I have discussed this before but as I sat in a full day of grad classes for my school leadership degree, I believed that I should revisit the topic. It is something consuming a large portion of my mind (at the time of writing since I had a lot of time on my hands to write and I post only once a week) and something I feel passionately about. This topic is higher education for teachers, for everyone involved in education.
Ever the perennial student, I have at the time of posting completed just under half of the coursework for my third graduate degree. The allure of full time student work pulls strong on me. Even when I am not in school, I constantly read books, articles, and blogs and listen to podcasts on topics ranging from teh Supreme Court to Latinx culture. A topic will intrigue me and I will go down the rabbit trail adding as many blogs, podcasts, books, shows, and classes about the topic. If I listed all the different degrees I have even considered, the sentence would reach lengths that only Victorian greats like Dickens and Hugo would rival. (Of course, I compare only length, not quality.)
In addition to a general desire to learn, if I do not know the answer ot something or know that I need help to do things better. I search out training or coursework. When I started teaching at my former school, I quickly learned that my limited Spanish proficiency was wholly inadequate to meet the needs of the English Language Learners in my classroom. When the head of TESOL for the district came to my school and announced that the district would sponsor TESOL classes held at my school, I jumped at the chance even knowing that I would take on the extra work while undergoing ADEPT evaluation. Then the actual classes came. Here and there I gleaned nuggets of helpful information but for the most part I found the classes themselves a waste of time and a lot of the work to be busywork with only tangential relation to teaching ELLs. By the time teh March withdrawal deadline approached, I knew something had to give. Without hesitation I dropped the class. I still sought ways to improve my instruction of ELLs just in other arenas due to the lack of rigor and real instruction taking place in those classes.
My experience with these three classes caused me to reflect on my time in the Clemson MAT program. At that time, only a year out of college, I found the work challenging because of the tight compression. Although some of my cohort members started taking classes the year before, I first attended class in June and graduated the following May. I expected a certain level of rigor based on all of my previous experience. In fact, I expected the work level to exceed my past experience because this degree was a Master’s’ degree, not a bachelors. I always understood that the higher you progress up the degree ladder, the work becomes more difficult. I entered each class waiting for the challenging work to begin, but it never came. At the time I attributed the lack of challenge to the particular program and had no contrary evidence since I left education so quickly. Then I reentered the teaching profession, encountered countless exasperating professional development as well as the TESOL classes I discussed in the previous paragraph.
These experiences did not deter me from further education. I still wholeheartedly thirst for all the possible tools to best teach my students. As my colleague and I analyzed the data from the tests, the tests themselves, and our district mandated curriculum, we both became increasingly passionate about curriculum design and education policy. We realized that we needed further education of our own and chose to start with the school leadership at my colleague’s alma mater, a prestigious upstate university as preparation for doctoral work in curriculum and instruction; many district and state level positions require such degrees. I made the application, set up my course schedule, and registered for the first class, ready to go to work.
I had high hopes. The professor intrigued me and the syllabi foretold of challenging work and fascinating topics. By the end of the semester, however, I learned the most from the textbook while hearing many of the same stories every week. Okay, not exactly what I expected but it still ranked above the TESOL classes. The next semester, we had a different instructor who taught a well-organized but unchallenging class. I started to detect a pattern.
Based on previous experience, I expected the two summer classes to go as well as the others, to have opportunity to do what I had talked about in my planning post. While the class will finish the day this post goes live, I write in the midst of the class, only one week down. Many of us have expressed frustration at the cost of the class not matching the perceived lack of benefit. Granted, a summer class will compress the work into a short period of time The amount of assigned reading did not surprise me. The lack of connection to what the professor discussed in class. We have small need to present ourselves in person. The readings and notes contain all the information we need. Insted we spend six hours of our day, unable to progress in the other work because of obliged presence in class.
Why does education for educators not practice the best pedagogical practices it preaches? Many of my fellow cohort members excel academically and crave the challenge. Even more than the challenge, we crave the learning that will equip us to pass on crucial knowledge to our students, to fix the brokenness of the education system in the United States.
I think that some of the problem lies in the fact that many who go into K12 education are not the “summa cum laude”s as my professor terms them. Do not misinterpret me. I do not mean that they are dumb or inept as the terrible cliché “those who can’t do, teach” says. No. I mean that students like myself and several of my colleagues rarely go into the public education field. My good friend, for example, triple majored in music, religion, and computer science. Conventional wisdom dictates that those students should go on to tenured research positions at major universities (ie Big Bang Theory) or into some other career which confers more prestige than that of the humble public school teacher. I hypothesize that the few who follow the same path, stay for long, and eventually burn out because of the lack of challenge and respect. If more stayed and clamored for relevant, rigorous training, would the status quo change?
The other reason I come to has everything to do with the political desire to reform schools into the mold of the latest educational fad. American history is riddled with attempts by lawmakers with little to no education experiences to fix what they see as problems in the public education and society as a whole. (That topic deserves further focus in the future for sure.) Some of the requirements placed on teachers include required professional development for certificate renewal of which a certain number the school must offer each year for the teachers. Teachers must also take ac ertain number of graduate level courses, either for certificate renewal or to meet other requirements like Read2Succeed in South Carolina where teachers on the basis of job description must take two or four specially approved courses. Both of these programs I just described lead to intense apathy. The required professional developments fill up with unspecific trainings to check the box. Teachers come to expect this, prepared with complaints. Many teachers express frustration about the R2S classes since for a high school PE teacher, for example, the fundamentals of literacy have no direct applicability to their teaching practice. These trainings and classes have the intention of improvement yet the disconnect between the intention, the theory, and reality creates great harm. The teacher inherits apathy and carries it around with them like an anchor. They bring the anchor to trainings and classes thus draining their motivation and desire to learn. Ultimately, this perpetuates a self-defeating cycle. Perhaps this explains the dilemma I keep encountering when it comes to further education in the education field. Perhaps not? Maybe some day, in my Phd program perhaps, I will encounter a program that will provide challenging curriculum.