Teachers Need Ways to Advance Without Leaving the Classroom
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that the education profession loses its best teachers because the only path to advancement requires leaving the classroom.
Key Takeaways
- Advancement shouldn't require leaving - The best teachers are promoted out of the classroom, which is backwards
- Create teacher-leadership roles - Mentor teacher, curriculum lead, and instructional coach positions can keep great teachers teaching
- Retain expertise where it matters - Students benefit most when excellent teachers stay in classrooms, not when they become administrators
Transcript
Teachers need opportunities for advancement that don't take them out of the classroom.
Because if you want to advance as a classroom teacher, pretty much your only option is to do something that's outside of the classroom.
And often when good teachers become administrators, it's not good.
It's not what they wanted.
The Peter Principle says that often people are promoted to their level of incompetence.
So sometimes people become bad administrators.
when there was nowhere else to go but into administration, when what they really wanted and what they were good at was teaching.
You know, they really wanted to stay in the classroom, but it's too flat a job.
I think this is a structural issue that we have to fix as a profession so that you can continue to grow, continue to advance as a teacher without doing something else.
And that's how it is in the software world, because they recognize the problem with the Peter Principle, where they would turn people into managers and then they wouldn't be good managers.
They wouldn't like it.
They wanted to be individual contributors.
And in the software world, That would mean, you know, they want to be software developers.
So they developed levels that you could move through to become like a senior engineer.
And we don't have anything like that in teaching.
And I think that's a mistake.
I think we need to develop something like that.
The other thing that tends to happen is people become coaches.
They become instructional coaches.
And if you turn all of your best teachers into instructional coaches, A, some of them, as this book suggests, are not going to be good instructional coaches.
And B, you're losing your best teachers.
And then C, you're spending a lot of money that you weren't spending before on coaching.
And I think that money is not always well used.
So I think our best teachers need to have opportunity for advancement in teaching.
They need to continue to be teachers.
They need to stay in the classroom and yet advance in rank, advance in salary in ways other than just seniority.
Let me know what you think.