Pedagogue Blog

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Student assessment is a necessary evil of the teaching profession but what is actually most effective?

Ankur Singh, formerly a student at the University of Missouri–Columbia, took an English class in his junior year of high school that influenced him profoundly.

“It was the only class I’ve ever taken where the lessons I learned will carry with me for the rest of my life, and after completion, I felt ten times smarter,” he says. The teacher focused on the development of the students’ critical-thinking skills and ensured that they were able to analyze poems and essays. He was keen to allow each student to form his or her opinions.

Because Singh loved the junior-year English class so much, he expected the college-prep AP English course he enrolled in during his senior year would be equally enjoyable. However, it turned out to be an awful experience. The critical-thinking skills he had honed the previous year were of no use in the new class; instead, the classes focused solely on preparing them for the inevitable exam. “It frustrated me to no avail, and I ended up doing very poor in AP English,” Singh says. “And I found the same thing in all of my other AP classes, which seemed more focused on college preparation and standardized tests rather than genuine learning.”

Singh began to wonder what the real purpose of education was. “All around me were students studying diligently, stressing out about their grades, homework, the ACT, college essays, AP tests. And here I was not caring about any of those things. Were there no students in this school who wanted anything more than just a college degree and a job?” He began to feel lonely, and then angry. Finally, during an AP French exam, he used the time to write a furious letter to the College Board, expressing his misgivings.

Though he expected to be reprimanded by his French teacher for writing a letter rather than taking the exam, she listened sympathetically and told him that she felt the same frustrations with the system. Though she had wanted to take the French students on field trips to a French bakery or watch a French film, she was forced to teach to the test. “Maybe if the students themselves spoke out against it,” she said, “it could all change.”

As Ankur Singh’s story demonstrates, the current model of assessments can lead to frustration in students and teachers alike. In a previous article, we outlined ways in which administrators in education might manage the hiring of qualified teachers and how they might also use the availability of qualified teachers to promote student success in the classroom. In the following articles, we will look at the use of multiple assessment measures in determining a student’s abilities and academic potential.

The basic premise of this strategy is as follows: Many states and school districts rely on large-scale assessments when making decisions about student grade progression. Despite the evidence that such assessments are not always an accurate reflection of a student’s academic abilities and despite the reality that most testing experts warn that high stakes retention or promotion decisions should never be made by a single assessment, states and school districts rely on these assessments.

How can we change the way we look at student assessments – and how can they benefit our students as a result?

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Answering the call to teach is a start – but there is so much more that goes into becoming an effective educator. Without better teaching education, certification, and specialty standards, we will never be able to rise above the current pass/fail system that dominates our public schools.

Case in point: Josie felt called to teach. She had worked with children supervising museum visits and had enjoyed that experience so much she decided to become a teacher. After getting her master’s in education, she completed two years of field work and felt prepared to teach. Like many beginning teachers, Josie experienced difficulties in her first year of teaching.

She was working long hours – spending more than twelve hours a day at school, which didn’t include the hours of preparation – and began to get stressed out. She comments: “I was unfamiliar with the resources available to me and how to access them. The teacher who had my classroom before me left behind a wealth of books, guides, and programs, but the amount was overwhelming, and I had little direction. Instead, I planned everything from scratch. Everything I did was homemade, the night before.”

As she worked around the clock, including on weekends, she wondered if she could continue to do the job. She remembered that fully half of new teachers quit before they complete five years of teaching, and wondered if she would be among them. Eventually, Josie used a search engine to seek help and discovered a resource called the New Teacher Center. She hooked up with a mentor, who advised her to keep one day of each weekend free. The mentor met with her weekly, and they worked together on ways to structure her days and allow student work to guide her instruction.

“Because of my mentor,” Josie says, “I have been able to feel a sense of control, which has allowed my creativity to flourish. I know where to plug in great ideas, and I can come up with engaging ways to teach, now that I have a better sense of what to be teaching! I have someone to go to for guidance. I don’t feel alone anymore.”

Josie’s story indicates that anyone in a support role for children in the public education setting should have an appropriate academic background and appropriate practical training to fulfill their job description. Their qualifications and training should align to their job experience. Individuals working as reading specialists must have the academic knowledge and specific training in literacy.

