One of the reasons I became a teacher is because it seemed like a particularly credible profession.  The process of becoming a teacher appeared to have more in common with an apprenticeship than an abstract degree.  My teacher’s college in particular was focused on getting us as much in-class time with a working, mentor teacher as possible.  Once in the profession, it takes a teacher twelve years to earn full pay, once again implying that this is an apprenticeship that takes a great deal of time to come to fruition.

I’m in year eight of teaching and life on the ground has been somewhat less affirming.  The vast majority of teachers I’ve met do little to expand their teaching skills, unless they are new and so desperate for a position that they spend thousands of dollars collecting additional qualifications.  Many older teachers I know still have the two teachables they started with, and in some cases aren’t even actually qualified to teach the subjects they are teaching.  A surprising number have never updated to honours specialist so they could top out on the salary grid (though that would be hard to do if you don’t actually have a degree or any background in what you’re teaching).

Having found an online community of teachers who are actually interested in improving their craft (and recognizing the changes digitization is having on education and society in general) has been a saving grace, but I still face comments like, “why in God’s name would I want to talk about teaching when I’m not at work?” or “oh great, another pointless PD day” when I’m on the ground in school.

To that end, I’d like to consider revisions to the much maligned ‘grid’ that determines teacher salaries in Ontario.  Ranging from just over forty thousand a year (which isn’t an awful lot when you’ve just spent over one hundred thousands dollars on five years of university), to just over ninety thousand a year more than a decade into working, the grid relies mainly on years in the classroom as a justification for pay raises.  The difference between an honours specialist in a subject and a teacher who has never lifted a finger to try and improve is less than 5% of pay at the top of the grid.*

I would suggest that there is a lot more to the craft of teaching than years in the classroom, especially if you’re not one of those very special teachers who like to trot out the same old lesson, year in, year out (one you probably photocopied from someone else in the first place).  In the great scheme of becoming a master teacher, your activity both in and beyond the classroom are vital to your understanding of how your profession works as a whole.

Teachers who are active in their professional organizations (ECOO, OHASSTA, OLA, OAME, ELAN, OCTE, and others), are working to enhance their craft by working with colleagues in their various disciplines.  How this isn’t a consideration in a salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who are active in school leadership roles (such as department heads, directions teams members, etc) are currently offered a rather silly little stipend to do what is essentially another part time job.  They do this with no time given from regular teacher duties, and for a couple of bucks a day.  Why these ‘positions of additional responsibility’ aren’t considered in the salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who take on student teachers and do one of the most important jobs in our profession?  Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school teams and clubs over the long term?  Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school events like graduation or grade nine introductory programs?  Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend their own time and money away from home attending professional conferences to enhance their practice?  You got it, nothing on the grid.

I’m not advocating for a pay per-extracurricular approach here, but I am asking for a grid that works from something other than how long you’ve been doing the job.  If we graded students the same way we salary teachers, they’d get higher and higher grades the longer they are in school, regardless of what they are doing.

Talk of extending the grid from 11 to 15 years is as myopic as basing the grid primarily on years of teaching in the first place.  Seniority has its place in teaching, there is no doubt.  How long a teacher has been teaching is an important metric in determining their quality, but it certainly shouldn’t be the key factor in calculating their pay.

If we’re going to overhaul the salary grid, let’s really examine what determines a teacher who is trying to perfect their imperfectable craft, and then make a grid that isn’t solely based on how old you are as a teacher.  That grid would be fluid and flexible, with people moving up and down in various elements of it.  You’d still enjoy seniority bumps, but a senior teacher who does nothing other than show up and go home, offering no mentor-ship to younger teachers, no direction for their school, no enrichment for their students, and who has no specialization in the subject they teach, wouldn’t be able to make within 5% of the trained specialist who offers up their time to lead departments, train new teachers, or lead subject enrichment.

This kind of grid would encourage the kind of meta-cognition we expect to see in our students, and encourage senior teachers to mentor and improve the craft, rather than closing the door to their classroom five years early while they glide to retirement.  It would also support teachers who recognize how changeable the world is at the moment and who take steps to try and prepare students for a future that will be quite unlike the past.

If we’re going to fix the grid, let’s fix it.  Seniority is only one (relatively minor) metric in considering how hard a teacher is working at becoming a better teacher.

