Lien On Me: Through the Eyes of Teachers

Did you know teachers do not believe teaching matters? This has bothered me ever since I read the Learning Forward article, “Flip the Script on Change” by Thomas Guskey in April 2020. Guskey cited research by Evans, Teasdale, Gannon-Slater, La Londe, Crenshaw, Greene, & Schwandt, 2019 that investigated teachers’ perceptions of student achievement data. This study found teachers associated students’ performance to instruction merely 15% of the time. More often, teachers believed that student achievement was a result of student characteristics, like behavior and backgrounds, although decades of compelling studies have indicated teachers have two to three times the impact of any other school factor.

What worries me is that if teachers have little confidence in instruction, then we have not been focusing on what makes a difference for student learning. Curriculums and assessments are meaningless without instruction and ineffective without teachers believing instruction influences students learning. The research didn’t find that teachers’ perceptions of student achievement was associated with curriculum or assessment either. 

This is a cause for great concern because this percentage (15%) is shockingly low. However, teachers are told what to do, when to do it with more expectations of compliance than autonomy. Rarely are teachers able to have sustaining, productive conversations and experiences about teaching and learning that allows them to explore instruction and build individual or collective efficacy. It isn’t surprising to me that teachers are highly skeptical that teaching matters most.

A genesis of change would be to engage teachers in multiple, authentic opportunities to explore the effectiveness of instruction in an asset-driven process during the school year and throughout their career. A process by which teacher equality prescribes the details. Coaching is one vehicle for this. 

All coaches believe in strengths based coaching, however we need to understand this isn’t fully actualized by teachers. Most coaching methods are “observation and feedback,” which delivers information and is absorbed only to a certain extent, regardless of the questions asked. Notes cannot capture a teacher's thinking. Plus, this is asking the teacher to recall events that occurred days, or weeks ago. 

Coaching methods need to have the conditions of self-discovery formed by the teacher. Video reflections with practice has the potential to create the synergy for teacher assumption of responsibility for learning. This coaching method promotes internal reflection and generates greater agency for the capacity to amplify self-efficacy.If we shift the paradigm to focus on instruction through the eyes of the teacher, then we will transform the teachers’ narrative about the effectiveness of teaching on student achievement.