bergerac. That was the extent of the technology in my classroom at the time, and yes I did have a chalkboard and colored chalk that students enjoyed using to share drawings and messages on my chalkboard throughout the day.

But the point of this trip down memory lane was not to tell you how old I really am. It was to simply say this: Technology when I began teaching in 1989 seems quaint and unsophisticated now, but even at that time, I pushed the limits of teaching and learning with the tools that were available. I used the technology, not for its own sake, but because those were the tools that helped me teach in the most engaging and effective manner. In a sense, that mindset is really the same mindset of a 21st century teacher.

Engaging students in my 1989 classroom and in a 21st century classroom presented the same challenges. I found myself trying to answer these kinds of questions then, and also in the 2006 when I began to heavily engage students in the use of digital technologies.

• How do you engage students who are more interested and engaged in things outside of school than inside it?
• How can I make the best use of technologies to both engage students in my content and teach them to make the most of the technologies themselves?
• How can my instruction best prepare students for a world outside of my classroom and school?

These questions are just as relevant now as they were then.

But here in 2013, digital technologies offer ours students so many more opportunities to learn in ways extending beyond the four walls of the classroom.. Here's what students today can do:

• Students today can be publishers of content. In 1989, it was a struggle to find ways for students to publish content. It was usually limited to either making physical copies and distributing them or posting on classroom walls. Today, blogs and content sharing platforms make it possible for students to publish for global audiences. Publishing content has become cheap and efficient in our digital classrooms.
• Students today can easily create multiple types of media content. During classes in 1989, my students were mostly relegated to creating content that was either textual or graphic, with the graphic content mostly being freehand drawings. Collages were also common. In today’s digital classrooms, students can still create text, but the tools to create video, photos, audio have all become prolific and easy-to-use. Students in today’s digital classrooms have power tools of multi-media content creation at their fingertips.
• Students today have many, many more choices of the kinds of content they can create, hence they are not limited to the research paper or dioramas (Anyone remember these?). In 1989, most of my students content creation was mainly writing papers, creating collages, making drawings, writing/acting out original plays, or creating other kinds of genres. Today’s students have new forms of textual media, new forms of graphical communication tools, and new ways to engage audiences digitally. Students in today’s classrooms can create their own apps, web pages, blogs, vlogs, with the whole global community being the limit.

For those of us who began teaching in the late 1980s, the classrooms of today offer our students so many more opportunities to engage in content creation, content publication, and content sharing. In spite of this, the fundamental educator mindset is the same. In 1989, to create an engaging classroom, I made the most of tech tools I had then. In 2013, that tech toolbox has expanded enormously, so teaching and learning through content creation and publication has expanded as well. It's this wonderful 1989 perspective of teaching and learning that makes me appreciate the greater possibilities of the 21st century classroom.

Strategies for Teaching Students to Critically Validate Online Information

“With all these online searching aids at our disposal, we should be committing to teaching our children accurate and creative searching techniques that are applicable across every discipline.” Alan November, Who Owns the Learning: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age

Our students hold within the palms of their hands and with their laptops, access to all of the world’s information, updated continuously and free, yet like Alan November indicates, I am not sure we consistently teach our students “accurate and creative searching techniques” that they can use in all content areas and in multiple contexts, to validate information. As educators, we still too often leave students to their own devices when sorting through online search results. Also, we only critique their sources when we evaluate their end products, instead of helping them in-process. But in our 21st century classrooms we desperately need to employ specific activities and teaching strategies designed to foster our students' abilities to critically validate online information.

In his book, Who Owns the Learning: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age, Alan November advocates for turning students into researchers as a means to having them take ownership of their learning. For students to effectively take ownership of that learning though, we can ill-afford to turn them loose with Google and expect them to dazzle us with what they find out. Though many students use the Internet daily, they are still most often “web-illiterate” in that they do not know how to validate the information they find on the web. As educators, we owe it to them to teach how to examine the validity of what they find during their research activities.

If we want to begin today teaching our students to critically validate what they find on the web, what can we do immediately in our schools and classrooms to make this happen? Using Alan November's suggestions, here's some starting points.

• “Train students to understand when, why, and how to use online content.” This means teaching students to know when turning to online sources will yield the information they want, and when going offline for information is more effective. For example, students might find a considerable amount of current information about the Boston Bombings on the Internet. However, if they want to find out what their local municipality is doing to address these kinds of dangers, there might not be much information available on the web. Instead, they might set up an interview with the town police chief or mayor to get information specific to their town or city. The reasons for using online content in the first place is to obtain the most current information available on a topic because the web’s information is quickly updated. Also, the web offers access to sources not readily available elsewhere.
• Teach students as November suggests to “Assess Online Information Sources.” This involves three things:
• Teach them to examine the purpose of the online information. The hidden message behind online content is not always apparent. Teaching our students to look for those hidden messages is important. Once they are able to critically examine why the content exists, they are also in a position to validate it. For example, too often content is provided by business, industry, and ideologically oriented sites to shore up their agendas. That does not make the information wrong or invalid, but it should caution students to further check facts. Why information exists on the web is an important consideration when trying to validate it.
• Teach students to examine the author. Being able to search the web and elsewhere for other work published by the author is a key literacy skill for our students. Because anyone can publish anything checking out the author is important. The web makes it easy for students to verify the credentials of content creators. Once again though, they will need to verify in multiple ways those stated credentials and that other stated publications are valid too. Knowing the author of web content is a key way to determine web content's validity and our students need to know ways to do just that.
• Teach students to examine the context of the online information. As Alan November points out, there are indicators of web content’s reliability by where that content is placed. For example, content on a personal web site is often not as reliable as content on a major university’s site, or the site of  a well-known, highly regarded publication. Still, students need to always be cautious. Even the most reliable web places can be wrong. Remaining skeptical until information can be verified in multiple ways with multiple sources is an attitude we should foster in all our students.

As we move toward getting our students to do more and more authentic, 21st century learning activities, it is vital that we focus more on the process of validating web information in our teaching. As November indicates, our students might use the web and Google every single day, but they do not often know how to validate all the information coming at them. As 21st century educators, we must teach students how to critically validate all the online information they encounter.