What’s Missing in American Schools

This piece is reprinted from The Marshall Memo, Kim Marshall’s weekly summary of current research and best practices in the field of education. Drawing on his experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, consultant, and writer, Kim Marshall lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”

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The article: “Building Better Teachers” by Sara Mosle in The Atlantic, September 2014, 314:2 42–44.

In this article in The Atlantic, Newark teacher Sara Mosle reprises some familiar concerns about U.S. public education:

- Large numbers of Baby-Boomer teachers are on the brink of retirement.

- 40-50 percent of novice teachers quit within the first five years.

- Schools will need to hire more than 3 million teachers by 2020.

- Many schools of education are doing a dismal job preparing the next generation of educators.

- Once hired, new teachers are often left to sink or swim, and much professional development for all teachers is weak.

- Some states have adopted “value added” metrics in an attempt to winnow out the least-effective teachers, but VAM is controversial and unproven.

- There isn’t a consensus on what makes an effective teacher, but there’s an emerging consensus on factors that don’t correlate with positive impact on students: years of teaching experience (beyond the first few); advanced degrees; passing state licensing exams; and some “obvious” personality traits, such as charisma and the ability to ham it up in the classroom.

The heart of Mosle’s article is an appraisal of Elizabeth Green’s new book, Building a Better Teacher, which Mosle believes is a timely explication of “a powerfully simple idea: that teaching is not some mystical talent but a set of best practices that can be codified and learned through extensive hands-on coaching, self-scrutiny, and collaboration.” Sounds good – so why isn’t this principle being put to work in all our schools?

Green’s book has detailed descriptions of Deborah Ball’s work as a young teacher helping students understand sophisticated math concepts – for example, Do two odd integers always add up to an even number? Ball is now at the University of Michigan’s School of Education helping new teachers get beyond rote memorization and skills practice and teach more effectively. This approach is like Japanese “lesson study”, which involves intense teacher collaboration and, Green believes, is the reason that Japan’s elementary schools are among the best in the world. Lesson study should work in the U.S. – so why hasn’t it gotten much traction?

Green was initially attracted to the way educator Doug Lemov deconstructed teaching in his book Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

But Green believes that Lemov’s followers (many in charter schools) went too far in the direction of strict discipline – no talking in hallways, silent lunches, suspensions for minor infractions. Follow-up studies of some schools implementing Lemov’s ideas have shown a discouraging attrition rate – in one case, a class of 100 sixth graders numbered only 30 at graduation.

Lemov believes that learning requires “the foundational ability to be quiet and listen,” says Green. Japanese teachers believe that children need “structured opportunities to talk in order to learn.” Green is convinced that Ball and Japanese teachers have found a better balance between discipline and student engagement.

“But Green’s account cries out for a look at the bigger picture,” says Mosle. Too few U.S. schools give teachers the team planning time necessary to implement something like lesson study.

“The lack of time is an American anomaly,” says Mosle. “Every single country that outperforms us has significantly smaller teacher workloads. Indeed, on the scale of time devoted by teachers to in-class instruction annually, the United States is off the charts. We spend far more hours in the classroom on average, twice and nearly three times more in some cases, than teachers in any other OECD country save Chile.”

In Finland, for example, high-school teachers spend 553 hours on classroom instruction; in Japan, the number is 500; in the U.S., it’s 1,051 hours. In elementary and middle schools, American teachers are similarly locked into schedules that leave insufficient time for transformational collaboration.

“In practice,” says Mosle, “this means that most teachers in this country have zero time to work together on new pedagogical approaches and share feedback in the way Green advocates in her book. They rarely have an opportunity to watch other teachers teach, the single best kind of training, in my experience; they’re too busy in their own classrooms (not to mention outside them).

“The goal isn’t to lighten teachers’ load but to redistribute it,” concludes Mosle. “[I]f teaching is to be a profession of the mind (as well as of the heart) that retains top talent and delivers results on the same level that other countries boast, the people who spend hours with our children in the classroom also need what they currently don’t get: the hours with peers and mentors that are essential to improving their craft.”

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