Want Vibrant, Engaged Teachers? Give Them Professional Freedom

Want Vibrant, Engaged Teachers? Give Them Professional Freedom

The pandemic unearthed a lot of opportunities along with all the hardships it
brought. One benefit was that it has made social and emotional wellness a more
mainstream topic across the board in education. As a result, teachers,
principals, and other school leaders seem to be carrying a little less on
their shoulders. With that weight lifted, they have been especially engaged
and energetic this year, but as the world returns to something like normal,
there is going to be tremendous pressure to go back to doing things the old
ways, even when they weren’t the best ways. How do we recognize that and work
to extend the longevity of the eagerness and energy that’s been returning to
campus?

Ulster Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) is a service district,
so all our programs are alternatives to traditional schooling. That gives us
some leeway to experiment that regular districts don’t have. Our districts
can, however, look to us and the approaches we use to see what works for all
students, making change a little easier for them.

At Ulster, the key to fostering a positive environment for teaching and
learning has remained the same before, during, and after the pandemic. We
believe our teachers are committed and capable educators and we give them the
freedom to prove it. Here’s what it looks like.

A few years ago, BOCES leaders and faculty had a meeting about New York
state’s Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), which has become a bit
of a touchstone for the ethos of our district. A lot of faculty expressed
concern about using the freedom they’ve been given to teach because if they
tried something and it didn’t work, they would be punished for it on their
evaluations and maybe even found to be ineffective.

Our superintendent, Charles Khoury, told them, “We hire professionals who come
to the table with professional learning, professional experience, and
professional judgment. Every teacher in every classroom makes hundreds of
decisions every single day. I want you to make those decisions based on what
you think is right using your professional judgment and experience. Each one
of you is the designer, manager, and leader of a learning space, and I need
you to be innovative in that role. I want you to figure out what’s right for
each student in your class and to do it, even if it’s new and it might not
work out.”

He told them that when any teacher is found to be ineffective, they would be
allowed to appeal and that he was the person who would hear and decide on
their appeal. And then he told them that if they were using their professional
judgment, he guaranteed that they would be deemed effective. Fear of being
found ineffective was stopping teachers from trying ideas they believed in, so
Khoury removed that barrier for them.

To be clear, though, this was not a blank check to let ineffective teachers
skate past accountability. Our job is to figure out who is struggling, why,
and then to help lead them past that barrier so they can begin innovating for
students again. We see the APPR as a tool for assessing growth instead of a
tool for identifying teachers who aren’t a good fit for our district. Blending
those functions doesn’t make sense, especially when we have an arsenal of
tools that can help us identify teachers for removal.

Empowered by Khoury, our teachers are building portfolios about their own
growth as teachers and learners that demonstrate that they are real students
of the institution. When teachers are students themselves, that trickles down
into the classroom and gives it a vibrant energy.

Our district is unusual, even among BOCES. We tend to do things a little
differently, and most of our teachers have never worked anywhere quite like
Ulster. To help make the transition smoother, we recently revamped and
extended our teacher on-boarding process to three days so that they can really
understand who we are and what makes our district unique. We on-boarded about
35 new teachers this year and received great feedback about this change.

In our morning meetings, we are trying to minimize email and focus on building
human connections. Our HR team and directors are pulling together clerical and
support staff cross-divisionally so people can begin building relationships
and connecting.

In other meetings that would previously have been only faculty, we are
including staff to help build community and make it clear that they’re part of
the team. Everyone who works in this district touches the lives of our
students, and keeping them in the loop by inviting them to meetings is a
simple way to make it clear that we honor that.

Like most principals or superintendents, we’re looking at all our spaces
intentionally to make sure people are eager to come in and work in our model
workspaces.

Building connections also extends beyond our campus. We have a detailed plan
to make sure leadership is able to meet other education professionals from
around the country. We want to make sure that our educators are not just
thinking about solutions within the box of Ulster County. Other people in
other places see different possibilities from what we might here, so we want
our people to explore and learn from people teaching in different contexts. We
are fortunate to partner with organizations like High Tech High, EL Education,
World Savvy and the Stanford d.School to collaborate, share knowledge, and
improve education.

How to Elevate the Voices of Teachers. Try Narrative Pedagogy

A former K-5 public school principal turned author, presenter, and leadership
coach, DeWitt provides insights and advice for education leaders. He can be
found at www.petermdewitt.com. Read more from this blog.

Rebecca Thomas has worked passionately in education for the past 25 years in
primary to intermediate settings and in a variety of leadership roles in New
Zealand. Steve Saville is a passionate educator who has significant experience
across a range of educational settings. For the last three years, he has been
working as an educational consultant specializing in the area of sustainable
school change and leadership in New Zealand.

Following a narrative means following a fairly well-worn path, waiting to be
told what to do by someone in “authority,” and then implementing that
prescribed plan—compliance rather than empowerment. Compliance isn’t wrong; in
some circumstances, it is necessary and logical. But it does have
consequences.

In our haste to transfer academic research and government policies into
fruition, the professional development of teachers has been a casualty in this
compliance narrative. Typically, the teacher/leader becomes the conduit, a
channel for conveying knowledge from the source to the students. Within this
transmissive system, we neglect to empower our teachers.

