Teaching Is Not Just One Job — It's Many Distinct Jobs
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how teaching encompasses many different roles and skill sets, and why professional development must be tailored accordingly.
Key Takeaways
- Teaching a first grader is different from teaching a senior - The skills, knowledge, and approaches vary enormously across grade levels and subjects
- PD must match the role - Generic professional development ignores these differences and wastes teachers' time
- Respect the specialization - Treating all teachers as interchangeable ignores the expertise each has developed in their specific role
Transcript
When educators say the professional development they're getting is not relevant to them, that tends to be because they're getting professional development that's aimed at everybody and not that's aimed at their particular job.
And I think we've got to stop treating education, being a teacher, as just one job and treat it as very distinct jobs within a larger profession.
And as a science teacher in Seattle, I really have to speak highly of the professional development that I received because it was very specific to teaching science and to teaching the curriculum that I was provided with and expected to teach.
And anything that is not that specific is of course going to be less relevant.
But we have this desire to treat every teaching job as if it's exactly the same and as if the professional development that people need is exactly the same.
And like, I get it because it's more efficient.
It's easier.
It's nice to be able to bring in one person to do professional development for your whole staff.
It's nice to bring in one instructional coach to work with your whole staff and act like everybody has the same job and can benefit in the same ways from that.
But I think that's just really not how teaching works because it is fundamentally different work to be a woodshop teacher and a PE teacher and an English teacher.
Like those are three very different jobs.
And yet we all have one in our minds as kind of the default.
Usually it's language arts or math that's our default.
And then we build all the professional development around that.
For example, One idea that you will hear in a lot of professional development is the idea of conceptual understanding, which is very, very important in some subjects, but not all subjects, right?
Conceptual understanding does not play the same role in PE or woodshop that it does in science.
Concepts are a big deal in science and the skills are different.
The things that kids are learning, the tasks that they're doing and the work of teaching vary so much between subjects that I think we've got to stop just defaulting to thinking this is all just one job.
Let me know what you think.