The Teachers of 2030: Creating a Student-Centered Profession for the 21st Century By Barnett Berry A TeacherSolutions 2030 Product In this report, I describe a future for America’s teaching profession – one that students and their families deserve. In a subsequent book, to be published by Teachers College Press, these themes will be developed in much greater depth — and built more directly and clearly from the voices and experiences of the 12 expert teachers who make up the TeacherSolutions 2030 team. Our work is made possible by the interest and support of MetLife Foundation — and our analyses draw upon and complement the issues and perspectives surfaced over 25 years by the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. The views presented here are those of the author and the teachers who are quoted and not necessarily those of MetLife Foundation. -Barnett Berry Table of Contents Table of Contents................................................................................................................i Acknowledgements............................................................................................................ii Teaching in 2010................................................................................................................1 Introduction........................................................................................................................3 Emergent Reality #1: A Transformed Learning Ecology for Students and Teachers.......8 Emergent Reality #2: Differentiated Professional Pathways..........................................14 Emergent Reality #3: Seamless Connections In and Out of Cyberspace........................17 Emergent Reality #4: Teacherpreneurism and the Global Educational Marketplace....21 Levers of Change..............................................................................................................25 The Keeper of the Flame..................................................................................................34 The TeacherSolutions 2030 Team...................................................................................36 i Acknowledgements The Center for Teaching Quality and the TeacherSolutions 2030 team are indebted to many who gave us their time, ideas and encouragement. First of all, we are grateful to MetLife Foundation and its steadfast belief in the value of a teacher “think/action tank” exploring the future of the teaching profession. Many experts in the field have advised us and agreed to participate in our webinars and online discussions. Thanks to Dennis Bartels, Executive Director of Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception; Ninive Calegari, founder of The Teacher Salary Project; Milton Chen, Executive Director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation; Jillian Darwish and Monica Martinez of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation; Sandy Fivecoat, founder of WeAreTeachers.com; Wesley Fryer, teacher, instructional technologist and award-winning education blogger; Heather Harding of Teach for America; Kevin Honeycutt, former art teacher and 21st century education researcher; Rafiq Kalam Id-Din, founder of Teaching Firms of America; Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard University; Chris Lehmann, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia; Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, charter member of the Teacher Leaders Network and founder of the K-12 Online Conference; smart mobster Howard Rheingold; Andrea Saveri of The Institute for the Future; Jon Snyder of Bank Street College; Zeke Vanderhoek, founder of The Equity Project charter school in Washington Heights, New York; and Sue Waters, an expert in mobile instructional technologies based in Perth, Australia. We also deeply appreciate the assistance of our nation’s foremost teaching policy expert, Linda Darling-Hammond, who has provided us evidence, ideas, and inspiration for closing student achievement gaps, truly reforming our public schools, and transforming the profession that makes all others possible. Finally, our efforts to elevate teachers’ voices through the TeacherSolutions 2030 initiative would not be possible without my colleagues at the Center for Teaching Quality — most notably Amanda Gladin-Kramer and John Norton. Amanda’s virtual community building skills grow exponentially each week, only surpassed by her dedication to the teachers of our Teacher Leaders Network. John — a dear friend and colleague of over two decades — can hear teachers better than anyone I know. No one is more skilled at making sure their ideas and ideals are understood. ii 3 Teaching in 2010 A lot has changed since the days of Horace Mann and his creation of the normal school in 1848 to specifically prepare teachers for our nation’s public schools. But not as much as we might expect. In its 160-year history as an organized occupation, teaching has never been marked by innovation or dynamic evolution. Instead, as education historian Kate Rousmaniere has written, the teaching profession has been “rife with political dynamics, social drama, and philosophical debate.”