What If We Also Set Up Teachers for Success?

Post submitted by ASCD author Robyn R. Jackson, author of Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching.

Marc Fisher's recent Washington Post two-part series (here and here) on teacher quality and school improvement struggles in the District of Columbia has caused me to wonder: What would we say of a teacher who told her students that they were performing terribly but did not provide them with the support and structure they needed to improve? How would we react if that teacher put her lowest-performing students on a 90-day instructional plan, and if they did not improve, expelled them? What if that teacher then replaced those students with a new crop of students but treated them the exact same way?

What would happen, in other words, if we treated our students the way that we often treat teachers?

The foundation of what we do as educators is a belief in the human potential to learn, to get better, to grow. How can we embrace that belief when it comes to our children, yet reject it as unrealistic when it comes to our colleagues?

I understand the dilemma. There is a sense of urgency. Students are failing at alarming rates. Do we really have time to give a poorly performing teacher the space and support to get better?
 
But what if we treated teachers the way we wanted them to treat students? What if our improvement plans, rather than being the last stop on the way to unemployment, set up teachers to be successful in the classroom? What if we held teachers responsible for raising student achievement but gave them the tools and the support to do so? What if we really did believe that all children--and all adults--could learn?

I think you'd see an immediate difference in school culture and a huge improvement in the quality of teaching. What's more, you'd see the adults buying into the idea that every one of their children will succeed because they benefited from this belief themselves.