A rarely discussed weakness in education is the lack of a true job description for teachers in hiring. Being told that “you will teach US History” or “we are hiring you to be a 4th grade teacher” is not a job description. It doesn’t say what you are responsible for causing. It merely describes the content and level you will be teaching. It doesn’t demand that you achieve anything in particular. It only says that a certain slot and set of roles should be filled and certain content should be covered.
A real job description would be written around the key learning goals and Mission-related outcomes. What am I expected to cause in students? What am I supposed to accomplish? Whatever the answer, that’s my job.
The Danielson Framework for Teaching doesn’t really address this problem, despite its many strengths. All the domains are about skills, not achievements; inputs, not outcomes: Planning and Preparation, the Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities. Couldn’t you therefore have these skills but not be an achiever of outstanding results? Vice versa: I have known many teachers who do little more than cause learning, yet would be found wanting on many of the components (think: Jaime Escalante or any gruff loner-but-respected veteran teacher).
Interestingly, job descriptions in other fields are typically far clearer about results sought. Here is an excerpt from a job description for a manager of marketing (arguably just a different version of “teacher”) from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development:
- Plan and prepare advertising and promotional material to increase sales of products or services.
- Inspect layouts and advertising copy and edit scripts, audio and video tapes, and other promotional material for adherence to specifications.
- programs that meet identified buyer targets.
- Monitor and analyze sales promotion results to determine cost effectiveness of promotion campaigns.
- Read trade journals and professional literature to stay informed on trends, innovations, and changes that affect media planning.
- Track program budgets and expenses and campaign response rates to evaluate each campaign based on program objectives and industry norms.
Notice how the italicized phrase in each item establishes a performance goal for the role: “to increase sales…for adherence to specifications…that meet buyer targets…to determine cost effectiveness…to stay informed…to evaluate each campaign.” How odd, really, that teachers are rarely hired in terms of desired outcomes like this.
Some years back I had an illuminating conversation with a high school principal about the problems in our hiring. We were arguing about what to do with the problem of so many teachers merely marching through textbooks. I said to him: well, you’re the Principal, you can change this. “Whoa!” he retorted. “I don’t have control over what they do. I just rent space to them in the mall.” A tad sarcastic and overstated, perhaps – but a sobering view of an all-too-common reality. Once hired, you can often define the job as you see fit.
I think we can boil the desired results of “teacher” down to a few core obligations. An educator must arguably cause four things in learners:
- greater interest in the subject and in learning than was there before, as determined by observations, surveys, and client feedback
- successful learning related to key course goals, as reflected in mutually agreed-upon evidence
- greater confidence and feelings of efficacy as revealed by student behavior and reports (and as eventually reflected in improved results)
- a passion and intellectual direction in each learner
1. For some odd reason the issue of student boredom and lack of interest in school work is rarely addressed in job descriptions and evaluation, even though it is arguably one of the greatest impediments to higher levels of student achievement. No one is going to meet higher standards if the work and classroom are boring. Our student survey results make the needs and solutions crystal-clear.
2. Successful learning understood as gain from a baseline is a no-brainer: make a difference in each learner, beyond the predicted effect size that results from just growing a year older in school. Even if value-added metrics are bogus at the macro level, they are essential at the local level. We should demand pre- and post- results on worthy assessment tasks that get at the heart of ongoing key goals such as argumentation, clarity of communication, problem solving, etc. (Many of the newer accountability systems try to do this, but too many of the SGOs or SLOs are invalid or silly, designed to game the system.)
3. Make students feel more competent and confident. No one – teacher included – is likely to learn if the learning environment makes one feel alienated, stupid or irrelevant. We also know that if students feel that the locus of control is outside themselves then learning to high levels is unlikely, and reaction to failure will be dysfunctional. Changing such fatalism ought to be a highly-valued component of a teacher job description.
