Roxana Elden: The Myth of the Super Teacher

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1. Kipp Dawson says:

   July 6, 2014 at 12:46 pm

   Thank you for this! Sharing this in the hopes that my colleagues trying to recover from the school year (NOT from the kids! but from the junk we all have to wade through from our enemies) will be able to enjoy seeing this fun portrayal of our reality.

   Reply
2. debneill says:

   July 6, 2014 at 1:09 pm

   Reblogged this on The History Chick in AZ and commented:
   This is a great video on teaching. I know exactly how she feels! Thanks for posting Diane Ravitch!

   Reply
3. kpodwika@comcast.net says:

   July 6, 2014 at 1:18 pm

   Thank you. I’ll read in a bit…personal issues for today..last few weeks..all day and night searching teacherspayteachers.com and pinterest for ideas, because I’ve been switched back to 3rd after two years in 2nd (when we adopted Common Core, so I am at a loss with Common Core at 3rd and they know it) before a year in 8th (which literally almost killed me in two ways) before about 17 yrs in mostly 3rd where our school had outstanding test scores.

   Have to run off.Thank you!!!!

   Reply
   • English Teacher in California says:

     July 6, 2014 at 8:00 pm

     That sounds really challenging. But remember, they may have cha nged the standards, but 3rd graders are still 3rd graders. You know a lot about teaching them.

     Reply
4. H.A. Hurley says:

   July 6, 2014 at 1:44 pm

   Humor! Honesty! Practical Advice! Short & sweet advice but can serve a teacher well. Especially, the Humor! In spite of the he** teachers! children and parents are put through.
   Laugh anyway!
   Surround yourself with other teachers with a great, or raunchy, or sick sense of humor, and adopt others.
   Meet on Fridays after school in a local establishment. Even in retirement, I am meeting regularly with some of my former teachers who began their careers with me years ago.
   Helps tremendously to share and laugh.

   Reply
5. Marian Higgins says:

   July 6, 2014 at 2:09 pm

   Thanks, I really enjoyed this video. Roxana offers excellent advice. She’s right about how damaging the myth of the superteacher has been. As we all know, teachers have no time to waste, yet “reformers” are loading our schools with time-consuming, money-wasting tasks that do not add to student learning and experience. When dealing with unreasonable, non-educator-types of administrators, I also found sneakiness helpful as well.

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6. Texas Teacher says:

   July 6, 2014 at 2:09 pm

   Love this! Thank you so much for sharing it! All teachers have their foibles and doubts, but to reflect on that and what we can do to get better is just so important. I also agree with her that the Hollywood angle of teaching is very misleading. The movies she referenced-both those ladies left teaching after only a few years themselves. It takes a lot of grit and humor to stick it out in this business and it’s refreshing to hear that honest take on it.

   Reply
7. concerned mom and teacher says:

   July 6, 2014 at 2:10 pm

   Roxana has a powerful message. That first year of teaching IS like army boot camp — it WILL make you or break you. She attempts to temper the pain of that reality with humor, but those of us who have been there in our first year of teaching are facing that same anxiety all these years later in this nightmare world of VAM and CCSS.

   It is even more terrifying after years of teaching to find yourself in that position. As kpodwika states, “…all day and night searching teacherspayteachers.com and pinterest for ideas..I am at a loss with Common Core at 3rd and they know it…” I feel your anxiety, kpodwika.

   Reply
8. julie says:

   July 6, 2014 at 3:52 pm

   All teachers have been there and all new ones will be there too. Needing humor, honesty and practical advice. I saw a video once of a school system that had first year teachers for one year with cameras on them. At the end of the day they’d sit down with a mentor, review the day and get practical hands on advice on how to do better etc. The only way to learn. I have learned everything about teaching from other teachers. And finally the message is for charter schools and TFA with no experience. It takes Years to know how to really manage a classroom for success in learning, YEARS. And old dogs can learn new tricks, they have to, to keep up. But who I’d really like to understand this is Bill Gates. Teachers are the heart and soul of the class to the students and not a robot task master, walking around computers to make sure kids are on task. In his vision of a classroom the very joy of learning will wither away.

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9. Bob Shepherd says:

   July 6, 2014 at 4:14 pm

   Love this presentation!

   Real continuous improvement flows from the bottom up. You know what flows from the top down.

   Here’s how to improve teacher quality: Put teachers in charge of their own continuous improvement, treat them like knowledgeable professionals, and importantly, CREATE TIME IN THEIR SCHEDULES FOR THEM TO WORK TOGETHER COLLABORATIVELY to go over last week’s lessons and discuss what worked and what didn’t, to plan for the following week, to discuss issues and approaches, etc. In other words, institute a program of Japanese-style Lesson Study.

