What it Takes to Be a "Good Teacher": Expectations and Constraints
Don Mayfield, SLATE Steering Committee Chair

Shelley, our 27-year-old daughter, has decided to become a teacher.  Both her parents are teachers, though that neither qualifies her to teach nor enhances her knowledge about the profession.

The other day, I asked her why she wanted to teach. “I want to make a difference.  I like working with kids.  I want to do something with my life. . . .”  Good motivation to begin a career, but once she is faced with thirty fourth graders, will that be enough to sustain her?  And will that be enough to make a good teacher?

What does it take to be a teacher?  More than that, what does it take to be “good” at it?  During that first year, Shelley will play several roles, some of which she will have adopted in her student teaching experience, and a few for which she will have had specific training, either in college, her teacher program, or previous jobs.

Being a Manager

If Shelley is to survive the first year, her most demanding role and the one for which she is least prepared is the managerial role.

Boss
First, she will be a boss. Shelley’s experience as a waitress at Roberto’s Mexican Restaurant hasn’t given her much chance to be in charge of anybody, but in the classroom, she will be responsible for managing the work and behavior of 30 children. She will assign and supervise work and assure that work is accurate and completed in a timely manner. 

Cop
At the beginning of the year, she will establish guidelines for behavior and consequences for infractions.  In many ways, she will be lawmaker, law enforcer and judge—roles in which Shelley has no experience. In fact, the role of enforcer will go contrary to the role that motivated her to become a teacher, that of helper.

Coach
Shelley spent some of her winters as a cross-country ski instructor, so she will be comfortable “coaching.” She will model skills she wants to teach, give clear instructions, describe where they go right (and wrong), provide constant, objective commentary (as well she can with 30 students) and, of course, motivate.

While she maintains good order and discipline in her classroom, she will want to lead her students to achieve at higher and higher levels. She will encourage them through speech and action.

While Shelley has always shied away from speaking in public—and always flew into a panic preparing for her speech class—she will have to be a Vince Lombardi to her students.

Because coaches value teamwork, Shelley will promote collaboration. In the end, however, she will want her team to win--that is, achieve academically

Quality Controller
For beginning teachers, judging the quality of student work is often more guess work than a precise science. While Shelley will have access to her students’ test scores, report cards and, in a few cases, anecdotal notes, she will probably have little other evidence of past achievement. Unless the student comes with portfolio in hand, she will have no examples of her students’ writing. Unless the student provides her with a list of books read during the past year, she will have no idea about her reading habits. And unless Shelley administers an extensive informal reading inventory, individually—often taking at least 30 minutes for each student--it will be weeks before she has a notion of her students’ reading abilities.

Yet, once school begins Shelley will assign work, judge the quality of it and, most often, return it “corrected,” hoping that “teaching by correction” will improve the future quality of work.

She will manage paperwork in an amount that few “real world” office workers can conceive—and that they certainly never take home to review, correct and record.

Resource Manager
In addition to the managerial duties above, our first-year teacher will manage, and in some cases, maintain, resources—paper, pencils, books, art supplies, computers, video projectors—some of which represent costly capital outlay—and none of which are insured. If the expensive resources are stolen, they will rarely be replaced.

Staff Developer
If Shelley is lucky enough to have an aide, she will have to train her. The aide may be a college student or a parent, but Shelley will be responsible for training, assigning tasks, and checking to see that they are done completely and on time. In addition to planning her student lessons, Shelley will have to create plans for her aide, including duplicating materials, correcting student work, and conducting reading groups.

Being a Healthcare Provider

In her college education courses, Shelley ran across the term in loco parentis. While the legal definition refers to the legal duty schools have to protect students from harm, in practice it takes on a broader meaning than breaking up fights on the playground and applying band aids to scrapes

Counselor
New teachers come into the profession because they want to teach and to help students reach their potential. They understand the need to counsel. At any time during her career, Shelley will find herself counseling individual behavior, family crises, death, and, for older students, career choices

Social Worker
Today, more than ever, teachers help students with crisis situations, especially neglect, emotional and physical abuse, welfare needs, legal issues and other problems. There will be times when Shelley will be an unofficial screener for Child Protective Services, an awesome responsibility for a young teacher.

