Is It Fair to Expect Teachers to Keep Improving Throughout Their Careers?

Is it fair to expect teachers to continuously improve?

I know this is a weird question, but think about it.

Is it fair that we hire people to do a job and expect them to continually get better and better and better over the course of their careers?

Think about this with me for just a second.

I think for the first few years of a teaching career, especially up to about year seven, there really is a learning curve, right?

Like teaching has a very steep learning curve.

Like almost nobody is very good at teaching right out of the gate.

it takes time to get really good at teaching.

And it's not until about year 7 to 10 where people really start to taper off.

But even after that period of time when people have gotten really good, We have this culture, we have this expectation that people will continually improve.

And it's built into our goal setting and evaluation process, the supervision process, observations, walkthroughs, evaluations.

All of these steps that we go through as instructional leaders are designed to help people to continue to improve.

And I think we need to ask ourselves, do people continue to improve?

Can people continue to improve?

Or are we just spinning our wheels?

Are we just going through the motions to try to produce something that we can't actually produce?

I don't think the answer is that no, people can't grow, but I do think we need to think about how this works because I think we have a little bit of mythology operating here.

We have a little bit of a misconception happening where we think if we just kind of go around and spar with people as instructional leaders, they'll continue to get better and better and better.

And sometimes the reaction from veteran teachers is like, please don't come by and like punch me in the face today.

I really don't have the time or the mental bandwidth for that.

Just let me teach.

And it's like it's not allowed to say, oh, you're good enough.

I'll leave you alone.

Like we don't have that culture in this profession that anyone is ever good enough and can just be left alone.

And certainly that's because at the beginning of our careers, we're not good enough.

Like if you were to look at my teaching as a first year science teacher and answer the question, like, is Justin good enough right now to just be left alone for the rest of his career?

He's like, definitely not.

You need to continue to improve.

and i think most people would agree that you do need to continue to improve up to you know about about year seven and after that the reality is you know people don't really improve that much but we still act like they're supposed to so what do we do with this how do we think about continuous improvement beyond that point where like maybe it's not actually even possible i think one angle that we really need to think about is that improvement happens not at the personal level, but at the systems level beyond a certain point.

Like once you as an individual operator are competent, any further improvement is probably mostly going to come at the school level, at the systems level.

W.

Edwards Deming, the management consultant, you know, the guy who kind of invented management consulting in the modern era, said that about 94% of improvement opportunities belong to the system.

It's not about the individual, you know, just being punched up to the next level.

It's about the system that they're operating within.

And I don't think that's like 100%, right?

I don't think it's true that people completely stop growing after they get their feet under them as teachers.

But I do think we have to question this assumption that we can just kind of get continuous improvement out of people.

And like, think about the hiring situation when We offer someone a job, we give them a paycheck because they can do that job.

What does that expectation of continuous improvement mean?

It means that what was good enough last month is now not good enough.

I'm expecting you not just to meet expectations, but I'm expecting you to go further and further beyond those expectations every month.

I think at some point that becomes unreasonable.

And one of the ways it manifests itself after people's skill has kind of maxed out is in just greater and greater sacrifice greater and greater contribution harder and harder work more time more extracurriculars more expectations on people that they don't really have the bandwidth for so i think we've got to grapple with this question of what is good enough for teachers what is a good enough level of teaching where we can say okay like yes we should all try to improve our systems and improve our results for students but you as a person doing the job of teaching are now Good enough.

How do we think about that?

Let me know what you think.