Restructuring the Teaching Profession

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader. And today on the show, we're going to do something a little bit different. I don't have a guest today, so it's just you and me, and we're going to talk about the teaching profession, and I'm going to share the rough outline of a proposal for how we can restructure teaching as a profession.

[00:35] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:37] SPEAKER_00:

And if you like this proposal and you decide that you want to explore it and potentially implement it in your school or district, we're going to put a link on our website on the page for this episode where you can contact me. And I don't have anything for sale. I just want to be able to talk with people who are interested about this a little bit more. But basically, here's the thing. Teaching is a profession, but there are some structural flaws with the way that it's set up to really operate as a profession. I deeply believe that teaching is professional work and that teaching needs to be professional work.

[01:11]

And over the years, we've done a lot of experiments as a profession to kind of de-skill and de-professionalize the work because the problem with professional work is that you need professionals to do it. and it's expensive to train and support professionals and there are supply problems, right? Doctors take eight years to fully train. So we know if we wanna have enough doctors, we've gotta plan at least eight years ahead. And we're constantly in the education world running short on teachers and then We change the standards for becoming a teacher in order to deal with that, and that results in all kinds of discrepancies in teacher quality and teacher preparation. And I think most of the concern for quality in the teaching profession is handled through two things.

[01:56]

One is evaluation. After someone is hired, we use the evaluation process to ensure that they're doing a good job and potentially do something about it. If they're not, But on the other end of the spectrum, we try to deal with the supply of quality teachers through preparation. And I think both of those steps are absolutely essential. So please hear me on that. I think we need to do great teacher preparation, and we need to do effective teacher evaluation, and of course, much more on the job to support teachers.

[02:25]

But there's a fundamental structural issue within the teaching profession that that no one is talking about. So that's why I wanted to kind of go on a little tear about that with you today on this episode of Principal Center Radio and propose an alternate structure for the teaching profession and one that is not pie in the sky, one that does not rely on resources that you don't have. So here goes. I believe the fundamental problem with the way the teaching profession is currently structured is that it's flat. It is a flat profession. When you become a teacher, You are fully a teacher on the very first day on the job, and you are fully a teacher on the day that you retire.

[03:04]

And there's really no differentiation in terms of responsibilities between a first year teacher and a teacher who's been on the job for an entire career. There's really no structural differentiation. And we have dealt with that kind of shortcoming of the way teaching is structured as a profession and as a career by putting salary scales in place, right? You get paid more the longer you are a teacher. And there's been a lot of criticism of that idea because there's no rational reason that we should pay people more simply for being on the job. You know, it's good if you're a teacher.

[03:36]

You want to get paid more over time, as I think everyone does, but that's not tied to anything really meaningful as far as advancement as a professional. And we try to compensate for that by paying people more if they get a master's degree or a doctorate or additional training. But for the most part, your salary is pretty fixed as a teacher. You come in on the bottom of the salary schedule and you retire on the top of the salary schedule. So money is one part of the equation, but I think it's not the part that's most important. I think the real structural problem with the way teaching is laid out as a profession comes down to responsibility, right?

[04:16]

On the very first day on the job, a new teacher has the same responsibilities as a teacher who's been on the job for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. There's no kind of gradual easing in to the teaching profession. When you are a teacher, you are a teacher first. full stop and there's no progression there's no career ladder within classroom teaching and of course there are opportunities within our profession for people to grow and take on different responsibilities and advance but i think it's a tragedy that most of those responsibilities or opportunities that are out there for teachers involve leaving the classroom because that creates an incentive for everyone who wants to get better who wants to take on new challenges to leave the classroom. And I think we could do so much better as a profession if we restructured things a little bit to give people increasing responsibility, increasing compensation, increasing professional challenge over time while remaining in the classroom.

