NTOY visits with Partners in Learning

Last Thursday I arranged for Sarah Brown Wessling, an English teacher ISEA member from Johnston HS to visit with our Iowa Partners in Learning group. No big deal, except Sarah is a big deal. She's the 2010 National Teacher of the Year and she has a national scheduler who (as you might expect) wanted each "i" dotted and "t" crossed, but I handled it and it was worth the effort. In addition to being an outstanding educator, Sarah is an articulate advocate for the teaching profession.


We had scheduled an hour for the conversation, but she gave us 2½ - maybe more than we were worth, but she didn't seem to mind. She organized her time around a half-dozen key questions, the third of which was "How do we enhance the profession?" Our group includes a UNI teacher educator, several retired teachers, retired ISEA staffers, business people who are parents of public school students, a librarian, a DOE consultant, and a miscellany of ISEA staffers, so her questions found a ready audience, but her answers didn't always go in the direction we expected. She said:

Teacher “voice” is too often not recognized. Teachers have not been given the opportunity to learn to articulate their practice. There are teachers who know how to make the implicit explicit. But as a “practice,” as a system we don’t train our teachers to do that. So when they are in a moment of opportunity (to tell their story or talk to some important issue), they are left without the tools to do it: largely because it’s not part of the practice in schools (“pockets” of excellence, of course, do exist). Teachers can't describe what they do, why they do it, and how it impacts student learning. Without that, how do you convince people that you know what you're doing in your classrooms, if you don’t know [have] the words? And, we don’t give teachers the time to find the words. So that’s a bigger, larger frame.

That got me to thinking. How does a teacher acquire "voice"? Sarah said that three things helped her ready herself to be a spokesperson for the profession: 1) Working on her MA; 2) Scoring AP exams collaboratively with other teachers; and 3) Completing the work necessary to earn her National Board Teaching Certificate. She told us a story about how putting herself in a "parallel" leaning experience vis-à-vis her students helped her understand how students actually learn - a concept that left us all nodding and wondering, "How do we get ourselves into one of those "parallel" experience vis-a-vis each other?" Sounds like something worth doing.


She told us an important truth:

The truth of the matter is that if we want to enhance this profession, we have to be able “to talk” about what we do. We have to talk about practice in a different way than is currently done. So often what comes out is that teachers are asked to speak to "inequities," a horrible corner to be in. When there’s a problem, then we ask for their voice, and it sounds like they’re whining, right? It sounds as though they’re complaining. But that’s all we’ve asked of them.

I told Sarah that she was the exact right person at the exact right time for her profession, and I think that's true. Hope to connect with her again. I think she has some important things to say to ISEA and other education leaders.