The Changing Influence of Teachers

Many consider teaching to be a lonely profession. Lieberman and Miller captured the essence of the teaching profession almost a decade ago when they wrote: “Unlike other professions, teaching does not provide for a shared culture based on the movement from knowledge to experience in the company of one’s peers…Once graduated from a preparation programme, teachers find themselves alone in the classroom with a group of students without a peer or supervisor (support structure) in sight.” ¹

There is, of course, a difference between being “alone” and being “lonely.” We all have experienced feelings of loneliness even amidst crowds, just have we have been alone in a room or in nature, and not felt lonely. But there is often a relationship between these two words, one a description of circumstance, the other a description of emotional state.

Which brings me to the central thesis of this post. I believe that the circumstance of faculty largely teaching alone is rapidly changing, and with this change will come concomitant changes in their role, self-image, power, and authority.

Several things are occurring in schools to change the circumstances in which teachers ply their profession.

• the role of the librarian is expanding. Increasingly, librarians and other media professionals are assuming greater roles in classrooms as students are asked to both perform research that draws upon a variety of media, make decisions about the quality of the research materials they access, and then to creatively express their findings through multimedia presentations. Many teachers may find themselves out of their comfort zones both literally (with less work done in the classrooms) and figuratively (with less work done through books and writing). In many schools the library is morphing into a learning commons area, in which individual, small groups, and large groups of students work, surrounded by resources both human, material, and virtual.
• curricula is becoming more cross-disciplinary and project-based. Secondary teachers in particular have long been relegated to discipline-based “silos,” with specialization and unique courses increasing with grade levels. These practices are giving way to models of teaching which rely on teams of teachers from several disciplines working together on a singular having their students work on a single project from multiple perspectives. STEM projects are a particularly common example of this, though there are others geared more towards the humanities in the form of “great ideas” courses.
• more and more teachers are creating and joining professional development networks (PDN). Ironically, some teachers have closer collegial relationships with professionals outside of their school than within it. The Internet has created hundreds of networks of teachers through which they can speak frankly with one another about their craft, share lessons plans, seek advice on difficult issues, and contribute to a growing corpus of works pertinent to a given subject. For some it may be easier to reach out to relative strangers for advice than to walk over to the teacher in the next classroom. For others, their PDN includes many colleagues from their own school, perhaps in the form of a Critical Friends group, as well as online colleagues. In any even, the increasing transparency in classrooms is changing both the “alone-ness” and “loneliness” of these teachers.
• teacher feedback and evaluation is placing greater emphasis on collaborative skills. Teachers who are poor team-players, who prefer isolation, low accountability, and assume postures that suggest “I’ve been doing this a long time and I have nothing to gain from others” are feeling the heat from administrators who are demanding a different set of behaviors. The days of simply transferring yellowed overhead transparencies to PowerPoint and continuing the lecture in the same way are quickly coming to an end.
• online courses are changing from being oddities to common occurrences in schools. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that online courses are exploding at the college level² While the absolute numbers of students taking online courses in K-12 schools lags that of colleges, the percentage of growth is impressive. ³ Based on this new mix of traditional, online, and blended courses we can reliably postulate that the circumstances in which faculty work, what they call their classroom, and who they call their students, may change dramatically in the next decade.
• the role of the teachers as possessor and dispenser of content (the “sage on the stage”) is under assault. Though derided for decades, this model of teaching has proven to be tenacious. It is, after all, the model that the vast majority of teachers experienced as students, and it is a model that, in the hands of a gifted few, is still compelling. But it has become clear from surveys and observations of students that few teachers are capable of sustaining student interest using this model exclusively.
• new knowledge of how students learn, and how teachers can take advantage of brain imaging research, neuropsychiatric findings, and similar scientific advances is challenging business as usual in the classroom. In have written several posts about new theories of learning and teaching based on the latest findings in cognitive research (see The Architecture of Learning, The New Science of Teaching and Learning, and Why Kids Don’t Like School), so I won’t repeat the findings here. Suffice it to say that as we learn more about how kids learn, we will need to adapt our teaching methods to take advantage of new diagnostic/prescriptive insights and means of assessing learning.

All of the foregoing suggests that modern teachers are more team players than solo acts. Some teachers may interpret this as a diminution of their authority, while others will welcome the change, the challenge, and the opportunity to redefine their roles as they key connector within a more expansive definition of who participates in the education of children. Some may take these changes as sign that it’s time to retire or to retrench, underscoring the irony that confronts every educational institution in which adults expect students to learn, adapt new behaviors, and discard outmoded, simplistic, or simply wrongheaded ways of thinking yet resist examining their own practice with every fiber of their being.