When applying for a teaching position, in addition to your resume, you will need to include a cover letter (also called a “letter of introduction”) and at least one letter of reference. Many employers will require two or even three letters. Be sure you check with each employer on what their specific requirements are.
Cover Letter
While your résumé stays the same regardless of where you are submitting it, the cover letter should be personalized. Each of your cover letters can follow the same basic format in how it presents information, but the phrasing needs to be customized for the specific job or district. Remember to request an interview when writing your cover letter.
Letters of Reference
References are recommendations of employment that can be either written or spoken. References increase the potential employer’s confidence in your ability. Selecting appropriate references is a vital part of obtaining employment.
Each district differs in the method by which they obtain references. Some require that you have the reference writers be teachers in your region of the country? Compose a letter and mail it directly to them; others prefer to e-mail a form and have writers submit it to them electronically. Some districts, however, simply call and speak directly with the person listed.
No matter how the reference is submitted, the same references can and should be used for each district to which you are applying. Select references that have direct knowledge of your academic performance, career objectives, and positive statements of support. Avoid using relatives and personal references who may be biased. College instructors or academic advisors, student teaching advisors, or mentoring teachers would all be excellent selections as resources. Be sure to ask their permission before using them.
While your recommendation writers may prefer to write the whole reference on their own, it is okay to provide a few introductory sentences or a sample letter for them to base their own reference on. Many recommenders appreciate the help getting started.
Remember to thank whoever helps you with your cover letter and letters of reference. Just as you want your recommenders to be professional, thoughtful, and timely in their assistance, you’ll want to follow suite in how you deliver your notes of thanks.
A major mistake made by reform groups is to table educational reform efforts because the expenditure does not fit into the school budget. If children are America’s most precious commodity and the focal point of the nation’s educational system, then the lack of funding is no excuse to forgo reform efforts. Many school reform efforts are cost-effective and can be implemented by resourceful educators. When there is a lack of money, reform is contingent upon the faith and commitment level of the faculty and staff. Money should not be wasted on model programs and unsubstantiated trends. Reform groups will have to work diligently and efficiently to implement the chosen reform efforts properly and effectively.
When school reform is needed and schools have limited resources, spending money on curriculum can be intimidating. The curriculum chosen will need to be a good fit for both teachers and students. Math and reading should be the first concern, because they are the building blocks for other subject areas, as well the most frequent measure of future success. Success in these two areas bode well for success in other subjects at all grade levels.
Teachers’ professional development is a key factor for successful school reform as well. When analyzing reform budgets, it is important to set aside money to hire teachers with the ability to create and teach in-service professional development programs. The ability to train the staff and educators internally will save the school money, and will give the teacher/expert a feeling of usefulness.
For instance, a teacher with 30 years of experience and a demonstrated ability to obtain amazing results from her specific teaching strategies might create a professional development seminar to share her expertise. This saves the school an enormous amount of money, and saves the administrator the trouble and cost of hiring a consultant. Another low-cost/no-cost option is to hire professors from neighboring colleges and universities to provide professional development services to your district as a form of community service or to fulfill requirements to obtain or maintain tenure.
In the end, schools operating with limited funds to support reform efforts will need to be both resourceful and creative in order to effect positive change. Forward thinking leaders, committed and imaginative teachers, and a supportive community can contribute to change that improves the educational experiences of our children.
New teachers have several options once their degrees are finished. Some want to study further, whether in their subject area or cutting across to broader issues like special needs education or education policy. Others hope to travel, teach overseas and learn about different countries’ school systems.
In South Africa, according to an internal planning report by the Department of Higher Education, more than 15,000 new teachers are expected to graduate from universities in 2015.
Research shows that the first year at work istoughest for novice teachers. Some may be barely older than their learners, or daunted by having to manage large classroom groups. Some may feel intimidated that they have to master enough content knowledge to teach all the subjects in the primary school curriculum. Some may feel overwhelmed by the social problems in the community surrounding the school.
How best can the education system support these new teachers in such a way that they become competent and confident while also retaining their passion, enthusiasm and idealism? One possible intervention is induction, where novice teachers receive structured mentoring and support by more experienced teachers in their first year or two at work.
This has worked wellin countries as diverse as Switzerland, France, China, New Zealand and Japan – and there is evidence to suggest it could be very useful in South Africa.
A long term investment
The South African Council of Educators has mooted the introduction of an induction year from 2017. The statutory body believes that induction can promote the image of teaching by helping to identify those who are not able to live up to the profession’s required ethical standards.
