Teachers often complain about the need to spend sometimes as much as the first three months of the school year bringing their students up to the level required to begin introducing new grade level appropriate content.

The paradox is that often those same teachers cannot agree on what the content of that prior coursework should be. If they cannot agree on the content of prior coursework, how can they NOT expect their to have to spend three months the next year bringing their students up to where they ‘think’ they should be?

The Paradox

Beginning in the fall of 1999, I spent two years embedded in a high school working with teachers to develop school community partnerships. During that time I gained a great deal of respect for teachers as professionals. I also observed a great deal of dysfunction in the system, and specifically the paradox of expectations.

One day I was eating lunch with a group of teachers who had the well deserved reputation of being among the best in the district. They were commiserating about the sad state of affairs which required them to spend the first three months of each school year bringing their kids up to the level of knowledge they felt the kids should have had when they started the school year, so that they could begin introducing grade-level appropriate content.

Certainly some of this remediation had to do with atrophy from summer break, but I was hearing more to this, so after listening for several minutes, I gave the football time-out hand-signal and asked, “Hang on a second, how many Algebra teachers are there in the school?”

The others at the table looked around at each other, some shrugged, finally someone ventured, “probably at least, maybe seven.”

“OK,” I said, “and they are all teaching the same course, right?” Everyone nodded. “And they all give the same final exam, right?”

There was sudden rapid intake of breath followed by stunned silence. A pin could have been heard hitting the carpeted floor. They were all looking at me like I had just announced that I was a suicide bomber with my finger on the trigger. Finally after several seconds, someone sputtered, “but…, but if we did that, we’d miss the ‘teachable moment’.”

“But if you have seven teachers, teaching seven different versions of content, the understanding of which is verified by seven different final exams,” I asked, “why would you NOT expect to have to spend three months bringing you students up to where YOU think they should been at the end of last year?”

Cultural Frame of Reference

There is a dichotomy of ideals in our cultural framework relating to teamwork. On the one end of this cultural dichotomy, there is a common understanding of the value of teamwork. As good as a quarterback may be, he doesn’t win a Super Bowl without a highly functional team supporting him. CEO’s clamor to form “crackpot” executive teams. The US army sets the priority of the team over that of the individual.

This teamwork ideal was epitomized in the 1995 Ron Howard movie about the rescue of the Apollo 13 astronaut crew when Mission Director Eugene Kranz says, “Failure is not an option[1].”

In tension with this cultural icon of the high functioning team, is the lone cowboy riding into the sunset. This is the stoic John Wayne or Clint Eastwood figure who single handedly saves the day. If you look at popular movies about teaching: Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dead Poet’s Society, and To Sir with Love, it becomes pretty clear where teaching lies on this cultural spectrum. In all of these movies, the hero is a lone teacher battling against the system to achieve great results.

From my perspective of an outsider embedded in that school, listening to the above conversation reminded me of an all-star basketball team where every player is so focused on themselves, that they never actually work together. Picture a play where the players are fighting for the ball while trying to dribbling it down the court. A game where everyone kind of does their own thing, each looking for the “Sports Illustrated cover photo moment,” with little regard for actually outscoring the other team.

The Effect

If we go back to that conversation with faculty members and analyze for nuance, the teachers in the school were working in the lone cowboy mode, and there are several unfortunate things which fall out of this approach. First, either contributing to, or as a result of this approach, there were no clear, common student learning objectives. Each teacher taught what they individually thought was important or what students found interesting. This wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem, except that there was also a competing expectation of curriculum progression (curriculum articulation in the language of educators). In other words, each subsequent course assumed that specific—though undocumented—knowledge and skill would be gained from the previous coursework.

With expectations of prior coursework content knowledge not being fulfilled, a substantial amount of remedial work was required at the beginning of each school year, which meant that grade level content had to be crammed into shorter periods of time, probably further contributing to the lack of prior content knowledge the next year.

With content largely subject to individual preferences, subjective evaluations were made of colleagues efficacy based on curricular preference, not quantifiable student progress. It was not uncommon to hear teachers berate each other for this difference of opinion, creating inferences that such curricular preference correlated to the ability of those teachers to facilitate student learning. Over time, animosity built up between faculty members. This sometimes became quite overt, as occurred in my very first faculty meeting, where I sat for twenty minutes in stunned silence as teachers openly criticized each other for classroom management skills and content mastery. With such animosity common, collaboration between teachers was the exception. With no collaboration, there was little sharing of materials, learnings or best practice among the faculty. With no sharing of best practice or learnings, there was little opportunity for growth among the teaching staff.

These system effects cascade. One teacher may set high standards and push their students to achieve those standards by assigning more challenging homework and giving lower grades than another teacher who grades on a curve. Because the more demanding teacher is giving lower grades than her colleague, parents become concerned, especially when those grades could effect something as important as college acceptance, so they complain to the principal. Since the principal is evaluated by his or her manager, the superintendent, based on their ability to keep parents off the superintendent’s back, they tend to support the less demanding teacher. The superintended wants to keep parents off his/her back because they are assessed largely on the ability to pass operating levees and construction bonds, which means his priority is keeping the community happy, which is hard when there are vocal complaining parents.

Based on my experience, both working in that school and in other environments, particularly environments which valued teamwork, the single most effective thing, though certainly not the easiest thing, which would improve student learning, is development of teamwork amongst teachers.