Questions addressed in this post:

• Why are classrooms such rowdy places?
• Why is teaching so hard?
• Why does professional development not make bad teachers good?
• What can we do about all this?

Here’s a learning environment as described by one Veronique Mintz:

Talking out of turn. Destroying classroom materials. Disrespecting teachers. Blurting out answers during tests. Students pushing, kicking, hitting one another and even rolling on the ground. This is what happens in my school every single day.

“Why I’m Learning More with Distance Learning Than I Do in School.” New York Times, May 5, 2020

In the noisy battles between teachers and disruptive students, learners like Veronique, a 13 year-old public school student, are often ignored.

Yet here she is, crafting a meaningful article for a wide audience–deftly rendering sensory details, marshalling evidence to support her claims, and ending on a hopeful note.

All it took was a pandemic. While the educator humbly gropes for the right modes and milieus to bring out the best in each student, sometimes help comes from elsewhere.

The Problem in Schools

In her NY Times Opinion piece, Ms Mintz explains three of the conditions that support her success as a distance learning student:

1. access to rewindable and pause-able video recordings of lessons and instructions.
2. teacher office hours, during which she can ask questions and receive feedback.
3. a complete absence of frequent interruptions by rowdy students.

These conditions, reasonable requests in any education setting, correspond to her three recommendations for when students return to physical school:

First, teachers should send recorded video lessons to all students after class (through email or online platforms like Google Classroom). Second, teachers should offer students consistent, weekly office hours of ample time for 1-to-1 or small group meetings. Third, teachers who are highly skilled in classroom management should be paid more to lead required trainings for teachers, plus reinforcement sessions as needed.

Numbers one and two, being more technical/logistical in nature, are not exactly easy, and yet feel do-able.

The third condition and corresponding recommendation encapsulates a complex and difficult challenge situated at the nexus of teacher development and student experience. In settings such as the one Ms Mintz describes, students spend many joyless hours learning nothing–a criminal misuse of young people’s time and potentially an experience which leads to lasting trauma.

Why is Teaching so Hard?

For the new teacher in the thick of daily battle, or even for the grizzled veteran instructional coach, it’s easy to forget why being an effective teacher is so difficult. Let’s remember a few reasons:

• Time: because it happens to be 8:30am on a Tuesday, twenty-five fifteen year olds and one adult should be prepared not only to focus on learning Physics, for example, but approach the subject in a very particular way. This alone is an unreasonable expectation.
• Biology: in the case of secondary students, neurological wiring wrought by over two million years of evolutionary momentum compel them to test social limits and reject authority.
• Self-Inflicted Flywheel: the very things new or nervous teachers tend to do, talking too much and giving unclear instructions, negatively compound not linearly but exponentially.

No wonder Ms. Mintz notes that in her three years of middle school, she’s “encountered only a few teachers who had strong command of their classrooms — enforcing consistent rules, treating students fairly and earning their respect.”

Having strong command of a classroom is not easy, nor is it particularly intuitive. To put this another way, the mindset and will to develop as a teacher evolves complexly across time.

Strong teachers cultivate a mindset of ownership and believe their actions impact students’ behavior, despite the fact that these are young people who sometimes give the outward appearance of ungratefulness, arrogance, laziness, inarticulateness, rudeness, indifference or worse.

To become good, it seems that teachers need to believe that disruptive students in particular are young people who want to succeed, but who have unmet needs. To become great, a teacher may need to come to see the disruptive students as revolutionaries, rising up against an unacceptable situation with the admirable idealism of the young.

While cultivating this fragile mindset, developing teachers will be required, in full public view of these students, to try new approaches and strategies, many of which fail at first and most of which contradict their own notions of what worked for them as learners–especially if they were a “good student.”

Also: the newer teacher will need to see their classroom as ground zero in the battle for gender, racial, and social-class equity, and facilitating what happens in class — who gets to speak, who gets heard, who and what’s imbued with status — as their part in bending the world toward justice.

The point is that it’s not only difficult to execute what needs to be executed to teach well; it’s also difficult to believe the things you need to believe in order to be successful.

Given this, the worse, but perhaps not unexpected, news is that we don’t really know how to help teachers get good.

Adult Learning in Uncertainty

Tom Lovelass doesn’t necessarily deserve the last word on this subject, but he does take a comprehensive look at Professional Development analyses with these questions in mind:

Do we know how to transform bad teachers into adequate teachers?  Can we take teachers who are merely adequate and make them good—even outstanding?

“What do we know about Professional Development?” February 19, 2014

After noting the incredible number of federal dollars spent on teacher development, Lovelass points to several rigorous studies designed to measure the impact of PD on student learning, each of which showed PD having a statistically insignificant difference from placebo. He concludes his report in this way:

When I hear people say that we know what good PD is, or that we know how to improve teaching but lack the will to do so, my initial reaction is that people who say such things are engaged in wishful thinking.  We are flying by the seat of our pants.  Teachers who seek to improve their own practice are primarily guided by common sense, intuition, word of mouth, personal experience, ideologically laden ideas about progressive or traditional instruction, the guidance of mentors, and folk wisdom—not a body of knowledge and practice that has been rigorously tested for its efficacy.

“What do we know about Professional Development?” February 19, 2014.

For me, embedded in this dismissal of PD as such is the key: if we are uncertain of what works, we must try many things, and provide varied opportunities for new teachers to learn and to shine, including:

• Coaching based on classroom observations, student work, and survey data
• Access to observing exemplary teachers in action
• Formal and informal channels for supportive colleagues to provide guidance
• Chances to teach outside a designated subject area and grade level
• Supportive year-end reflection dialogues
• Teacher internships and service learning, potentially transformative experiences that reveal new possibilities for teaching and learning
• Consistent social-emotional support and training
• Opportunities to acquire new technology and craft-making skills, or learn languages and modes of artistic expression
• Play, games, and purposeless joy

Which brings us back to Veronique.

Student Learning in Uncertainty

Just as there’s no established path to flourishing as a teacher, students walk their own individual and winding way toward becoming themselves.

Amidst this mystery, educators can provide varied opportunities for students to learn, express themselves, and discover and share their gifts. Ask students to:

• Daily: speak, write, draw, and move
• Weekly: collaborate, concentrate, refine, build, argue, design, and provide input to teachers on their experience of learning
• Monthly: immerse in experiences, gather data, interact with professionals, compete, create beautiful products, perform, pursue justice
• Yearly: conduct rituals, celebrate and reckon with the past, plan for the future, express desires and gratitude

Variation is the strobe-light which, when lit from different angles and altitudes, illuminates the dark and discovers what sparkles.