I recently attended a presentation by independent education specialist Martin Prew for the Centre of Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg. Prew argued that induction enhances teacher effectiveness, strengthens teaching skills, helps with professional socialisation and, most importantly, has been shown globally tolower teacher attrition.
Nobody will contest the value of providing support to novice teachers. But the nature of this support, and how best to implement it, still needs much discussion.
Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, who has researchedthe issue extensively, told the Centre of Development and Enterprise there were several key factors for effective induction. These include:
trained mentors who can give useful feedback;
opportunities to view and analyse good classroom practice;
a reduced load for beginner teachers;
shared planning time; and
additional learning experiences such as seminars about assessment, how to work with parents, and so on.
This is much more than the general orientation to school rules and policies that often goes under the guise of induction. It requires far more time and commitment than is often available to senior teachers in the busy school year.
What, then, are some of the issues that should be considered as South Africa sets about designing an induction programme for new teachers?
Time, training, cost and certification
The first issue is time. This must be built into the crowded school day so that new and experienced teachers can get together and talk in earnest and thoughtful ways about their challenges, interventions and suggestions. Those designing the induction system must ensure that the pressures of a full curriculum and a myriad of administrative tasks do not mean such talk remains perfunctory, without analysis and reflection.
The second issue is that of training. An experienced teacher is not the same as a good mentor. Once mentors are identified, they themselves may need guidance on how best to support new teachers. The question of who will provide this training is at this stage not clear.
Cost is the third issue. School-based mentoring, which is sensitive to the context of the individual teacher and school, and is grounded in practice, has been shown to be most effective in the long run. However, a standardised model of mentor training will be cheaper to implement, as one set of guidelines can be developed and teachers can be trained in a centralised venue.
Finally, there is the matter of certification. Presently it is universities which have the legal competence to provide qualified teacher status. If full qualification status becomes dependent on passing the induction year, a new framework of certification will need to be developed with its own rules and requirements, as well as its own bureaucracy and quality assurance mechanisms.
It is very doubtful that this is desirable in a system which already struggles with the capacity to carry out its work.
An important discussion
None of these considerations should detract from seriously considering the introduction of teacher induction. Any intervention that can support new teachers and add value to the teaching profession is worth exploring.
All those involved in teacher preparation should look forward to a deep discussion about the purpose and potential of induction, and careful planning as to how this might be achieved.
It seems that graduating from high school is no longer the end goal of P-12 learning – earning a college degree has replaced it. By 2018, 60 percent of jobs will require a college degree. In a recent post, I wrote about the nationwide average high school graduation rate being 80 percent – which is admirable but also means that at least 1 in 5 kids won’t make it to college classes. When you factor in the high school graduates that bypass college completely, it seems that at some point America’s workforce will simply not be able to meet the demands of its employers.
When it comes to minorities who graduate high school and are ready for the rigor of college coursework, numbers are bleak. A new report from the College of Education at the University of Arizona found that less than 1 in 10 minority high school graduates in the state are adequately prepared for college. Non-minority students are not much better off though, with only 2 in 10 prepared for college after graduating from high school. A rise over the past 15 years in minority students in elementary and high school in state, as well as economic disparities between students of color and their white peers, are cited in the study as drivers behind the high school graduation-college readiness gap.
Arizona should not be singled out though. Of the 1.7 million high school graduates that opted for the ACT college entrance exam in 2012, only 60 percent were deemed “college-ready.”
Arizona is a standout example, though, of the way the changing landscape of the country is impacting P-12 education and the college demands that follow it. Childhood classrooms today look vastly different from the ones even 10 years ago and children, minority or white, come with different need sets. Teachers can learn only so much from textbooks and their own school experiences – they must have the resources to reach students from different backgrounds, and understand how those students will change over the course of the teachers’ careers.
In the case of Arizona, some mandatory Spanish-language education would be a start but the language barrier is only the tip of the iceberg. If students in Arizona classrooms are first-generation Americans, their own parents are not familiar on a firsthand basis with classrooms in America and certainly not the university system.
Even students who are academically ready for college may not be emotionally ready for the pressure and responsibilities of self-learning – both things that need to be taught before high school ends.