[05:18]

So I don't want people to have to feel like they have to go be an instructional coach or go work at the district office and be a curriculum director or become an administrator. if they get really good at teaching and want to continue to advance their career and get paid more and all of the things that go along with advancement. We really leave people stuck in the classroom who want to be in the classroom, who want to not get out of the classroom, but who want to continue to move forward professionally. And I think we've got to do something about that. And it's especially urgent because new teachers often get in way over their heads when they start. Part of the consequence of not really being able to advance within the classroom is that you have a full load of responsibilities on day one.

[06:03]

And I can tell you from my personal experience and from what I hear as a... work with principals and supporting new teachers, it is absolutely clear to me that teaching is far too difficult a job on day one. We've got to ease people into the profession more. I struggled as a new teacher.

[06:21]

I worked in a fairly high needs school and just was not prepared for the classroom management challenges. I wasn't prepared for understanding the developmental needs of sixth and seventh graders i had trained to be a high school teacher and i think that's that's true for a lot of people we get in over our heads right at the beginning and it's not that we couldn't learn to do that work it's that we're just baptized by fire right we're just thrown in and a lot of the time we don't make it we start to drown and for every teacher that goes through that hundreds of students are suffering the consequences of that lack of kind of a gradual easing into the profession And of course, this is a pretty well-known problem. But the way that we've tried to address that problem structurally is on the front end with more training. If teaching is too demanding a job on day one, we try to start earlier in the process, right?

[07:12]

We try to have a five-year undergraduate degree in teacher preparation program. And we try to screen students very well for that and prepare them very well and provide more and more and more training on the front end. But I think the research is very mixed as to whether that really makes a difference. You know, a lot of your success as a new teacher comes down to things that are still pretty hard to measure. And then, of course, you have to actually like it to want to stick with it and make it your career. So I think rather than simply invest in more and more and more preparation and trust that to solve our problem, we need to look at a different solution because the more we pour into preparation, the more we raise the cost of getting people into the teaching profession.

[07:55]

And when the cost gets too high, we end up with shortages and people say, no, I don't actually want to go to school for five years to be a teacher. I'd rather go to school for six weeks. And then we end up with a lot of not optimal alternatives as far as how we're getting people into the classroom. And of course, a lot of people begin their careers really uncertified and without a lot of training at all. And I know in a lot of private schools, there really is no formal requirement for teacher training beyond kind of a college degree. So I don't want to propose something that is strictly on the front end as far as teacher prep.

[08:29]

I think we need to look at the responsibilities that we give new teachers on the front end and then restructure the teaching profession to scale those up over time as people's skill grows, as their experience builds, and we need to match their compensation and their level of professional autonomy to that growth. And that brings us to the fundamental structural problem. Teaching is a flat profession. Let's say you have a sixth through eighth grade school and you have departments within that school, call it a middle school. And within each department, let's say you have three teachers. Let's say you have three math teachers and one of them is a veteran and is pretty high on the salary scale.

[09:12]

One is a new teacher and is right at the bottom of the salary scale. And one is kind of in the middle, kind of you know, working their way up the salary scale as they gain more experience. Now, in the way the profession is typically structured, all three of those middle school math teachers would have exactly the same responsibilities. Now, they might teach different courses, they might teach different grade levels within that middle school, but if they're all teaching math, they all have roughly the same responsibilities, and there's no differentiation between the responsibilities that we give to a first-year math teacher versus an experienced teacher versus a veteran teacher who's been on the job a very long time. All of the differentiation that we do in terms of workload, in terms of professional responsibility, comes down to things that are outside of the classroom. Like your veteran teacher might be on the leadership team or might be on more committees or might be involved in work outside of the school to work at the district level.

