Joel Zehring

I’m thinking of presenting some questions to the staff at my school to see how close we are to a hedgehog concept. Here are my iterations of the three questions:

1. What do you love to teach? (Be specific)
2. What could our school do better than any of other school in the world?
3. What could we do to make people want to give us money?

The trick is in the ask. I don’t want to simply throw it out at a staff meeting, and a Google form seems a little bland. I have this sense that packaging the questions in the right ways might really spark the imaginations of the teachers, administrators, and support personnel. The right ask might initiate dialog in addition to collecting data.

Any ideas on how I might creatively survey 50+ educators?

Doug Belshaw has quite a discussion going at his blog under the post Politics: the biggest problem in education. Doug posted kind of a sprawling piece that touches on business, government, administration, and even school vision.

I’m a believer in government being as small as possible: whilst the state needs to intervene in the ‘big picture’ of education, I think there are other organizations and bodies eminently more suitable to deal with assessment and examinations, for example.

I posted a couple of comments, because I’m fascinated by the “big picture” and how we develop a coherent vision that garners teacher buy-in. The short version of my idea: get the teachers together and lead them to develop their own vision for their school.

First, find the single common answer to three questions: 1. What are we deeply passionate about? 2. What can we do better than anyone in the world? 3. What drives our economic engine? Then, make everything your school does work toward that goal.

Lisa Parisi and Maria Knee asked on their latest podcast episode “Is teaching a calling or a job?” The conversation was wide-ranging, and several interesting points were shared; points to which I will now selectively and insightfully respond.

There are two sides to the passion coin. Passion is critical for attracting and developing great teachers (good teachers with no passion can still get “the job” done). Passion is not sufficient for sustaining a great teacher over the course of a 30 year career. It is a pillar that needs to be partnered with other pillars of great teaching: purpose, professionalism, development, collaboration, innovation, success, recognition and even compensation.

Yeah, I said compensation. Those people who tell you they didn’t get into education for the money are lying to you (and possibly themselves). I don’t see many teachers doing this thing for free, and that’s a good thing. Humans have decided to ascribe value to a service by exchanging money for that service. The more valuable the service, the more money it deserves (to a point). Service professionals who accept less money than their services warrant devalue their services and themselves as professionals. This can lead to sub-standard service and a disintegration of professional standards, as we’ve seen in some corners of public education.

So what’s the solution for training pre-service teachers? We need to show them how to build their careers using all of those previously mentioned pillars, not just passion and perks (I’ll admit it, summers are nice, and our upcoming fall break will allow me to stay home with our new baby on the way).

Additionally, we need to rally together as school communities to build great organizations, not just good schools. We need to answer these core questions: What are we deeply passionate about? What can we be the best in the world at? What drives our economic engine? Finding the single answer to those three questions and pursuing that target relentlessly will make us part of something bigger than ourselves, which is a sure-fire method for attracting great teachers and retaining them in education for the long haul.

Cross-posted on Ed Tech Talk and the Conversations Blog.