I also think that the assimilation mentally of generations-past needs to be forsaken. It seems to me that all of the energy that goes into trying to “change” minority students who enter the classroom would be better spent adjusting teaching methods to ones of inclusion. The global economy demands that students understand that the world is made up of diverse people with a variety of backgrounds, and languages. In order to succeed as a nation, that recognition must take place and those lessons must be included in the process of educating.
The “passing the baton” mentality also needs to be abandoned if students are truly expected to succeed academically after high school ends. If America truly wants to live up to its “Land of Opportunity” moniker, this generation of P-12 students needs to be viewed as a responsibility by their educators long after the high school graduation benchmark has been met. Instead of letting students make their own mistakes in early adulthood, at least when it comes to the future of their careers and livelihoods, educators should stay involved and help bridge the high school-college gap.
What programs do you think might help make this happen?
Recently President Obama announced his “It’s On Us” campaign that calls on all college-aged men to step up their efforts when it comes to protecting women on campus. The program also calls on colleges that receive federal funding to take a tougher stance against sexual assault and to have prevention programs in place.
The President has the backing of some celebrity faces to bring his plan some attention, including Kerry Washington and Jon Hamm. It seems like a winning plan on its own, but set against the context of the changing college landscape, some people are crying foul.
Less men are enrolling in college classes than they did even five years ago, as the number of women continues to rise. Several lawsuits have been brought by young men against their colleges alleging discrimination when it comes to assault cases — and some young men have won. There are over 30 cases still in the court system now, which represents a 400% increase in just 4 years. Some are claiming that young men are the actual victims because they are facing unfair judgments from colleges that are afraid of losing funding without making an assault statement.
All sides of these issues should be considered of course, but I think that President Obama is on the right side of the debate with his new campaign. Asking peers to watch out for each other, and step up when something seems awry, is a smart way to prevent a lot of the lawsuits in the first place. Colleges cannot control their student body outside learning hours and drinking on campus is not going away any time soon. So placing the responsibility to prevent sexual assault on the students themselves is an effective solution.
What do you think? Are young men getting a bad end of the deal when it comes to increased anti-sexual assault policies on college campuses?
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A guest column by Edgar Wilson
Somewhere over the last few decades, teaching and testing developed an adversarial relationship in America’s classrooms.
How can we evaluate teachers without standardized measures of outcomes?
Are students under too much pressure from high-stakes testing?
Are teachers “teaching to the test” at the expense of more comprehensive instruction?
The conflict and controversy is damaging to everyone involved in education—students, teachers, administrators, employers; everyone has an interest in seeing America’s schools be the best they can possibly be, but there is a lot of opinion and disagreement over what “best” actually looks like. In part, this is because we can’t even agree on how to measure quality.
In a presentation on the future of healthcare, Northeastern University professor Carl Nelson drew parallels between the field of management, and the evolution occurring in healthcare.
“We have the Big Data movement and data analytics not only providing appropriate diagnoses, but also guiding us all,” explained Nelson. “It can be used appropriately to guide decision-making, to make judgements.”
In essence, this means best practices growing naturally from more robust data.
Data acquisition in business, as well as in medicine, is occurring right at the point of implementation: wearable sensors, product-trackers, and communication systems all connected through the growing Internet of Things (IoT) enable data scientists to watch, live, as people and organizations operate. By aggregating social media statistics, watching how customers (and potential customers) interact with a brand, and what life events, interests, and behaviors correlate with consumer activities, businesses learn both about their customers, and themselves.
Examining all the data—passively generated and actively gathered—allows analysts to then identify shortcomings, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
“We have moved greatly in the field of management from management based on intuition certainly, over a long period of time, to a management based on evidence (evidence-based management),” Nelson said. “The same thing is happening and has been happening in the field of medicine—so-called ‘evidence-based medicine’.”
In education, the challenge has been—and in many respects, continues to be—reliable sources of “evidence” on which to base changes to best practices. As in management and medicine, intuition and expertise has an important role in education: teachers often remark at the rewards in witnessing “Ah-ha” moments in the classroom. It isn’t something measured or captured in a discrete assessment; it is an organic thing, the look on a student’s face when the elements of a lesson all click into place, that whirring of mental machinery once the fuel of understanding is suddenly injected.
Where’s the Evidence?
The trappings of business and healthcare have been upgraded to support Big Data’s newly prominent role. Analysts review measures of existing behaviors, collected and recorded on the spot, and use them to develop new, evidence-based best practices.
Tablets, laptops, mobile devices and other digital tools and toys are destined for a prominent role in America’s classrooms; that much seems safe to assume given current trends.