[10:07]

But the in the classroom responsibilities are exactly the same for all three teachers. And honestly, I think that makes no sense. It makes no sense that we've structured the teaching profession in such a way that all three of those teachers have the same responsibilities. And it even gets worse because since teaching is a flat profession and a lot of people who want to advance want to stay in the classroom, one way that teachers quote unquote advance and make progress professionally while remaining in the classroom is to get a better and better gig for themselves within the classroom. So you'll often find that in a math department, the highest level math courses are taught by the most experienced teacher because that teacher has kind of quote unquote, put in their time and earned the right to teach those kind of more fun classes that have maybe less needy students and more engaged parents.

[10:59]

We work ourselves into positions of privilege within the profession that don't line up with what students need. Think about the structure there and whether that meets students' needs. Do we want our best and most experienced teachers teaching our students who need the least help? No, we want our best teachers to be responsible for and working as closely as possible with our neediest students. So this incentive system is precisely backwards and we've got to think of it a different way. Okay, so here's my proposal.

[11:31]

Rather than look at, say, being a middle school math teacher as one job and that we need to bring three different people in to fill three identical roles in terms of being a teacher and just teaching different courses or different students, I think instead we need to decompose that job a little bit and make it more specialized so that it's actually structured as a profession. Think about being a doctor, right? Being a doctor is a profession, it is a career, but there are lots of different kinds of doctors that play lots of different roles within the medical profession. And it's that differentiation that allows us to have specialists, that allows us to have general practitioners, that allows us to have doctors who work in hospitals and perform different roles with different levels of expertise and training. So instead of having a math department or a grade level team with a flat structure with three identical jobs on it or five identical jobs on that team, imagine that we reconfigured that a bit and had kind of an introductory level of teaching.

[12:36]

We had a more intermediate level and a more advanced level. So we have our master teachers kind of running the department or running the team and making some of the higher level decisions. And we have less senior, less experienced teachers filling those other roles. And of course, you could have two levels, you could have three levels. But what that would allow us to do is break down the responsibilities differently. Because I think one consequence of treating teaching as a flat profession is that we treat every task related to teaching as if it was equally professional work.

[13:11]

But really, teaching is composed of lots of different tasks and skills, some of which really do not require the level of advanced thinking and advanced training and expertise that others do, right? Some of the work that teachers do could be done by almost anyone with a pulse. And on the other hand, there are some decisions about teaching and some work that's done in the classroom that we really need highly trained professionals to do. And I think we've got to break that down more. So let's get into the mechanics of how this would work a little bit. And by the way, tons of other professions do this, right?

[13:45]

This is not a novel concept at all. It's just one that we don't currently use in teaching. So let's say we have three levels of teachers in our schools. How do we pay for the more advanced salary of the teachers with more responsibility? And how do we kind of recognize the different levels there? First, I want to point out a positive side effect of this kind of redistribution of responsibility.

[14:09]

We've got a lot of teachers in our profession who love teaching but simply can't keep up with the kind of outside of school workload. I think it would be a tremendous improvement to our profession if it could just be a job where you show up and do great professional work and then go home and don't have to worry about it. And I think if we were to restructure kind of the middle level of the job. So let's say we have three levels. If a level two teacher can show up on time and do great work all day and go home and be done and not have to be consumed by their job 24-7 the way teachers typically are, I think we would find that teaching is a much more attractive career. And I think we can still leave room for that kind of extra level of commitment that we

[14:59]

in our little model here, but I think we've got to give people a little bit more flexibility than teaching currently offers. It is too demanding a job, even for people who are good at it. And we've all, I think as administrators, we've all lost great teachers who just said to themselves, you know, I really would like to have more time to spend with my family. I love this work. I love working with students, but I cannot be planning and grading papers all night. I've got to be there for my own family.

[15:27]

And every other career that's out there has an attraction to people who are in teaching if there's no homework, so to speak. So I think as a default, let's say we don't change too much for those level two teachers. We just kind of reduce the responsibilities a little bit and make it more of a professional day job. on the senior end. Let's say we want to pay our best teachers more, we want to give them more responsibility, but we don't necessarily want to just give them more responsibility outside of the classroom. We don't want to just pile on more and more and more because that's what we typically do, right?

