Nov 2, 2006 11:58 AM
What is standing in the way of teacher effectiveness? That’s the question that the bipartisan advocacy organization Common Good set out to answer when it asked eight New York City teachers to keep a detailed diary of their work life for two weeks.
The summary report, “All in a Day’s Work,” which is rich in anecdotal detail, illuminates how bureaucracy and over-regulation are interfering with teachers’ ability to do their jobs. It found that student discipline, assessments and testing, mandated teaching procedures, school management and paperwork are encroaching on the school day and pulling teachers away from their core mission of helping students learn.
Four of the teachers, along with two education scholars and UFT President Randi Weingarten, gathered at the Harvard Club on Oct. 10 to discuss the report’s findings in a dialogue with about 100 teachers, professors and education policy-makers.
“If we are serious about improving America’s schools, we need to listen carefully to what teachers are telling us,” said Weingarten, who devoted her monthly column, “What Matters Most,” in The New York Times on Oct. 15 to the Common Good report’s insights. [It is reprinted in this issue of New York Teacher on page 19.] “We must respect the skill and commitment of our educators by providing them with the professional latitude they need to do their jobs, rather than drowning them in paperwork and micromanagement.”
Pedro Noguera, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, said it was incumbent on would-be education reformers to grapple with the issues identified in the report.
“We have a shortage of teachers willing to teach in urban schools because when you put people in jobs in these circumstances, it’s not surprising that people leave,” Noguera said.
Both audience members and panelists lamented that no one from the Department of Education was present for the dialogue since DOE officials were the people who most needed to hear the teachers.
“Two students start arguing and one student holds up scissors, threatening to stab the other student; I intercept the scissors and instruct students to start getting to work.”
All eight teachers reported in their diaries that they had to deal with unruly students.
Not only did the classroom disruptions interrupt instruction, but the teachers spent time afterward calling parents, filling out disciplinary forms and following up with administrators.
The diaries showed that school discipline procedures were either ineffective or nonexistent. In a typical story, a teacher removed a disruptive student several times only to have the student return minutes later to her classroom.
“I was amazed by the lack of schoolwide policies on student discipline,” said Johannah Chase, an 8th-grade teacher in East New York in Brooklyn. “It seemed incomprehensible to me that there was no policy for what to do if a fight broke out between two of my students.”
“During the year, we are required to individually assess our students in reading five times. Each assessment takes 25-50 minutes per child to administer, and that time block does not even include all the time it takes to maintain the records for each of the five assessments. I feel as if I spend more time assessing than teaching.”
The consensus among the eight teachers was that assessments and testing, much of it driven by No Child Left Behind requirements, take too much time away from instruction. Some teachers complained that the assessments they were required to do did little to guide their instruction.
Bruce Zihal, a veteran middle school science teacher in Queens, said he was pulled from his regular classroom assignments for four weeks last spring to administer and grade science tests.
Katie Kurjakovic, an elementary school ESL teacher in Queens, said she spent six weeks last May and June grading state tests and spent the first nearly six weeks of school assessing each of her students.
“If you add it up, there are 12 weeks during the year when I won’t be instructing students,” she said.
“Teach mini-lesson. Read aloud book by author we have selected. Student raises hand with question. Tell him to put hand down. Students not allowed to ask questions during mini-lesson. Feel guilty.”
The report documented teachers’ consternation with mandated teaching methods that many felt were onerous or counter-productive to teaching and learning.
The teachers reported that the slew of mandates — including covering bulletin boards in a particular way, posting “teaching points” next to every item of the daily agenda, and maintaining a binder with detailed conference notes on each child’s progress — caused them to shift their focus from teaching to compliance.
“I am tired of always having to be aware of ‘how things will look to someone coming in’ rather than being able to focus solely on student needs,” wrote one teacher.
Melanie Cohen, who taught 5th grade in Brooklyn last year, said her principal harassed her all year long because she insisted on seating her students in rows instead of groups.
“I came from teaching in a private school,” said Cohen, who quit in frustration at the end of her first year. “The arrangement of my desks was never an issue before.”
She credited the UFT with helping her get through that year. “I used the union to my advantage because I didn’t know what the rules were,” she said.
“I begin leading into the lesson and explain several examples to my students only to be interrupted by a phone call. I answer it, and it’s the school secretary asking me for a copy of the program from my sister’s graduation, for which I missed a day of school last week.”
In their diaries, the teachers reported frequent classroom interruptions, sudden changes in schedules, planning time consumed with unexpected work, and absent or unresponsive administrators.
One Common Good researcher observed a teacher who was interrupted 16 times in one day.
Chase, the 8th-grade teacher in Brooklyn, complained that administrators constantly changed her schedule so she didn’t know what she would be teaching until a half hour before the day began.
“There was no money for substitutes so any time a teacher was absent to grade a test or go to a workshop, we’d have to redo the schedule,” she said.
Many of the teachers lamented the absence of collaboration with administrators and their lack of voice in decisions that affect them.
“File writing in folders. Realize that [I] have no recent entries of mandated conference notes in required ESL binder. It comes down to priorities. Do I spend my limited time with needy students instructing them, or writing down observations in a book I frankly do not find useful?”
Excessive paperwork was another cause of frustration for teachers. One new teacher estimated that she spent two hours a day on obligatory paperwork.
“It seems like we’re always playing catch-up with paperwork and multiple forms of record-keeping,” another teacher wrote in her log.
Several teachers questioned the necessity of much of the paperwork, while others wondered why other school staff could not be assigned to do some of it.
“In isolation, each incident described by the teachers is seemingly harmless,” the Common Good report concludes. “Yet, when combined, these moments create new burdens that are all-too-often overlooked.”
The researchers’ advice: “By listening more carefully to teachers on what they believe impedes their effectiveness, new strategies for school improvement can be born that take into account not only what makes sense for school reform from afar but also what seems to work the best on the ground in schools.”
The researchers’ advice:
“By listening more
carefully to teachers on what they believe impedes their effectiveness, new strategies for school
improvement can be born that take into account not only what makes sense
for school reform from
afar but also what seems
to work the best on the ground in schools.”