Testimony of Aminda Gentile before Education Committee New York City Council Dec. 7, 2005
Dec 7, 2005 11:13 AM
Good morning, Councilmember Moskowitz and members of the Education Committee. Thank you for inviting me today. I am Aminda Gentile, Vice President for educational issues and director of the UFT Teacher Centers, where our mission is helping teachers succeed in the classroom. information requests that you submitted to Chancellor Klein on the components of teacher quality. In them you ask how to identify good teachers, cut them out of the pack and promote them. How do you distinguish excellent teachers from all other teachers, you asked.U.S. schools still struggle to address this critical link in their own work environment. As a result of the disconnect, teachers are often isolated in their classrooms, face overwhelming noninstructional duties, have extremely limited opportunities for meaningful decision making, lack basic instructional materials, and perceive few opportunities for advancement and growth.”Bronx.
Before coming here today I reviewed the
I would like to switch the focus entirely this morning.
These questions have nothing to do with creating a highly qualified teacher workforce. I am suggesting that good and even great teachers are developed, not born. A system that builds and supports its teacher workforce creates good teachers and good teaching. While there are some attributes or talents that dispose people toward teaching, good teachers are made.
I don’t think you’d subscribe to a practice of identifying a few good students and singling them out for excellent education while ignoring other students. You want to bring all students up to standards.
We are still a long way from creating the conditions for optimal teacher development. In its new report, “Going Beyond ‘Highly Qualified’ Teachers,” the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development writes,
“Although business leaders have long recognized and responded to connections between employee working conditions and productivity, many
Let me rephrase your question: it’s not how do we identify good teachers but how do we grow good teachers.
Teachers for the most part come into our system young, green, and a little naïve. They have beautiful ideals, they have the knowledge base, and they have determination, yet after two years a fifth of them will be gone. After three years, a third will quit. In five years, almost half will leave, saying they love the kids but do not feel they can succeed under the conditions in their school. We need to start developing good teachers by treating them differently.
Good teachers develop in a culture that supports them. We have to pay attention to the working environment. A school with constant turnover, isolated staff and weak leadership is not going to develop high quality teachers, no matter what potential they have or how hard the teacher is pushed.
Let’s start by treating teachers as the professionals they are.
1. The UFT career ladder proposes we use the medical internship as a model, with a reduced teaching load for the first year, along with intensive mentoring. Currently, we offer one-seventeenth of a mentor and a full teaching load to starting teachers.
2. The mentor’s caseload must be reduced as well, and new teachers should be mentored for their first three years.
3. The career ladder includes advancement and rewards as teachers develop skills and knowledge. At the top of the ladder is the lead teacher, recognized in schools as an expert and paid accordingly. The lead teacher provision in the new contract follows a successful piloting of this idea in the
4. The school climate must support good teaching. It should offer common planning time to teachers in a grade or a department, an opportunity to discuss their students, their lessons and their questions. It should allow classroom inter-visitations so that teachers can give help and get ideas from colleagues. To a large degree, teacher quality is developed in working with peers.
5. Excellent professional development at the school level can quickly develop teaching talent. But it must be ongoing and relevant to that teacher’s classroom, embedded in the work day, focused on content and instructional practice. The UFT Teacher Centers have found—and research supports—that the effective PD approaches are: in-classroom peer coaching and small-group work sessions that allow teachers to exchange best practices.
6. School leadership is crucial to developing a quality workforce. A school leader with deep knowledge of instruction and a collegial approach to sharing it builds creative and skillful teachers. If the principal and APs are micromanagers or punitive, then teachers, like any employee, look to do the minimum and stay out of sight.
7. Developing excellent teachers cannot be done without the required resources and facilities. Crowded classrooms and scant supplies prevent teachers from conducting good lessons. And when we talk about supplies, let me emphasize that this includes classroom access to instructional technologies. This is the 21st century, and we are teaching children to compete in a world economy. We can’t do that without technology.
How do we know quality teaching is taking place? We know by our students’ success. This is hard to measure, because students come to us from such a wide range of backgrounds. But we are beginning to develop sophisticated tools to analyze student progress. As long as we use multiple measures of assessment, not just test scores, these new tools, such as value-added analysis, can provide helpful feedback. By reflecting on their practice and getting help on their way, excellent teachers are made. It happens every day in our schools.
So we must resist the temptation for external solutions--searching through someone else’s backyard for elusive diamonds. Highly-qualified teachers will grow right here, as they always have.
