Teacher Leadership Today

Time to End Teaching Quality Fight & Seek Third Way

In a new commentary published by Education Week, TLN co-founder Barnett Berry, president of the Center for Teaching Quality, calls upon policymakers and education policy wonks to abandon the "either-or" struggle over the best way to select, prepare and evaluate teachers and work together on balanced policies that both increase student success and enhance the profession’s future.

“In the early years of this new century, the fate of teaching in America still appears to be up for grabs. Whether, in grabbing for it, we tear the profession apart remains to be seen,” Berry writes.

“Over the past two decades, researchers of all ideological stripes and methodological perspectives have converged around a view that teachers are the key to whether or not students achieve. Yet little consensus has been reached on how best to recruit and reward teachers, how much preparation talented candidates need, how to use test-score data in assessing teachers, or how long we should expect to retain recruits in teaching careers.”

Are America’s public schools trapped between the front lines of a “not-so-civil policy war, with no possibility of reconciliation?” Berry asks. “Maybe not. I suggest we begin moving beyond the rancorous rhetoric and imagine a future of teaching in which the following conditions prevail . . .”

Visit the Education Week website to peruse the intriguing conditions around which Berry believes school reformers can find common ground. You can also leave comments of your own. If you’re asked to sign in, Ed Week allows registered non-subscribers to access several free articles per week. More information here.

Illustration by Gregory Ferrand for Education Week.

Getting Homework Right

If you want to sort a roomful of teachers into figurative piles, ask about Homework. Last month, a member of the TLN Forum did so in our virtual chatroom, closing her query to her colleagues with “Where do you stand on students working on assignments outside of school?” A day or so later, we had a pretty good dialog piece for our Teacher Leaders Network page at Teacher Magazine. You can tell it touched a nerve by the 16 comments left by teachers (who had 16 different points of view!).

Just this week, Jon Hanbury, a TLNF’er from Virginia, spotted this post at the ASCD Inservice blog (worthy of aggregation, BTW). It offers a smart summary by middle grades English teacher Dina Strasser of Robert Marzano’s research-based take on homework. It’s chapter three in his book The Art and Science of Teaching. Strasser’s Cliff Notes are a great read and also drew some good comments, including a reference to a new study by the Canadian Council on Learning that found little homework benefit for students below about 8th grade – and only then if “new rules” were followed. (Same as the old rules: purposeful and relevant to classwork.)

[If you're curious about the t-shirt, it was spotted by a blogger on the torso of a junior high school student, during a swim meet. The first reason: "I didn’t do my history homework because I don’t believe in dwelling on the past." Last time we looked they were sellling them on eBay.]

21st Century Skills and the Future of Learning

I know of no better way to leap beyond the current debate over whether 21st century “learning” or “skills” are anything different (and therefore worthy of educators' special attention) than to spend an hour exploring the new education trends presented by the Ohio-based KnowledgeWorks Foundation, which they've titled 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning. This isn’t your grandma’s education experience we’re moving into. The contexts of learning are going to be fundamentally different, whatever cries you may be hearing from the core knowledge lifeboats.

Many will recall the “Map of Future Forces Affecting Education” published in 2006 through a KnowledgeWorks partnership with the venerable The Institute for the Future, a 40-year old nonprofit research center specializing in long-term forecasting. Since then, KWF leaders have made presentations on the Map at many major conferences, piquing some interest but perhaps not reaching a larger audience because of the Map’s “strange factor” (visit and you'll see what I mean).

At the new Forecast website, the map metaphor has been moved to the background in favor of a more user-friendly tab/jump approach – although KWF considers the 2006 Map on ongoing resource. They explain:

The first Map helped all those concerned about education to engage with the future, and, as a result, make better decisions in the present. The 2006-2016 Education Map is still relevant, but the trends presented have evolved and deepened over the past few years. The 2020 Forecast represents both new trends and the evolution of the themes from the 2006 Map.

We encourage you to review key documents and research from the 2006-2016 Education Map as they are still valid and meaningful in the context of today’s world and the 2020 Forecast.

The new website's presentation is designed around these themes: Knowledge, Economy, Society, Systems, Organizations, and Self. The content is also more proactive, with many paths leading to recommended activities. To offer a single example, clicking on Society reveals this question: "Your sense of community and your own identity are changing in a global society. How will you shape our shared world?" Click on Learn More and you find the Driver of Change labeled "A New Civic Discourse," with appropriate discussion and action resources. To the right you'll find related Trends you can explore. Here's KWF's summary of the Civil Discourse change driver (the unusual terms can all be explored as well):

The convergence of participatory media culture, diverse diasporic movements (the formation of dispersed populations that share common roots and identity), and frameworks for creating new commons (bottom-up means of managing shared resources) set the stage for re-articulating identity and community in a global society.

Education will find itself a contested resource in the crossroads of these forces of change. It will become part of the civic discourse in multiple new kinds of public forums and spaces as “educitizens” make visible the status of schools and of educational decision-making, resources, and activities in their communities. School administrators, district level staff, and teachers will need to learn how to communicate and interact in a bottom-up world of engaged educitizens. (emphasis added)

That's something different, don't you think? The Future of Learning homepage includes a link to KWF’s previously established “The Future of Education Is Here” blog – which has shifted its emphasis to news and commentary that relate to the Forecast. If you’re still fond of paper and ink, you can order a print copy (up to 150) at no cost, or download and print yourself.

There are so many fresh and challenging perspectives in the Forecast content that it’s better to point you toward it than try to summarize very much of it. I’ll leave you with the homepage teaser:

A Radically Different World

If you think our future will require better schools, you're wrong.

The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments.

If you think we will need better teachers, you're wrong.

Tomorrow’s learners will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles.

As every dimension of our world evolves so rapidly, the education challenges of tomorrow will require solutions that go far beyond today’s answers.

As America sets out to spend hundreds of billions on school innovations and “reforms,” how many education and policy leaders are even aware of the carefully considered trends and issues embedded in this Forecast? I hope it’s more than the perhaps too-cynical observers of eduworld like myself might predict.

-- john norton

Image: Transliteracy, from the KWF website.