The Hidden Assumption (by Jim Dillon)

Jim Dillon has been an educator for over 35 years, including 20 years as a school administrator. While he was the principal of Lynnwood Elementary in New York, he developed the Peaceful School Bus Program, designed to prevent and reduce bullying, and subsequently published The Peaceful School Bus (Hazelden, 2008). The program is now being implemented in schools across the country. He is the author of No Place for Bullying: Leadership for schools that care for every student (Corwin, 2013). Jim is currently an educational consultant for Measurement Incorporated. He makes presentations and conducts workshops on a variety of educational topics, including instruction, classroom management, leadership, and supervision. Jim has presented at many local, state and national conferences. Jim's blog, The Peaceful School Bus is a Teach 100 blog.

In March 2010, Newsweek ran a cover story entitled, “The Key to Saving American Education.” This title was superimposed on a blackboard where the following statement was written over and over: We must fire bad teachers. The article makes some bold statements about the profession of teaching:

“Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not)… Nothing then is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones.”

Those assumptions about teaching are reflected in current policy and practice regarding teacher evaluation. If you examine most of the teacher evaluation systems being employed, their goal is less about helping teachers improve their practice than it is about sorting them into categories. Its main purpose is to single out those bad teachers who are perceived as the reason why education is failing.

This assumption that seems to drive policy and practice is unfortunately not often voiced clearly or even discussed. Instead the debate ends ups being between teachers unions and government reformers over the possible variations in how this assumption manifests itself. Education, however, would be much better served if we looked a little deeper into some of these assumptions and discussed this issue on a more fundamental level.

Unless we confront this basic assumption about teaching as a profession and whether teachers can grow professionally, our evaluation system will remain a mechanism for sorting teachers rather than becoming a process for increasing their knowledge and skill.

If there is one clear fact I cling to after my many years as an educator, it's how complex and difficult teaching is. When teachers fully embrace their profession, they discover that each day, each lesson presents an endless source of reflection and opportunities for their professional growth. Those who have reached the highest levels of their profession would scoff at the idea of a skilled craft person, an athlete, or an artist perfecting their skills and reaching an endpoint or even a comfortable plateau of professional growth. Would a Meryl Streep, a LeBron James, or a Joshua Bell ever consider coasting for the rest of their careers? Were they finished products after a few years’ experience, or are they perpetual works in progress?

The basic hidden assumption about the teaching profession is central not just to how we evaluate teachers, but to teaching and learning itself. The research pioneered by Carol Dweck on mindsets, a fixed versus a growth mindset , has profound implications on the entire field of education. To sum it up: those who believe that they are capable of growth continue to learn and grow even when they encounter challenges or adversity; those who believe that their ability is fixed or innate end up finding a comfort zone of performance and seek to avoid challenges that could stretch their skills. A teacher evaluation system that is based on the “fixed” mindset seeks to sort those teachers who “have what it takes” — an innate ability — from those who don’t. This approach, however, ignores and does a tremendous disservice to the great majority of teachers who want to learn and grow in their jobs. Sadly, if our teacher evaluation policy and practice is based on a fixed mindset approach, then teachers are much more likely to have that same fixed mindset for their students.

Here are just a few ways that the hidden assumption (fixed mindset) manifests itself in other ways:

• The reason for poor teaching performance has to be motivation, therefore, giving teachers more money will motivate them to teach better.

• If giving teachers more money isn’t sufficient motivation for improvement, then using the prospect of being labeled ineffective and possibly losing one’s job should motivate them.

• If students are not learning, it’s because of what they are being taught, therefore, change the curriculum; this is where the Common Core originated.

• If students aren’t learning it is because the public school system is not working, so we should institute a charter school system using private enterprise.

• If students aren’t learning, then the answer is to find the right program to institute and have the teachers learn to follow it.

As a follow up to the Newsweek article, I read a report prepared by by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, in partnership with the National Staff Development Council (now Learning Forward) about teacher performance . This report must have caught the eye of policymakers because it basically concluded that professional development for teachers didn’t result in any improvement in performance and had no impact on student achievement. This report confirmed this hidden assumption, fixed mindset teaching, which has guided education policy. It basically said that since you can’t improve teacher performance, the best use of funds should be devoted to removing ineffective teachers and motivating the rest to do better. I later read a commentary of the report that said that the type of professional development analyzed was a workshop/professional conference. The report didn’t account for an embedded type of professional development where teachers learned from colleagues in a school culture that promoted collaboration and ongoing growth.

What if education policy was based on a growth mindset, instead of a fixed one? What if teaching was a profession where people learned on the job and got better as they gained experienced? What if the lack of improvement was more about skill and not about will? What if policy focused on creating the conditions for optimal professional learning? What if we invested in helping teachers improve their skills and applied the research we have about how people learn and grow to professional development? These questions should at least be asked if we truly want to improve education in our country.

Education policy and the practice it promotes today seems stuck by something it can’t even see: the power of hidden assumption to create its own reality, the proposition that we usually get what we expect or as Henry Ford said: “If you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.” On an even more fundamental level we should ask: how is it that our educational institutions have gotten so far away from asking real questions about what teaching and learning is all about?

Perhaps it is time for all educators to think a little more deeply, ask some challenging questions but, most of all, to start believing in the value and power of education itself.

Sources:

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the National Staff Development Council, "Status of Professional Learning," 2009-2010.

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