   Extrinsic punishment and reward systems

   a. Are powerfully demotivating for cognitive tasks, as has been demonstrated again and again in research by economists and social psychologists
   b. Suppress the free and open communication necessary for continuous improvement to occur
   c. Silence the voices of those who are in positions to know what is actually going on
   d. Create climates of fear and distrust
   e. Lead to widespread cheating and gaming of the system
   f. Tend to be created at a distance and a priori and so to be stupid
   g. Make into antagonists those (administrators and teachers) who should be working together
   h. Create a climate in which teachers are competitors with one another rather than collaborators, a terrible thing because in a truly collaborative environment, stronger teachers will know who are the weaker ones and will coach and mentor them

   When people feel safe, are given responsibility, and are empowered, they rise to the occasion. When they are micromanaged and disempowered and subjected to continual threat, they build resentments and subvert.

   Anyone who has ever served on a jury will know what I mean. Take a cross section of the adult population, give them a grave collective responsibility and empower them, collectively, to make decisions, and they take that responsibility and power extremely seriously. I’ve served on juries three times, and each time I was AMAZED by and proud of what the ordinary people–the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker–did.

   The advice to get together often with other teachers in both formal and informal settings, for work and for play, is excellent. I don’t drink, but I will gladly, at any time, meet with fellow teachers for a wind-down session at the local watering hole after school on Friday.

   Reply
10. changemaker says:

    July 6, 2014 at 4:26 pm

    Thank you, Diane. I am ordering the book!

    Reply
11. Catherine Lomas Scott says:

    July 6, 2014 at 6:21 pm

    I thought you might be interested in this. I’m a psychologist and well aware of all the correlates of attitudes, like ingrained belief in the inferiority of particular groups. One of those correlates is that any member of a group thought to be les competent at anything has to be a ‘super’ whatever to be regarded as even slightly able to do their job. This applies to women and members of feminised professions. Wrote this. My husband put hi name omit because I wasn’t eligible to be published The Conversation at the time.

    It was heavily edited before it was published and I’m not happy with the result but thems the breaks.

    This is the link: https://theconversation.com/why-were-never-satisfied-with-teachers-8654
    Why we’re never satisfied with teachers

    Concern about teacher competence has been around for several decades. Recently, there has been a concerted push by state and federal governments to enact policies to improve “teacher quality”.

    Concern about teacher competence has been around for several decades. Recently, there has been a concerted push by state and federal governments to enact policies to improve “teacher quality”. Meeting last week, state and federal education ministers agreed that all teachers will have to undergo annual performance reviews.

    Others have suggested teacher education is the area needing most improvement, and lifting university entrance scores or establishing other barriers to a teaching degree is the answer.

    “Teacher quality”, the favoured term in all of this talk, represents a push to create not just competent teachers but great teachers – defined variously as those who are highly qualified, highly effective or highly accomplished.

    Interestingly though, other professions do not find themselves similarly pressed for greatness. You can see this easily when you search on the internet for “improving teacher quality” (it gets around 3,180 results) while there are barely any results for “improving doctor quality”, “improving plumber quality” or “improving lawyer quality”.

    And yet many see outstanding teaching practice as a vital policy area. Indeed so strident are the claims that teaching must not just be competent but superlative that it can be difficult to step back and ask why the profession is regarded as “broken” in the first place. And, further, why “good” is just not good enough when it comes to teaching.

    The hidden issue of gender

    While those who say the teaching profession needs to be fixed claim a variety of supporting evidence for action, there is one important factor that does not make it into public debates – the influence of gender stereotypes.

    Put bluntly men are regarded as more competent than women. When we judge women’s performance, the expected standard is lower than that expected of men and we see what we expect to see. Women are not judged as equal in competence to men unless their performance is exceptional and well above the male norm.

    These shifting standards apply not only to women when compared to men but to any stigmatised group compared to a group regarded as more competent. Research has proven this empirically.

    And when women are seen as not competent when compared to men, jobs which are dominated by women are seen as requiring less skill than “male jobs”. Work that is performed mainly by women is then regarded as low skill and is accordingly undervalued and underpaid.

    To most, a skilled trade is being a plumber or electrician, but not a hairdresser.

    Not only are women’s jobs undervalued, but they are given less status in society and so are more often the subjects of complaints.

    Teaching stereotypes

    Teaching is a highly feminised profession and becoming more so. That women do teaching makes it immediately prey to suspicions that the work is low level – on a par with perceptions of childcare – and probably not being performed well. That entry into teaching requires a university education does not prove that practitioners are competent.

