The Teaching Profession Is Too Flat — We Need Growth Pathways

Teaching is very flat as a profession.

That's one of the strangest things about being a teacher, and it makes it incredibly difficult to get good at teaching.

One of the things that you'll notice about almost any other career is that you step into it, right?

There are gradual steps to take on more and more responsibility, in any other field, like as a doctor, you're a resident and you have all those different steps beyond just going to school and then getting a job.

And I think we've got to think about what that might look like in the teaching profession to allow people to actually advance professionally without becoming an administrator or doing something else entirely.

Like within the classroom, you should be able to advance professionally and not just have like one job that's exactly the same from day one until you retire.

Because what ends up happening is the learning curve on day one is incredibly steep, right?

Like this is a job that takes multiple years to get good at and yet your responsibilities don't really change.

Your compensation doesn't really change.

You just get like step increases.

That's not really what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about progression of responsibility.

I'm actually working on a book on this right now about developing teacher leadership And I think one of the ways that we could recognize teacher leadership and make the job easier in the earlier years is back off on some of the responsibilities for new teachers.

Like you should probably not be planning curriculum from scratch if you're a brand new teacher.

Somebody else should have written the curriculum.

You should be getting curriculum from your teammates.

There should be some support so that you don't have to do everything that a full-fledged teacher is doing from day one or everything that a master teacher is doing.

Some of these things really should be limited to master teachers who want to put in the time, who want to put in the work.

To you know contribute to their team contribute to the profession like this does not have to be as hard a job as it is for everybody from day one so I put all that under the banner of unflattening the profession and making it possible to really advance as a professional without Leaving the classroom and I think so many people who become administrators and then like regret it really just wanted to advance professionally as teachers and But there wasn't really any pathway to do that.

And I think sometimes people become not very successful administrators when they're ready to grow.

Like they really legitimately are ready to grow and advance, but they didn't want to do administration.

But that was the only path.

Let me know if that is something that you've seen.

And let me know what you think we could do to unflatten this profession and make it really possible for people to advance professionally while staying in the classroom.