Teacher Retention & Development

U.S. chooses ‘change’” is the headline on my Internet homepage as I begin to write the introduction to this issue of HaYidion on the day after Election Day. Yet as we all know, change is scary. Nonetheless, change is the fundamental feature of education. The Latin root of the word “education” is “e-ducare” which means “to lead out.” Education always involves change, as we lead our learners out from the known to the unknown, from security to insecurity.

The upcoming RAVSAK conference in San Francisco promises to have joyful reunions, professional networking, and helpful workshops. Our conference is a time to learn from each other and from national experts.

In recent years, the media have been alive with stories about the coming teacher shortage. As the current generation of master teachers retires and fewer young people go into the profession, we are told, it will become harder and harder for schools to populate their classrooms with excellent teachers. The numbers show that there is some truth behind the alarmist tales, and teaching continues to be seen in many quarters as a “soft,” low-paying, and low-prestige profession that attracts relatively few high-achieving students.

Accreditation is the primary vehicle for quality control in all professions. Every profession requires practitioners to be certified either by the state, by voluntary accrediting agencies (AMA, Bar Association, etc.) or by both. Beauticians, embalmers, mechanics, plumbers, and barbers must demonstrate their knowledge and expertise before they can work in their fields. Jewish education is perhaps the only profession in which untrained, uncertified, and often unskilled individuals can have a career as teachers. Many of today’s Jewish educators are exceptionally motivated, passionate, and creative. Yet the Jewish community does not value their services in the same way it values other professionals. General studies teachers must be licensed. Why aren’t the same demands made for those who teach Jewish studies, who nurture and mold young minds to become literate, committed, and proud Jews?

As educators (and parents), we all know instinctively from our own experience what research confirms more scientifically: students learn better from good teachers than from poor ones. But what is it that makes for a good teacher? Common sense might tell us that good teachers know their subject and have a passion for what they teach. And it might tell us that good teachers are able to manage their classroom. But “common” sense is not always common or dependable. Some principals, for example, may praise a teacher because his or her classroom is orderly, while other principals may see the same classroom as overly regimented. And how do we know what teachers really know, and whether they know enough to teach to the highest level and inspire the most able students?

Being a first-year teacher is challenging; being a Judaic studies teacher often brings added challenges, such as lack of curriculum, unclear standards, and less buy-in from students and parents. Training institutions, the Jewish community, school administrators, school boards and parents all claim they want the very best Jewish studies teachers. Yet are we doing what it takes to achieve this?

There is abundant empirical and documented evidence that we need more highly competent Jewish educators in both Judaics and Judaic-specific pedagogy for our day and supplemental schools. To this point in time, the Jewish community has not created a comprehensive, longitudinal and institutionalized structure for recruiting, developing and retaining Jewish educators. However, there is an obvious and elegant solution to this challenge: the implementation of an eight stage career development ladder for students and teachers in our Jewish day schools. This developmental ladder would begin in kindergarten, continue through middle and high school, extend through college and graduate school, and be fully implemented in our Jewish day schools.

Many college students hold teaching positions in Jewish supplementary schools. These eager young people are enthusiastic, have fresh ideas about Jewish education, and are instant role models for younger students. They build their resumes with real work experience in a field they may enter in the future and earn salaries well above what their friends are earning for what seems to be far fewer hours. A more perfect match could not be possible. So, what is the problem?

By necessity, Jewish day schools pay a lot of attention to teacher recruitment, but the other side of the coin, retention, gets short shrift. In fact, when it comes to teacher retention, Jewish day schools are like leaky swimming pools: we keep pouring more in at the top, while neglecting to fix the hole in the bottom. Years of research have shown that, in public schools, 30% to 50% of teachers leave the classroom after their first three years. The 2008 JESNA Educators in Jewish Schools Study confirms that Jewish schools aren’t doing much better in keeping our most valued teachers. What are we doing wrong? Or, perhaps more appropriately, what are we not doing at all?

One of the most important moments of transition is entry into a new community. This is one of the reasons Jews, and cultures all over the world, have rituals to welcome babies into the human family, and to welcome adolescents into the realm of adulthood. Creating ritual to address new situations has occurred throughout Jewish history, and has been one of the gifts of contemporary creative Jewish life. In that spirit, RAVSAK invited me to invent a ritual for welcoming new teachers into day schools. I’m very pleased to explore this ceremonial opportunity in the pages of HaYidion.

One of the most powerful investments a school can make is in developing its teachers’ skills and knowledge. Ample research confirms what we all know from experience: some teachers are more effective at helping students learn than others. In fact, a recent study showed that the quality of a teacher’s instruction is the most important factor in a student’s academic achievement, more important even than that student’s past achievement. Said differently, even students who have struggled in the past can make great learning strides with a highly skilled teacher.

Talented people are what differentiate great companies from weak ones. The same is true for schools. When parents are choosing among various schools for their children’s education, they assess the talent of the teachers as well as the environment the teachers and administration create for the students. As a result, managing teachers’ performance needs to be a top priority. It is essential both to reward and recognize exceptional teachers as well as to address performance problems of those teachers who are not meeting expectations. Below are some helpful tips on doing both.

