Juggling Skills: The Traditional Teacher Role

Teachers do a lot! And they need to be good a lot of different things to be effective.   In fact, when you breakdown the traditional teacher role, you see that teachers must perform a laundry list of skills in their daily routine.   In many other professions, an entire job might be primarily designed around performing just one of these skills.

The following is a list of just some of the things that the traditional teacher role encompasses on a given day:

Teachers are managers: they must motivate, influence, and control a large group of students.  Managers in large companies rarely have more than 7-10 direct reports.  Teachers typically manage between 20-30 people at any given time and secondary teachers have as many as 200 under their direct supervision in a given day.

Teachers are designers:  they must create interesting lessons to engage students.  Teachers frequently teach multiple classes so they must develop these concepts on a daily basis.  Yet, most of the day must be spent executing the lessons they designed the night before.  Designers at a company like Apple spend their entire day just creating great products

Teachers are performers: beyond just developing interesting lessons, teachers must captivate their students.  Teachers are essentially on ”stage” 5-7 hours a day.  However, unlike most professions associated with performing, they don’t get to practice before each performance.

Teachers are analyzers: like a good scientist, they must determine ways to collect evidence, interrupt the results, and change course as necessary.   Although, unlike a scientist, this process must be completed in between a teachers primary duties.

Teachers are experts: teachers must know their content area and must be nimble enough to answer questions on the subject as they come up in real time.

Given the breadth and depth of skills that we expect from teachers combined with other challenges like low pay and limited resources, is it any wonder that we see 50% of teachers exiting the profession by year 5?  The teachers that are able to develop their craft over years by mastering all these skills are truly extraordinary professionals. 

While it is amazing to see what remarkable teachers can accomplish, what if things were structured differently so that we didn't need every teacher to perform every skill at a very high level to produce student results.  What if the teacher role was broken down into sub-roles?  What if teachers were specialists?  

In our next post, Haystack EDU will explore a developing opportunity to change the teacher role to make teachers more effective, to make the teaching role more sustainable, and to make teaching into more of a profession.