Anyone serving in the capacity of a special educator should have a similar level of knowledge and training in their area. School counselors, too, should have a standard of knowledge and training and be able to demonstrate a practical readiness to problem-solve and apply support solutions specifically to individual students, rather than relying on cookie-cutter models. And mentors can be enormously influential for teachers at the beginnings of their careers.

Of course, it is the school districts and the schools themselves that must ultimately enforce these standards in their hiring practices. The benefits of doing so are clearly immense, potentially reducing retention and social promotion, for starters, and ultimately producing better-educated, well-rounded graduates of the public education system.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

We need to hire better teachers. Period. That starts with better teacher training. The idea of identifying qualified, appropriately trained teachers, and then ensuring that they engage in continued education and training during their career, requires adjustments to hiring standards and implementation of employment models that may be different from the polices and models currently in place.

One very basic change requires is that all teachers be certified. This would affect quite a significant number of existing teachers, of course. A second needed change is a requirement that teachers have experience and specific knowledge training in the subject or subjects they teach, especially at the high school level. In other words, any teacher who is teaching mathematics must have a degree in the field. The basic argument is that teachers must demonstrate that they can teach students the knowledge and skills and that they can teach them in the context of a broader, enriched curriculum, one that truly affords students a rounded education, rather than an education that teaches to tests.

The idea that anyone with a basic college education can act as an effective teacher is flawed; not everyone has what it takes to teach successfully, particularly without specification. Instead of hiring teachers out of desperation, districts must take the time to apply due diligence to the process. We would not let a basic college graduate with no bookkeeping experience do the accounting for our schools – so why would we ever allow teachers in the classroom that are not exclusively qualified?

School districts have to ensure that the teachers they hire have viable classroom experience, and also that they have the relevant theoretical knowledge to be able to effectively problem-solve, addressing the needs of all students in the classroom. This is such a key point to eliminating retention and social promotion issues – and it means more children learning at optimal levels.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

What if the tools to eliminate retention and social promotion already exist in our classrooms?

What if all we need are more effective teachers?

Given their centrality to the student’s learning experience and to the management of education as a whole, it’s obvious why effective teachers form the most important alternative to retention and social promotion policies. With qualified, competent teachers, most students exhibiting learning difficulties should nonetheless be able to achieve enough academic progress to warrant advancement to the next grade. Indeed, what this conclusion might indicate is that there should be some internal streaming within grades of the American education system.

Students struggling with literacy or math skills could be streamed into a specific classroom either for a specific grade or for the teaching of a specific subject. The focus of the teaching could be to address the specific challenges experienced by the individual learner, to essentially teach to the student, to interpret standards and expectations for the particular student, and to play to their strengths and target their weaker areas for development.

According to Bellanca, the most successful attempts to teach for intelligence entail several basic assumptions. First, teachers must acknowledge that traditional methods for teaching are not always wrong. There are, Bellanca suggests, many high-achieving students who thrive under the traditional approach to teaching and many typical students or low-achieving students who can improve under a more traditional teaching focus. The key is that traditional methods are inadequate for many students who are less achievement-driven.

Because all students are expected to learn a specific curriculum, it is important that all students have the opportunity to be taught in a manner that enriches their learning. This applies to high achievers as well as to those who struggle academically. When faced with a less motivated student, however, a teacher must be able to develop a strategy to target their specific needs. Individual teachers must have a greater repertoire of methods.

More than this, best teaching practices should concentrate on building new theories of intelligence. Teachers should be familiar with new theories of intelligence and be able to build on them in their teaching practices. We do not have the space in this volume to elaborate on specific theories, but it is appropriate to mention Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, Robert Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence, Daniel Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence, and Reuven Feuerstein’s theory of structural cognitive modifiability.

The second point is that the public education system should encourage teachers to regard the process of teaching as a strategic act of engagement, consistent with new theories of intelligence that identify active engagement of students’ minds as a prerequisite for learning. Indeed, teachers have support to apply planning as a means of facilitating the effective application of proven engagement strategies. By regarding teaching as a strategic act, teachers can go about the designing lessons and units that integrate a variety of strategies with targeted content so that each student understands the required knowledge and develops the required skills.

