A Model, Perhaps

Since my fireside chat at EHS this week, which turned out to be even more exciting than I anticipated, I have been thinking about my off-the-cuff remarks regarding model schools.  I am perchance defending my own hastily drawn model, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Schools, as I have postulated before, serve many missions.  One of those is to house the children of our community safely for about 8 hours a day for 180 days a year.  We cannot get away from that.

We are also expected to teach them, the operable definition being that teaching has not occurred until there is evidence the child has learned.  Thus the phrase teaching for learning.  We cannot get away from that.

We have been attempting to perform those two missions in little rectangular rooms where 20+ plus kids or more sit at the feet of an adult, college educated, certified professional teacher.  That adult bears the brunt of the responsibility for the learning of all those kids.  In a system our size, secondary teachers are totally responsible for the outcomes of their subject by grade.  In elementary school, multiple teachers teach the same grade level, but there is typically more than one teacher teaching each subject by grade while all elementary teachers have multiple preparations. 

All this happens all day, every day.  Groups of kids, one teacher.  From the teacher’s point of view, the kids are not getting any easier to teach at the same time what we have to teach is growing in depth and complexity.  Teachers are boxed in all day with the kids, and their focus must be on grading, planning, setting up for tomorrow.  They are lucky and exhausted if they get through the day.  There is no time for real collaboration, no time for real professional development, no time to learn all the newest whiz bang stuff out there.  Something has to give. 

Of our $12 million dollar budget, roughly $5.5 million is devoted to teacher salaries.  Almost half.  This does not include aides, principals, etc.  Just classroom teachers.  So, what would I do with another $5.5 million dollars?  (This is rhetorical.  My answer follows.)

Double the number of teachers is what I would do.  If we set aside the reality that we will not receive another $5.5 million and the reality that another 120 teachers are not available to hire, let’s look at what we could do if we had twice as many teachers.

We would pair everyone up.  We would not need more classrooms; we would have two teachers where now we have one.  We could format that in any number of ways.  Every classroom has two functioning teachers to help.  Each classroom has a morning teacher while the other plans, learns, prepares, etc., and then they flip for the afternoon.  One teacher could be the “teacher” and the other could be the planner, grader, curriculum expert, materials resource person, and classroom observer to identify kids tuning out.  Teachers would be structured to collaborate, we could dramatically reduce the bane of teaching, and we would have dramatic improvement with that many adults working with the same number of kids.  The only real magic bullet to improve instructional outcomes for kids is a dedicated, prepared, motivated teacher working with small numbers of kids.

And, teachers could enter the ranks of other professionals who intentionally set aside time each day to reflect, to learn, to collaborate, to consider either their patients or their projects or their day in court.  Success up, stress down.  I like it! 

But oops, the current thinking politically is to raise the stress and lower the money.  Guess I’ve got it all backwards.

Anybody got $5.5 million?