Committed to Teaching or Committed to Students?

I am committed to teaching:

This is what I do as a teacher. WHICH LEADS TO. Student learning as defined by grades. THEREFORE. I am a good teacher.

I am committed to students:

I aim to be a good teacher. WHICH LEADS TO. This is what I do for my students. THEREFORE. Student grades as defined by learning.

I composed this dichotomy sometime last year, left it in my drafts, and found myself thinking about it again this week. The catalyst for bringing it back into my consciousness was two days of training with Dr. Virginia Rojas, a leader in inclusive teaching and English language acquisition strategies for English language learners.

Over the course of those two days, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to and observing a significant amount of teacher discussion around those topics and could see that significant growth was occurring in the room! And yet... there were pockets where these seeds of new ideas fell on rocky ground and did not take root. In fact, there was resistance and in some cases, outright disbelief that the strategies presented by Dr. Rojas, and the need for those strategies, actually existed.

As I pondered this wide spectrum of readiness to accept these practices (shown through research to be effective) I wondered what was going on. And then this little piece I had penned popped back into my thoughts. Maybe it goes some distance towards explaining what is going on.

Those resistors I could loosely categorize as teachers "committed to teaching". It is teaching that shapes their identity. Observing them at work you would see a classroom where order rules, the teacher talks, and the students follow. The systems are running, the routines are set and observed and the teacher has a good sense they are doing a good job.

When ideas are presented that will upset the system or routines, those ideas are explained away or minimized in their usefulness. Subtle (or not so subtle) challenges, often wrapped in the "in my experience" bludgeon, place the value and observations of personal experience over the educational research spanning thousands and thousands of different sample sets, and experts are gently asked to sit on the bench and watch the "real" game go on. No need to let any "new" ideas upset the systems or routines that are producing good results with my students! "My students already get good grades in my class, why should I change what I do?"

And then there are the teachers who are "committed to students" - the fertile ground!

When an expert walks into the room they lean in, listening. And when those ideas start flying you hear these teachers say things like, "that might work with some boys in my class", "Kelly would really respond to that sort of approach", "I wonder if that would work with Suzy?". There is no thought of routines, or systems or interruptions to "what I've already planned!", there is just a mind clicking through all the students, working out what will help who.

This teacher is thinking about what he or she can do for his or her students - to enhance their learning. An improvement in grades is a byproduct of enhanced learning!

I'm not sure I'm at the point where I am ready to begin talking about how to make the stony ground fertile, or even the best approach to trying to plant in rocky places, but I acknowledge that these challenges present themselves. Maybe the starting point is for each and every teacher to recognize the readiness of their own soil. Maybe I can help with that!

So...I am committed to teaching, or I am committed to students... which one are you?