4. You cannot achieve great results without knowing kids and playing to their strengths, no matter how fixed the standards and curriculum are. How many students are regularly helped to play to and recognize their strengths as a central part of planning, teaching, assessing, and reporting? The ideal was framed nicely by the SCANS report: students should leave school with a résumé, not a transcript. How many teachers (besides primary-grade teachers) spend the first week of school mostly getting to know the strengths, weaknesses, talents, interests, and styles of all learners – and then taking a few days to modify plans accordingly? Interestingly enough, almost all coaches do this: early practice is primarily about seeing who you have and what they can do; and adjusting accordingly.
“I have to cover the content”
With a genuine job description we can finally tackle a great problem in education, the common view that the job is to cover the content. No: marching page by page through a textbook (or the written curriculum) can never be your job as a teacher – ever. The textbook or curriculum is written completely independently of your goals and students; it is a generic resource that merely pulls together a comprehensive body of information and lessons in a package for use by thousands of people with varying needs all over the United States. It is utterly insensitive to formative assessment results and the near certainty that deviations from the pagination will be needed to cause high levels of learning.
Textbooks are thus really like dictionaries or encyclopedias. And we don’t ask you to learn English by going through the dictionary from A to Z. Yet, this is what almost all textbook-driven teaching amounts to. As with dictionaries and encyclopedias, you would consult them as needed – i.e. in light of specific overarching goals. That this approach to textbooks rarely happens may be the biggest indicator of the pressing need to clarify the job.
Once the goals are clear, intelligent decisions about the textbook can be made:
- Which chapters in the textbook are central to my goals, course goals, Mission, and standards?
- Which chapters are not vital, relating only somewhat to my goals, course goals, Mission, and standards?
- Which chapters can be skipped since they are irrelevant to my goals, course goals, Mission, and standards?
- What must I do to supplement the text in order to achieve my goals, course goals, Mission, and standards?
“No, you don’t get it! I have to cover all this content to prepare them for the tests! That’s the bottom line, not my goal, and I am hassled about it regularly. We have to prepare them for the test, so we have to cover everything.”
But as I have long written, backed by both evidence[1] and common sense, this widely-heard lament simply doesn’t make sense. Here’s what you are saying, really: “I would rather teach for understanding and engagement, but I can’t. I ‘have to’ just cover all this content superficially and right out of the textbook. That’s what the tests demand.”
Really? The tests reward superficial and disengaging teaching? You need to teach badly to get higher test scores? The work has to be scattershot and uninteresting to be good preparation for a test?
Such a view defies common sense as well: the best teachers I have seen make their subject interesting and they make it hang together via interesting problems, big ideas, and clear performance goals. Endless content coverage is actually the approach of someone who has no explicit course goals and strategy for staying focused on them. In other words, someone not clear on their job.
I blame the employers, not the teachers: the job description is their obligation. Hiring against it and evaluating against it is one of their primary obligations. It’s time we got this basic act of professionalism in the workplace right.
[1] See Shwartz et al (2009), and Bain (2004).
(This is a greatly revised piece, for blog purposes, based on a chapter I wrote a few years back for a Solution Tree book on teaching.)
15 Responses
I spent many years in higher education “doing it my way”, with all the hassle which that generated, and many of my colleagues were doing it “their way”. Towards the end I started to hear the words “deliver the material” from heads of departments and others, as a description of the job, and I had real fears for the future. In HE (college) this appears to have happened. Very sad indeed.
This is a sad commentary indeed. There is such a need to professionalize our work so that there is a balance of accountability and autonomy. Why do people want teachers to merely deliver the material? Is there no trust? Is content more revered than intelligence?
Thank you for yet another thought-provoking blog entry. This idea is outcomes is one about which I have many discussions, especially when it comes to teacher bonuses and raises. A lack of clarity tends to be a problem in many instances including job descriptions – mine includes more than one person could possibly do in addition to the caveat including anything additional the principal may ask. Fortunately I work for an intelligent and fair woman.
In terms of the focus on skills in teacher evaluations, I think they are the skills the professionals believe will led to the desired outcomes (the ones you lay out are beautiful). In teaching, there is too much at risk for me to wait to see the results/outcomes at the end of the year. Yet, it is doable to look at results throughout the year and use that data to inform instruction – and I imagine much of the skills to be used will be those in Danielson’s framework and Lemov’s work, as well as others. I guess, as usual, it is a balance.