And just as the Internet of Things, applied in clinical settings and connected to individual patients, doctors, and institutions is providing new troves of real-time data feeds and outcomes patterns, so too can applications be deployed in classrooms and attached to individual students to give instructors a new, closer, quantifiable look into what drives learning outcomes.
Mark Oronzio, CEO of Ideaphora, is one of the innovators working to bring formative assessment—measuring the learning process as it happens—to a place of greater prominence in the classroom.
“What we’re looking to do is provide a more automatic assessment of a knowledge map,” says Oronzio.
His company’s product is based on an existing concept, knowledge maps, as a way to graphically represent and record the learning process.
When learning is captured as it happens—rather than by a summative assessment, which is aimed at determine outcomes following instruction—real-time data can be provided to both students, teachers, and even data scientists looking to correlate instructional methods with on-the-ground results.
“Aside from it being what we call an Authentic Assessment—it’s not a multiple choice quiz, where I got tricked, or because I’m not a good writer I didn’t do well on the essay—this is making connections and defining connections,” Oronzio explains. “We think it would be a more accurate assessment; it is actually a picture of what’s going on, and the connections going on in the learner’s mind. The other cool thing about it is, it is not a discrete test, it wouldn’t have to be administered necessarily.”
This is the essence of competency-based education (CBE), an ongoing method of assessment that, at best, might help displace some of the emphasis on standardized testing and high-stakes tests.
Snapshots of Learning
Abundant data makes a compelling argument.
Adding the capability to watch, measure, and analyze instruction leaves less room for politics and opinion to dictate changes to curriculum and assessment standards. By combining the principles of CBE with a method of visualizing and recording the associated data, education has an opportunity to launch into the Big Data playground.
Just as in business and healthcare, the educational revolution comes not just from the devices themselves gaining widespread adoption, but from the programs and applications whose use they make possible. It is far from a nail in the coffin of standardized testing, but it does demonstrate how technology can combine with traditional instruction to provide new windows into the academic environment.
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Edgar Wilson is an Oregon native with a passion for cooking, trivia, and politics. He studied conflict resolution and international relations and has worked in industries ranging from international marketing to broadcast journalism. He is currently working as an independent analytical consultant. He can be reached via email here or on Twitter @EdgarTwilson.
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A couple of years ago, I taught an afterschool class at a Seattle nonprofit, the Technology Access Foundation (TAF), which provides STEM education (science, technology, engineering, math) to children from less-privileged backgrounds. My students were 8-11 years old, and it was the first time that I had taught elementary school students.
The curriculum devised by TAF’s staff involves hands-on interaction with laptops to explore programming, robotics and audio editing. With a PhD in computer science and a range of experience teaching older students, I thought it would be easy.
It was anything but.
To allow students a lot of interaction with their devices, I avoided lectures and instead had the students work on their own while I went from table to table to help them individually. My hope was to give the children a chance to learn at their own pace.
The students, however, had other ideas. The minute I turned my attention to one, the others started playing video games. However nutritious the syllabus, they were drawn to the cognitive candy of flashy graphics and sound effects.
The problem I faced at TAF was a small version of the conundrum that confronts parents and schools everywhere: how do we prepare children for a technological world while avoiding the distractions of technology?
Diversions in India
I first encountered this problem about a decade ago in India. At the time, I was the head of a research team at Microsoft Research in Bangalore. My group explored ways in which computing technology could support poor communities. Education was one of our focuses.
Many Indian government schools boasted computer labs, but given limited funds, they often had no more than five or six PCs. With class sizes of 40 or more, this inevitably meant that crowds of children would huddle around each machine, with most of them unable to access the mouse or keyboard.
We tried an innovation in which a single PC was outfitted with multiple mice, each with an attendant cursor on screen. This customized educational software, called MultiPoint, allowed several students to interact simultaneously.
MultiPoint was a hit with students. A controlled trial showed that for some exercises, students could learn as much when they were sitting five to a PC as when they had a PC all to themselves.
A Technology Access Foundation student sneaking in a video game during an afterschool programming class. Kentaro Toyama, CC BY
However, when we tried to take the idea to other schools, we were stymied.
One problem we often encountered was that teachers would be overwhelmed with the mechanics of the technology. Without a dedicated IT staff or significant training themselves, they’d spend the first 15-20 minutes of a 50-minute class fiddling with the PCs to set them up.
