Today’s post is the first in a series detailing the worst directives that teachers have ever been given.
I know, I know—we get so many bad ones, it’s hard to choose the worst! But a number of teachers have made their choice, and, though it may be painful to read them, here goes ....
‘Fidelity’ Is Not a Good Word
Bobson Wong and Larisa Bukalov teach math at Bayside High School in New York City. They are the co-authors of The Math Teacher’s Toolbox: Hundreds of Practical Ideas to Support Your Students and Practical Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide (3rd edition) and winners of the Math for America Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education:
Of all the bad directives we’ve seen in our teaching careers (we’ve been in the classroom for 19 and 27 years, respectively), the worst has been the requirement that we teach a curriculum “with fidelity,” meaning that we must follow its lessons and pacing calendar exactly so that every teacher teaches the exact same lesson on the same day. This issue hits particularly close to home for us because our district is implementing a curriculum with fidelity this year. Starting in September, teachers all Algebra 1 classes in New York City public schools have been required to use the Illustrative Math curriculum and follow the city’s mandated pacing calendar.
The justifications for strictly following a curriculum appear reasonable. Just as actors aren’t expected to write their own scripts and musicians aren’t expected to write their own songs, teachers shouldn’t be expected to write their own lessons. Unlike many other countries, the United States doesn’t have a national curriculum. Since American teachers typically lack a common resource, they must cobble lessons together from a variety of sources.
Furthermore, overworked teachers have too many responsibilities to do their jobs sustainably. The solution is to provide teachers with “high-quality instructional materials” that teachers shouldn’t have to modify. By strictly adhering to lessons, teachers have more free time to focus on other tasks, like analyzing student work and building relationships with students and families.
We don’t oppose curriculum mandates. In fact, we’ve found many of the curricula our schools or districts have provided us to be useful resources. We also agree with supporters of mandated curricula that teachers shouldn’t have to write lessons from scratch. Teachers should be provided with adequate common resources for instruction.
While we support a mandated curriculum, we object when districts require that teachers use one without modification. Teachers work with students more closely than curriculum writers or policymakers do. As a result, teachers need the freedom to adjust instruction appropriately. No curriculum can possibly account for all of the variability (such as different cultural backgrounds and levels of English proficiency) that teachers encounter every day.
Even countries with a national curriculum give teachers the flexibility to customize instruction for their students. (For example, Larisa helps Ukrainian teachers develop curricula. In Ukraine, teachers are given a textbook and common resources, but they create their own pacing calendars and choose appropriate activities in their lessons to match their students’ needs.) Anyone who has watched “American Idol” knows that choosing the right song and arrangement is just as important as singing it well.
Barring teachers from adjusting a curriculum in order to alleviate their workload doesn’t address the systemic problems that created those burdens. These bans are especially problematic if a curriculum is not culturally responsive. In our experience, following a curriculum exactly increases student and teacher stress by pressuring everyone to move to the next topic whether students understand it or not.
Curricula also usually fail to incorporate time for teachers to build relationships with students in class, thus limiting teachers’ ability to be culturally responsive educators. In addition, we find that once policymakers mandate a curriculum, they rarely question its effectiveness. If test scores don’t improve, policymakers tend not to question the curriculum (does the curriculum meet the required standards?) but focus instead on implementation (what are teachers doing wrong?).
In short, we believe that the ideal curriculum centers resources that strengthen students’ conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. For math, this means providing opportunities for students to construct their own understanding, problems with various levels of difficulty, and differentiated assignments. The ideal curriculum should also include discussion questions and anticipated responses to help teachers guide student thinking.
Most importantly, teachers need the flexibility to rearrange or modify lessons as necessary to fit their students’ needs. Teachers should be given time to collaborate with their colleagues and reflect on their work so they can improve their instruction. Of course, teachers who modify the curriculum should be held accountable for their changes by being required to show that their lessons meet required standards. Forcing teachers to follow identical lessons makes as much sense as forcing Beyoncé and Rihanna to sing only Taylor Swift songs.
It’s OK to Smile
Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey are professors of educational leadership at San Diego State University and teacher leaders at Health Sciences High:
“Don’t smile until winter break” was advice we both received from our respective university supervisors. This well-intentioned advice was offered in the spirit of classroom control and establishing (young) adults as leaders of the classroom.