Third, teachers have to understand that it takes more than a review of theoretical information to change teaching practices. Continuing education for teachers is crucial but it must include more than theoretical discussions. There must be some effort for teachers to learn to apply new teaching strategies in the classroom, with guidance to ensure that best practices are actually achieved. In other words, the education system should develop scenarios for teachers to receive regular practical training in addition to theory-based continuing education instruction.

Finally, teachers must also be aware that changing their teaching style or otherwise enhancing it is also going to require, in most instances, that students make changes in their own learning styles. Indeed, when teachers encounter students who are struggling academically, the need to change learning styles may be very immediate. It should, however, be recognized that changing learning styles can be extremely challenging for students. Especially when teachers are making changes to their teaching, it is important for them to be aware that the change process has equally significant ramifications on the student’s side of the desk.

Beginning from an abstract, theoretical point of view and using that to construct a framework or big picture may work in some classroom scenarios. On the other hand, starting with a hands-on classroom test of a new method may be the best approach, and will allow students to be involved in the subsequent evaluation.

As alternatives to retention and social promotion, effective teachers function as the most immediate tools available to the education system in terms of identifying at-risk students and applying all that is known about education and teaching strategies and the capacity to adjust teaching models and the like. This could help at-risk students to master the knowledge and skills needed for them to be able to successfully meet standards for graduation. Like any tool, however, teachers need effective handling as well. They need to receive regular training updates, access to research information, and access to networking opportunities.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

How do we support teachers to help them achieve the level of competency required in America today? Are we doing enough to support what we expect them to accomplish?

As part of the third-year evaluation activities, one study asked a group of lead teachers to indicate what they valued most in the ORSI effort to enhance teacher experiences and provide supports.

According to the results, teachers most valued informative professional development that they could take back and incorporate into their classrooms. They also reported valuing the experience of being treated like professionals because it helped them to change practices in classrooms when improvements were needed. The study also indicated that teachers valued being part of a network, being able to share information with other professionals to discuss practices that could improve student learning.

When forced to accept a new curriculum and make difficult changes in instructional approach, teachers most valued having access to support groups and workshops on the aspects of effectively teaching new material, especially math and science topics. Listening to nationally recognized trainers were also said to make a positive difference when it was necessary to adopt a new curriculum and make difficult changes in approach.

In other words, teachers value support from the institution of education itself. They also value the opportunity to be exposed to information on best practices for teaching and for information about curricula and standards. Allowing teachers to understand why the system expects them to teach certain knowledge and skills helps them to be more effective at their jobs.

Strategies such as providing regional networking and direct assistance to schools also helped remove the isolation and access issues for teachers looking to acquire new skills. Access to information, including hands-on materials, information on teaching strategies about advanced content, and opportunities to work with other teachers on the same grade level emerged as important support strategies. Teachers also value the administrative support of principals and superintendents who can pass along useful, research-based information.

According to the ORSI, most school administrators strongly supported requests of teachers to attend regional trainings that promise to improve skills in raising student achievement in math and science. One third-grade teacher reported that “ORSI professional development targets specifically the programs we use, and recommends practices for teaching more effectively within those programs.”A fifth-grade teacher indicated that “professional development opportunities now are convenient and well-publicized within our school. We are now encouraged to attend professional development.”

Adequate supports like these help ensure that teachers are consistently able to set students at the center of instruction, helping teachers to guide students and implement practices that enhance and fine-tune the teaching of the individual child instead of the class. Entire districts can benefit when school and district leaders allow teachers to examine curricula and learn new teaching practices by networking with their colleagues.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Beyond academic knowledge, what is a teacher’s responsibility in classrooms? What life skills are needed and which ones actually help prevent retention?

An awareness of how to teach children skills for healthy relationships and conflict resolution is crucial to successful academic teaching as well as moral teaching. What part of the challenge of teaching healthy relationships lies in is creating a different power dynamic within the classroom. The norm in traditional authoritarian classrooms is an imbalance between children and teachers, with teachers having to manage the imbalance between their power and their relatively powerless charges.

Aaronsohn thinks it inevitable that children find themselves learning through something of a “hidden curriculum” because of this power imbalance. This learning is based on their inability to negotiate their ideas or feelings, and especially on the difficulty, they experience in having their needs met in any functional way.

