The Professional Educator

Young people are capable of much more than many of us are led to believe. In a typical school a teacher may see 25 students for an hour a day, 5 days a week. That is 250 student-hours every week! This way of looking at school leads to a question that can help us re-think education from the ground up: How can we use all those student-hours in a way that is meaningful to our students and to the larger community, that also meets our goals for individual students? This guiding question can be used to evaluate all that we see and do in education. If education is done well, there should be visible results in our schools and in our communities of the work we do with students.

I grew up thinking that a professional is someone who gets paid to do their work. My experience over the last six years on an all-volunteer mountain rescue team has shown me how little getting paid has to do with professionalism. Professionalism is about how well we do our work. If we live up to the standards of the practitioners who work at the highest levels in our field, we are professionals. If we reflect on our daily and cumulative experiences to make ourselves more effective for students, we are professionals. Educators have both the responsibility and the opportunity to demonstrate and strive for professionalism in their practice.

The Professional Educator aims to point out practices that do the most for students and with students. Teachers who view themselves as professionals are engaging, challenging, and effective. Most students in a well-run classroom or school want to be there; they complain when they have to leave. The ability to engage students is not a magic power that some teachers have and some don't. It is something we can all learn to do with the proper combination of experience and learning opportunities. Professional teachers are challenging to students, in a way that motivates them to enjoy working hard. When we invite students to do work that is within their grasp but slightly difficult for them, they relish the challenge. Professional teachers learn the comfort zones of their students, and continually offer them the opportunity to step outside of those comfort zones, where all learning takes place. They are effective in that they impact all of their students positively. They are not perfect; they operate in the same world everyone else works in. But they do not let reality hold them back from consistently doing what has been shown to be effective, and from relying on their instincts when appropriate. Developing professionalism as an educator also keeps teachers engaged, challenged, and satisfied in their own work.

The Professional Educator holds up as role models those educators who balance work time and personal time effectively. Our "Teachers of the Year" should not be people who stay at school until 7:00 every night during the week, and then put in 12 hours on the weekend. Our heroes should be people who learn to teach in an engaging, challenging, and effective manner in something close to a normal 40-hour work week. This balance is possible, and we must look to those who achieve this balance as model educators. Twelve-hour days and weekends at school are reasonable and even necessary on occasion. But they are not healthy as a habit, they are not sustainable, and most important they are not a prerequisite for educational excellence.

Thank you for reading, and please share your thoughts. Let our collective wisdom move us forward in the quest for professionalism.


References:
Searby, Linda & Shaddix, Lisa. Growing Teacher Leaders in a Culture of Excellence. The Professional Educator, Vol 32 No 1, Spring 2008. (8 pages) ERIC record Full Text from ERIC

Searby and Shaddix describe the Teachers as Leaders program in the Mountain Brook school system in Alabama. This program works to develop leadership skills among teachers in the Mountain Brook school system, with the goal of letting teachers who have demonstrated leadership from within their classroom explore more formal leadership roles. The program does not just prepare teachers to become administrators. It also aims to help effective teachers identify specific ways to extend their influence beyond their immediate classroom through mentoring new teachers, chairing grade and department teams, heading up professional development efforts, and other roles compatible with classroom teaching. Suggestions are made for further refinement of the leadership program.