Whatever the technology’s potential, in actuality, time was diverted from learning.
Technology’s law of amplification
Similar things happened in dozens of other projects we ran in education, agriculture, healthcareand so on. Despite our best efforts at good design, computing technology did not, in and of itself, lower costs, improve pedagogy, or make organizations more efficient.
Teachers didn’t improve just by using digital content; administrators didn’t become better managers through clever gadgets; and budgets didn’t grow with the use of supposedly cost-saving machines.
Anurag Behar, CEO of a nonprofit we worked with, put it succinctly:
“At its best, the fascination with [digital technology] as a solution distracts from the real issues.”
Other researchers have found a similar pattern. University of California, Irvine, researcher, Mark Warschauer, along with colleagues Michele Knobel and Leeann Stone, sums up this challenge in his paper:
Placing computers and internet connections in [low-income] schools, in and of itself, does little to address the serious educational challenges faced by these schools. To the extent that an emphasis on provision of equipment draws attention away from other important resources and interventions, such an emphasis can in fact be counterproductive.
In other words, while digital tools can augment the efforts of a well-run learning environment, they harm dysfunctional schools by distracting them from their goals.
The amplification principle also applies at the individual level.
Children have both a drive to learn and an affinity for quick rewards – digital aids amplify both. Few people would imagine that children left in a room with an encyclopedia and enticing toys (even educational ones) could, on their own, summit the intellectual mountain that is a K-12 education.
Handing students a computing device and expecting them to teach themselves is the virtual equivalent of being left in such a room. Rigorous research by economists Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson finds that laptops provided free to students result in no educational gains of any kind.
In other words, while technology can amplify good pedagogy, there is no way around quality adult guidance for real learning.
People first, technology second
At TAF, I was lucky to have a good manager and several terrific teachers as role models. They recommended that I set some rules. For example, I asked students to close their screens any time I was doing a demonstration. I prohibited free time with the laptops if they came early, so that they wouldn’t start off with games. And anyone caught playing video games during class was sent to my manager for a few words of discipline.
Implementing these rules was a challenge at first, but young children are mercifully responsive to firm adult direction. Within a couple of classes, the students got used to the new class culture, and they started focusing on the learning activities.
What I learned was that even in a class about computers, maximizing screen time wasn’t the goal. The first requirement is the proper mindset – focused motivation in students and capable adult supervision.
If technology amplifies human forces, then a good outcome with technology requires that the right human forces be in place first.
As described by insidehighered.com, new student amenities such as lazy rivers are “bad for optics” when talking about the cost of college. The article explores the notion of luxury amenities on college campuses driving up the cost of tuition.
Because New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized these high-priced student enhancements, they may be unfairly correlating these spending projects with the cost of tuition.
With student loan debt spiraling out of control and tuition continuing to spike, both lawmakers believe that these types of amenities aren’t needed.
But according to insidehighered.com’s article, tuition isn’t rising because of a lazy river. The price of higher education is going up due to cuts in state budgets.
“These lazy rivers are not the reason why student debt is soaring seemingly out of control. The big problem that higher education faces today, at the public side, is cuts in state spending,” said Professor of Economics at the College of William and Mary, David Feldman to insidehighered.com.
This certainly is an interesting antecedent when looking at college costs. As mentioned earlier, adding lazy rivers and climbing walls is “bad for optics” when discussing how colleges charge students for their education. In this case, LSU is in the process of upgrading its student recreational facilities by installing a lazy river and other amenities.
While tuition isn’t impacted by the cost of the upgrade, which is $85 million, student fees were effected. That decision to increase student fees was granted by the school’s student government, not leadership brass.
If anything, this just seems like a popular talking point for politicians gearing up for the 2016 election season. The cost of college and student loan debt will be hot butting topics for voters nationwide, and to hinge “lazy river” and “rock climbing wall” onto the rising cost of college will simply add fodder to the conversation.
The U.S. education system is becoming increasingly modernized. Efforts in the business world to improve leadership were ignored by school administrators for a long time, but this is beginning to change.. Researchers are scrambling to propose models that would steer the education sector to new heights. Most of the efforts to improve leadership have sprung from the fact that now, more than ever, there is increasing pressure on school leaders from the government, communities, and various highly placed observers, all of whom are concerned about the state of education in America. This is especially true in light of reports that have found American education lacking when compared with other developed countries.