Note:  teacher pay based on student test scores are another American myth that are designed to diminish the profession while cloaking justifications (usually financial) in fictional, statistical validity.  Standardized tests are inherently limited, and teachers who teach well to them are probably such compliant, mechanical creatures that they are actually poor teachers.  US world rankings would suggest that trying to standardize teaching around this kind of testing is a disaster.  A well designed salary grid would recognize the many individual ways that a teacher could improve their craft, without grossly simplifying the metrics for excellence (such as basing the grid almost entirely on seniority).

From the Prezi brainstorming graphical interface: http://prezi.com/mlmks5pq65dz/dancing-in-the-datasphere/

If we live in an increasingly data-rich, but resource poor world, what do we need to do as teachers to give our students a fighting chance?

There is no reason to assume that Eric Schmidt is blowing smoke.  If we really are generating this much information, and now have a means of saving, reviewing, organizing, and learning from it, we need to radically re-think how we educate our children.  Knowledge itself is now plentiful and accessible, teachers are no longer the font of knowledge.

Traditional classrooms work on a data-drip of information, out of the teacher’s mouth.  Many of these teachers are willfully ignorant of the radical revolutions going on in their disciplines as information is no longer confined to the limits of human specialists.  Interdisciplinary studies are prompting radical changes in how we understand just about everything.  Teaching your twenty year out of date university experience out of a ten year out of date text book makes you about as pertinent as a dodo.  Many of our current teaching habits assume nothing is changing, but it is, radically, quickly, meaningfully, everywhere but in the classroom.

When I was a kid I was an astronomy nut.  I memorized the nine planets, the meaningful moons, I knew distances, sizes; the universe was a (relatively) small solar system with stars beyond.  We currently know of over 600 planets, and discover an average of a dozen a week, every week.  We are discovering solar systems so bizarre in nature that they beggar belief; but none of that is in the text book, and most teachers won’t bother with it because accessing the datasphere is too difficult with limited technology access in school (fixable with this).

We are discovering these things with drastically improved sensing technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution.  We record this data in abundance using storage technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution.  We often fail to access it for years after the fact because we have not yet caught up with our ability to observe and record the universe around us.  Fortunately we’re now developing systems that sort their own data, and make connections without human oversight – the data itself is beginning to self organize.  The future will be smarter than we can imagine as individuals.

This acceleration is happening in all fields of human endeavor.  We are teasing free nuances in archaeology, history, and science.  We understand in greater detail how the masters painted five centuries ago, we have seen to the edge of reality and felt the remnants of the explosive expansion that started everything.  What we haven’t done is evolved education to prepare our students for this deluge of data.  We still mete out information because we define ourselves as holders of knowledge.  We’re holding a cup of water as the dam breaks around us.

We drip feed students information in class and then complain that they are unfocused, disinterested.  We then agonize over how to make our lessons more engaging.  We wring our hands over outright lies and insinuations instead of letting the datasphere show the truth; we cater to myth, habit and tradition of paper based learning.

In the meantime a steady stream of data overwhelms our students from social networks that dwarf in size any their parents or grandparents had.  We belittle their circumstance by demeaning their means of communication, and overvaluing our traditional modes of contact.  Because they don’t ‘pick up a phone’, they don’t demonstrate meaningful relationships like people of a certain age do (oddly similar to what the phone-people’s parents said about them when they couldn’t be bothered to go and visit people face to face any more).  Kids nowadays, their social networks are empty things devoid of real meaning.

Worst of all, we don’t teach them how to manage the avalanche of data that threatens to bury them; then we criticize them for not managing it well.  Many teachers manage it by ignoring it entirely

We spoon feed them vetted data in tiny amounts because we think that is credible, safe and real, but that isn’t the world they are going to graduate into.  Being able to manage multiple, often conflicting data, organize information out of the noise and critically analyze material is far more relevant than memorizing the right answers to the same questions we’ve been asking for years.

Until we take our responsibility to prepare our students for the 21st Century seriously, we will continue to think that slowing them down, unplugging them and ignoring the datasphere that continues to grow around us at a prodigious rate is not only the easier (cheaper) thing to do, but it is the right thing to do too.

What we aren’t doing is making them familiar with their likely future circumstances, and we do it because it’s easier to ignore a revolution than recognize it, even if it’s happening all around us.