However, the advice fails to recognize the power of teacher credibility. According to the Visible Learning database, teacher credibility has a significant impact on students learning. Essentially, teacher credibility is the recognition that students who trust their teachers and believe they can learn from them really do learn more.
In fact, two teachers implementing the same curriculum and instruction can get different outcomes from students, depending on the students’ belief that they can learn from that teacher. Teacher credibility has four major components: trust, competence, dynamism, and immediacy. Importantly, we do not get to decide if we are credible; our students do.
Trust is straightforward. Are we reliable and honest? Do we have students’ best interests at heart and do we handle them with care? In other words, are we trustworthy? Competence is also fairly straightforward. Students spend thousands of hours with teachers, and they know what it feels like to learn. They know when the teacher has the skills necessary to foster a learning environment and support their learning. Interestingly, competence is compromised when teachers change their instructional routines and strategies too often. In that case, students think that the teacher doesn’t know what they are doing.
The other two aspects of credibility are directly impacted by the recommendation not to smile until winter break. Dynamism is the passion teachers have for students and their learning and relates to the environment that is created. Dynamic teachers enjoy teaching and learning and exude confidence. Imagine not smiling while trying to maintain a dynamic learning environment in which students know that their teacher cares about their learning?
The final aspect of teacher credibility is immediacy, which is an idea from psychology that centers on connectedness, relatedness, warmth, and psychological closeness. Immediacy is conveyed through verbal and nonverbal behaviors.
As has been demonstrated with young children, “still-facing” someone (failing to react to another person) is traumatic. Take a look at the video from Professor Tronick in which parents still-face their children for just a couple of minutes. The stress on children is significant. Imagine having that experience hour after hour? This violates the connection between adults and children and compromises immediacy. Thus, the recommendation to avoid smiling, or by extension make connections with students to let them know they are important, is a terrible one.
‘English-Only?’ - You’ve Got to Be Kidding
Alexander F. Tang (he/他/佢) is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu. He has published in the WAESOL Educator, COABE Journal, and the Journal of Language and Literacy Education:
In my honest opinion, when I was teaching adult multilingual learners of English (AMLE), I often would hear my colleagues tell my students to only speak English in the classroom. I thought and wondered to myself: Why are we still enforcing these hegemonic and pervasive norms in the 21st century?
Baffled to hear from my students about how their past teachers promoted “English only” classrooms in English as a medium of instruction, I wanted to share with my colleagues that promoting multilingualism, and encouraging the use of the students’ first language, is actually more beneficial because it allows them a safe space to effectively learn.
When I was teaching intermediate-high ESL to my students, they were all shocked about how I encouraged the use of their first languages and how they could use translanguaging practices for meaning-making. By implementing translanguaging in the multilingual classroom, this disrupts the “English only” directives that are still carried on today.
Oftentimes, most monolingual teachers want to understand everything their students say in the classroom. However, once a teacher restricts the use of the first language, this act of limiting linguistic abilities in the classroom demotivates students from learning. As a result, this may cause students to stop putting the effort into what they are learning. Translanguaging can allow students to use their linguistic repertoire fully in active learning (García & Li, 2014; Li, 2022a; Li, 2022b; Li & García, 2022; Tai, 2023).
Translanguaging can be political as well, as students choose to make meaning with all the linguistic resources they have while constructing language in and outside the classroom, which encourages “criticality by exposing the learner to different thinking and doing” (Li, 2022b).
As we are in the 21st century, we must come to terms with how our multilingual learners are mixing linguistic structures to create new expressions (Li, 2022b). As a political stance, translanguaging challenges notions of Academic English, as all languages matter, a point of view that should promote multilingualism, especially in English as a medium of instruction.
By examining the multiple facets of translanguaging in multilingual settings, we can promote language learning actively and inspire AMLE to continue using the linguistic architectures (Flores, 2020) they have been building throughout their lives , as all languages are valuable and should be used in everyday life.
Thanks to Bobson, Larisa, Doug, Nancy, and Alexander for contributing their thoughts!
Today’s post answered this question:
What has been the worst rule or directive you have ever experienced as a teacher, why was it such a bad rule or directive, and what should have been said, instead?
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
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