Although it is unconscious in most instances, teachers feel pressured to adhere to administrative standards, forcing children to produce “work” and exhibit “behavior” within parameters that are perhaps too narrow to be functional. This inevitably leads to more frustration and anger between teachers and their students in a traditional classroom setting. This is not an environment that can be conducive to learning or positive interactions between teachers and students.

The alternative approach Aaronsohn outlines depends on a basic philosophy of unconditional positive regard. In other words, it is helpful to work on developing a model in the classroom that builds the confidence of students, not only in their teachers, through positive reinforcements, but also through the development of methods to achieve emotional balance and honesty within the classroom. Under this scenario, teachers model conscious patterns of empathy, impulse control, and anger management.

It is especially useful to use an approach of unconditional positive regard in classrooms dedicated to special education. Unconditional positive regard helps children with social or emotional maladjustments deal with frustration while enhancing coping strategies like developing an internal locus of control and a healthy, realistic sense of personal efficacy.

The ultimate competency for a qualified teacher, then, is the ability to instill enthusiasm for learning for the sake of learning. Yes, students should be encouraged to prepare themselves for a career, preferably also for higher education as well as a high-level job. The competence of teachers might well be measured not only on how well they manage to establish this state of preparation, but also on how well they combine this single focus with a broader interest in and enthusiasm for learning. The exceptional teacher produces (or unleashes) naturally inquisitive minds.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

How much of what a teacher does in a day is with the student in mind – and how much of it is to fit his or her own teaching agenda?

In The Exceptional Teacher, a study on transforming traditional teaching through thoughtful practice, Elizabeth Aaronsohn discusses some “traditional” teaching models and approaches to teaching: “I define traditional teaching as teaching in which the focus is on the content, about which the teacher is understood to be an expert, and which must be ‘covered’ in such a way as to ensure that students acquire a certain body of knowledge based on the activity of watching and listening to the teacher.”

Aaronsohn goes on to define what she considers the problems of this teaching mode, the habits that are teacher-pleasing, beginning with an analysis of teacher-pleasing as a theoretical framework. The contention is clearly that teachers are not encouraging students to learn for themselves, to think, or to analyze the material. Rather, the focus of teacher-pleasing is memorization and rote learning designed to secure good grades.

“Children in school learn well, and very early, that grades are the teachers’ ultimate power over them,” Aaronsohn contends, adding that this tends to make students do what they need to do to get a good grade. They cookie-cut their learning to fit within the parameters of what their teachers want rather than what would be beneficial to them in the long run.

Aaronsohn also argues that traditional teachers seem primarily concerned with having students memorize the right answers, demonstrate proper grammar, and focus on correct form rather than devote time to the development of original ideas, either in classroom discussion or student writing. This is where traditional teaching fails the student because this approach simply encourages children to do what they need (and often only what they need) to survive in school.

Too often the unspoken goal of traditional teaching is simply to escape retention or social promotion by keeping grades above failing. The management of classroom learning to provide different modes of teaching for different types of students should be a major area of research.

One of the shortcut learning tricks displayed by many students being taught under traditional methods is the practices such as not reading an entire assigned text, but simply listening carefully to the teacher’s comments because of the certainty that only they would be tested. Another trick is “playing the system,” which entails skipping the reading entirely and allowing teachers to “spoon-feed” the content they intend to test.

All of these are shortcuts that students have evolved from learning the game the traditional K-12 system – and what teachers need to push back against. Understanding how to engage students beyond what the teacher may have written in a lesson plan is tricky but important to reaching this current generation of students.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

WHO a teacher is as a person impacts HOW he or she educates

Beyond specific teacher qualifications and the alignment of teachers with particular training to undertake specific teaching assignments, we must also consider and define teacher competence apart from any credentials they may have. This is so because, unfortunately, even a considerable amount of academic and professional training does not necessarily result in the acquisition of the competence necessary to the meet raised expectations for student learning.

As an alternative to retention and a suggested best teaching proactive, Glasser proposed that teachers should model and relate schoolwork directly to student interests and needs as a means of motivating students to work harder. Merit promotion was also a viable strategy to encourage students to work harder, to be motivated to study and perform well on a specific test or on several specific tests, especially when testing is the principal criterion for retention.