When most administrators hear the term “professional development” they picture their teachers sitting in a room learning about the latest and greatest pedagogical techniques and curriculum from “experts.” The hope is that the teachers will bring back ideas from the outside world and apply them in their classrooms. This typical image is not surprising given the way professional development has historically been enacted. Many scholars consider this approach to be a narrow conception of professional development, ignoring what is known about how adults learn and what teachers need to know and do to be effective teachers. (My analysis is based largely on the work of Cochran-Smith and Lytle, Relationships of Knowledge and Practice: Teacher Learning in Community.) Here I will propose new ways of working with teachers on professional development days, to make them more apt leaders and instructors.

High school history often gets a bad rap. When we think of history class, too often we imagine kids slumped over their desks, wondering, “What’s this got to do with me?” It’s hard enough to try and get our students to imagine what life was like before Facebook, let alone trying to get them to imagine what life was life 50, 100, or—dare I say it—1000 years ago. And yet, I would argue, history, of all the subjects in the school’s curriculum, has the potential to stir students in significant ways. History after all is a great story—especially Jewish history. For the so-called “me generation” teenager attempting to construct a meaningful identity in a world of competing influences, historical context can be powerfully compelling.

A “mentor” is defined by most dictionaries as “a wise and trusted counselor or guide, especially in occupational areas.” “Tutor” and “coach” are usually listed as synonyms, but there are some subtle differences between the three terms. A tutor is generally a private teacher whose job is to give individualized instruction in a specific area like French or chemistry. A coach may also be a kind of private tutor, someone who prepares a student for an academic examination or an athlete for a sports competition, and of course the common understanding of a sports coach involves the ongoing preparation and training of a team for sports competitions. In the last twenty years the term ‘peer coaching’ has gained popularity in education and business. Charles Slater and David Simmons (“The Design and Implementation of a Peer Coaching Program”) define peer coaching as “a confidential process through which two or more professional colleagues work together to review current practices; expand, refine, and build new skills; share ideas; teach one another; conduct classroom research; solve problems in the workplace.” Peer coaching is clearly different from mentoring in that peer coaching involves a relationship of equals, learning from and with each other.

The Y Generation, born from 1977 to 1986, are products of an increasingly global economy, where knowledge is power and laptop computers often provide the quickest means to attaining both. Many of today’s young teachers not only have access to millions of digital resources, they also have at their fingertips thousands of professional and social networks. They are receptive to working in teams, and they are good at it. They do not blink at the mention of blogging, Googling, and Wikipedia, or the use of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Indeed, learning communities are their forte.

Contemporary school leaders often praise the virtues of collaboration and the use of data for decision making, yet it seems the more things change the more they stay the same. While it may appear that educational leaders are fixated on improving academic performance and promoting excellent teaching, the reality is that at most schools student performance is static and most classroom teachers fundamentally teach the way they did when they began teaching.

Each year at the Institute for New Heads, I give the school leaders some sardonic advice: “If something goes terribly awry, and you need to buy time to rectify it before your parent body finds out, suggest a change to the dress code. This tactic will keep parents embroiled for at least 18 months, so you can fix the problem you need to hide while the parent body is distracted.” Next July for the new group of heads, I’m going to add a similar strategy for the faculty: “If you need to implement a change that will, like all change, cause gnashing of teeth and drawing of battle lines, do it after you form a task force to study changing the compensation system to a merit pay model. The faculty will be so annoyed and preoccupied by trying to ameliorate that offense, the other change will seem minor by comparison.”

This column features books, articles, and websites, recommended by our authors and people from the RAVSAK network, pertaining to the theme of the current issue of HaYidion for readers who want to investigate the topic in greater depth.

After working many years in various institutions in which davening takes place, I entered room 203 on my first day at Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School in 2002 and I could not believe my ears. Tefillot that in other institutions were not taught until high school, if ever, were recited beautifully by fifth graders from families of all range of observance. From their faces, it seemed that they knew the words, they knew the tune and they knew the structure.

When we examine our history, we learn that communal prayer developed to take the place of sacrifice after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E. An examination of the resulting siddur or prayerbook shows that it contains within it the essence of Jewish belief, practice, calendar, ideas—in fact, all that enables Judaism to be a portable religion. It is, therefore, a vital foundation of Jewish life. And educators who shape Jewish learning in inclusive community day schools that celebrate the diversity of Jewish life face the question of how to approach tefillah in a way that reflects their respect for the range of families present in their schools. As with other areas of study, in relation to tefillah, we then consider three questions: What do we want students to learn? What do we want students to value? And, as a result of what they have learned and come to value, what do we want students to do?

Tefillah stands at the heart of a Jewish day school program that nourishes religious purposefulness. Yet building meaningful and engaging curricula that both teach prayer and engage students in services remains one of our most elusive goals. The problem is compounded in community day schools that serve students representing a broad spectrum of Jewish practice. Using a denominationally based siddur can easily be interpreted by parents and community leaders as favoring one particular approach to prayer over another.

Like many community day schools that are committed to pluralism and a pluralist expression of Judaism, the San Diego Jewish Academy has historically struggled with tefillah. For some, tefillah should be an intrinsically Jewish activity that contributes to the Jewish vibrancy on campus. For others, tefillah is an intrinsically alienating activity that only contributes to the inherent discomfort with things that are “too Jewish.” In truth, many students were turned off from tefillah as it had been run. Opinions were divided among administrators and faculty; meetings at all levels of the school, including the board, exposed disagreements over how to handle this issue. Parents generally supported conducting tefillah in the school, but were troubled by negative reports from their children. The tension had become so palpable that there was discussion of getting rid of the two day per week tefillot sessions at our school.