[16:03]

And we often kind of burn out our very best people by simply giving them a greater workload without giving them any more money or any more responsibility or any more of a chance to make an impact at a broader scale unless they leave the classroom. On the bottom end of the scale, let's say our level one teachers are new, are inexperienced, or perhaps they're just not as skilled as someone else. Maybe they've bounced around a lot. Maybe they've changed grade levels and they're just kind of green with that level of teaching. Let's say we want to start our new or just less experienced or less skilled teachers at a level one. So on a team, we've got level one, level two, and level three.

[16:44]

And let's say level two is pretty similar to your average teacher today. Level three is pretty similar to your master veteran teacher. And level one is pretty similar to a new teacher or someone who just has not advanced very far and not really developed that level of skill. First of all, how do we pay them? How do we come up with the money to pay them differently? Well, this one is real simple.

[17:07]

Let's say we keep our level two salaries the same. Let's say we cut our level one salaries in half. And let's say we take all of that money that we've taken away from the level one salaries and we give it to the level three teachers. All right. So now we have a pretty big step up. All right.

[17:25]

And of course, those numbers are arbitrary. We could shift those around however you want. You could start with a more modest adjustment. But let's say we were to take...

[17:34]

three teachers who all have equal amounts of experience, but we want to give them different levels of responsibility. They have different things going on in their lives. They have different levels of skills. They're at different places in their career. And we want to have a level one teacher, a level two teacher, and a level three teacher. And they're all in the same spot on the salary scale.

[17:53]

And for the sake of making the math easy, you know, anytime we're gonna do math in a podcast, we've gotta get to some round numbers to make it easier on ourselves. Let's say all of those teachers are earning $50,000 a year in the traditional flat structure. Okay, so we've got three teachers who are all in the same place, $50,000 a year on the salary schedule. What if we broke that apart and said level one teachers are going to make half that amount, $25,000 a year. Level two teachers will continue to make $50,000 a year. And level three teachers are going to get that additional $25,000 that we took away from the level one teachers.

[18:32]

And that will bump those level three teachers up to $75,000 a year. Now, we've got a big progression from 25 to 50 to 75. And advancing in your career within the classroom can double and then triple your salary from the time that you start as a level one teacher. So think with me for a second about what some of the consequences of that would be. Well, first of all, we would take a real hard look at what responsibilities we were giving to those level one teachers. And we'd look at what all of our teachers are doing today and say, okay, what are the tasks that I would be most comfortable within the responsibilities of teaching with giving to our lowest paid and presumably least skilled and experienced teachers?

[19:19]

Well, we could find lots of things that need to be done in the process of teaching that that don't require a veteran teacher with 75 000 in in salary coming in and lots and lots of experience things like grading papers things like making copies things like getting materials organized things like teaching lessons to the entire class you know i think often as new teachers we focus on our lesson delivery and some aspects of lesson delivery and even planning are not that hard. It's just that when we do them in isolation, we miss a lot that we would get better at with experience and that we get better at with collaboration with more experienced colleagues. So let's say the level three teacher has ultimate responsibility for student learning. They're responsible for the lesson plans. They're responsible for student progress and monitoring that with formative and summative assessments.

[20:14]

They're responsible for behavior plans. So the responsibility goes to the top. And a lot of the tasks that are honestly kind of a waste of our best teacher's time go to the bottom. And of course, whatever is kind of left to change for the middle could change or stay the same. But imagine with me for a moment that we restructured teaching responsibilities and restructured the teaching profession in that way. What do you think would happen?

[20:43]

Well, obviously we would need to go slow with this, right? We would need to phase it in on kind of a voluntary basis. We would need to do kind of a pilot. But let's say you have an opportunity like that coming up in your school. Let's say contractually you have the flexibility to do this if you would like. And let's say you have a team or a department or a grade level that has one master teacher, one incredible teacher on it and two vacancies.

