Maximizing Teacher Development to Create a Better Learning Environment
By: Annabelle Kinyanjui, EC Fellow (Oakland Cohort 5)
Inspiring. Nurturing. Enduring. All of these verbs have a big place in education. They represent being a teacher. Firstly, having the capacity to inspire, and uplift their students. Secondly, using soft skills to nurture a productive and safe environment for students. Lastly, they endure any challenges presented to them by their students or curriculum. What happens when teachers don’t uphold these different definitions and feel hopeless when they want to improve their teaching?
Schools across the country all have the same mission in mind: to teach students the knowledge and skills they need for college and their own lives. Well, what happens when schools don’t have teachers that can really maximize their potential for their students? When a teacher feels burnout or doesn’t know how to navigate a classroom setting, it is felt by all of their students. This leads to a sense of lack of motivation for students, as the environment for their education is sort of rigged against them. If a student does not feel like they can achieve in a classroom setting from day one, students overall will feel discouraged to try as hard as they can. So, teachers need to have the resources to avoid having their classroom out of control, and effectively educate their students.
When teachers aren’t given the ability to learn how to teach as effectively as possible, it slows down the momentum of the classroom. Once a student goes into the classroom, they should know that they are going to be able to learn their subjects as effectively as possible, but their teacher is the starting point for that progress. This is going against the verb I brought up: inspiring. How can a student be inspired by a teacher who is not fully equipped to teach them? In a “Journal of Teacher Education,” Linda Darling-Hammond would write, “A 1% increase in teacher quality (as measured by NTE scores) was associated with a 3% to 5% decline in the percentage of students failing the [state competency] exam.” (Darling-Hammond) This shows that once teachers go through enough learning on their own to increase their teaching quality, it is felt by their students, even increasing the rate of students succeeding at the state exam. Teachers who are given the opportunity to improve and will themselves to do so, can make their students succeed.
I bring up this topic because it’s something that I’ve been realizing that’s happening around me. Last year, my teachers were able to have the tools to teach, and had the will to really hone in the skill of teaching. Students did not have such a hard time trying to understand the material, as the teacher displaying it did not make it complicated or harder than it already was. My classmates and I knew our teachers like the back of our hands and were able to ask any kind of question because we understood the basics of what we were learning. Now, going into this school year, teachers aren’t teaching the way that students learn, like not giving them study guides or rushing through the lesson in hopes that everyone already understands the material. When I think about it, my peers and I barely know our teachers. We aren’t given the time to really understand who they are and learn about them person by person. This goes against the second verb I brought up: nurturing. Teachers, alongside students, need to nurture a strong relationship with each other so that they can help each other improve in the classroom and do well in the future. If this doesn’t happen, it creates a situation where a student doesn’t really want to learn because they don’t know the material enough to ask questions and don’t have a strong student-teacher relationship they can rely on.
This leaves us with creating a solution. If teachers need to learn how to teach more effectively, they should be able to get more teacher development classes and coaching alongside them. After being given insight on how to improve their teaching, coaching would allow teachers to see if they need any constructive criticism to improve upon. Also, getting student surveys would be helpful as well because hearing feedback from students can show teachers what they do well, and not doing well. These teacher development classes should go over how different subjects are most effectively taught and how to nurture a solid foundation of a student-teacher relationship. Teachers should also not just give up on teaching. That goes against the last verb I brought up earlier, enduring. Teaching is not easy, so a person who wants to be a teacher needs to be able to endure growing pains on this challenging journey.
For the Oakland Unified School District, teachers should be given teacher development classes and get more coaching in the classroom. Every department should have a leading coach who’s taught before and knows what to look for in teachers who want to improve. This would allow teachers to have a safety net to fall back on while climbing to the next level.
Lastly, I want everyone to think about what it means to be a teacher. What does it mean to be a student? How do these two people coincide with each other to succeed?
Darling-Hammond, Linda. “Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, №3, May/June 2000 How … — Sugar.” Sugarlabs, 2000, wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/a/aa/Darling_Hammond.pdf.
