This is the reading instruction show.
I'm your host is always a doctor, Andy Johnson.
Topic of today's podcast is this teacher shortages stem from a professional respect shortage.
Now, a variety of research studies conducted over the years have shown that of all the variables impacting the quality of teaching and the amount of learning that goes on in the classroom.
The most significant variable is the teacher.
Yet we underpay under value and dis empower this most significant of significant variables.
And we expect them to come back year after year because they quote love unquote kids.
Is there a teacher shortage?
Yes.
But even worse, there is an excellent teacher shortage.
In this podcast, I'll address 10 factors that if we address them would alleviate both the teacher shortage and the excellent teacher shortage.
Number one and the most obvious is teacher pay.
Now, here's a question.
Would you expect a lawyer to work for low pay and put up with poor working conditions because they love their clients?
Would you expect a doctor to put up with constant top down interference in media beatings because they love their patients?
Yet teachers are somehow supposed to put up with low pay, constant interference and poor working conditions because they love kids.
Now, there are those who think that free market competition is the answer for all of society's problems.
Wonderful.
However, I would invite my free market friends to put their free market money where their free market mouths are.
Pay teachers a professional wage.
This is the first step and the most important step in having excellent teachers in every classroom.
If teachers wages enable them to care for their family by a house, send their kids to college, there would not be a teacher shortage.
The second issue is job security benefits and options.
Now, it used to be that job security and good health benefits could offset the lower professional pay for teachers.
As a teacher, you're less likely to lose your job during economic downturns and you had good health care benefits and retirement.
Health care and other benefits are being cut, but most importantly, unemployment is down.
Teachers have options.
Number three, keep your stinking thank yous.
There's the thank you campaigns. You've seen the signs.
If you can read this, thank a teacher.
Or on TV, when someone says they're a teacher, they get around to this false appreciation applause.
Now, being appreciated is always nice, but appreciation isn't going to send their kids to college or pay back their college loans or give them a down payment for a house.
How about a sign like this? If you can read this, pay a teacher a professional wage.
Keep your stinking thank yous and your appreciation.
That just gets in the way of addressing real reform related to teacher pay and working conditions.
Number four is college loans.
We want the best and the brightest to go into education.
Yet, the best and the brightest soon realize that taking out big college loans for a job that will not pay a big college wage is not a best or brightest act.
It just doesn't make sense to take a low paying job with a big college loan.
At the very least, we should consider educational loan forgiveness after five years of teaching.
Number five, class size and class room size.
Managing the social, emotional and intellectual lives of 20 human beings is a complex and demanding jobs.
It becomes even more complex and demanding if 20 human beings are crammed into a small confined space, a small classroom.
And it becomes even doubly more so when class sizes get above 24 or 25 students.
Cramming too many kids in a classroom is the most efficient and effective way to make learning go down and drive teachers out of the classroom.
Number six, teacher preparation.
First, teacher preparation and teacher education programs matter.
Linda Darling Hammond has done lots of research here and when compared to fast track teacher programs like Teach for America.
Teacher prep programs outperform the fast tracks on measures of teacher performance, student learning and continuation in the classroom.
The fast tracks are like throwing a bunch of spaghetti on the wall. Some of it is going to stick, but a lot of it is not.
Resulting in even more teacher turnover as well as less prepared and qualified teachers teaching your kids.
Do you really want somebody learning on the job teaching your kids?
Also, could you imagine a fast track dentist program? Would you want a lawyer representing you who was prepared by a lawyers for America program?
Why in heaven's name would anybody think it's a good idea to throw less qualified teachers in a classroom unless it is for the sole purpose of keeping teachers wages down?
Number seven, professional development.
Now here's the thing. There is no teacher licensure program in the world that can create a finished teaching product.
We've got just three semesters in student teaching.
So what we do is prepare pre-service teachers to begin the journey toward becoming a master teacher.
And this points to the importance of continued mandated legitimate professional development for all teachers.
Legitimate professional development builds on what teachers learned in their teacher licensure programs.
And within the context of their real life classroom, they're much better able to learn.
They learn more and learn much more deeply.
Now, continued teacher licensure as well as pay raises.
I recommend that they be tied to legitimate teacher professional development.
Teachers need to be provided the resources, the time and the incentive to continue to enhance their professional knowledge.
And effective teachers have four types of professional knowledge.
First, content area knowledge. That's knowledge of the stuff you're teaching.