One of the new ventures being considered as a leadership solution is entrepreneurial leadership. One aspect of entrepreneurs that stands out is their positive influence on creativity and economic growth, both of which are commodities in high demand globally. School leaders can draw valuable lessons from entrepreneurs when it comes to being innovative, motivated, and goal-oriented.
Many studies have been dedicated to entrepreneurial leadership in the business sense, especially for small enterprises, but few have linked it to school leadership. Perhaps this is due to the fact that school leadership has traditionally been seen as separate, likely because the success of a school is not measured in dollars. However, among many other similarities, schools and businesses share an emphasis on obvious, measurable results.
The entrepreneur’s drive has been the main focus of many research studies. Schumpeter describes this drive as “the will to conquer,” “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom,” and “the joy of creating and of getting things done.” While these developments accurately describe an entrepreneur’s desire to succeed, they do not explain where the so-called “Schumpeterian entrepreneurial endowments” come from. This will be the basis for our focus on entrepreneurial leadership.
Recently, researchers have recognized that entrepreneurs do not successfully build new ventures without possessing effective leadership behavior traits. A good example of this is the requirement that business founders create a vision for their firm, and inspire or influence others to see and understand their dreams. This is a good trait for attracting employees and acquiring the necessary resources for growing their ventures.
Entrepreneurs have to set the initial goals in a way that rewards workers. They need to show leadership because they are founders of their ventures; there are no established standard operating procedures or tried and true strategies that they can fall back on when starting from scratch. This is the main difference between entrepreneurs and corporate managers, since the latter often have more well-defined goals, objectives, structures, and work procedures to guide them. This may be an advantage to entrepreneurs, since the problem of substitutes and/or blockers of leadership that are usually associated with the larger and more established organizations are less of an issue.
Though the importance of leadership in entrepreneurship has been established, there has been a lack of research on the forms of leadership behavior that are required, and which prove most effective. Additionally, much of the entrepreneurship literature on this kind of leadership has been one-sided, focusing mainly on empowering leadership behaviors. The failure to include the conditions caused by other behaviors, such as directive leadership, may be harmful to any entrepreneur. More specific research is needed to explore the benefits of entrepreneurial leadership for schools; after all, an educational breakthrough could be just around the corner.
The factor that ultimately determines how successful students will become academically is the teacher(s) that they are assigned to. The qualities of good teachers are varied; some are effective using kindness, while others set a high bar for their students and never waver. Each teacher will have to find his or her way through the everyday practice of being in a classroom, and no two teachers will educate in the same way. Like all aspects of our lives, including love and relationships, Americans grow up watching teachers on the big screen. Movies that celebrate strong teachers inspire the next generation, particularly when it comes to underpriviledged schools.
As I began to research this series, I pondered an interesting idea: what if all teachers in America were “required” to watch and thoroughly discuss the movies on my list? With one exception, all these movies deal with rebellious and underprivileged youth in urban schools and economically depressed family backgrounds.
What these movies have in common are teachers who rise to the occasion and whose methods are unorthodox. They are all unconventional in their methods, but they are all – or become – dedicated and compassionate and completely concerned with the welfare their students – as opposed to principals, fellow teachers or even school boards.
In To Sir, with Love (1967): Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier), an engineer by trade, comes to teach a class in the East End of London, full of obnoxious and unruly and underprivileged white students. He wins them over once he abandons the posture of the “typical” teacher and begins to level with them. He teaches them that to have respect for others, they first have to learn to respect themselves. In the end, what was to be a temporary job becomes his vocation. Everything we see in this movie is worthy of emulation by all teachers everywhere.
Up the Down Staircase (1967): In this classic, a young idealistic woman, Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis) starts teaching in a “problem” school in an urban setting — a really rough neighborhood. At first she is naïve and her students laugh at her. But slowly she begins to think about what kind of “kids” her students are, and begins to see them not as enemies, but as young people who need her help to get out of the cycle they are in. Eventually she breaks through to them, not so much by breaking the rules, but through compassion and understanding. Once again, it’s the quality of the teacher that makes the difference and her dedication to her profession (which, once more, becomes permanent).