Another strategy, outlined by Siegel and Hanson, involves the use of remedial aids to support students who have difficulty in a specific skills area. Supplementing instruction but requiring minimum absence from the classroom (compared to special education pull-out supports) can also be effective.

Glasser considered a somewhat proactive approach: having teachers specifically insist on superior work from students who are not performing well. Although this strategy might seem self-defeating for students already struggling academically, a good, competent teacher should be able to recognize instances in which this, or any of the other strategies outlined here, might be effective at engaging a struggling student.

Being able to gauge when it is appropriate to employ optional instructional strategies or practices is an important skill we might reasonably expect to find in competent teachers. Teachers should be able to facilitate cooperative learning, mastery learning, direct instruction, adaptive education, individualized instruction, peer tutoring, and curriculum-based assessments as instructional strategies whenever appropriate.

A core teacher competency should not only be the ability to identify and implement specific teaching strategies to support individual learning needs but the ability to make a sound judgment about strategies from the available range. The best teachers should be able to recognize those measures that would be most effective at supporting an individual student and inspiring him to be accountable for his education.

Because of the importance of home–school communications, teachers must be good communicators. They must be able to engage parents as well as students, and should encourage parents to support their children while also addressing potentially sensitive issues with them.

Positive social-communication and interpersonal skills are also important competencies. Teachers should be comfortable and competent at encouraging student responsibility and self-evaluation. Beginning as early as first grade, Glasser suggests; teachers should encourage students to undertake self-grading. He also argues that teachers shouldn’t even accept class work until both teacher and student have agreed on its quality.

When these “gray” areas start to come into play, it further emphasizes the futility of a pass/fail system. There are so many nuances to learning – and to teachers and students as individuals. This is such an important concept to embrace if we are to move forward from a pass/fail mentality into one that actually works for every student in the classroom.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Are the current education and teaching models for student teachers sufficient to prepare them for their jobs as teachers?

Perhaps teaching in general is not a field we need to redesign but one that we need to redefine to support the needs of diverse students, targeting those at risk of retention or social promotion.

First, all teachers should receive a certain level of core education and training in instructional practices and areas of classroom management, curriculum management, and the like. This training should address some of the clearly apparent gaps in understanding. One study conducted in 2007 examined the issue of teaching practices in rural schools and confirmed the need for improving the professional practices of teachers.

In a five-year study of rural schools in Missouri, Harmon et al. also determined that the challenges for rural schools, while similar to urban schools, were even more pronounced. Specific weaknesses include low fiscal capacity, fewer management support services, greater per-pupil costs, higher numbers of teachers teaching outside their specialty area, less competitive salaries and benefits, less specialized space and equipment, less availability of planning support services, and fewer evaluation support services.

Harmon, Gordanier et al. discussed the situation of rural teachers and district leaders in the Missouri Ozarks, a region including all ten school districts in the Ozark Rural Systemic Initiative (ORSI). Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the proportions of students managed by ORSI who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch programs exceed the state average of 40.7 percent. Within these ten districts, two districts also had eligibility rates of 72.5 and 73.4 percent.

The study considered the implementation of new curricula as a means to encourage teachers to review their teaching practices. Even without new curricula, though, the study found that teachers should regularly review curricula with a view to identifying potential improvements or developments they could use in their own practice. Teachers were encouraged to review curricula in the context of teacher-focused training and development, immersing themselves in the insights of national experts in order to learn how to implement standards more effectively in their own classrooms.

Various policy recommendations for high-quality professional development for teachers also outline the need for extensive, long-term professional development that focuses directly on the classroom work of teachers, the curriculum actually taught, instructional materials to be used with students, and necessary assessments.

Although all teachers need not major in education, it makes sense to require a certain number of educational credits at an undergraduate level. Any teacher or prospective teacher of kindergarten or first grade student should clearly have academic training in early childhood development or elementary education. Being able to understand and track the development of children between the ages of five and eight is critical to kindergarten and first grade teachers, who are charged with helping to identify those students who are struggling with some aspect of their development and are therefore putting themselves at risk of being held back.