* As a consequence, when we walk into the public school classrooms of 2010 we might find an interactive white board instead of a chalk board, and an LCD projector instead of a pulldown map, but the ways teachers organize their classrooms, teach their content and expect students to learn is often eerily familiar — even to those who attended school in the early 1960s, when I entered my first grade classroom. Since its modern origins in the mid-1800s, much of teaching’s organizational arrangements and its cultural backbone have remained the same. Most teachers continue to teach in isolation from one another most of the time. Many — especially those teaching in high needs schools serving students of color and poverty — are expected to implement a standardized curriculum in lockstep fashion. Today, most teachers still are supervised by administrators who are promoted to school leadership positions not because of their pedagogical expertise, but due to their ability to manage and control both teachers and students. While a great deal of effort has been made to develop better school principals as part of modern-day school reforms, little emphasis is placed on those who can cultivate teacher leaders who can spread their pedagogical expertise, build school-community partnerships, or elevate their policy voices on major matters related to student learning. In top 10 fashion, here is how the teaching profession is best characterized in 2010: 1. Inequities in how public education is financed in the United States leave few resources for high- need urban and rural schools — those serving poor children and those of color — to compete in teacher labor market.** 2. While policymakers claim they want better qualified and prepared teachers, they routinely lower hiring standards to expediently address shortages — especially for schools serving our nation’s most vulnerable students. 1 3. While school district recruitment and hiring practices have improved, they continue to value the inexpensive teacher over the expert, and they still rely on the career mobility patterns of Baby Boomers — not those of Generation Y. 4. Most universities, while attracting more academically able candidates than in the past,*** still do not prepare teachers for teaching in high-needs schools. 5. While more districts are recruiting non-traditional candidates for high needs schools and posi tions, the narrow training offered does not prepare teachers for 21st century teaching and leader ship for tomorrow’s schools. 6. While teacher tenure rules are archaic, unions resist giving up job protections because of princi pals who do not have the skills or inclination to conduct fair evaluations of teaching effective ness. 7. While some states and districts require induction programs for new teachers, most novices are still assigned the most challenging classes, without comprehensive mentoring from trained experts who have time to support them. 8. Even those teachers who are well-prepared and well-qualified often find they cannot teach ef fectively in schools where poor working conditions — inadequate or unsupportive administrators, limited time to learn and improve, too few opportunities to lead and collaborate — define their “not-so” professional environment. 9. Collective bargaining has set a standard for defining teachers’ economic interests along industrial union lines, but it has not significantly advanced the status of teachers in terms of being recognized and rewarded as experts about learning. 10. While foundations and the federal government programs have promoted new performance pay systems, most reflect only marginal changes (e.g., modest stipends, emphasis on 20th century testing regimes, etc.), rarely promote teacher ingenuity, and often place a cap on leadership op portunities. *Kate Rousmaniere. “In Search of Profession: A History of American Teachers,” in David M. Moss, Wendy J. Glenn and Richard L. Schwab (eds.). Portrait of a Profession: Teaching and Teachers in the 21st Century. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005). **In 2003, median teacher salaries in New York City were $53,000 as compared to $95,000 in suburban Scarsdale – a function of funding inequities as well as dramatically different levels of teachers experience and education. ***See Drew Gitomer’s recent analyses of the improved academic ability of teacher education candidates and graduates at http://www.ets.org/ Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf 2 About this paper’s authorship This monograph appears midway through the development of a book on the future of teaching, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2010. The book is a team effort, undertaken by 12 accomplished educators from across the United States, who have agreed to systematically study and speculate about public education and the teaching profession in the year 2030. As they go about this work, these teacher leaders are drawing upon their own experiences, current policy research and debate, and the insights of other future-thinkers who, like themselves, look at the educational, social and political trends of today and begin to imagine best-case scenarios about learning and teaching tomorrow. In essence, this paper is a progress report on the TeacherSolutions 2030 (TS2030) project, written from the perspective of Barnett Berry, who is President and CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality and a writing partner with the TS2030 team. In this monograph, Berry speaks in his own voice about the future of the teaching profession, but he draws deeply on the understandings and insights emerging from his teacher colleagues as they continue work on next year’s book from Teachers College Press. not the future. But they are principles yet to be Introduction achieved in most of our nation’s public schools, where so many promises of educational opportunity remain unfulfilled. We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine Our look ahead is a fast-forward to 2030 – barely 20 We are not soothsayers. So began my years from now and well within the career reach of ongoing collaboration with a small team of many teachers working in classrooms today, including great American teachers eager to imagine a half-dozen members of our own writing team. a brighter future for students and the teaching Whatever the current stage of our education careers, profession. We quickly agreed not to make a vain those of us working on this project all agree on this: attempt to describe the future with perfect clarity. The teaching profession must look very different in But after almost a year of study, we remain confident 2030 if all students are going to