Teachers (1984): This is another one where we have yet another underprivileged school in a tough neighborhood. Here, the hero is Alex Jurel (played by Nick Nolte), but the most interesting and memorable feature of this movie involves another character (Herbert Gower) played by Richard Mulligan. When a mental institution tours the school, Herbert detaches himself from the inmates and takes over a history class. His first act as authority figure in the classroom is to pick up the textbook, look at it, frown, and walk to the window and toss it out, to the surprise and delight of the entire class. By the time he is found out and taken back to the mental institution, he has managed to transform the whole idea of teaching history. As he is led by attendants from the mental institution through the crowded corridor of the school, the teacher played by Nick Nolte salutes him in an obvious sign of respect. Perhaps all good teachers should be a little crazy? Not a bad idea.
Dead Poets Society (1989): This is the exception to the underpriviledged rule. Here we are not in an inner-city school, but in a privileged private school for boys. John Keating (Robin Williams), an alumnus of Welton Academy in Vermont, comes back to his alma mater as an English teacher. His first act of business is to invoke the carpe diem theme and thereby to encourage his students to live in the present and to love poetry. His asking them to tear out the introductory pages from the textbook is another brilliant move. He calls that kind of “literary” claptrap “excrement.”
This is another brilliant teacher who breaks the rules, and that’s really the secret of his success. In the end, he is betrayed – both by the administration and one of his own students. He is made the scapegoat for the suicide of a student whose egomaniacal and rigid father drove him to it, but Keating’s teaching ends up being blamed for it. The real tragedy of this story is that a clearly brilliant and unconventional teacher is booted out for all the wrong reasons. When after his departure things get back to “normal,” things also return to being hollow and insipid.
In all of these movies, the teachers begin as outsiders to their students, and end up becoming peers (and in some cases, an outsider to other teachers and administrators). The teachers take their eyes off the curriculum to look at what their students really need to learn, even if that means tearing pages out of textbooks, or throwing them out the window.
In the next post, I will take a look at a few more movies that feature teachers and their inspiring tales in the classroom. What would you add to my list?
Many administrators in higher education rise from the faculty. However, when a faculty member is promoted to an administrative position, becoming a director, department chair, or deans, perhaps, it can be quite a challenge to master the art of leading.
To get some insight into how new administrators can learn to effectively manage and lead, I recently sat down with Dean Amy Hillman of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University to talk about promoting for within and some of the strategies that work best in an educational setting.
Q: First, tell me some of the key reasons for and benefits of promoting from within, selecting administrators from established faculty members?
A: Making this choice is similar to a private business choosing whether to bring in an outside manager or CEO, or to promote an insider. There are advantages to both. When significant trajectory change is needed, often an outsider is best because he or she can see the organization anew and shake things up. However, if a radical course change is not needed, then there are a lot of reasons to look inside. First, insiders know the organization. This advantage cannot be overemphasized. Insiders know the culture, generally the way things work, and have insights into the faculty, staff and students. Second, promoting from within in any organization provides career advancement for key faculty who want to grow into administration. Retention of top faculty talent as administrators is more effective and less costly than losing top faculty to take administrative jobs at other universities. Finally, while insiders know the organization, the organization also knows them. They have a personal network and have already established some social capital that will help them succeed in their new post.
Q: What is the most important benefit, in your experience, when it comes to promoting a faculty member to an administrative position?
A: Continuity of the elements of the organization that are its strengths, without sacrificing the benefits of change.
Q: When you promote a faculty member to an administrative position, you essentially start up a transitional phase for them and for the university or department they are going to lead. In your experience, what are some of the most important features of this transitional phase?
A: Setting clear direction is important for any department or unit, but it can’t be done without the new leader getting into the new role and having some time to assess the best path forward. Early in the transition, it’s important to listen to all the stakeholders while learning the full scope of the new responsibilities. After people feel heard, they are much more inclined to follow direction from new leaders.
Q: What, would you say, is the biggest challenge for new administrators going through this transitional phase?
A: When you’ve worked somewhere as a faculty member for a long time, it’s pretty easy to think you know a lot about the school, but an administrative job opens your eyes to all sorts of things you didn’t know about. The toughest challenge is learning the new responsibilities, while reframing your view of the organization.
Q: The W. P. Carey School of Business has promoted from within on a number of occasions and done so quite successfully. What are some of the strategies you have found to be most effective for managing this important transitional process?
A: Having multiple mentors is great. For example, new department chairs have peer chairs in other disciplines, who are more seasoned. Also, staff within their units have rich history that is invaluable. Supervisors and peers at other universities can also be a great source of advice.
Q: What steps does the W. P. Carey School of Business take to support administrators when they are transitioning from a faculty position to a leadership position?