Teachers working in higher grades need to demonstrate a certain level of formal education in their target subject or subjects, as well as in the art and science of education. But some degree of familiarity with child development and psychology is necessary for even higher-grade teachers if they are to be sufficiently alert to students whose academic struggles suggest they may need additional support.

Teaching certification should be a requirement for public school teaching. It is a standard for education already and, by state, it provides at least some means of assessing the individual teacher’s commitment to their work and their preparedness to invest in the work they are doing.

These “paper” certifications are just that, though. They are important but we can’t wrap a teacher’s worth completely around them – and we also can’t assume that the basics of certification and licensure is enough. It isn’t – and our students deserve more.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

In classrooms with traditionally at-risk students – like minority, English-language learners and those from low socio-economic brackets – teachers can feel overwhelmed at the amount of work it takes to adequately teach students who have less advantages than others.

Preparing teachers to meet the needs of a diverse student base is absolutely necessary to student success long-term.

In an article targeting the importance of experiences and training on effective teaching to meet the needs of diverse learners, Edwards, Carr, and Siegel outline a specific component of an ongoing project to explore differentiated instruction (DI) as an approach for meeting the academic and related needs diverse learners in schools.

The 3 Dimensions (3D) of Diversity for Inclusion, as the project was known, emerged as a result of a September 2001 faculty meeting of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Southeastern Louisiana University. In the meeting, it came to light that the results from the prior academic year’s annual student teacher exit survey indicated teacher candidates wanted more intensive preparation to be able to work more effectively with diverse learners in schools.

A core problem within the teaching profession, as these findings suggest, is that few professionals have the knowledge, skills, or even basic training to determine the best pedagogical practices for many typical classroom scenarios. In fact, the survey conducted by Edwards et al. concentrated initially on ascertaining how regularly teachers were using specific strategies or techniques to plan for and accommodate individual differences in the classroom.

When interviewers asked about how often candidates’ strategies related to diversity, inclusion, differentiated instruction, accommodations, and modifications in the classroom, most indicated that they rarely employed instructional strategies to differentiate instruction, use tiered assessments, differentiate lessons using major concepts and generalizations, or use instructional materials to promote diversity. Rather, the focus was on using teaching materials rather than standard texts, allowing for a relatively wide range of product alternatives, including oral, visual, musical, and spatial; using cooperative and flexible grouping strategies, and varying questions based on student readiness, interest, and learning styles.

While these strategies go some way toward supporting students with atypical needs, the lack of focus on instructional strategies to differentiate instruction supports the idea that most teachers do not go far enough in their instructional approach. That is, they do not use instructional strategies to specifically and thus effectively target students with diverse needs. Their cut-and-paste, plug-the-hole solution is to use a range of learning materials to try to make up the difference. The transference of actual knowledge and skills to students falls by the wayside.

More than this, it appears that most teachers do not have an adequate range of experience before undertaking a formal teaching position. Edwards et al. touch on this issue at some length in their study. Indeed, they cite the educational and training background of survey respondents. The majority was female, Caucasian, and university-educated via a traditional undergraduate program. Most had no prior teaching experience, and only 40 percent of respondents said they had any kind of specific teacher training.

This tells us that teachers simply aren’t getting enough training before they enter classrooms and certainly not enough support when they are there. Further, diverse student bodies do not identify with the people influencing their educations, which is certainly not the fault of the teachers, but should be a wake-up call to all educators to recruit a more diverse teacher population that better reflects the students sitting at the desks.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

Teachers are held to a higher standard than other professions – both in the classrooms and in their personal lives. Fair or unfair, it’s just part of the job. When it comes to documented “standards,” it seems like the rules are constantly changing for American educators – but is it for the betterment, or to the detriment, of students?

To get a sense of where teacher qualifications are right now, let’s consider the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and their study of teaching qualifications and other trends among teachers of mathematics, English, and science. According to the NCES report for 2010, only about 80 percent of teachers teaching English or science had majored in their main area of teaching. Only about 70 percent of mathematics teachers had majored in their main assignment, and only 60 percent of these were certified.

