The nice things we can't have.

This is the article I discussed in the last post:

Leaders Must Address Teacher Well-Being With Action, Not Just Self-Care Talk

By listening to educators and building supports that reflect their genuine needs and concerns, these leaders are shifting school cultures in ways that go beyond lip service.

By Paige Tutt

August 16, 2024

(published in Edutopia, online magazine from the George Lucas Educational Foundation)

 

My thesis is that the reason we don't have these good things, generally, is because the way this system is constructed, with its cramped incentives and punitive approach, Administrators can't afford to offer them. They can't offer them because they have bosses even further removed from the classroom than they are, and whose concerns have even less to do with actual students.  

 

As you'll see, most of the good ideas involve giving teachers more TIME, which Admin can't give because they would have to take it from the stuff their bosses want them to do: the next new idea for raising attendance (Everybody got your poster paper?) or the hottest new piece of technology. 

Admin is left handing out teacher trophies because really doing the thing of supporting your staff is too risky. It's expensive and time consuming and the Big Bosses do not approve. The Big Bosses do not care if your school is replacing a third of the teachers every two years. They DO care if your paid-by-the-head attendance goes down or your test scores dip. Little Bosses care about what the Big Bosses tell them to care about. Following orders pays the bills.

 

That's not to say there isn't some excellent--if familiar--stuff in the article. There is, but it often comes off as pie-in-the-sky "You know what would be great?" ideas cooked up by naive (or cynical) teaching-adjacent consultant brains. 

 

Kudos to those making these ideas work in their specific settings, but what is missing from the article, and what is always missing in the way Big Bosses hand down edicts like stone tablets, is a vision for what these proposals look like in real life, in most real classrooms, in most real districts. 

 

While trying not to get too cranky, I'll break it down here: The article separates the actions that "go beyond lip service" into two basic categories:

START WITH TEACHERS.

and 

TREAT TEACHERS LIKE PROFESSIONALS.

 

 Then Tutt elaborates based on those education professional conversations:

 START WITH TEACHERS.

1.  Multichannel feedback
2.  Basic needs first
3.  Found time
4.  A parent sounding board
5.  Adopt a subtraction mindset

TREAT TEACHERS LIKE PROFESSIONALS.

1.  Rethink dress codes
2.  Include flexibility in PD
3.  Protect planning time

 

Let's start with STARTING WITH TEACHERS.  

1. "Multichannel feedback." This begins with Admin checking in regularly to see if the Teachers are Alright, you know, by asking them and asking them to fill out this or that survey. This assessing "the state of how teachers are feeling" through "one-on-one meetings or anonymous surveys" or an "open-door policy" takes time that teachers already don't have. 

Worse, after years of staff surveys, I never saw a single suggestion or complaint addressed in a meaningful way. Sometimes it was worse than pointless because if you told them the truth and they happened to read it, you became a focus of... scrutiny. Mostly it was just paperwork the principal had to collect to check a box and when I figured that out, I just turned the same one in every year because it was always accurate. That's discouraging in the extreme and certainly doesn't promote "teacher well-being." 

2. "Basic needs first." This is something along the lines of "Take care of the teachers so they can take care of the students." I want to quote at some length. See if you can spot the challenge:

When Mathew Portell was principal at Fall-Hamilton, he implemented a “tap-in/tap-out” system: Teachers submit a request via text message—no explanation needed—and within minutes two adults arrive; one adult takes over the class while the other checks in with the teacher. 

I don't know this school or this district, but thinking that there are two teachers available to rush (within two minutes!) to the aid of a third because they "just need a minute" is absurd. And thinking that deans or instructional coaches (must be credentialed, remember) can drop what they're doing and rescue a teacher in need beggars belief. Who are these extra education professionals wandering the hallways looking for crisis events? I never met them.

The article stresses that the "basic needs" of teachers ought to be a primary concern of Administrators:

Likewise, the essentials—like having time to use the bathroom and eat lunch—writes Sarah Miles, a former educator and now director of research for the nonprofit organization Challenge Success, are nonnegotiable, and leaders should prioritize scheduling time for teachers to meet basic human needs. This communicates that leadership prioritizes “stopping to fuel your body” and encourages staff to “take a break, slow down, see friends, and break bread together,” Miles says.

Time Time Time Time Time. The truth is that there is not enough time to do the job now, and these recommendations all require more time, time that isn't there. And the fact we're even talking about whether or not you get time to go to the bathroom is offered as a strategy for keeping teachers alive and teaching tells you almost everything you need to know about being a teacher.

 3. "Found time." Time again, this time it's giving back some of the time Admin has taken away. Word to Admin: Don't make teachers do stupid stuff. Don't have a meeting if there's nothing important to do. If it's important, don't have a meeting when an email will do. And don't send so damn many emails!