Being a Scholar

While Shelley works face to face with her students, managing their behavior, making assignments, attending to their physical and emotional needs, she will study them objectively, gather data, draw tentative conclusions, and implement strategies that improve instruction. She will feel pressure to pay particular attention to improve test results

In some states, there are consequences if her students do not improve their test scores. At the very least, the local newspaper will be sure to rank the neighborhood schools—and bring concern to those schools that rank lowest. At the worst, a school may lose its principal, funding and, possibly, administrative control to the state or some other higher agency.

Researcher
Though Shelley has never seen herself as a researcher, schools today demand that she improve student achievement, methodically, based on “scientific research.” She may even wish to replicate past research to validate their findings. She will want to design a classroom research plan, generate data in support of her efforts, and achieve results.

Diagnostician, Linguist, Cognitive Psychologist
Even if she doesn’t want to conduct formal research on the effects of instructional strategies, she will certainly want to target a few students for thorough diagnosis. As a teacher of reading, she will analyze students’ oral reading, diagnose problems, and design a plan for improvement. As a teacher of writing, she will need the skills of a linguist in order to understand rhetorical patterns of her students’ writing, and the skills of a cognitive psychologist to determine how her students learn.

In all cases, she will have to establish guidelines for evaluating abilities and progress and whether or not children have met the standards for reading, writing, and mathematics established by the state.

Curriculum Designer
Shelley’s school may provide her with textbooks for her students and manuals for teaching them. Initially, she will rely on teacher guides but will soon realize that they are woefully inadequate to the task of meeting the needs of her particular class. While the guides may provide standards, objectives, and assignments, they will lack motivating questions and background information her students need to move efficiently into new material.

 With her limited knowledge about curricular design and even less knowledge about her students’ educational background and learning styles, Shelley will need to adapt the lesson plans suggested in the guide. For her students to understand the material, she will need to provide background and arrange the information and concepts in an optimal sequence. She will also need to build in differentiated assignments that will help her less able students to meet the standards and her gifted ones to be challenged.

Being a Technician

Shelley is the new generation of computer savvy teachers. She arrives at the schoolhouse door with years of experience with computers and, through her credentialing courses, training on how to use them for instruction.

Computer Technician
As a newly credentialed teacher, Shelley will have had a basic course in instructional technology.  In this, she will have an advantage over some of the other members of the faculty who may have computers in their classrooms, but no training on how to use—or fix--them.

She has learned a word processing program for lesson planning. For creating attractive instructional materials she uses Photoshop and PowerPoint. For classroom management and record keeping, she uses spreadsheet and database applications: Excel and Access. She has also learned several programs she will teach her students to use in their work: Kid Pix for creating visuals in their reports and Inspiration to generate ideas and organize their writing. 

While Shelley’s schooling has prepared her for integrating technology into her lessons, she has had no training in how to maintain that equipment—and no equipment maintenance contract or probably no computer technician to help when her PC crashes.  If she is expected to use computers, she will also be expected to de-fragment her hard disk so it runs more efficiently and reinstall her system software when her hard drive crashes.

Recently, teacher education has come under attack nationally from U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige. Speaking before educators at the first Teacher Quality Conference (June 2002), he lamented that the public school system is "broken," and that teachers are largely to blame.  According to Paige, good teachers in America's classrooms are scarce--and it's not because of low salaries or inadequate school funding or overcrowded classrooms. Paige maintains that America's current teachers are "bad" because they don't know their subject matter -- and they don't know their subject matter because they have taken far too many useless pedagogy courses.

 Reflecting on the roles teachers play every day, one might respond by asking Secretary Paige whether it would be better to take more courses in management, law enforcement, psychology, and linguistics.