I certainly agree that administrators have a responsibility to ensure the people teaching children in their building are worthy of every child they serve.
Powerful but simple!
Morning Grant, I enjoy reading your posts and sharing them with my staff to generate thought provoking discussions. I agree that teachers need a clear job description and think this is a good idea. Role clarity, or lack thereof, is a main reason people stay, or leave a job.
My suggestion would be to use the MA DESE teaching rubric as a guide to set some parameters on teacher expectations. They are accountable for these expectation via their evaluations. The document states “Rubrics are designed to help educators and evaluators (1) develop a consistent, shared understanding of what proficient performance looks like in practice, (2) develop a common terminology and structure to organize evidence, and (3) make informed professional judgments about formative and summative performance ratings on each Standard and overall.” We are trying in our district to simplify this document and focus on some top priorities (teaching ALL students being one of them via student engagement), share these with teacher input and move our school forward together. The rubric can be overwhelming, so breaking it down and sharing expectations in advance has proven helpful to teachers and administrators alike.
Keep up the great work
Bill
Thanks, Bill! I think the MA rubrics are quite good – thanks for reminding me of them. However, even here many of the things are skills as opposed to outcomes. For example: Consistently supports students to identify strengths, interests, and needs; ask for support; take risks; challenge themselves; set learning goals; and monitor their own progress. That is an input, not an outcome. It doesn’t say that the teacher has to actually improve the intrinsic motivation of students. In fact, ironically, it puts almost all the burden on students! Here’s another: Consistently defines high expectations for quality work and effort and effectively supports students to set high expectations for each other to persevere and produce high-quality work. But nowhere does it say that these expectations should be turned into results. By contrast, a very specific outcome is specified for parent interaction: Successfully engages most families and sustains their active and appropriate participation in the classroom and school community. Is able to model this element. See the difference? Why not also say “Successfully engages students in class, leading to steady improvement of performance” or something like that?
Grant, this is a really interesting idea…
I especially liked the 4th one– a passion and intellectual direction in each learner
If that were part of an actual job description, then the conversation about what great teaching is would have already started in the building.
Not surprisingly, the problems come in with interpretation. I look at the above description and would decide as a teacher to really get to know my students BEFORE instructing them (as you referenced in your entry) and adapt my instruction throughout the year to make sure I was drawing from what the students were passionate about, not what I was passionate about.
But then there is also the expectation that a teacher articulates clear learning objectives for the units and lessons, which sometimes mandates actually writing it on the board (your previous blog handled that idea). But if the teacher is designing clear objectives and articulating them FOR students then pretty quickly it can turn into a situation of the teacher making all of the decisions as to what is important, not the student and so meeting the expectation above is made more difficult. Another way of saying this is that the student’s intellectual direction and passion will be snuffed out in favor of the teacher’s biased decisions. This is just one example where the edicts of building leaders often cross swords and it becomes very arduous for teachers to figure out how to act. Of course, there is a happy mix somewhere.
This potential problem aside, stating these expectations at the outset allows a VERY productive conversation to get going.
Thanks for the post.
Dan, great point. The INHERENT tensions in teaching need to be more explicit and put on the table, in my opinion. Indeed, arguably the greatest tension is inherent in mass education: The more it is ‘mass’ the less it is personalized and able to focus on student autonomy. All the more reason to discuss that tension front and center! This would actually require admins. to do less dopey mandating of depersonalized outcomes and processes, if this were the kind of discussion to be had in contract negotiations.