    Even opposition education spokesman [now minister for education] Christopher Pyne has publicly described a teaching degree as an “easy option”.

    After all, we “go easy on ladies” and probably let them through even though they have not done very well; that, or the courses are not very taxing or high level.

    Obsession with teacher inquiries

    Unease that degrees graduating large numbers of women must be, by their nature, not up to scratch is manifested by the sheer number of inquiries there have been into teacher education programs.

    In Australia there has been, on average, one major state or national inquiry into teacher education every year for the past 30 years. No other program of professional preparation has been thought to warrant such scrutiny.

    Looked at dispassionately, these concerns look to be irrational. These low level degrees, so the thinking goes, carry on to the next stage, where we expect the average level of teaching is bound to be insufficient. What is good enough when done by a woman is, well, really just not good enough.

    Super teachers

    In this context, merely being suspected of incompetence is sufficient proof that women and teachers are incompetent. So in order for teachers to prove themselves the equal of other professionals they can’t just be proficient, they need to be atypical superstars.

    Members of other professions – dominated by men – are expected to be able to do their jobs. Because of this expectation the level of evidence required to prove incompetence is very high (the reverse of the situation for women, where lack of evidence of exceptional performance equates to proof of incompetence).

    Because there is little to suggest that most professionals are unable to fulfil their duties they are not repeatedly accused of incapacity. In addition, the relevant programs of professional preparation are not subject to repeated rounds of inquiry.

    Some students don’t do well at school, lawyers lose cases, doctors treat patients who fail to recover or even die, psychiatrists work with distressed people who may not recover their mental health. Only teachers are stigmatised for failing to achieve superhuman feats of professional performance.

    What about other female professions?

    The case of nursing may be seen to test the theory that gender beliefs underpin attitudes towards teaching. Nursing is even more feminised than teaching but there have been no recurrent panics about the quality of nursing or nurse education.

    But nurses are safely nestled into a hierarchy controlled by (mostly) male doctors. That they are under the supervision of men renders their supposed lack of competence less of a threat.

    Teachers, in comparison, work in classrooms away from scrutiny and overt supervision. It is instructive that “remedies” for the “poor standard” of teaching frequently involve increasing formal performance management, as had been agreed to under the new system of performance reviews.

    Advocates call for more supervision and oversight of teaching practice, usually by (presumably male) principals, which includes direct observation of teaching. Frequently included in the remedy is insistence that principals should be able to hire and fire, with this exercise of power presumably guaranteeing better performance.

    Thus safely under the supervision of (male) principals teachers’ innate womanish incompetence can be contained and controlled.

    A strange fixation

    If an individual is obsessed with an idea for which there is dubious or no evidence along with compulsive repetition, many would diagnose a disturbed mind.

    Our societal obsession with the inadequacy of the teaching force and the repetitive nature of the remedies proposed to fix this unproven deficit are accepted as right and necessary, however.

    If our argument is correct, obsessions with teacher quality will continue until the gender stereotypes are acknowledged and we discuss fully the groundless belief that teachers are incompetent.

    This piece was co-authored by *Catherine Lomas Scott and Stephen Dinham.

    Catherine Lomas Scott is a freelance researcher and writer. Stephen Dinham is Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne.

    Reply
12. Ohio Algebra II teacher says:

    July 6, 2014 at 6:46 pm

    Just bought the book. I champion any combination of teaching excellence and humility.

    Reply
13. Back2basic says:

    July 6, 2014 at 9:41 pm

    Hi Catherine:

    In term of the majority, could you please show us the evidence in your research that which single parent, mother or father, accomplishes to raise their children successfully?

    Between female and male person, who has more endurance, patience, and caring for children? According to statistics, we have more female university students in most of advanced countries.

    In other word, in the past, women are dominated and restricted so that they cannot fulfill their potential. However, today, women are motivated and have their freedom to pursue their careers as they please.

    Your argument will only be valid if Teaching College fails to prove their invaluable teaching curriculum which aims to produce well rounded future generation, to sustain the civilization, and to maintain humanity for the society. Back2basic

    Reply
14. Judith says:

    July 7, 2014 at 10:51 am

    Should be required curriculum for TFA.

    Reply
15. Dana says:

    July 7, 2014 at 3:58 pm

    She was real! I enjoyed her telling her truth and, yes, this job is hard and trying. No one knows, besides a fellow teacher, what we deal with everyday during the school year. I have retired because I could no longer handle the stress of the demands of the job with heavy emphasis on testing.

    Reply