Second, pedagogical knowledge. This is knowledge of general teaching strategies such as problem based learning and inquiry learning.
The third is pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of teaching strategies related to specific content such as math methods and reading methods and science methods.
And fourth, knowledge of learning and learners.
This is the educational psychology stuff that focuses on things like human development, human learning and the human learning organ, the brain.
Now, legitimate professional development is not an afterschool, one and done workshop.
And it's not the type of professional development offered by for profit entities.
There's nothing wrong with for profit entities if you realize they're for profit and not for people.
But you must understand their goal is to sell their product.
And the for profits will try to convince you that their product is the only thing that stands between failure and the academic success of your students.
They have a financial incentive to say certain things and they do.
Now, currently teachers can maintain their licensure through CEUs, continuing education units or clock hours.
But an hour here and an hour there often does little more than reify and reinforce current practices.
You can get CEUs and clock hours merely by attending a workshop or a conference.
Now, these are all important, but you don't have to do anything other than show up.
You don't need to demonstrate your learning in any way.
They're brief encounters.
Legitimate professional development occurs over time with reflection, experimentation, social interaction and connections with research and research based theory.
And currently there are two venues of effective professional development.
The first is the action research project, which is connected with a strong research base you connected to the literature.
The second is graduate courses in education.
Now, recognize I recognize that I teach graduate courses and I'm biased.
I say that up front.
However, good graduate education differs from the many clown shows masquerading as research based professional development.
Because in graduate courses, there's no financial incentive to say or promote certain things.
My success in teaching graduate courses or doing professional development is not determined by the sales of any product.
Number eight, disempowerment and external mandates.
We want creative and intelligent teachers yet we don't allow them to use their creativity and intelligence to design learning experiences to meet the individual needs of their students, the students in front of them.
Instead, we try to teacher proof curriculums by buying expensive new one size fits all programs and insisting teachers follow the directions exactly as told that they implement them with fidelity.
We don't allow teachers to make the decisions that are best for their students and this my friends is educational malpractice around the country.
State legislatures hard to believe, but people who know little about research based best practices are forcing departments of education to mandate that certain things be taught in certain ways.
This demeans disrespect and disempowers teachers and leads the decisions that are not in the best interest of our students.
Number nine, standardized testing.
The increase in standardized testing has done nothing to improve the quality of education.
The old saying is that a pig doesn't get heavier by weighing it.
Yet the educational overlords keep weighing that pig.
Standardized testing has narrowed the curriculum and resulted in teaching to the test and this occurs at the expense of deep learning and high level thinking.
And since low level skills are most easily measured on these pig weighing tests, more low level skills are taught.
And if only low level skills are taught, only low level learning will occur.
And the last one, number 10, academic standards.
There's a grand bit of mistinking going around that if you create a whole bunch of academic standards and force teachers to teach them that a whole bunch of learning will take place.
It's somehow assumed that good standards teaching is good teaching.
This of course is nonsense, poppycock and folder all.
The simple truth about academic standards is this.
There's generally too many of them.
A few standards are good, but that doesn't mean that more standards are better.
You can't standard your way to good education.
Good education comes from good teachers.
Too many academic standards clutter up the teaching process and disallows good teachers to be good teachers.
Good teachers often find themselves teaching standards and not students and this is not good.
Good education is the foundation of our society.
To keep our society strong, we must invest in teachers teacher preparation and continued legitimate professional development for teachers and attend to the 10 elements teacher pay, pay them a professional wage, job security benefits and options provide good health benefits while recognizing that teachers have other employment options.
Keep your stink and thank yous and appreciation to yourself because these get in the way of real reform.
College loads consider loan forgiveness after five years or lower the cost of college.
Class sizing, classroom size, smaller class sizes, larger classrooms.
Teacher preparation, stop the quick fix, fast track teacher prep programs that serve only to bring low qualified teachers into the classroom for a short time and serves to keep teacher salaries low.
Professional development, Thai continued licensure and pay raises to legitimate teacher professional development.
Disempowerment and external mandates empower teachers to make the decisions that are best for their students.
Standardized testing, stop the testing madness, deemphasize this artificial learning measure and use more authentic methods for students to demonstrate their learning.
And the last one, academic standards. Cut down on the number of standards, focus on a few standards and let teachers design the best way to address them.
This has been the Reading Instruction Show. I am your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.