Time is the enemy, and so are the people who take it from you. 

 4. A parent sounding board. This is personal support for parent communication, in this case by a principal, which is a dynamite idea and one that probably works in a small elementary school with a dozen teachers. But imagine having fifty teachers and each one working with 150 middle school students or two hundred tenth graders. 

Teachers in middle and high school can access other means of support, both personal and electronic, but if you've got a hundred parent contacts to make, and you need to ask "Does this sound right?" you don't have time to go very far looking for it. Maybe you rely on a friend in the department or colleagues at lunch. Maybe you just go without the support. 

More support for parent contacts would be a lifesaver for lots of teachers, but the structure of middle and high school means most of us have to find it or invent it ourselves.

  5. Adopt a subtraction mindset. Right. Those of us who are old enough remember the spinning plate guy on Ed Sullivan, always trying to add one more plate without dropping the whole lot. 

Work, particularly (but not exclusively) in the type of small pilot school where I served the last ten years of my career, is a room full of spinning plates with Bosses always adding one more. My friends Nick and Link used to tell Admin that plus one means minus one. They had adopted a "subtraction mindset." My covert advice to young teachers was, "You need to let a few hit the floor. Break a few dishes." 

The Admin pushed back constantly and hard, but we were veteran teachers and mostly got away with it. It is admittedly a risky move for newer teachers, especially in an "at-will" environment with nonrenewal hanging over you. That, of course, made all teachers vulnerable and newer teachers the most vulnerable and prime targets for extra plates--and burnout.

 

Moving on to "TREAT TEACHERS LIKE PROFESSIONALS.

 From the article:

“A good principal never forgets what it’s like to be in the classroom,” says Carise Echols, principal at Theodore Jones Elementary School in Arkansas. Likewise, a principal never forgets that educators inside the school building are skilled practitioners, writes instructional technology specialist Mary Beth Hertz. “The best way to appreciate a teacher is to appreciate the hard work that they do and their high level of expertise.”

This one made me spit out my coffee. Most of the principals I ever had became principals precisely so they could forget what it's like in the classroom. The rest forgot anyway. 

The suggestions in this domain are decidedly tepid. 

 1. Rethink dress codes. Really? At least it's something a principal can do, I guess.

 2. Include flexibility in PD. This is just TIME dressed up. Plus, one of my earliest lessons in "Who's The Boss?" came in my third or fourth year. 

Big English Department meeting. We would be creating our own PDs to fill in half the required twenty or whatever. We'd build a matrix with two or three choices each session, and we'd conduct the meetings ourselves. 

So we spent the next week working on it and the next department meeting putting it together: Building an Essay, Romeo and Juliet, The Transcendentalists, Reciprocal Teaching, Song Lyrics, The Power of Propaganda. At the next department meeting we found out that it was all off; the district had sent over weeks of new required business. 

3.  "Protect planning time." TIME. Again. And again it's an elementary school with about 300 students. This time they're shuffling kids around to open up ninety minutes of planning time in the middle of the week. And again, it's hard to see how that works in other settings. 

Middle and high schools may have a hundred teachers and thousands of students moving through six or eight instructional periods a day with limitations on which sections are offered which periods with which teachers. The matrix is complicated and not easily manipulated. Smaller schools are even more constrained. 

Regardless, time is finite and already in short supply. More time for one thing is less time for something else. What Administrator will brave a confrontation with their Big Boss by telling them that "plus one means minus one!" Did someone say subtraction mindset?

TIME. TIME. TIME. And now, there's this:

The elephant that didn't bark: Testing.

The article doesn't mention it (maybe because elementary?), but the not-enough-time we used to have has been pulverized by the rise of The Big Standardized Testing Regime (again, h/t palan57.bsky.social), ruling the country since 2001.

The job is tough and was before the No Child Left Untested Act of stupid thousand and one, and all these good ideas were good back then and still are. but the testing dictatorship has made all the time, parent, burnout problems exponentially worse. 

It forces districts to do the opposite of providing time, support, and a professional work environment for teachers, the opposite of treating them as the professionals they are with the expertise they have. If you've ever been called into the office and asked to smile more when you talk about the test, you know exactly what I mean.

I have friends in schools right now, schools that monitor their teachers and their classes remotely to ensure the required time is being spent on test-prep. After No Child Left Behind and the cancer of testing metastasized, teachers-as-professionals became a Beowulf-level legend shared passionately by old teachers and ignored as irrelevant by newbies.

It wasn't always great, and it wasn't ever easy, but it used to be one thing, and now it's another. It's a system that prioritizes following orders and chasing promotions. Until the concerns of Administrators are permitted, incentivized to align more with those of their teachers and students than with their bosses, teacher well-being will remain just (self-care) talk.