[21:10]

What if instead of continuing to pay that incredible master teacher the same amount and then hire two new people and pay them the same amount, what if you said, okay, this is going to be three jobs, level one, level two, level three. And our existing teacher that we know and trust is going to be the level three teacher. And we are going to hire a $50,000 a year level two teacher and a $25,000 a year level level one teacher. So we're not messing with anybody who's already on staff. We're not ruining anybody's life by cutting their salary. We are just trying something new when the opportunity presents itself through hiring in a different way.

[21:47]

I think we might find that there are opportunities to experiment and learn from those experiments if we keep an eye out for them. And if this is something that you would like to try or that you would just like to think about more, on this page on our website where you'll find this episode of Principal Center Radio, there's going to be a link to the network. And the network is our discussion board. And there'll be a post specifically for this episode. And I would love to have an ongoing conversation with you about this proposal. So go to principalcenter.com slash radio and find this episode.

[22:19]

Or you should be able to click through. from your podcast app directly to this episode on our website, and then click through to the network discussion board. And there are some instructions there for signing in. And talk to me about this. What do you think about this proposal for decomposing the teaching profession and adding kind of career ladders into it within the classroom? What responsibilities would you want to go to our level three teachers?

[22:43]

What responsibilities would you want to go to our level one teachers? And how would you redesign the teaching profession within your school with the same number of students, with the same number of teachers, with the same amount of money? How could we do better by shifting the responsibilities around a little bit and how would that work out? And again, I think there would be great consequences for people who want more flexibility or who wanna be able to just go through different seasons in their lives or who wanna be able to make a change. Let's say you have been a level two teacher and your parents get sick and you say to yourself, well, I really love my job. I don't want to give it up.

[23:21]

I don't want to stop working with students, but I really need to let my family take the priority right now so I can have more time to take care of my parents. So I'm going to step from a level two position to a level one position. Would that be doable within this kind of system? Absolutely. Right now what happens in our flat profession is that people simply don't keep up as well as they would like when they have more going on in their lives. So I think we've got to really look at what people's lives are like and how the demands of teaching as it's traditionally structured interact with those patterns that we go through in our lives.

[24:01]

You know, if you wanna go back to grad school, you probably don't wanna be a level three teacher while you're taking a full load of graduate classes. So you might say, okay, I'm capable of being a level three teacher, but I'm gonna stick with level two teaching right now so that I can just kind of have that as my day job and then really not have to take anything home with me. And when I'm no longer taking those grad classes, then I can step back up into a level three role, get the pay that goes along with that when I'm more able to handle the workload and the responsibility. So again, I would love to have your input on this. And if you go to network.principalcenter.com and sign in there and find the discussion for this episode of Principal Center Radio, let me know what you think.

[24:41] SPEAKER_01:

And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[24:45] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for joining me for this special episode of Principal Center Radio. If you would like more of my direct thinking straight into your ears in podcast form, I want to let you know about High Performance Habits, which is our members-only podcast. We have two podcasts now at the Principal Center. We have Principal Center Radio, which you're listening to right now, where we have guests who come on to talk about their work and their books and their big ideas. And High Performance Habits is where you get into my systems and strategies for transforming your productivity, building capacity for instructional leadership in your school, and multiplying your impact on student learning. And most of what we do at the Principal Center is centered around webinars.

[25:30]

I think webinars are a great learning format that works online. But I also know that it's tough to make time for webinars. So we've added High Performance Habits, the pro-member only podcast, to give you an additional way to engage with our content at the Principal Center, to review our content, to think about your work in a different way. when you're not necessarily sitting at your computer. You can play these podcasts on your computer, certainly, but you can also listen on your mobile device during your commute or during other non-screen time. So we've got quite a few episodes already available for you.

[26:05]

If you want to become a pro member, you can go to principalcenter.com join and get started today and get full access to all of our high performance habits podcasts.

[26:16] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.