A: We reduce expectations and workload in teaching and research to allow focus on the administrative position. We have more frequent meetings with the new administrator’s supervisors and team members early in the transition, and we always talk about how to improve, whether they’ve been in the job for days, months or years. Finally, discussing the transition back to faculty is also important.
Q: Which supports has the W. P. Carey School of Business found to be most effective?
A: Mentoring.
Q: Lastly, what are your top recommendations for a faculty member who is shifting into an administrative position? What can they do to make the transition successful from the start?
A: Recognize that you may be an expert in your field, but you may not know much about the administrative role in the organization and may need management coaching. Being open to feedback, asking questions and, in general, humility are a great start.
And that concludes my interview with Dean Amy Hillman of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Thank you for these great insights and for all that you do to support our leaders in higher education.
Teachers have long known that not every student is perfectly suited to traditional classroom setups, but with budgets tight, doling out individual attention is not always a reality. What if there was a way to make the traditional classroom setting work better for everyone though?
Research has found that classroom seating arrangements have a great impact on student performance and behavior. A study done by Angela Hammang at Montana State University found that when carefully crafted seating charts were in effect, teachers were twice as successful reaching students and that the attainment of lower ability students was doubled. In her research, Hammang experimented by moving students around in different seating charts to help them find their optimal place, in this case it was a biology classroom, based on learning styles and personalities. She also looked at groupings by gender and past grade performances. In all cases, the students performed at a higher level when the teacher assigned seating in a calculated manner. Students on the underachieving end of the spectrum showed the most improvement when classroom seating was developed with thought, and not simply assigned based on the alphabet or another random manner.
It’s clear that finding the right classroom seating assignment benefits students and educators, but how can it be accomplished without asking too much of the teacher’s time? How can the guesswork be removed?
A Simple Solution to Classroom Seating
Duncan Wilson has 16 years’ experience as a teacher who was looking for a way to streamline classroom practices to make the most of the time he spent with his students. He met software engineer Gintautas Sasnauskas a few years ago, and together they formed Edukey Education Ltd in 2011 to put the technology behind some of Wilson’s ideas. His first project? Software that guides educators through the process of assigning classroom seating based on reasonable conclusions about the students. ClassCharts is available to all teachers for freeand allows for collaboration between classrooms and among teachers. It gives students the best chance at success, no matter what classroom they are in. Since the software became available in 2013, more than 70,000 teachers have signed up and more than 2.5 million students are in the system.
The software was developed based on the following truths that Wilson experienced in front of the blackboard:
Positive student behavior is necessary for an optimal classroom experience for the children in it.
Students’ personalities and how they interact with each other impacts their learning potential. Grouping students with complementary personalities leads to higher levels of achievement.
Tracking student behavior, and sharing that information with other educators and administrators, allows for better resources and intervention.
Teachers who are familiar with the names of all their students improve the self-esteem of those children and can better assign praise when it is due.
Aside from the “warm and fuzzy” feelings between teachers and students, and students and their peers, that intuitive seating charts provide, there are some practical implications too. There is more data than ever available on students and provided to educators – so much so that it can all be overwhelming and useless without the right implementation.
ClassCharts uses data rich information to present teachers with the key data that they need to make informed seating decisions and to tackle behavior issues. When integrated between classrooms, teachers can see how the behavior of their students ranks other places and together educators can create plans to guide students toward higher achievement. Schools that upgrade from the free version to the whole-school option give administrators and other school leaders the opportunity to see which students may need the help of extra learning resources. There are even options for informing parents of behavior issues, negative or positive, to keep them abreast to how their children are performing at school.
A New-Fashioned Approach
Most teachers have probably implemented seating charts at one point or another, and perhaps have put some of the ClassCharts concepts into play. It quickly becomes clear to a teacher when two particular students will not be productive near each other or when a certain student would fare better at the front of the classroom. The technology behind ClassCharts goes far beyond the seating basics though, and even calculates factors like students who receive free lunch, or have special education needs. The priorities of an individual school are also taken into consideration when ClassCharts creates a seating chart. All of the variables that a teacher would normally have to weigh are simply input and processed. Simple. And effective.
It’s interesting how something that seems as simple as a seating chart has such complicated implications for student achievement. With smart seating chart implementation, though, students can perform at a higher level and teachers can enjoy the good behavior that accompanies it.
Do you feel like seating charts positively or negatively impact your classrooms?
Take time to look at www.classcharts.com. I promise that you will not be disappointed.
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