I don’t see a great tension, however, in playing to student interests and strengths while articulating clear outcomes. Every 4th grade teacher of reading does this nicely. You are going to get better at reading – period. But you will have lots of choice in what to read and how to reveal your understanding and engagement in reading. That’s why I persist in believing that high school is in the sorriest shape of all our educational institutions: less and less choice, fewer imaginative courses. Nor does it have to be that way: we had a fabulous elective system when I taught HS. Colleges offer all sorts of intriguing courses. It’s the HS that is stuck in a disengaging depersonalized rut – except in the obvious places like art and robotics. I so wish more HS faculties would rise up and say: look, school does not have to be this depersonalized in an era of standards. We are MORE likely to meet standards and improve results if kids are engaged.
yes.. the inherent tension isn’t even acknowledged. Stating these expectations in the hiring process would force the conversation out in the open…. It is so important to do this and so rarely done.
you mentioned sometime ago that with the emphasis now on skills that the time may ripe for arguing for more imaginative electives which honor and preserve common learning goals but allow for flexibility for the teachers. That would send a powerful message to the faculty that while their destination is in part decided for them, they get to pick the car! Their passions would undoubtedly rub off on the students.
It’s very puzzling to me that electives at the hs don’t even get considered anymore. I understand that in small schools scheduling electives is a complicated business but that’s hardly an excuse for denying both students and teachers opportunities to play to interests and strengths. And the loss of them pre-dates the Standards movement, so that can’t be the key factor. It’s especially odd when colleges have so many, and HS people are always claiming that ‘way the colleges want’ limits their ability to be creative.
how much autonomy do teachers even have? why I want to write curricula.
What in the world do you have against Jaime Escalante?
Nothing! Great teacher. But read the biography of him: he was hardly a model school citizen. That’s the whole point.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because I was on the other side of the interview table for the first time, and realized that a key difference I saw in the interviewers was a result of the ed schools they’d attended: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/on-interviewing-and-ed-school/
And that got me thinking about the purpose of ed school, why I’m pretty certain it’s a necessary aspect of training teachers, despite the vagueness of the process. Which I think is related to your thoughts on job description.
” I said to him: well, you’re the Principal, you can change this. “Whoa!” he retorted. “I don’t have control over what they do. I just rent space to them in the mall.” A tad sarcastic and overstated, perhaps – but a sobering view of an all-too-common reality. Once hired, you can often define the job as you see fit.”
Yes. And I do. I’ve done so every year I’ve taught, and I don’t march through textbooks. My kids aren’t going to rock out tests anyway, so I’d rather they know what they know, to the extent possible.
“. Being told that “you will teach US History” or “we are hiring you to be a 4th grade teacher” is not a job description.”
See, I disagree. I think it is the job description. Then the principal evaluates how we do that job description, based on his or her personal (sometimes objective, but not always) preferences, and gives us tenure or not. Fundamentally, we are paid for the hours we spend in class plus an additional number of PD hours. Everything else we put into it is gravy.
I wonder how many teachers at the high school level follow the text religiously? that’d be a much better survey than asking kids their opinion about school.
For myself, I haven’t ever been a slave to a textbook, and go through the process you describe every time I get a new course, constantly revisiting as I move through the year. I always find that I still go too fast the first year, then slow it way back the second, and then pull in subjects slowly as I get better at designing the course. I encourage all other teachers to do the same. My coworkers are always taken aback when they ask me what chapter I’m on and I say, I don’t do chapters.
I appreciate the details in your reply and the challenge of finding out what folks do in planning. I described this once as the black box of education, about which we know far too little.
I actually have some data on planning and teaching from a few schools. The results suggest that you are in the minority, alas. Most people just follow the textbook, especially in math and science; and in middle schools. Thus, I can’t see why you think a slot describing the content only is the job description. If the problem of ‘coverage’ is real – and all I have seen in decades of being in schools and in working with teacher-planners says it’s real even if not universal – then, greater clarity in the job is needed since people are unwittingly doing something other than we wish them to do.
I will likely blog on this since it goes to the heart of why I think a better job description/curriculum/assessment system is needed. I’ll ask people to take the survey and use it with staff if they are admins. PS: I don’t know why that would be a ‘better’ survey than asking kids questions about their experience. Both are important pieces of information. I confess it bothers me that you would find such info ‘better’ since the aim of teaching is not planning but engagement and learning.