Beyond the Individual Teacher: The Collective Aspects of Teaching Quality

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What makes for effective teaching, and how can it be measured and compensated, incentivized and mandated? A great deal of current philanthropic initiative, think tank attention, and federal funding attempts to answer that question. Teaching quality occupies a prime position in the federal spotlight as one of four required Race to the Top assurances. And at state and local levels, the ability to measure the “value added” by a particular teacher to her students adds more accountability pressure.

But as Stephen Sawchuk reminded us in a recent Education Week article, low-performing and high-poverty schools and districts face two intertwined problems: the overall supply of effective teachers and the equitable distribution of available teaching capital across a community’s or city’s schools. Sawchuk describes some promising new directions, including a federally funded, multi-city research effort, noting that they

go beyond narrow transfer incentives to include targeted retention strategies, improved professional development, and a focus on the caliber of the school leaders and peers that teachers new to such schools will be working with every day.

What is significant here is a recognition that the problem of having enough good teachers to go around is about more than recruitment incentives and preparation shortcuts. Sawchuk quotes Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education:

All this focus on individuals, on getting the best and brightest and placing them into schools, is a limited strategy. It is driving so much of what’s going on right now that we risk neglecting the context of these people’s work. 

Moore Johnson and several other leading researchers and thinkers contributed to the most recent issue of the Annenberg Institute’s quarterly journal Voices in Urban Education. This issue — no. 27, Spring 2010 — examines an underexplored area of the great teaching quality debate: collective practice. Susan Moore Johnson addresses the role of school as an organization in developing teachers’ professional capacity and increasing student learning.Carrie Leana’s research, out of the University of Pittsburgh, highlights the power of human capital combined with social capital in influencing teachers’ practice. And Milbrey McLaughlin and Joan Talbert, both of Stanford University, provide evidence that professional learning communities that center on students, use data effectively, distribute expertise, and enjoy district-level leadership and investment are proving to have a powerful impact on school culture, instructional quality, and student outcomes.

The common conclusion of the VUE 27 authors, as well as a key learning from a series of cross-sector gatherings on teaching quality facilitated by the Annenberg Institute and Kronley and Associates on behalf of the Ford Foundation, was this: The weight of attention, policy, and resources is disproportionately directed to the individual teacher. Prevailing conceptions and measures of quality teaching are simply too narrow. What's more, without attention to school-level conditions and contexts, accountable and focused collegial relationships, and more supports for collective capacity building, victories in improving teaching and learning will be limited and short-lived.

Promoting the collaborative aspects of teaching does not aim to allow individuals to avoid accountability. Nor does it diminish the role of the capacity of individual teachers and the need for every classroom educator to meet high expectations. It simply recognizes that teaching is not a solitary enterprise and that teacher performance is inextricably tied to with how schools are organized; how teachers view themselves, their students, and their work; the working conditions that support or hinder teachers’ efforts; and their relationships with students, families, and the communities in which they teach.

In an adverse economic environment like the present — and with the end of federal stimulus funding looming — it is more important than ever to make investments wisely. We now know enough to understand that investment in individual teacher quality is not enough; investments in collective capacity building are an effective and necessary use of resources in good times and bad.

PREPARED BY 
Marla Ucelli-Kashyap
Former Director, District Redesign,
Annenberg Institute for School Reform