As someone who is responsible for building our citizenry and preparing our future work force, a teacher should be proud of what they do and have the ability to show the world the value that they are bringing to the table. When talking to teachers about why they joined the profession, I often hear responses like “I want to help kids grow”, “I want to give back”, or “I want to solve a social justice problem”. While I think these are great reasons for joining the profession, (I myself originally joined the teaching force because I wanted to help kids, who did not have certain socioeconomic advantages, to get to a position where they had choices around their future) I rarely hear a teacher say that they started teaching to increase the America gross domestic product or grow the global economy. Yet, that is exactly what great teachers do.
Teachers are one of the primary levers we have in our economy to drive growth. While the impact that teachers have may take some time to show in our economic outputs, our ability to prepare workers for highly skilled jobs will be key for America to remain relevant in the new information based economy. Studies continually show that highly effective teachers have a significant impact on students’ future prospects. Thus, for a highly effective teacher, the way to maximize impact whether you are motivated by helping individual students to grow or having a major impact on the US economy, is to be in a position where you can extend your reach as much as possible. It is not just about getting results but it is about how many students you are able to get results with. An organization called Public Impact has done some interesting work on this topic through something they call Opportunity Culture. However, in order to identify which teachers are best prepared to take on this responsibility, there needs to be a mechanism to help represent teachers to the education community and the world more broadly to help differentiate the various skills that they bring. In other words, Teachers need a way to represent themselves as the professionals that they are.
While there should be an easier way to find opportunities to grow your impact when you are looking, there should also be chances to be found. To do so you need to establish a personal brand and distinguish yourself. As I’ve said in previous posts, the nature of what it means to be a teacher is changing and there will be many more opportunities for teachers to grow their impact while being more fairly compensated for the value that they bring. However, these opportunities won’t just go to the best teachers. They will go to the best teachers that also have the ability to communicate the unique value that they bring to the table.
In my next post, I will discuss some practical strategies for how to do this. Until then Teachers show your stuff! You do great work and it deserves to be noticed.
In a lecture I heard from the John Danner, CEO of Rocketship Schools, in one of my graduate school classes, he related the current state of the teaching profession to what the medical profession previously looked like. As it turns out that like the current teaching profession, doctors were primarily generalists. They would go door to door for little pay trying to provide their services. Given that they faced so many different situations and lacked the technology, medical outcomes were unsurprisingly not very good. However, given advances in science, pharmaceuticals, technology, and city infrastructure, the profession shifted towards greater specialization and medical outcomes improved.
Education is faced with a similar opportunity. With technology tools developing that will help individualize education for students, there is an opportunity to rethink our approach to the roles we utilize in staffing a school. Given that this development will likely change how much of a curriculum is delivered and how students are assessed, there will be an opportunity to have educators move from being generalists to focus their energy on going deep across a limited set of skills.
While there are a growing number of schools that are implementing new models that are starting to personalize education for students, these new approaches are still quite new. Yet, there are already new focused roles that are starting to develop in schools. I’ve presented a few examples below and cite the skills (full list in my last blog post) that they emphasize.
- Small group facilitator: This role is responsible for taking small groups of kids and helping them tackle specific skills in small pull-out groups. This person must have strong content knowledge and be able to think creatively on the fly to meet kids where they are and guide them to understanding. This role emphasizes skills associated with being a performer and expert.
- Master teachers: This role is responsible for the outcomes of a larger group of kids as well as managing junior teachers. They create a plan of execution and manage teachers towards these goals. This role emphasizes skills associated with being a manager and designer.
- Data analyst: This role is responsible for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing student data. This person may group students and deciding who gets pulled when but they may actually not teach kids themselves. This role emphasizes skills associated with being an analyzer.
- Lab coach: These folks are responsible for motivating and managing a large group of kids at one time as they work through personalized computerized curriculum but don’t actually need to have a strong content knowledge because the content is largely delivered electronically. This role emphasizes skills associated with being a performer and manager.
Thus, these new roles allow for a more focused approach to jobs as an educator. There are a number of potential positive impacts from rethinking human capital. First and foremost, students have the potential to be served more effectively. By catering what adults do to the personalization of curriculum delivery, there is a much better chance that students won’t be left behind. Second, specialization has the potential to further professionalize teaching. Teachers will be able to more effectively differentiate themselves based on their particular skills and abilities. If the trend continues towards schools having more budgetary and hiring control, this should allow wages to become more differentiated based on the value teachers are adding towards gaining student outcomes. Thus, stronger performers will be rewarded for their achievements. Finally, it should help teachers remain in the profession longer. If teachers are able to focus on developing a narrower set of skills early on, they are more likely to feel successful and there will be less likelihood of burnout.
While it is clear that it will take some time for these new models to develop and establish a definitive sense of what ultimately works, it is important to not think of human capital as an afterthought. By rethinking and reconstructing how schools are staffed, there is a great opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in educating students with these
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.
Nearly 50% of teachers will leave the profession before their 5th year. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it was just ineffective teachers leaving the profession but attrition from schools is happening at essentially the same rate across all skill levels. This not only is a significant brain and skill drain on the profession but it is extremely costly as well. It is estimated to cost the system $5 billion a year and means that approximately 600,000 teaching positions across the United States need to be filled every year. If 50% of the top talent were leaving the profession in the medical or legal fields by year 5, we would have a national crisis on our hands.
However, it turns out that it doesn’t need to be this way in education. According to a recent report put out by The New Teacher Project (TNTP) called the “Irreplaceables”, 75% of top teachers leaving their schools said they would have stayed had their top need been addressed. To resolve this issue, TNTP recommends that schools and district implement strategies to achieve “smarter retention” of top teaching talent. While effectively implementing these strategies would make a significant difference, this type of philosophical and behavioral change has previously proven difficult to implement across the system. However, what if our energy was focused on getting teacher fit right on the front end? Would this positively impact retention and teacher effectiveness?
In so many aspects of our lives, there are mechanisms to make sure that we are making smart decisions based on what we want and need. Consumer reports help us make the best decision when purchasing a car or an electronic product. Yelp helps us pick the right place for us to eat. Match.com helps us find the right mate. However, teachers don’t have the same luxury when picking a place to work. There isn’t one place for them to go to understand the full landscape of their options and determine the best places to apply based on their skills and values. Currently, the best option for teachers is to cobble together their options through multiple web searches and word of mouth. In the past, this issue wasn’t as much of a problem because there were relatively few options given that hiring was largely centralized at a district office. However, with the increasing trend towards decentralized hiring due to the growth of charter schools and shifting district policies, teachers have significantly more choices on where they work. This also increases competition for talent so schools have a similar need to locate and differentiate talent. This is a great advancement for education but it creates a new information and access problem.
Haystack EDU is the solution to this problem for both teachers and schools.
Haystack EDU is the talent hub for 21st century educators and learning institutions. We help teachers and schools match with each other efficiently and effectively.
There is a revolution underway to replace the industrial schooling system through utilizing technology to create next generation schooling models focused on individualize learning approaches for students.
While technologies are being developed and new school learning models are emerging, the human capital implications for these approaches are largely being ignored. In these new models, teachers will need to take on more specialized roles that emphasize new skills but there is currently no plan to transition the profession.
To do this, Haystack EDU is first creating a platform that teachers and schools can utilize to match with each other by utilizing excellent search/filtering and getting to know each other through in-depth profiles.
At the same time, Haystack EDU is working with schools implementing new models to understand how the profession is changing.
Haystack EDU has spent the fall running placement pilots in Chicago and New Orleans over the fall and will be launching our electronic national platform in January! Sign-up on the site to stay posted.