meet the demands that we can identify present realities, examine of our global economy and our ever-evolving expert predictions of future trends,1 and apply our democratic way of life. understandings of what works for student learning today to describe what will likely work – and be needed – in the schooling of tomorrow. My colleagues in this venture teach in every region of the nation. They serve students in many teaching roles, at many grade levels, in urban, suburban and The teaching we imagine emerges from a student- rural schools. Some began teaching in the 1970s, centered profession, driven by new tools, others launched their careers in the New Millennium. organizations, and ideals. Some of the ideas and These 12 expert teachers and myself – a former principles that shape our vision come from the past, teacher who advocates for their profession — set out to look deeply at teaching’s past and present and the Jennifer Barnett wants a state of the profession in our nation’s public schools. place at the table when deci- sions are made about her Using the virtual tools of the Teacher Leaders students’ learning. Network (TLN), a dynamic professional learning community supported by the Center for Teaching 3 Quality, we studied the works of researchers and facility with digital tools necessary to process relevant reformers, demographers and futurists — and the information and determine what is useful and valid. best thinking of teacher leaders and policy pundits. We examined the debates swirling around No Child As our interconnected world gets smaller, our schools Left Behind and the question of how best to identify also need to help students understand and work a highly effective teacher. We debated long and hard with more culturally diverse people, across national among ourselves. Ultimately we came together, boundaries. Increasingly, students and families not always in lock-step, but in harmony about an are seeking opportunities for anytime/anywhere expanded vision for student learning in the 21st learning. Teachers must be able to meet them in century and for the teaching profession that will, in the educational marketplace, leveraging their skills myriad ways, continue to accelerate that learning. and knowledge as guides in the growing world of technology-driven student learning opportunities. At the turn of the century, Marc Prensky suggested All the while, Internet technologies are providing that students of today and tomorrow “do not just teachers with unprecedented opportunities to connect think about different things, they actually think with one another beyond school walls – dissolving differently.”2 If this is true —and more and more I bureaucratic controls over professional development believe it is — then policymakers and the public must and making it possible for any teacher to learn from now focus on the ways we expect teachers to think successful colleagues without regard to physical about and do their work and the varied roles they boundaries, the clock on the classroom wall, or the need to play in student learning. The focus of today’s budgetary decisions of the central office. debates should not be about “making” better schools and teachers using a 20th century blueprint. The key Learning and Teaching in 2030 conversation needs to be about changing the learning environments of students and the teachers who serve them. In 2030, interactive media environments and immersive learning games have long since created students with a new profile of cognitive skills, In the “flattening world” of the first quarter of the 21st requiring teachers to teach much differently.3 century, students must know and do more. They must Advances in cognitive science and human brain- learn much more than the 3Rs of reading, writing and scanning techniques have spawned new teaching math (and a smattering of science and social studies) methodologies that diagnose and remedy literacy now demanded of them by last-century standardized difficulties in children and adults. Virtual tools and tests and top-down school accountability systems. networking, just coming of age in the early years of The rules and tools of the No Child Left Behind the century, have now opened borderless learning Act have reinforced an overreliance on traditional territories for students of all ages, anytime and measures of student achievement and promoted anywhere. Ray Kurzweil’s early 21st century vision a cautious curriculum and lock-step teaching. In of brain cybernetics and nanomachines that would the emerging workplace, most students – not just allow human users to vastly expand their cognitive an elite few — must be able to find, synthesize, and abilities has proved prescient. Not only are students evaluate information from a wide variety of subjects benefitting directly, many teacher leaders have begun and sources. The continued exponential growth of to use tools like “experience beaming”1 to spread their knowledge in many fields, especially in science and teaching expertise more readily to fellow practitioners, mathematics, poses new challenges for keeping underscoring the value of expert teachers in a society abreast — and undermines worn-out notions of and an economy that rests on information science. the need to cover content defined by a classroom textbook and an overly prescriptive set of curriculum standards. At a time when more than 4,000 new Indeed, in the year 2030 we can imagine that books are published daily (and you can publish your America’s teaching profession has fully arrived, and own for a few hundred dollars, if you like) no one can beleaguered public schools are reaping the benefits of keep pace with the flow of new ideas. But students can I Krzweil proposes that nanotechnology will make it possible for “experience beamers” to transmit the entire flow of their sensory experiences to others via the gain the habits of mind, the learning skills, and the Web. 4