Thus, only 42 percent of secondary level math teachers both majored in math and have a certificate to teach it. Although substantially more English and science teachers had at least majored in the subject they taught, it is still somewhat disconcerting that fully one on five English and science teachers had minimal exposure to the material they were attempting to teach. One of the first areas of concern, therefore, is the actual qualifications of teachers. Not only should we be concerned about teachers’ qualifications to teach; we apparently need to look into the degree to which they have mastered the material they are tasked with teaching.

It is also of no small concern that 12 percent of mathematics teachers have neither a teaching qualification nor a math specific qualification in schools in which at least half of the students are African-American. This suggests a racially based disparity.

Before considering the preparation of teachers to teach specific age-groups or subjects, we also need to consider what core aspects of knowledge and core skills teachers should be able to demonstrate to be considered competent.

Because of the importance of standards in the educational setting and the current reliance on state testing, several researchers have concentrated on the importance of accountability strategies.

Mathison and Freeman, for instance, discuss some of the current accountability strategies for school reform relying heavily on measured outcomes and especially student achievement linked to specific levels of performance. Their discussion also addresses research on elementary and middle school competencies targeting classroom experiences and involving conversations with teachers.

The results of these extended studies point to a tension between teachers’ desire to be professional, on the one hand, and their desire to give students the best chance to succeed within standardized testing scenarios, on the other.

Their research also suggests that the centralized curriculum mandates and high-stakes testing scenarios force teachers to act in ways that they consider to be lacking in integrity. Teachers feel that some of their actions, designed to support student success in examinations, do not fit within the scope of what they consider to be professionally ethical or reasonable.

Aaronsohn goes so far as to suggest the removal of grades from teaching all together. She suggests this as a means of overcoming the notion of “teacher-pleasing” among students and teaching for memorization. Aaronsohn outlines efforts to investigate student perceptions discussing the extent to which students indicated that they tended to focus on “figuring out the right answers and the correct behaviors each teacher required of them for them to get top grades or, at best, merely survive each class session.”

In a national study examining effective literacy teaching practices in early school years in Australia, researchers found that students with learning difficulties in literacy and numeracy benefited from certain teaching patterns that could well be transferable to different learning scenarios. In considering the problems of teaching literacy and numeracy, however, the study also outlined some of the underlining struggles in education, in teaching specifically.

The National Reading Panel of 2000 in the United States has also had some impact on Australian models. The Australian study mentioned concentrates on building an evidential link between children’s development in English literacy in early school years and their teachers’ classroom teaching practices. Specifically, the study showed that value-added analysis of student assessments showed teachers pushing six dimensions of literacy in their teaching practice: participation, knowledge, orchestration, support, differentiation, and respect.

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

It’s clear that the teaching profession has plenty of unresolved issues. It’s impossible to apply one blanket group of standards to an entire industry and then hope for the best.

Teacher professionalism, or lack of it, impacts student success, and failure.

Part of the challenge is identifying what exactly constitutes a qualified teacher. How are their qualifications determined and how can we verify those qualifications? First, we need teachers to facilitate the process of reforming the education system and ending grade retention and social promotion, as outlined in previous articles. Teachers must take ownership of certain standards and ensure that they are effectively managed.

In one sense, we’re charging teachers with implementing core curriculum elements for students and with managing some aspects of assessments to determine how well students retain the core knowledge. We’re also expecting teachers to manage classrooms, considering certain aspects of the classroom dynamic to assess and ultimately support the learning needs of all students, not just the “typical” ones.

Teachers are partly responsible for overseeing communication between home and school and between themselves and school administrators and policymakers who may have some bearing on whether or not a child is retained or socially promoted, whether they are deemed to be falling behind academically or whether there are other issues that are not being adequately addressed.

Because of specific expectations about what students learn and how they learn according to age, we’ll also assume that teachers need special knowledge to teach certain subjects, depending on the type of teaching job they take on. For instance, math teachers should have a degree in math or math education. Someone teaching English at a higher level should have an English degree. Elementary school teachers should have degrees in either elementary education or early childhood education, depending on which grade they go into. It’s important to place teachers on a track and then stick with it – most teacher qualifications do not easily translate to different grades or topics.

More specification is important to teachers having the necessary skills to adequately educate the exact students in their classrooms – and it’s essential to promoting those students accurately.