We know this transmissive teaching method is often ineffective in driving
sustainable change, or learning, so why would we accept it for ourselves?

Just as we crave the desire to enable our students to be agentic, active
learners, driven by the joy of learning, we should also hold our professional
developers to account for creating teachers who persevere, are resilient to
challenges, who aren’t afraid to question, innovate, create, and learn from
their mistakes.

We can create these conditions for growth by taking the other path, creating
our own narrative. Enter stage right, the Power of Narrative Pedagogy.

Narrative pedagogy is an approach to thinking about teaching and learning that
evolves from the lived experiences of teachers and students, using a narrative
landscape to find and explore meaning. The telling of stories opens the door
for eliciting and analyzing issues, interpreting and contextualizing meaning,
and reflecting and integrating personal and theoretical knowledge. The most
important thing about narratives is that they have an emotional effect on
people: They can both shock and encourage them.

“Stories are easier to remember because stories are how we remember. When
facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes
less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts
into context and deliver them with emotional impact.”

We have always found meaning in our lives through stories. It is what makes us
human. Our ability to use metaphor and story to create history, culture, and
purpose are all unique to us as a species. Think of when you listened to a
song, read a poem, or watched a movie that has touched you on a personal
level. It was written in another place and another time by a stranger who does
not know you and whose life may bear only a scant connection to your own, but
it resonated, it made you think, laugh, cry, filled you with love, or energy,
or sadness. This is the power of narrative. Stories define and validate us as
individuals and as a society.

Before we set out down this path, we need to know the starting point. For
educators, that means knowing ourselves and our context. We can’t be told
this, and if we are told this, our context is likely to be defined by
statistics and comparisons.

Over facts and figures, we need personality and life. We need to listen to our
own stories. Pause, pay attention, hear, and understand the voices that make
up our context, our professional identity that has shaped us, our personal
narratives.

To do this requires courage. A courage of care is needed to respect and
empower the voices of our own people to ensure we are not only meeting our
community’s needs, we are also ensuring our schools are places of joy and
magic. Listening is the first step toward empowerment and agency.

Working hard with a collective of schools that were trying to collaborate on
raising the literacy achievement of their students, we found the above
approach needed implementing. This was a mixed group of schools with varying
contexts, from primary to intermediate to high school brought together because
of their data, their statistics.

Initially, there was conflict in these sessions as the school staffs didn’t
quite understand the purpose of discussing the progress of students who were
at levels above and below their “usual” scope and away from their context.
They were also struggling to see the point in yet another meeting to their
busy week. Taking the time to listen to their concerns, giving them space to
share their narrative, and hearing what they were finding challenging, we
designed the following meeting with care.

As they trundled into the next meeting tired and resistant, the session opened
with a rallying call, a “thank you” for their honesty with a reassurance that
their words had been heard. Instead of talking about progress, the educators
spent time discussing what teaching methods they currently used in their
settings. If there were any strategies that were unfamiliar in the group,
teachers volunteered to model what that looked like to the others. Each school
was represented, each teacher was nervous.

On sharing their teaching strategies, the room erupted in joy. They had been
empowered to share their stories, shared their expertise. Our job had been to
merely listen, respond, and facilitate the conversation. After each modeled
example, they excitedly referred what they had seen to the progression
framework we had been building a rubric for, then they made connections with
how the modeled example could be adapted for the level they taught at. The
result was efficacy as they had room to create their own narrative instead of
being compliant. The rabble had bonded.

There is a danger in using narrative pedagogy. To share our stories, to create
our own narrative, to establish where we are and where we need to go means
being emotionally vulnerable, it means sharing and collaborating. This is
going to be, at times, uncomfortable and challenging. Sometimes, it is easier
not to and just go with the flow.

The dramatist Bertolt Brecht realized this when he used Verfremdungseffekt,
(the “estrangement effect” or the “alienation effect”) when he wanted his
audience to respond to important themes (wars) that were confronting Germany
between the two world wars. Brecht set his plays in “removed locations” to
enable his audience to respond to the themes and issues before personalizing
them to facilitate a more rational thought process and emotional connection.

At its core, the use of narrative pedagogy allows for voices to be shared to
develop a collective story or history that defines and drives the group. It
values the individual by giving them space to share and be heard, so we get to
know ourselves better individually and collectively. The process of “storying”
in this way is one reason why reflection journals are often so effective.

We invite our teachers to reflect on the way they teach, favoring
relationships and student agency as researched ways to effect change in how
our students learn. If this magic method works from teacher to students, it’s
about time we realize that this method will also help our teachers learn, too.

This approach is not new. It is well researched and documented. For example,
the work of Rasa Nedzinskaitė-Mačiūnienė [Vytautas Magnus University] and Agnė
Juškevičienė [Vilnius University], Lithuania, Kerry Priest [Kansas State
University] and Corey Seemiller [Wright State University], as well as Ivor
Goodson [University of Tallinn] and Scherto Gill [University of Sussex], all
detail the power of stories and narrative pedagogical approaches.